The Christ Who Came Down

Carpocrates says that the world and everything in it were made by angels far below the unbegotten Father, and that Jesus was born of Joseph. He came into the world like other men, but he was more righteous than the rest. His soul was vigorous and undefiled, and so it remembered what it had seen while it lived with the unbegotten God. For that reason, Carpocrates says, a power was sent down on him from that God, so that by it he might escape the angels who made the world. That power passed through them all, and in every one of them it won its freedom, and then it went up again to God. And every soul that longs for the same things this power longed for, he says, stands in the same condition as the soul of Jesus. [a]

Jesus’ soul, they say, was trained in Jewish customs as the law required, but in truth it despised them, and this is why he received powers that cancelled the sufferings men undergo as punishment. So, Carpocrates argues, any soul that can despise the world-making rulers as the soul of Christ did receives in the same way power to do the same things. That is why some of them have grown proud enough to say that certain of their own number are equal to Jesus himself, and others even more powerful than he was. Some, they claim, are better than his disciples — Peter and Paul and the rest of the apostles — and in no way inferior to Jesus. Their souls came from that same power above, he says, and since they despise the world-making angels just as he did, they have been counted worthy of the same power and of going up to the same place. And if anyone should despise earthly things more than the Savior did, Carpocrates says such a man could become greater than Jesus. The people who follow him practice magical arts and incantations, love potions and charms. They use attendant spirits and spirits that send dreams, and use the rest of the tricks of sorcery, claiming that they now have power to master the rulers and makers of this world, and even everything in it.

These men have been sent out by Satan to bring the divine name of the church into disrepute among the nations. What the devil is after is this: that people who hear the teachings of these men, first one thing and then another, and who suppose that all of us are of the same stamp, should turn their ears away from the preaching of the truth — or else that, seeing what these men do, they should speak against all of us.

The followers of Carpocrates say that souls pass from one body into another until they have filled up the measure of all their sins. When not one sin is left, the soul is set free and goes off to that God who is above the world-making angels; and in this way, they say, every soul will be saved. But if a soul manages, while it is in the body for a single lifetime, to get through the whole measure of wrongdoing ahead of time, it does not pass into another body at all. Having paid off every trespass at once, it will be released from ever living in a body again. Some of them also brand their own disciples on the back of the lobe of the right ear. And they make images of Christ, saying that Pilate had them made at that time.

There was a man named Cerinthus, himself trained in the learning of the Egyptians, who said that the world was not made by the first God but by a power that had broken off from the Power which is above all things — a power that does not know the God who is over all. He held that Jesus was not born of a virgin, but that he was the son of Joseph and Mary, born just as the rest of men are, and that he was more righteous and wiser than anyone else. After the baptism, he says, Christ came down on him in the form of a dove, from the sovereignty that is above all things; and then Jesus preached the unknown Father and worked miracles to prove that he had been sent. In the end, Cerinthus held, Christ withdrew from Jesus: Jesus suffered and rose again, but Christ, being spiritual, remained beyond the reach of suffering. [f]

The Ebionites, however, admit that the world was made by the one who really is God, but they tell the same tales about the Christ as Cerinthus and Carpocrates. They live by Jewish custom, saying that they are counted righteous by the law, and that Jesus was counted righteous by fulfilling the law. That, they say, is why he was named God’s Christ and Jesus — because no one else had kept the law completely. If anyone else had carried out the commands the law contains, he would have been that Christ. And they say that they too, when they fulfil the law in the same way, are able to become Christs; for they hold that our Lord himself was a man in exactly the sense that everyone else is. [h]

There was also a man from Byzantium named Theodotus, who brought in a heresy of a new kind. What he says about the origin of the universe agrees in part with what the true church teaches, since he admits that all things were created by God. But he takes his account of Christ by force from the school of the Gnostics and from Cerinthus and Ebion, and claims that our Lord appeared in something like the following way. Jesus, he says, was a man, born of a virgin according to the Father’s purpose; and after he had lived like everyone else and had become outstandingly religious, he afterwards received Christ at his baptism in the Jordan — Christ who came from above and came down on him in the form of a dove. This, according to Theodotus, is why no miraculous powers worked in him before the Spirit came down and was shown forth in him — the Spirit he calls the Christ. But some of his followers are inclined to think that this man was never made God at all, not even when the Spirit came down; while others hold that he was made God after he rose from the dead. [k]

As different questions came up among them, another man — he too called Theodotus, a banker by trade — tried to establish that a certain Melchizedek is the greatest power, and that this one is greater than Christ. Christ, they say, came to be after the likeness of this Melchizedek. And like those already spoken of as followers of Theodotus, they assert that Jesus is a man, and that Christ came down on him in the same way as in the account already given. [n]

There are, however, all sorts of differences of opinion among the Gnostics, and we have decided it is not worth listing the silly teachings of these men, since they are too many, without reason, and full of blasphemy. Next to them, even those who drew their philosophy from the Greeks have been shown to be far more reverent about the divine. But it is Nicolaus who has been the cause of the wide alliance of these wicked men. He was appointed by the apostles as one of the seven for the service of a deacon, and then he departed from sound teaching and used to teach that it makes no difference how a man lives or what he eats. And when his disciples went on insulting the Holy Spirit, John rebuked them in the Revelation as men who commit sexual immorality and eat what has been sacrificed to idols.

Cerdo too, taking his cue in the same way from these men and from Simon, says that the God preached by Moses and the prophets was not the Father of Jesus Christ. That God, he argues, was known, while the Father of Christ was unknown; the one was just, the other good. Marcion propped up this teaching of his in the work he undertook to write, which he called Antitheses, and in it he was in the habit of throwing at the Maker of the universe whatever slander came into his mind. Lucian, this man’s disciple, did the same. [r]

Apelles, who comes out of this school, speaks as follows. There is a certain good God, as Marcion also supposed, and the one who created all things is just; and he, according to Apelles, was the Craftsman of everything that has come to be. There is a third, the one who used to speak to Moses, and this one was of a fiery nature; and there was a fourth, a cause of evils. But these he calls angels. He slanders the law and the prophets, claiming that what has been written in them is of human origin and false, and he picks out of the Gospels, or out of the writings of the apostle Paul, whatever pleases him. And he gives himself to the discourses of a certain Philumene, treating them as the revelations of a prophetess. [u]

He says that Christ came down from the power above — that is, from the good God — and that he is the son of that good God. He was not born of a virgin, he says, and when he did appear he was not without flesh: he formed his body by taking parts of it from the substance of the universe, that is, from hot and cold and moist and dry. In this body, unnoticed by the powers of the world, he lived in the world for as long as he did. Afterwards, Apelles held, he was crucified by the Jews, and died, and was raised up after three days and appeared to his disciples. And he showed them the marks of the nails and the wound in his side, wanting to convince them that he was no phantom but was present in the flesh. After he had shown them his flesh, Apelles says, he gave it back to the earth, the substance it came from, since he coveted nothing that belonged to another. He might use for a time what belonged to another, but in due course he returned to each thing what was properly its own: when he had loosed the bonds of his body once more, he gave back heat to what is hot, cold to what is cold, moisture to what is moist, and dryness to what is dry. And in this state our Lord went off to the good Father, leaving behind in the world the seed of life for those who through his disciples would come to believe in him.

It seems to us that these teachings have now been explained well enough. But since we have decided to leave unrefuted not one of the opinions any of them have put forward, let us see what the Docetae have invented as well.