I’m sure the instructions for the familiar Hand-Grenade of Antioch, from Monty Python, was influenced by the tone of the interesting Gnostic snippet which follows…

"First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then…”


Describing the Ex Nihilo cosmogony of Basilides (early 2nd cent.), in the words of Hippolytus:

There was a time when there was nothing, but “nothing” was not anything existent. Simply and plainly, without any sophistry, there was absolutely nothing. When I say, “was”, I do not mean that anything was. I use the word in order to signify what I want to indicate – I mean there was absolutely nothing. Since, then [at that time], there was nothing – no matter, no substance, no non-substance, nothing simple, nothing complex, nothing not understood, nothing not sensed, no man, no angel, no god, not anything that is named or perceived through sense or any intelligible things, and not anything which can be defined as more subtle than anything else: the non-existent God wished (without intelligence, without sense, without will, without choice, without passion, without desire) to make a cosmos. … So the non-existent God made a non-existent cosmos out of the non-existent.

GNOSTICISM AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY, Robert M. Grant, 1959 (p. 143)


I’m sure if allowed one additional edit, he would have added: “…and I should add there was not time as we know it either -- simply an occurrence, where none had been before.”