Basilides

Taught at Alexandria a generation before Valentinus, and pushed the negative theology further than anyone else in the ancient world: the source is not merely unknown but not-being — Hippolytus reports him saying there was a time when nothing was; and that nothing was not any existing thing, and that the God above it all is best called the non-existent God, not because he lacks being but because being is too small a word. This is the closest the Greek-speaking world came to Ein Sof and Ayin, the Nothing that is not an absence — reached independently, from grammar rather than from Torah, and about a thousand years earlier.