The Priests of the Serpent

These are the contents of the fifth book of the Refutation of All Heresies.

What the Naasseni claim — the men who call themselves Gnostics — and that they put forward the very opinions the philosophers of the Greeks had put forward before them, and the men who handed down the mystery rites as well; the Naasseni took their opening from both, and built their heresies out of them. What the Peratae hold, and that they did not frame their system out of the holy Scriptures but out of the art of astrology. What the Sethians teach, and that they stole their theories from the wise men among the Greeks and patched their own system together out of scraps of opinion taken from Musaeus, Linus, and Orpheus. What Justinus holds, and that he framed his system not out of the holy Scriptures but out of the marvels reported in detail by Herodotus the historian.

In the four books before this one I think I have set out at great length what every thinker among the Greeks and the foreigners has held about the divine nature and the making of the world; and I have not even left their systems of magic out of account. So I have gone to no ordinary trouble for my readers, in my eagerness to push many of them forward into a desire to learn, and into a steady hold on the knowledge of the truth. [e]

What remains, then, is to hurry on to the refutation of the heresies. It was in order to supply that refutation that we put forward everything we have already said. For the founders of the heresies took their starting points from the philosophers, and then, like cobblers, patched together the blunders of the ancients according to their own private reading of them, and offered them as something new to people who can be deceived — as we will prove in the books that follow. For the rest, the occasion invites us to take up the subjects we proposed, and to begin with those who have dared to sing the praises of a serpent — the one who started the error, by means of certain words that his own energy devised. The priests and champions of this system were first of all the people called Naasseni, a name that comes from the Hebrew language, since in Hebrew the serpent is called naas. Later, though, they gave themselves the name Gnostics, claiming that they alone had sounded the depths of knowledge. Many have detached parts from the system of these thinkers and built out of them a heresy that has several branches but is essentially one. They explain exactly the same things, dressed up as different opinions, as the discussion will prove as it goes along.

These Naasseni, then, by their own account, honor a man and a son of man above all else. This man is both male and female, and among them he is called Adamas; and many different hymns are made to him. The hymns, to keep it short, run among them in something like this form:

But they divide him into three parts, as Geryon was divided. For one part of this man, they say, is rational, another soulish, another earthly. And they suppose that the knowledge of him is where the ability to know God begins. They put it this way: “The beginning of perfection is the knowledge of man; the knowledge of God is perfection complete.”

All these qualities, though — rational, soulish, and earthly — have withdrawn and come down together into one man at once, the Naassene says: Jesus, who was born of Mary. And these three men, he says, are in the habit of speaking through him at the same time, each out of the substance that is his own and to those who properly belong to him. For according to them there are three kinds of all existing things — angelic, soulish, and earthly; and there are three churches — angelic, soulish, and earthly; and the names of these are the chosen, the called, and the captive.