THE TESTIMONY OF HERETICS IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE SECOND CENTURY.

SECTION FIRST.

THE CHARACTER OF THIS TESTIMONY.

217. TE heretics, whose unanimous voice is heard at this epoch, are not a small number, as was the case with the contemporary fathers. ‘They are a host — a cloud of witnesses. Ancient authors have reckoned in those remote times as many as thirty-two heretical sects, differing very much in their dogmas, but very unanimous, as we shall see, in attesting for us the existence of the canon, and “its authority in all the churches. And so great is the power of this proof, that in our day we have seen many German defenders of the canon! who have placed the main strength of their apology in it, This testimony is involuntary, since we owe it, like that of Celsus, to the most dangerous enemies of primitive Christianity. We must here admire how Providence makes use of such men, after 1700 years, in reducing to powder the negations of modern criticism. Behold these ancient enemies, the cause of so much trouble to the Church in its earlier days, now joining their voice to that of the fathers of the second century, to establish, against the rationalists of the nineteenth, the authenticity of our sacred books, and the divine authority attributed to them by all the Christian Churches throughout the world¹ “It is a fact worthy of our most serious consideration,” says Hug, “that the depositions of heretics, so accidentally preserved, attest not only the existence - of the New Testament in the second century, but its anterior origin; for these depositions relate not merely to their own times; they mount much higher up, and attest that the apostles Peter, John, and Paul, were authors of our sacred writings.” To have all the force which belongs to it, this proof would require a greater development of quotations than we could conveniently present here. The numerous writings of all these heretics have perished, like those of the unbelieving pagans of the same period; but we find most copious citations from them in the refutations written by Irenæus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Hippolytus, and some others.

218. To behold all these heresies springing up in a time so close to the days of the apostles need not astonish or perplex our faith. Heresies germinate and flourish only in times of awakening and life. The whole history of God’s people shews us that these departures from the truth have been more frequent when the churches have been most fervent and pure. St Paul goes so far as to say that they have their use in the government of God, “For there must be also heresies among you,’ he tells us, (1 Cor. xi. 19.) And he takes care to instruct the church of Corinth that God knows how to make use of this evil for the good of His people; because the very heresies which harass serve also to purify them. “Their word will eat as doth a canker,” (2 Tim. ii. 17, 18,) he has said; but frequently they also perform in a church a similar office to that of leeches on a sick body — they draw off what ought not to remain in the system. Hence it results, the apostle says, “that those that are approved are made manifest among believers;” and they prove the elect. We are not, then, to be astonished at the great number of heretics in the second century, or even in the first. The gospel never spread. itself over the world with so much power as in the days of Trajan and Hadrian, (from 98 to 138;) but never did such a multitude of monstrous sects invade the churches of God.

219. Irenæus, in his great work, has described in detail all those of his time; and the celebrated Hippolytus, thirty years after him, has passed them under review in his Refutation. He enumerates as many as thirty-two; four belonging to the Ophites, who already, in the time of John, mixed their own prophecies with the Revelation; eleven of different Gnostic sects, given up in various ways to the worthless deceptions of a philosophy which they eulogised as Gnosis or Science;² twelve others belonging to the Ebionites, Judaising sects, who repudiated the doctrines of grace, and the divinity of Jesus Christ; others made up of Ebionism and Gnosticism; and, lastly, five others, who were in error chiefly on points of discipline, and who, at least, were orthodox as to the doctrine of God and His Christ.

220. But all these sects have borne a striking testimony to the canon of Scripture, chiefly in the following particulars: — ’

(1.) The majority of them, with all their errors, and the rashness of their modes of interpretation, acknowledged the authority of our sacred books. This was, for example, the case with the powerful host of the Valentinians, who formed alone six sects of Gnostics. This was the case also with the disciples of Carpocrates, and with those of Theodotus, who belonged rather to the Ebionite sects. “Valentine appears to have made use of a complete canon,” said Tertullian,³ (Valentinus integro instrumento uti videtur;) and Irenæus satisfies himself with saying of this sect, that “it had a preference for the writings of John. They attempt,” he adds, “to justify their errors by apostolic and evangelic citations, though they give perverted interpretations, and are unscrupulous in their exegesis, (παρατρέποντες τὰς ἑρμηνείας, καὶ ῥαδιουργοῦντες τὰς ἐξηγήσεις.)”

(2.) In the second place, even those heretics who allow themselves to reject part of the canon, render a remarkable testimony to it by the fact, that their respective sects, carried away in opposite directions, contradict one another. The sacred books which some reject are exactly those that others prefer. The Ebionites, considering Paul as an apostate from Judaism, rejected his writings, and those of Luke, his fellow-labourer; while, on the contrary, many of the antijudaising Gnostics, Marcion especially, and all the Marcionites, rejected Matthew, Mark, Peter, and John, holding them for apostles of the circumcision. In this manner, far from shaking our confidence in the canon, these conflicting testimonies, taken as a whole, are equivalent. to confirmatory depositions,

(3.) Lastly, it must be, above all, carefully observed, that of all the heretics of the second century, even among the worst, there is not one who disowns the authenticity of the books of the canon, even of the books which they did not receive. The controversy between them and the Church never turned on the apostolicity of the twenty-two homologoumena, nor on the credit they had obtained at that time in the universal Church. In rejecting a certain number they only rejected the doctrine, and you never hear them uttering a doubt that these scriptures were not written by the apostles, or the companions of the apostles, whose names they bear. They satisfy themselves with maintaining that the doctrine taught is not conformable to the intentions of Jesus Christ. If Marcion rejected three out of the thirteen epistles bearing the name of Paul, it was not because they were not Paul’s, but because Paul wrote them under an evil influence; and if he rejected Matthew and Peter, it was only because Peter and Matthew, he said, “judaised,” — one in his Epistle, the other in his Gospel. But not one of the Marcionites hesitated to acknowledge that, in rejecting them, he set himself in opposition to the judgment of the Church.. Let this double acknowledgment be carefully noticed, and let account be taken of this double testimony rendered to the historic authenticity of our holy books. It is of great force; for, with all their hatred against the Church, and with so much knowledge and talent to oppose it, these audacious men, if they could have seen the least possibility of disputing these two facts, would certainly not have neglected to employ so effective a weapon, which, at a stroke, would have levelled their opponents, and ended the controversy for ever.

To give the reader a more correct estimate of this proof, we shall pass rapidly under review the principal heresies of the period, beginning with Marcion, and then going back to the other sects which come nearest to the days-of the apostles,⁴

SECTION SECOND.

MARCION.

221. The Marcionite sects were undoubtedly among the most daring in their attempts against the Scriptures; and yet we may see, even in their negations, what an irresistible testimony they render, both to the anterior existence of the first canon, and to the universal authority it then possessed in the churches of God.

Marcion was born in the days of St John, about the end of the first century, at Sinope, on the borders of the Euxine Sea, His father, bishop of that city, having been made acquainted with his being guilty of an act of immorality, was obliged to exclude him from the church, and firmly refused to readmit him. Unable to bear this disgrace, Marcion left Sinope secretly, and repaired to Rome⁵ There, as he was a man of talent and energy, he soon acquired great personal influence, and was welcomed by the Roman clergy. He dared even to aspire to the first place, Epiphanius says, (προεδρία;) and when rejected by the elders (πρεσβυτέροις) of the church, to whom the cause of his leaving Sinope had been made known, he threw himself in despair into the party of Cerdo. This man was a dangerous Syrian heretic, already notorious in Rome as the head of a powerful antijudaising sect. Marcion gave himself up entirely to his Gnostic views, and in a short time surpassed his master in the boldness of his doctrines, the great number of his disciples, and his attempts against the Scriptures. He methodised his negations with great precision, and impressed his system with the strongly-marked features of his own character. Very soon the attraction of his powerful personality and the seductive boldness of his philosophy gained for him, whether in Italy, Egypt, or Syria, or even in Persia, a large number of disciples; and his sect became so powerful and vigorous, that in the fourth century, if we may believe Epiphanius, it still maintained congregations and bishops. Irenæus⁶ informs us that this daring man attempted to get himself acknowledged by the bishops of the Church; and having met Polycarp in Rome, he was bold enough to say to him, “Dost thou know me, Polycarp?”

“I know thee,” replied the martyr, “to be Satan’s first-born.”

We cannot tell, any more than Tertullian,⁷ the exact ‘time when Marcion fixed his residence in Rome. “In what year of the first Antoninus,” said that father, “the influence of the dog-star exhaled him from his native Euxine, I have not cared to investigate.” But since Justin Martyr, in his first Apology, which was written in 139,⁸ speaks of Marcion as still teaching — and at that time his doctrine had been widely disseminated — many years must have elapsed since his separation from the Church. His first arrival in the metropolis of the empire must have preceded, a very long time, the death of Hadrian.

This remark is important. It brings us very near the days of St John; and the simultaneous presence in Rome of Cerdo, Marcion, Tatian, and Valentine with Justin Martyr, is also a fact very worthy of attention. It serves to confirm the testimony to the existence, the use, and the authority of the first canon in the contemporaneous Church, which men so different give at the same time and in the same place,

222. “In separating the law from the gospel, Marcion,” Tertullian says, “professed not to be an innovator, and only to restore the apostolic rule, which had been falsified by his opponents, (non tam tnnovasse regulam quam retio adulteratam recurasse.)”⁹

In general, the heretics of the second century, like many rationalists of the nineteenth, from not having comprehended the harmony of the Divine revelations, and those intimate relations which, in the order of grace, connect the respective doctrines of the law and the gospel, could only see in these revelations a remediless antagonism. Entertaining these views, persuaded of their irreconcilableness, they received certain scriptures only, while rejecting others, and indulging themselves in a morbid fondness for contrarieties, said they could not make either Peter or James agree with Paul, or Matthew and John with Luke. In the same way some, particularly the Ebionites, as Irenæus states, holding Paul as an apostate from the law, (apostatam eum legis dicentes,) rejected him with intense dislike; while Marcion, with many others, straining the doctrines of Paul in an opposite direction, held, on the contrary, that he alone was a true apostle, and admitted into their canon only his epistles, reduced to ten, and the Gospel of Luke. In their aversion to all that was Jewish, they went so far as to maintain that the God of the Jews (the Demiurgos or Creator of the visible world) was very different from the God preached by Jesus Christ. Marcion, moreover, like the rationalists of our day, pretended to establish, not only what he called the antitheses, (or contradictions of the two Testaments,) but also the antitheses of Peter and Paul, and of the evangelists, Luke and Mark, or Luke and John. His canon was divided into two parts, Epiphanius tells us, — the Evangelicon and the Apostolicon. As to his Apostolicon, it consisted only of ‘ten epistles of Paul. Of the thirteen epistles which bear the name of this apostle he excluded the three pastoral epistles and the Epistle to the Hebrews, for he kept the Epistle to Philemon. Tertullian¹⁰ has, besides, taken care to inform us that his arrangement of the epistles, without knowing why, was not that which the Church had been accustomed to observe. He also boasted of having restored the true title of the Epistle to the Ephesians, which he called the Epistle to the Laodiceans, (Eph. vi. 27.) And the same father assures us that he had made certain alterations in these. epistles, particularly in the Epistle to the Romans, “taking away,” he said, “what he pleased from the integrity of our instrument,¹¹ (auferendo quae voluit de nostri instrumenti integritate.” Yet Epiphanius,¹² who passed the same censure upon him, and who indicates seven of these alterations, shews that they were not of much importance, and consisted chiefly in retrenchments, There were, indeed, only three for which there was not some authority.

As to his Evangelicon, he has indulged, as we have said, in far greater liberties. He-received only one Gospel, which he called the Gospel of Christ, and which was called in the Church the Gospel of Marcion, or the Gospel of the Black Sea, (the Euxine.) He himself had arranged and modified it; and it was, simply (as Irenæus, Tertullian, and Epiphanius say unanimously) “a mutilated¹³ St Luke.” The text of this Gospel formed the staple of the composition; but he made alterations and retrenchments, among others, that of the prodigal son, of the Saviour’s nativity, and the circumstances of His death on the cross.¹⁴ “These heretics,” says Irenæus,¹⁵ “claiming to be more faithful and wise than the apostles, (sinceriores et prudentiores,) and alleging that these have announced the gospel still imbued with Judaism, (adhuc quae sunt Judaeorum sentientes,) have employed themselves in cutting the Scriptures in pieces, (ad intercidendas conversi sunt Scripturae,) ignoring some and mutilating (decurtantes) others, as if none were legitimate but such as they had reduced in size, (minoraverunt.)”

And it is deserving of notice that Marcion publicly avowed that he had taken away certain passages in the original Scriptures of Christ, (His opinor conciliis tot originalia instrumenta Christe delere Marcion ausus est.) “Thou hast thyself avowed it in a certain letter,” adds Tertullian;¹⁶ “but by what right hast thou done it? Who art thou? <A prophet? then prophesy. An apostle? then preach in public. An apostolic man? then think like the apostles. If a simple Christian, then believe what is given thee. But if thou art neither of all these, then I tell thee with justice, Die!”

All these reproaches which the fathers cast upon him shew with what jealousy the text of our sacred books was then watched.

223. Yet we may remark in passing, while on the subject of these heretics, that it must not be imagined that the mutilations of which Marcion and the Marcionites were guilty were a malpractice frequently repeated. On the contrary, it was a very rare offence, such horror did it excite, and Marcion has remained so notorious in history for this excess of audacity, that Origen,¹⁷ a hundred years after him, when going over. his recollections of the Church, could say, “I have known no men who have so mutilated and remodelled (μεταχαράξαντας) the gospel as the followers of Marcion and those of Valentine — perhaps also those of Lucan.” And yet, as to Valentine, have we not heard Tertullian assure us that this heretic employed a complete instrument? so that he did violence to the Scriptures only by perverse glosses, and not by material alterations.

224. Let us stop here to examine more closely the evidence of the testimony which Marcion rendered to the canon in the first quarter of the second century. And for this, imagining ourselves at Rome in the year 128, only twenty-five years after the death of St John, let us stand on the threshold of that pernicious school of philosophy where the young professor from Sinope expounds his Gnosis. Or better still, let us go eleven years later, when, in the same city, the martyr Justin, daring to address his first Apology to the emperor, the senate, and all the Roman people, (καὶ δημῳ παντὶ Ῥωμαίωνῆ he says to them, “How many impious persons are there whom none of you think of persecuting, and in particular one Marcion, from the Euxine Sea,¹⁸ who is even now occupied in teaching his disciples to blaspheme God the Creator, and even to deny Him, pretending that there is one greater than He.” Let us go, we say, to the door of that school where the persecutors of the Christians forbear molesting him, and there we shall obtain all the proofs which can be required of us of the existence of the canon. Had the Christian Church, we are asked, already, in the first year of the second century, its sacred. collection of scriptures? But who can put this question after having visited Marcion and his school? Who will suppose that the Church has not its collection, when this man, violently separated from it, has already his own? He who in so many things has shewn himself outrageous against the Scriptures; who has maintained doctrines so revolting against God the Creator, against the Old Testament, against the incarnation of Jesus Christ, all the while calling himself a Christian philosopher — this very Marcion has had his well-defined canon, composed of one Gospel and ten epistles, while the Christian Church, which so bitterly reproached him for not receiving the rest, has not its own! And to hear the modern men of learning tell us that the canon published by Marcion is the first of which ecclesiastical literature has left us any memorial! As if “the complaints of the fathers, who were indignant at his mutilations, are not the memorials of the complete canon of the contemporaneous Church, as much as they are of the mutilated canon of this heretic!

225. Better to estimate this testimony we must carefully consider the six following remarks: — :

(1.) It can be proved, by numerous citations from Tertullian and Irenæus, that Marcion was well acquainted both with the collection of the four Gospels and with the three epistles of Paul, which were excluded from his canon. This has been shewn by Kirchhofer in his Quellensammlung, (Collection of the Sources.)

(2.) Marcion never disputed the authority of the nine books of Scripture rejected from his collection. On the contrary, not only was he aware of their existence, but he knew the authority they had in the Church; and, moreover, he never denied that they were rightly attributed to the authors whose names they bore. Only he pretended that they were infected with Judaism, and he set himself to depreciate their authors, Tertullian tells us, in order to gain for his mutilated Gospel the reputation he took: from theirs. (Connititur ad destruendwm statwm eorum Evangeliorum quae proprie et sub apostolorum¹⁹ nomine eduntur, vel etiam apostolicorum,²⁰ et scilicet fidem quam illis adimit suo conferat.) On this account he is for us a very important witness.

(3.) Marcion and the Marcionites avowed²¹ that they employed themselves in mutilating the ancient Scriptures, (tot originalia instrumenta Christe,) which had been received before their time into the Church. “The Marcionites,” Irenæus has already told us, “pretending to be more sincere and more wise than the apostles, have applied themselves to cutting into the Scriptures, rejecting some and mutilating others.” That is the reason why we have heard Tertullian opposing the canon of Marcion to the canon of the Church, (auferendo quae voluit de nostri instruments integritate.)²²

(4.) We hear all his opponents (Tertullian, Irenæus, Origen, Epiphanius) charge him, not with introducing unknown texts, but with having altered those which were in circulation before him.

(5.) Among the charges they make against him is one which, without being very grave, is important, as shewing us the extent to which the collection of the Scriptures had been studied in all the churches, and what place it had taken as an organic whole in the usages of the people of God. We have seen that Marcion, while retaining ten²³ of the thirteen epistles which the Church had attributed without exception to St Paul, had thought well to alter their order, and how he is blamed for this change by Tertullian in his fifth book against Marcion, and by Epiphanius in his forty-second chapter against heresies. How remarkable it is that, only twenty-five years after the death of the disciple whom Jesus loved, this collection should have become so familiar to all the churches of God, that they were already in the habit of arranging Paul’s thirteen epistles and the four Gospels in one invariable order,²⁴ though an order which, as we have repeatedly said, is by no means that of their composition! How certainly must this arrangement of the sacred books have prevailed always and everywhere, for Epiphanius in his charges against Marcion to have supposed that it dated from the days of the apostles. “Marcion,” he says, “puts the Epistle to the Philippians in the second place, while, according to the apostle, it is in the sixth, (παρὰ δὲ τῷ ἀποστὸλῳ ἕκτῃ.) He puts Philemon in the ninth, while, according to the apostle, it is the last, (παρὰ. δέ τῴ αποστὸλῳ ἐσχάῖὴξ κεῖται;) the first to the Thessalonians in the seventh, while the apostle puts it in the eighth; and as to the Epistle to the Romans, he has put it (he says) in the fourth place, that, as far as he is concerned, nothing may remain in its place, that nothing might be right with him, (ἵνα μηδὲν ὀρθὸν παρ’ αὐτῷ εἴη.)”²⁵

Certainly this unanimity of the churches in arranging our sacred books everywhere in the same order, and different from their respective dates, is in days so remote a very significant fact to shew us the place already taken by the canon in the usages of the universal Church.

(6.) Lastly, the indignation of all the fathers on the subject of Marcion’s attempts against the Scriptures, and the precise charges which they brought against him, attest with what holy jealousy the text of our Scriptures was then guarded in the’ churches of God.

But the testimony of Tatian will come to complete that of Marcion.

SECTION THIRD.

TATIAN.

226. Cave and other ecclesiastical historians often complain of the uncertainty that prevails in the chronology of all the heretics of the second century. Thus, as to Tatian, while Epiphanius puts in the second year of Antoninus Pius (that is to say, in 149) the end of the long sojourn which this heretic made in Rome, whither he went to found a school of heresy, others would place these facts twenty years later.²⁶ As to ourselves, who are going back through the years of the second century, we think it convenient, without wishing to decide the question, to place Tatian immediately after Marcion, because history throws important light on that of the teacher of Sinope.

He was, like Marcion, a clever, learned man, but haughty and impetuous, and, like him, resided for a time in Rome; and again, like him, after having appeared to unite himself to the Church of God, violently broke off from it, and set himself against one part of its canon, but yet not against the same books. It is as such, also, that Tatian renders our Scriptures a testimony which serves to complete that of Marcion and that of Justin Martyr. Born in Assyria, of a pagan family, he at first devoted himself with great ardour to the study of the philosophy of his time, when he repaired to Rome, and there met Justin, “that admirable man, (ό θαυμασιώτατος Ἰουστῖνος,)” as he calls him.²⁷ From that moment he made a profession of Christianity, and attached himself so closely to Justin, that after his martyrdom he aimed to continue his school. But very soon his success inflated him, and became his ruin, Irenæus said. He devoted his attention to the systems of error borrowed from the philosophies of the Hast, and on returning to Mesopotamia, he became the chief of the Encratites, ascetics who united the foolish fancies of Valentine with the repulsive theories of Marcion.

We have said that, with regard to the canon, Tatian completes at the same time the testimony of Justin and that of Marcion: of Justin, since he cites without hesitation the writings of Paul and those of John, while the works of the martyr which have come down to us say little of them; and of Marcion, since he attributes directly to Paul the Epistle to Titus, while Marcion, as we know, rejected it.

Besides this, in his Address to the Greeks, Tatian makes evident allusions to the Gospel of John and to his Apocalypse. Moreover, we learn from Irenæus,²⁸ and also from Jerome,²⁹ that to defend his heresies, he called in the authority of the Epistles of Paul to the Corinthians and to the Galatians.

But still further, we have to cite from this mischievous man a literary fact very significant for the authority of the canon, and more especially of the sacred collection of the four evangelists. It is, that among the great multitude of his works, (infinita volumina, says Jerome,) the authors of that time often name “the important harmony of the four Gospels,”³⁰ which be himself called, The Composition of the Four, (τὸ Διὰ Τεσσαρων) “It was,” says Eusebius,³¹ “a collection and a certain combination of the Gospels, (συνάφειάν τινα καὶ συναγωγήν . . . τῶν εὐαγγελίων συνθείς.)”

See, then, already, so near the death of St John, the collection of the four evangelists acknowledged, thoughtfully read, and compared by the labours even of a dangerous heretic, who denied, with so many other truths of our faith, the humanity of our Lord, and the reality of His death. No doubt Tatian made some culpable retrenchments in this collection; but these alterations do not appear on the first reading, and neither Eusebius nor Theodoret (who speak of it) intimate that he introduced any fragment of an apocryphal Gospel. His work, even in the days of Eusebius, was still “used by certain persons who were not aware of the alterations, (καὶ παρά τισιν εἰσέτι νῦν φέρεται.)’ Epiphanius expressly tells us that it was composed of the four Gospels, and that many called it The Gospel according to the Hebrews. Lastly, Theodoret,³² almost a century after Epiphanius, while informing us that Tatian had left out the genealogy of the Saviour, and the passages that point out His descent from David according to the flesh, tells us that his book was still in circulation in some places. “T have myself found,” he says, “more than two hundred copies in our churches, (of Syria,) which have received them with respect. I made use of them, without understanding the fraud, (κακουργίαν;) but, having collected them all, I took them away, to replace them by the Gospels of the four evangelists.”

This testimony of Tatian is of great value; but go back still higher in the century to arrive at Valentine and the six different sects which bear his name.

SECTION FOURTH.

VALENTINE AND THE VALENTINIANS,

227. The Valentinians, as it would appear from all the fathers who have described them, were one of the most powerful and most pernicious of the Gnostic sects. Valentine, born in Egypt, began his public career as a teacher of the Platonic philosophy, but, like many other teachers of the same period, he established himself in Rome as the seat of his labours many years before Justin Martyr, on the one hand, or Marcion and Tatian on the other, had commenced theirs. Valentine preceded these two men, celebrated on such different grounds, and his testimony must be placed very much nearer the days of the apostles, for he had made himself known in 120, He said himself that he was a disciple of a friend of St Paul, and Irenæus tells us³³ that he came to Rome during the episcopate of Hyginus, and that he lived there to the time of Anicetus. He was, therefore, in the metropolis when Polycarp came on a mission from the Eastern Churches, and might have had Marcion among his hearers. His lectures attracted a crowd, A great number of admirers were attached to him, both from the superiority of his abilities and the power of his eloquence, (quia et ingenio poterat et eloquio.) “He had even aspired to the episcopate,” says Tertullian,³⁴ “and it was thought that, in the chagrin of his disappointed ambition, he broke off his connexion with the true Church, (de Ecclesiâ authenticae regulae abruptt.)” Yet his impieties did not exhibit themselves in all their audacity till after his retirement to the island of Cyprus. His principal disciples, Ptolemy, Secundus, Heracleon, Mark, and others, formed. as many distinct sects, gained a conspicuous position in their age, and were in general better known than Valentine himself. Irenæus begins his great work on Heresies with an exposition of the strange Valentinian systems. Tertullian combats them in like manner in his book, De Praescriptione Hereticorum, Clement in his Stromata, and, later still, Origen, Hippolytus, and others. 298. But here, as to the first canon, it is a fact of the greatest value that already, in these remote days, Valentine and his disciples, in spite of their most audacious heresies and violent hatred against the Churches of God, openly acknowledged the entire collection of the Scriptures at that time received. Valentine made war upon them only by the Oriental fancies of his imagination, and by the boldness with which he dared to found the most pernicious systems of error on his strange interpretations. Neither he nor his followers directly rejected any of the Scriptures. He had the same canon of the New Testament as the contemporary Church. “Valentine,” said Tertullian, “appears to make use of a complete collection, (Valentinus integro instrumento uti videtur;)” but, added he, “by the violence he does to the meaning of words, this man has taken away from the Scriptures, and added more to them, than was done openly and with a loud voice by Marcion himself, sword in hand, (emertè et palam machaerâ,) the one perverting by his interpretations where the other mutilated the texts.” The fragments of his writings that have been preserved by the fathers shewed that he made use of the Scriptures like the Christians of his age. When he cites the Epistle to the Ephesians, it is by calling it the scripture, and, in the same fragment, he clearly appeals to the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John, to the Epistle to the Romans, to the Epistle to the Corinthians,³⁵ and also, though less clearly, to the Epistle to the Hebrews, and to the first of John. When Irenæus³⁶ reproaches the Valentinians for having dared to entitle a certain book composed by them, “The Gospel of Truth,” he says, “he had had it only a little time,” and in complete disagreement with the Gospels of the apostles. It was only a Gnostic commentary recently published to explain their errors, without their having ceased on this account to acknowledge with the universal Church the four canonical Gospels.

We shall not embarrass ourselves here with their absurd doctrines; we are occupied only by their historical testimony, and this testimony strikes us as so much the more significant since they abandoned themselves to the most extravagant fancies about their pleroma, their thirty aeons, their ten decades, and their female aeon or the mother Achamoth. We may see the strange fancies of this Christianised paganism seriously exposed and refuted in the great work of Irenæus, and also in other fathers. In that work we hear them citing themselves almost every book of the canon to defend their errors, and thus, without any apologetic intention, they attest the authority our Scriptures possessed throughout the contemporary Church. If we confine ourselves to example — to the fragments cited by Irenæus — we shall see the four Gospels adduced, (though with a manifest preference for that of John,) and a frequent use made of Paul’s epistles, especially of the Epistles to the Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, and Ephesians. “By means of a fallacious exegesis, (ῥαδιουργοῦντες τας ἐξηγήσεις,)” says that father, “they take their demonstrations (ἀποδείξεις) from the evangelical Scriptures, and the apostolic epistles, (ἐκ τῶν εὐαγγελικῶν καὶ αποστολικῶν.)”³⁷

But more than this, and with all our desire to compress, we must have, among other Valentinians, the two chiefs of their two most noted sects, Heracleon and Ptolemy, both of the Western school.

SECTION FIFTH.

HERACLEON AND PTOLEMY.

230. These two heretical teachers must be regarded as anterior to Valentine, though they have been generally classed among the Valentinians, on account of the similiarity of their errors.

Heracleon is represented by Clement of Alexandria³⁸ as the most distinguished (δοκιμώτατος) teacher of the Valentinian school; but what must render him more noticeable for us is, that he is the most ancient commentator on the New Testament in the West whose name has come down to us.

We may judge of the antiquity to which these commentaries of Heracleon lead us back, when we state that he had made himself notorious in Sicily by his heresies when Bishop Alexander occupied the see of Rome, (from 109 to 116,) that is to say, six years, or not more than thirteen years after the death of John; for it was at the express request of the bishops of Sicily, assembled in council, that this bishop composed-a work against Heracleon, abounding in declarations from the Holy Scriptures.³⁹ The writings, therefore, of this heretic must have been already published, at the latest, only eight or ten years after St John’s death, and perhaps much earlier.

We cannot tell exactly in the present day what books of the New Testament Heracleon expounded. But we learn from Origen that he explained all the Gospel according to John;⁴⁰ and from Clement of Alexandria that he had also commented on that of Luke⁴¹ We have, besides, large fragments of him cited by the fathers, and learn from them that he quoted Matthew, as well as many epistles of Paul, with this formula, “the apostle says,” particularly the Epistle to the Romans, the Epistle to the Corinthians, and the second to Timothy.

231. The reader should take special notice here of a fact which is of great importance at this epoch — the appearance of commentaries on the New Testament, both in the West and East, (as we shall soon shew.) What must the writings of the New Testament have already become in the Church, for even heretics to experience the need of such works? But more than this, we can see in the very character of the commentary of Heracleon what was then the belief formed in the churches touching the full inspiration of our sacred books, even to details in their language, since we see the author, particularly on the subject of the Pastoral Epistles, regard as significant even the slightest variations⁴² in the words of the apostle. Certainly nothing can better attest the contemporary faith in the authenticity and authority of our Scriptures than the spectacle of these unhappy men obliged, in order to obtain some credit, to cite them and to pervert them as the books on which the faith of all the churches of God rested. Would they have acted thus if the authority of these books had not been for a long time fully established?

And as to Ptolemy, whom the fathers equally place among the Gnostics of the Italian school, to distinguish them from the Oriental Gnostics, Tertullian⁴³ places him before Heracleon.⁴⁴ Irenæus, who undertook to refute him, represents him as knowing how to give the most seductive appearance to the Gnostic errors: and Epiphanius makes him known to us more fully by reciting a letter which he had written to one of his disciples, a female, named Flora. In that you will hear him cite in favour of his heresies the Gospel of Matthew, the prologue of that of St John, passages from Paul’s Epistles to the Romans, the Corinthians, and the Ephesians; as you will also find in the fragments preserved by Irenæus,⁴⁵ passages taken from the four Gospels, and the Epistles to the Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, and Colossians.

But we shall be able to remount still higher, I mean to Basilides and his son Isidore, to Carpocrates and to the Ebionites.

SECTION SIXTH.

BASILIDES AND HIS SON ISIDORE.

232. In our upward course through the crowd of heretics of the second century, it is often difficult, as we have said, to disentangle their respective ages. Yet it appears sufficiently clear that Basilides was much more ancient than Cerdo and Heracleon. He was the leader of a Gnostic sect of the Oriental school, and his son, who was equally celebrated after him, made a great number of disciples.

Basilides had already rendered himself famous in Egypt,⁴⁶ about the year 112, and it is said that he died about the end of Hadrian’s reign, He professed to have had for his master a companion of St Peter, (Glaukias, his interpreter.) A disciple of Menander, who was himself a disciple of Simon the Magician, Basilides was among the first Gnostics, like one of those enfants perdus who are set in the forefront of the Wattle. He betook himself from Syria to Persia, where he spread the errors on the origin of evil that were at a later period propagated by Manes, and after that he returned to found a school in Egypt. He endeavoured to recommend his pernicious doctrines by an eloquence inflated with all the pomp of language. According to him, Christ did not assume our flesh, and suffered only in appearance. He reckoned 365 heavens, of which he recited the birth, placing above all abraxas a mystic power, the name of which in Greek letters forms the number 365, and which he made use of for magical purposes. Clement, Tertullian, Origen, Eusebius,⁴⁷ and Epiphanius, who all speak of this pernicious man, have preserved fragments of his writings; and Eusebius tells us that Agrippa Castor, a very able and celebrated writer of that epoch, powerfully refuted them.

234, All these testimonies shew us that Basilides was in the East what Heracleon had been in the West — the most ancient of the known commentators on the New Testament; for he had also, Eusebius tells, “composed twenty-four books of commentaries (ἐξηγητικῶν) on the gospel.” Here we see the gospel commented upon publicly in the East, very near the time of St John, as it was in the West! Besides this, Clement of Alexandria⁴⁸ tells us, that his followers supported their doctrines relative to marriage on Matt. xix. 11, 12, and 1 Cor. viii. 9; and another of their errors on what Paul said to the Romans, vii. 7, “By the law is the knowledge of sin.” Basilides, also, Clement affirms,⁴⁹ cited in the twenty-third of his Exegetics a beautiful passage from the 1st Epistle of Peter, (iv. 14-16;) and we find Origen⁵⁰ censures him for wishing to found his dogma of metempsychosis (μετενσωματωσεως) on those words of St Paul to the Romans, “For I was alive without the law once,” (vii. 9,) that is to say, before being in this human body.

235. We might proceed still further with this review of the primitive heretics, and go back to Cerinthus, or Menander, or Simon the Magician, to listen to new testimonies. We might cite Carpocrates and his son Epiphanes, more ancient than Basilides, and who, while practising magic, and holding the doctrine of metempsychosis, did not hesitate to vindicate their moral irregularities by quotations from Luke, (xii. 52,) from Matthew, (v. 25,) from the Epistles of Paul to Timothy, (1 vi. 20, 2 i. 14,) and from the First Epistle of John, (v.19.)⁵¹ Above all, we might appeal to the most ancient sect, the Ebionites, who began in the lifetime of the apostles, and were violent Judaizers, denying the Divinity of Christ, and setting themselves against Paul and Luke. Nevertheless, they raised no objection to the authority of the epistles of this apostle, nor of the acts of Luke, nor of the Gospels of Mark, Luke, and John, though they made, by means of a mutilated Matthew, a Gospel which was called The Gospel of the Ebionttes.⁵² But we have said enough, and we hasten to come at last to the apostolic fathers, so called because they had seen with their own, eyes the apostles of the Lord.

1) See their most recent introductions to the study of the New Testament, beginning with that of Hug, (Hug’s Hinleitung, prop. i, p. 88.)

2) 1 Tim. vi. 20.

3) De Praescript. Haeretic., cap. ii,

4) We shall not speak here of the Ophites, nor the Cerinthians, nor the other heretics of the first century who are less known to us, nor of the Arians and’ Manicheans, who came later, nor even of Theodotus, the tanner of Byzantium, who flourished in the latter half of the second century. We confine ourselves to the first half.

5) Epiph., Haeres., xlii., 1. See also Cave, Dict. Hist. Eccl.; Bingham, Orig. Eccl., i., p. 226; Massuet, De Gnostic. reb., § 135. [Neander disputes the truth of the statement that Marcion was excommunicated for unchastity, &c. See his “General History of the Church,” (Torrey’s transl.,) vol. ii., p. 186, Bohn’s ed. — TR. ]

6) Haeres., iii., 3.

7) Adv. Marcion, i., 19: — “Quoto quidem anno Antonini Majoris de Ponte suo exhalaverit aura canicularis, non curavi investigare; de quo tamen constat, Antonianus est hereticus, sub Pio impius.”

8) Apol., c. xxvi.

9) Adv. Marcion, i., 20,

10) Adv. Marcion, v., 20, 21. See also Epiphanius, Haeres., xlii. The latter puts in Marcion Philemon in the ninth place, and Philippians in the tenth,

11) Adv. Marcion, v., 13.

12) Haeres., xlii. Yet it would appear by Origen’s commentary on Romans xvi. 25, that he omitted the two last chapters.

13) See Hahn’s attempt to reconstruct Marcion’s Gospel — Das Evang. Marcions in reiner urspriinglichen Gestalt. Konigsb., 1823.

14) Epiph., Haeres, xlii. See Kirchhofer’s Quellensammlung, p. 336, &c.

15) Haeres., iii, 12, § 12,

16) De Carne Christi, cap. ii.

17) Contra Celsum, ii., 27.

18) Apol., i., 26. 9 Μρκίωνα δὲ τινα Ποντικόν, ὃς ΚΑΪ ΝΥΝ ’ΈἹῚ ἐστι διδάσκων τοῦς πειθομένους.

19) It is thus he designates the Gospels of Matthew and John,

20) He here refers to Mark.

21) Iren., Haeres., iii., 12.

22) Adv. Marc., v., 138.

23) We only speak here of the first canon. We shall treat in the sequel of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

24) In the ancient Latin manuscript at Cambridge, (Bezæ,) the four Gospels are arranged thus — Matthew, John, Luke, and Mark. It appears that before Jerome’s time this was the ancient order. It is the only one of the manuscripts of a high antiquity (says M. Berga de Xurey) which joins the Greek to the Latin translation.

25) Haeres,, xlii, p. 868,

26) Cave, Scripta Eccles. Hist. Litt., vol. i, p. 75.

27) In his Address to the Greeks, pp. 18, 19.

28) Haeres., i. 28. See also Eusebius, H. E., iv., 29; Tatian, Orat. ad Graec, cap. xlii., 135, 18, 19.

29) De Scriptor., cap. xxix.

30) Epivhanius says expressly the four Gospels.

31) H. E,, iv., 29.

32) Haeres., i., 20.

33) Haeres., iii, 4, 3.

34) Contra Valent., cap. iv.

35) De Praescript. Haeret., cap. xxxyiii. Tertullian opposes the ancient instrument to the new, This term, instrumentum, Quintilian applies to the writings of a lawsuit; and in Suetonius, instrumentum imperii is an inventory or description of the empire.

36) Adv. Haeres., iii., 11, 9.

37) Haer., lib. i., cap. iil.

38) Strom., i, iv., 9.

39) Cave, Hist. Litt., p.47. Bâle, 1741.

40) This father cites him at length more than forty times in his own commentary on John, The fragments of Heracleon on this Gospel have been collected by Grabe, “Spicilegium,” ii., 85-117.

41) Strom., iv., 9.

42) See him on 2 Tim. ii. 23; Clement, Strom., iv., 1. c,

43) Adv, Valentine, iv.

44) Hares., xxxiv.

45) Adv. Haeres., i., 1, 8, vi., 35.

46) See Cave, Hist. Litt., p. 49; Clement, Stromata, i, 7.

47) Hist. Eccles, iv., 7.

48) Stromata, iii.

49) IV. Opp., p. 504, Paris, 1629.

50) In Ep. ad Roman, cap. v. .Opp., tom. iv., p. 549, edit. Bened.

51) See Iren., Haeres., i, 25; Tertull., De Praescript., cap. xxv. Orig. in Genes,, ch. i.; Kirchhofer, Quellensamml., pp. 419, 420.

52) Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., iii, 27. The reader who wishes to pursue the study of these witnesses further, may consult Bunsen’s Hippolytus, Kirchhofer’s Quellensammlung, and the recent work of Mr Westcott on the Canon, pp. 301-305, Cambridge, 1855.