Bar-dês'a-nīst, n.

n. [L. Lat. Bardesamasta, Fr. Bardesianiste.] (Eccl. Hist.) One of a branch of the Gnostics of the second century, followers of Bardesanes of Edessa, in Mesopotamia.

They held to two original self-existent beings, one good, the other evil; that human souls had no material bodies before the fall; that Christ had only the semblance of a body, and did not die on the cross, nor rise from the dead; and that redemption consists in being divested of our gross, material bodies, and being clothed in ethereal or spiritual bodies. Mosheim.