Monuments of the Apostles

And I can point out the victory monuments of the apostles. For if you will go to the Vatican hill, or out along the Road to Ostia, you will find the victory monuments of the men who founded this church. [a]

Cerinthus too, by means of revelations that he would have us believe were written by a great apostle, sets astonishing things in front of us, and claims that angels showed them to him. He says that after the resurrection the kingdom of Christ will be on earth, and that flesh, living in Jerusalem, will once again be in service to its cravings and its pleasures. And because he is an enemy of the Scriptures of God and wants to mislead people, he says there will be a span of a thousand years given over to wedding feasts.

After this there were four prophetesses at Hierapolis in Asia, the daughters of Philip. Their grave is there, and their father’s as well.

They say that everyone of the first generation, the apostles themselves included, both received and taught the very things these men now hold; and that the truth of the preaching of the good news was kept safe down to the time of Victor, the thirteenth overseer of Rome counting from Peter, and that under his successor Zephyrinus the truth was falsified. What they claim might even be believable, if the holy Scriptures did not contradict them in the first place. And besides that, there are writings by brothers older than Victor’s day, written in defense of the truth against the pagans and against the false teaching of their own time — I mean Justin and Miltiades, Tatian and Clement, and many others. In every one of them Christ is spoken of as God. Who has not read the books of Irenaeus and Melito and the rest, which declare Christ to be God and man? And all the psalms and hymns written from the beginning by the brothers, by believers, sing of Christ as the Word of God and speak of him as God.

The church’s teaching has been proclaimed all these years; how then is it possible that men preached down to Victor’s time in the way these people assert? And how are they not ashamed to slander Victor like this, when they know perfectly well that Victor cut off Theodotus the tanner from the fellowship — the ringleader and father of this God-denying revolt, the first man to say that Christ was merely a man? For if Victor held the very opinions their blasphemy teaches, as they claim, how would he have thrown out Theodotus, the man who started this teaching?

Let me at least remind many of the brothers of something that happened in our own time. If it had happened in Sodom, I think it might have brought even those people to their senses. There was a man named Natalius, a confessor — not from some distant age, but from our own day. He was taken in once by Asclepiodotus and by a second Theodotus, a banker. Both of these were pupils of Theodotus the tanner, the first man cut off from the fellowship over this opinion — this mindlessness, rather — by Victor, the overseer of that day, as I said. They talked Natalius into letting himself be made overseer of this sect, on the understanding that they would pay him a hundred and fifty denarii a month.

So he joined himself to them, and again and again the Lord warned him in visions. For our merciful God and Lord Jesus Christ did not want a witness to his own sufferings to be lost outside the church. But he paid little attention to the visions. He was caught by the honor of presiding over them, and by that filthy greed for money that has ruined so many. So at last he was whipped by holy angels and beaten hard all night long, until he got up early in the morning, put on sackcloth, covered himself with ashes, and threw himself down in front of Zephyrinus the overseer, in great haste and in tears. He rolled at the feet not only of the clergy but of the laypeople as well, and his weeping moved the pity of the compassionate church of the merciful Christ. And after many prayers, and after showing the welts left by the blows he had taken, he was at last, and with difficulty, received back into the fellowship.

They have brazenly falsified the sacred Scriptures. They have thrown out the rules of the ancient faith. They have refused to know Christ, not asking what the sacred Scriptures say, but working hard to find some form of syllogism they can build their godlessness on. If someone sets a word of divine Scripture in front of them, they examine whether it will make a conditional or a disjunctive syllogism. And leaving the holy Scriptures of God aside, they study geometry — men who are of the earth, who speak of the earth, and who do not know the One who comes from above. Some of them go to great lengths measuring out Euclid; Aristotle and Theophrastus are admired; and Galen, if you please, is perhaps even worshipped by some of them. As for men who misuse the skills of unbelievers to prop up their own false teaching, and who use the cunning of the godless to water down the plain faith of the divine Scriptures — is there any need to say that such people are nowhere near the faith?

This is why they have laid bold hands on the divine Scriptures, claiming that they have corrected them. Anyone who wishes may check that I am not saying this against them falsely. If a person cared to collect all their copies and compare them side by side, he would find that they disagree in many places. The copies of Asclepiades, at any rate, will be found to differ from those of Theodotus. Plenty of such copies can be had, because their pupils were eager to write in each man’s corrections — as they call them; corruptions is what they are. And again, the copies of Hermophilus do not agree with these; and as for those of Apollonius, they are not even consistent with themselves. Compare the ones they prepared earlier with the ones later corrupted for a particular purpose, and many differences will be found.

And how outrageous this offense is, it is hardly likely that even they are unaware. For either they do not believe that the divine Scriptures were dictated by the Holy Spirit, and then they are unbelievers; or they think themselves wiser than the Holy Spirit, and in that case what are they but men possessed? They cannot deny that the crime is theirs, since the copies were written in their own hand. They did not receive such copies of the Scriptures from the men who first instructed them in the faith, and they cannot produce the copies these were made from. And some of them did not even think it worth the trouble to corrupt the text. They simply denied the law and the prophets outright, for the sake of their lawless and godless teaching, using grace as their excuse — and so they sank to the lowest pit of ruin.

… the things he had been present for, he set down in this way. The third book of the Gospel is the one according to Luke. Luke, the well-known physician, wrote it under his own name and in order, after Christ’s ascension, when Paul had taken him along as a man devoted to what is right. He had not seen the Lord in the flesh himself, so he began his account, as far as he was able to manage it, with the birth of John. The fourth Gospel is John’s, one of the disciples. When his fellow disciples and the overseers urged him to write, he said, “Fast with me for three days from now, and let us tell one another whatever is revealed to each of us.” That same night it was revealed to Andrew, one of the apostles, that John should write it all down under his own name, with the others going over it as they called things to mind.

And so, although the several books of the Gospels teach us different beginnings, it makes no difference to the faith of believers, since in all of them everything is set out under one governing Spirit: the Lord’s birth, his suffering, his resurrection, his life with his disciples, and his two comings — the first in the lowliness of being rejected, which is now past, and the second in the glory of royal power, which is still to come. What wonder is it, then, that John keeps bringing these same things forward in his letters as well, saying of himself, “What we have seen with our eyes and heard with our ears, and what our hands have handled — that is what we have written.” For in this way he declares himself to be not only the eyewitness and the hearer, but also the recorder, in order, of all the marvelous things concerning the Lord.

The Acts of all the Apostles, moreover, are gathered by Luke into one book and addressed to the most excellent Theophilus, because the various events took place while he himself was present. And he shows this plainly — that his rule in writing was to give only what fell under his own eye — by leaving out the death of Peter, and also Paul’s journey when he set out from the city, Rome, for Spain.

As for the letters of Paul, they show of themselves, to anyone willing to understand the matter, what they are, and from what place or with what purpose they were sent. He wrote first of all, and at considerable length, to the Corinthians, to check a split over false teaching; then to the Galatians, to forbid circumcision; then to the Romans, on the rule of the Old Testament Scriptures, and also to show them that Christ is their beginning. We must go through these one by one, since the blessed apostle Paul, following the pattern of his predecessor John, writes by name to no more than seven churches, in this order: first to the Corinthians, second to the Ephesians, third to the Philippians, fourth to the Colossians, fifth to the Galatians, sixth to the Thessalonians, seventh to the Romans. And although he writes twice to the Corinthians and to the Thessalonians to set them right, it is still shown by this sevenfold writing that there is one church spread abroad through the whole world. John too, in the Revelation, writes to only seven churches, and yet he speaks to them all.

Besides these he wrote one letter to Philemon, one to Titus, and two to Timothy, out of plain personal affection and love; and yet these too are held sacred in the regard of the universal church and in the ordering of its discipline. There are also in circulation a letter to the Laodiceans and another to the Alexandrians, forged under Paul’s name and aimed at the teaching of Marcion, and there are several others besides that cannot be received in the universal church; for it will not do to mix gall with honey.

The letter of Jude, certainly, and two by the John named above — or bearing John’s name — are counted among the general letters. And the book of Wisdom, written by Solomon’s friends in his honor. We accept as well the Revelation of John and that of Peter, though some among us will not have the latter read in church. As for The Shepherd, Hermas wrote it quite recently, in our own times, in the city of Rome, while his brother Pius held the chair of the church of Rome as overseer. And therefore it ought indeed to be read; but it cannot be read out publicly in church to the people, and it can be placed neither among the prophets, whose number is complete, nor among the apostles, at the end of the times. Of the writings of Arsinous, also called Valentinus, or of Miltiades, we accept nothing at all. Rejected too are those who wrote a new book of Psalms for Marcion, together with Basilides and the founder of the Cataphrygians in Asia.