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According to the Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis (ch. 26), and Theodoret's Haereticarum Fabularum Compendium, the Borborites or Borborians (; in Egypt, Phibionites; in other countries, Koddians, Barbelites, Secundians, Socratites, Zacchaeans, Stratiotics) were a Christian Gnostic sect, said to be descended from the Nicolaitans. It is difficult to know for sure the practices of the group, as both Epiphanius and Theodoret were opponents of the group. According to Epiphanius, the sect were who embraced the pleasures of the earthly world.
Epiphanius also indicates that the Phibionites honored 365 archons, with the 8 listed archons merely being the greatest of them. According to him, a male would have sex for each one of the archons as an offering.
Tangentially during his description of the Nicolaitans, Epiphanius claims that certain Gnostics, a subset of those "who are called Gnostics and Phibionites, the so-called disciples of Epiphanes, the Stratiotics, Levitics, Borborites and the rest", believed Barbelo to appear repeatedly to the archons in an attractive form so as to collect their semen, and in the process of doing so recover the power that had been "sown" in them. J. J. Buckley notes that this belief may have served as the grounds for certain Phibionite rituals.
The Borborites were also said to extract fetuses from pregnant women and consume them, particularly if the women accidentally became pregnant during related sexual rituals. Buckley notes that this implies treatment of an aborted foetus as "strayed semen", and would serve to prevent it from developing into another body "for the archons' clutches".
Stephen Gero finds the accounts written by Epiphanius and later writers plausible and connects them with earlier Gnostic myths.Gero, Stephen (1986). "With Walter Bauer on the Tigris: Encratite Orthodoxy and Libertine Heresy in Syro-Mesopotamian Christianity," in C.W. Hedrick, R. Hodgson (eds.), Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism, and Early Christianity, Peabody, Ma.: Hendrickson Publishers.
J. J. Buckley, similarly, highlights parallels which the Phibionite or Koddian belief system and rituals described by Epiphanius show with other Gnostic groups. The consumption of seminal and fetal material, as a microcosm of Barbelo's seduction of the archons to recover captive light, shows parallels with the Manichaean belief that when vegetables are consumed by the Elect, the captive light-particles or within are purified and liberated. The ritual use of semen and menses parallels the use of water and hamra, respectively, in a ritual metaphor for fertilization in a Mandaeism masiqta. Contrasts include Mandaean pronatalism versus Phibionite antinatalism, the stratification of society into priests and laity (Mandaeism) or elect and hearers (Manichaeism) versus the work to liberate divine sparks being carried out by the Phibionite laity, and the Manichaean view of semen and menses as demonic versus the Phibionite identification of their own bodily fluids with the body of Christ.
Bart Ehrman, conversely, finds Epiphanius almost entirely unreliable. Ehrman writes that accusing opponents of wild sexual practices was common in Roman antiquity, so Epiphanius's lurid accounts should be seen as an outgrowth of that. He also finds Epiphanius's story of how he learned of their alleged doctrines implausible – if they truly were having scandalous rites, they would be unlikely to share them with non-members. More generally, documents written by Egyptian Gnostics themselves such as those found in the Nag Hammadi library do not seem to match what the anti-heresy writers claimed. While both their opponents and the Gnostics agreed that Gnosticism scorned the material world of the flesh, Gnostic writing has generally indicated a trend toward asceticism as a result – of ignoring or punishing the flesh through exertion and fasting. Proto-Orthodox writers instead concluded that if the Gnostics believed the material world to be inferior to that of the spirit, they would have thrown themselves into debauchery, a claim Ehrman finds unsupported by evidence and the opposite of what the actual Gnostics likely thought.
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