The Heir of the Apostles

Where was Marcion then, that shipowner from Pontus, the eager student of Stoic philosophy? Where was Valentinus then, the follower of Plato? It is clear that these men did not live so long ago — for the most part in the reign of Antoninus — and at first they believed the teaching of the universal church, in the church at Rome while the blessed Eleutherus was overseer — until their restless itch to speculate, which they passed on to the brothers like an infection, got them expelled more than once. Marcion, for his part, went out with the two hundred sesterces he had brought into the church; and when at last they were banished for good, they scattered the poison of their teachings far and wide. Later, it is true, Marcion said he repented, and accepted the terms he was offered — that he would be received back if he restored to the church everyone else he had been training for destruction. Death got to him first. [a]

It was, to be sure, necessary that there should be heresies. But it does not follow from that necessity that heresies are a good thing — as if it had not been just as necessary that there should be evil! It was necessary, too, that the Lord should be betrayed; but woe to the traitor. So let no one use this to defend heresies.

If I must also touch on the pedigree of Apelles: he is no man of the old days, no more so than Marcion, who taught him and shaped him. He gave up Marcion’s continence for the company of a woman, and withdrew to Alexandria, out of sight of his most saintly master. He came back some years later no better than he went, except that he was no longer a Marcionite, and attached himself to another woman, the virgin Philumene — we mentioned her earlier — who afterwards became a prostitute on a monstrous scale. Taken in by the force that worked through her, he wrote down the revelations he had learned from her. There are people still alive who remember these men — their own pupils and successors — so nobody can deny how late they come. And in fact they are convicted by their own works, exactly as the Lord said.

For since Marcion separated the New Testament from the Old, he necessarily comes after the thing he separated: it was only in his power to separate what was already joined. Since it was joined before it was separated, the fact that it was separated afterwards proves that the man who did the separating came afterwards too. In the same way Valentinus, with his rival interpretations and his undeniable corrections, makes his changes on the express ground that what stood there before was faulty — and so shows that the writings were somebody else’s.

We name these corrupters of the truth because they are better known and more widely followed than the rest. But there is also some fellow named Nigidius, and Hermogenes, and several others, who to this day go about twisting the ways of the Lord. Let them show me the authority they come with. If it is some other God they preach, how is it that they use the things and the writings and the names of the very God they preach against? If it is the same God, why treat him in some other way? Let them prove that they are new apostles! Let them claim that Christ has come down a second time, taught in person a second time, been crucified twice, died twice, been raised twice. For that is how the apostle described it; and that is how Christ is accustomed to make apostles — giving them, on top of everything else, the power to do the same signs he did himself. So I would like their mighty works produced as well — except that I grant them one mighty work: the perverse way they compete with the apostles. The apostles used to raise men from death to life; these men send men from life to death.

Let me come back, though, from this digression, and take up the priority of truth and the lateness of falsehood. My argument draws support even from the parable that puts first the Lord’s sowing of the good seed of the wheat, and only at a later stage brings in the enemy, the devil, spoiling the crop with worthless wild oats. What is pictured there is the difference between teachings, since in other passages too the word of God is compared to seed. From the order itself, then, it becomes clear that what was delivered first is the Lord’s and is true, and that what was brought in afterwards is foreign and false. This ruling will hold its ground against every later heresy, since none of them has in it any settled ground of kinship with the truth that would let it claim the truth for its own side. [l]

But suppose there are heresies bold enough to plant themselves in the middle of the apostolic age, so as to look as though the apostles handed them down, because they existed while the apostles were alive. Then we can say: let them produce the founding records of their churches. Let them unroll the list of their overseers, running down in unbroken succession from the beginning, in such a way that the first of those overseers of theirs can name as the man who ordained him and went before him one of the apostles, or one of the apostolic men — and a man, at that, who had stayed constantly with the apostles. This is how the apostolic churches hand down their registers. The church of Smyrna records that Polycarp was placed there by John; the church of Rome makes Clement to have been ordained in the same way by Peter. In exactly the same way the other churches produce the men whom the apostles appointed to their places as overseers, and whom they count as carriers of the apostolic seed. [n]

Let the heretics manufacture something of the same kind. After their blasphemy, what would they think unlawful to attempt? But even if they do manufacture it, they will not advance a step. Their own teaching, once it is set beside the teaching of the apostles, will declare by its own difference and contradiction that its author was neither an apostle nor an apostolic man — because the apostles would never have taught things that contradicted each other, and the apostolic men would never have put out teaching different from the apostles’, unless the very men who were taught by the apostles went off and preached the opposite.

So the heretics will be put to this proof by the churches — churches that cannot trace their founder to an apostle or an apostolic man, being of much later date, since in fact new ones are being founded every day, but which are counted no less apostolic because they hold the same faith and are akin in doctrine. Then let all the heresies, when our apostolic church challenges them by these two tests, produce their proof of how they think themselves apostolic. But in truth they are not, and they cannot prove themselves to be what they are not. Nor are they received into peace and fellowship by any churches that are connected in any way with apostles — since they are in no sense apostolic themselves, differing as they do over the sacred trust of the faith.

On top of all this, I add a review of the doctrines themselves. They existed in the days of the apostles, and the apostles exposed and denounced them. They will be shown up more easily this way, when it turns out that they were already there then, or at any rate took their seed from the weeds that were there then. [r]

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul marks out certain people who denied the resurrection and doubted it. That opinion was the special property of the Sadducees. Part of it is held today by Marcion and Apelles and Valentinus, and all the others who attack the resurrection. Writing to the Galatians, he goes after men who kept circumcision and the law of Moses and defended them: that is Ebion’s heresy running there. And people who “forbid marriage” he reproaches in his instructions to Timothy — which is the teaching of Marcion and his follower Apelles. He aims the same blow at people who said “the resurrection is already past.” The Valentinians claimed that opinion for themselves.

When he mentions “endless genealogies,” one recognizes Valentinus again. In his system some Aeon or other with a newfangled name — and not one of them only — fathers Mind and Truth by his own Grace; these two in the same way produce of themselves Word and Life; and these in turn beget Man and the Church. Out of that first eight, ten more Aeons spring up after them, and then the other twelve arise with their marvelous names, to fill out the mere tale of thirty Aeons.

The same apostle, when he disapproves of people who are “in bondage to the elements,” points us to a doctrine of Hermogenes, who brings in matter as having no beginning and then compares it with God, who has no beginning. By making the mother of the elements a goddess in this way, he puts himself in a position to “be in bondage” to a being he sets on a level with God.

John, in the Revelation, is charged with correcting those “who eat things sacrificed to idols” and “who commit sexual immorality.” There is another sort of Nicolaitans even now; theirs is called the Gaian heresy. And in his letter he singles out as “antichrists” the people who “denied that Christ had come in the flesh,” and who refused to hold that Jesus was the Son of God. Marcion held the first of those; Ebion the second. And the teaching of Simon’s sorcery, which pressed the worship of angels, was itself reckoned among the idolatries and condemned by the apostle Peter in Simon’s own person.

These, so far as I can see, are the kinds of counterfeit teaching which — as the apostles themselves inform us — existed in their own day. And yet among so many different distortions of the truth we find not one school that raised any dispute about God as the Creator of all things. No one was bold enough to guess at a second god. Doubt was felt about the Son sooner than about the Father — until Marcion brought in, alongside the Creator, another god who was nothing but goodness. Apelles made the Creator out to be some glorious angel or other belonging to the God above him — the god, on his account, of the law and of Israel — and declared that he was made of fire. Valentinus scattered his Aeons about, and traced the sin of one Aeon to the producing of God the Creator. [y]

To nobody, of course, except these men, and to nobody before them, was the truth about the divine nature revealed! They got this special honor and this fuller favor from the devil, we cannot doubt, because he wanted to rival God in this too: he wanted to do himself, by the poison of his teachings, what the Lord said could not be done, and make “the disciples greater than their teacher.”

So let the whole crowd of heresies pick out for themselves whatever dates they like for their appearance, provided that when they appeared is treated as making no difference — granted also that they are not of the truth, and, as a matter of course, that whatever did not exist in the time of the apostles can have had no connection with the apostles. If they had existed then, their names would be on record, along with the measures taken to put them down. Those heresies that did exist in the apostles’ days stand condemned by the mere fact of being named. So if it is true that the heresies which were in a rough state in apostolic times are the same ones we now find in a much more polished shape, that very fact is their condemnation. And if they were not the same, but arose later in a different form and merely took over certain positions from them, then by sharing an agreement in teaching they must share in the condemnation as well, on the strength of the rule already laid down — lateness of date, which meets them at the very door. Even if they had no share at all in condemned doctrine, they would stand judged in advance on the ground of time alone, and be all the more spurious for not having been so much as named by the apostles. Which makes us the more certain that these are the heresies which were announced back then as going to arise.

Challenged and refuted by us on these terms, let all the heresies boldly bring forward, on their side, rules like these against our teaching — whether they are later than the apostles or contemporaries of the apostles, provided they differ from them, and provided also that the apostles condemned them in advance, either in general terms or by name. For since they deny that our teaching is true, they owe us a proof that it too is a heresy, refutable by the same rule that refutes them; and at the same time they owe us a place to look for the truth, which by now is plainly nowhere among them. Our case is behind nobody’s in date. On the contrary, it is earlier than all of them, and that fact will be the evidence for the truth, which everywhere holds first place. The apostles, again, nowhere condemn it; they defend it — which will show that it comes from themselves. For a teaching they refrain from condemning, when they have condemned every foreign opinion, they show to be their own, and on that ground too they defend it. [ab]

Come now, you who would like to put your curiosity to better use — apply it to the business of your own salvation, and run through the apostolic churches, where the very chairs of the apostles still stand foremost in their own places, where their own authentic letters are read aloud, giving out the voice and bringing back the face of each of them. Achaia is very near you: there you have Corinth. You are not far from Macedonia: you have Philippi, and the Thessalonians. You are able to cross to Asia: you get Ephesus. And since you are close upon Italy, you have Rome, and from Rome the very authority of the apostles themselves comes down even into our hands. [ac]

How happy that church is, on which the apostles poured out all their teaching along with their blood! Where Peter suffers as his Lord suffered; where Paul is crowned with a death like John’s; where the apostle John was first plunged into boiling oil, came out unhurt, and was sent off to his island exile. See what she has learned, what she has taught, what fellowship she has had even with our churches in Africa. One Lord God she acknowledges, the Creator of the universe, and Christ Jesus, born of the virgin Mary, the Son of God the Creator; and the resurrection of the flesh. The law and the prophets she mixes in one volume with the writings of the evangelists and the apostles, and from that she drinks in her faith.

This faith she seals with the water of baptism, clothes with the Holy Spirit, feeds with the thanksgiving, heartens with martyrdom — and against a discipline held like this she admits no one to argue. This is the discipline which — I will no longer say foretold that heresies would come — is the thing they came out of. Even so, they were not of her, because they set themselves against her. Even the rough wild olive comes up from the stone of the fruitful, rich, genuine olive; and from the seed of the mellowest and sweetest fig there springs the empty and useless wild fig. In the same way heresies too come from our stock, though not of our kind: they come from the grain of truth, but because they are false they have nothing to show but wild leaves.

That being so — in order that the truth may be judged to belong to us, “as many as walk by the rule” which the church handed down from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, and Christ from God — the ground of our position is clear. It rules that heretics are not to be allowed to appeal to the Scriptures at all, since we prove, without the Scriptures, that they have nothing to do with the Scriptures. For as they are heretics, they cannot be true Christians, because what they follow they did not get from Christ but chose of their own mere will; and by that choosing they incur, and accept, the name of heretics. Not being Christians, then, they have acquired no right to the Christian Scriptures. And it may very fairly be said to them: [ah]

“Who are you? When did you come, and where from? You are none of mine — what have you to do with what is mine? Marcion, by what right do you cut my timber? Valentinus, by whose leave are you diverting the streams of my spring? Apelles, by what power are you shifting my boundary stones? This is my property. Why are the rest of you sowing and grazing here to suit yourselves? This, I say, is my property. I have held it a long time; I held it before you. I hold sure title deeds from the original owners themselves, the men the estate belonged to. I am the heir of the apostles. Just as they drew up their will with care, and committed it to a trust, and put the trustees on oath, so I hold it. As for you, they certainly always treated you as disinherited, and disowned you as strangers — as enemies. But on what ground are heretics strangers and enemies to the apostles, if not the difference of their teaching, which each of them, of his own mere will, has either put forward or taken over against the apostles?”