Callistus and the Book of Elchasai

Callistus was a household slave of a man named Carpophorus, a Christian who belonged to the emperor’s household. Because Callistus was a Christian too, Carpophorus put a considerable sum of money into his hands and told him to make a profit with it in banking. So Callistus took the money and set up a bank in the district called the Piscina Publica. As time went on, a good many widows and brothers left deposits with him, on the understanding that they were placing their money with Carpophorus. But Callistus made away with all of it and found himself unable to pay. [a]

Naturally there was someone to tell Carpophorus what he had been doing, and Carpophorus said he would require an accounting from him. When Callistus saw how matters stood and realized what he had to fear from his master, he slipped away and made for the sea. At Portus he found a ship ready to sail and went aboard, meaning to go wherever she happened to be bound. Even so he was not overlooked: there was someone to bring Carpophorus word of what had happened. Acting on it, Carpophorus went straight down to the harbor and tried to hurry aboard after Callistus. But the ship lay at anchor out in the middle of the harbor, and the ferryman was slow about it, so Callistus, on board, had time to make out his master in the distance. Knowing that he would certainly be taken, he stopped caring whether he lived, and, reckoning his situation hopeless, threw himself into the sea. The sailors jumped into their boats and hauled him out against his will, while the people on shore raised a shout. So Callistus was handed over to his master, brought back to Rome, and put by him to the mill.

Time went on, and — as happens in cases like this — some of the brothers came to Carpophorus and begged him to let the runaway off his punishment, on the plea that Callistus said he had money owed him by certain people. Carpophorus, being a devout man, said his own property did not concern him, but the deposits did; for many came to him in tears, telling him they had handed over what they entrusted to Callistus on the understanding that they were lodging the money with Carpophorus himself. Carpophorus gave way to their pleading and gave orders for Callistus to be released.

Callistus, though, had nothing to pay with, and could not run again, since he was being watched. So he worked out a scheme by which he hoped to get himself killed. Pretending he was going to his creditors, he hurried on their Sabbath to the synagogue where the Jews were gathered, took his stand, and made a disturbance among them. They were upset by him, insulted him, struck him, and dragged him before Fuscianus, the prefect of the city. Asked what the trouble was, they answered: “The Romans have granted us the right to read publicly the laws that have been handed down to us from our fathers. This man came in and stopped us, making a disturbance among us and claiming that he is a Christian.”

Fuscianus happened to be sitting on the judgment seat at the time. As he was showing his anger at Callistus over what the Jews had said, someone went off, of course, and told Carpophorus what was going on. Carpophorus rushed to the prefect’s seat and called out: “I beg you, my lord Fuscianus, do not believe this man. He is no Christian. He is looking for a way to die, after making away with a quantity of my money — as I will prove.” The Jews took this for a trick, as though Carpophorus were using the excuse to get Callistus off, and they shouted against him in front of the prefect more bitterly than before. Fuscianus was swayed by these Jews; he had Callistus flogged and handed him over to be sent to a mine in Sardinia.

Some time later, when there were other martyrs in that place, Marcia, the mistress of Commodus, a woman who loved God and wanted to do some good work, sent for the blessed Victor, who was at that time overseer of the church, and asked him which martyrs were in Sardinia. He gave her all their names but left out Callistus, knowing the criminal things he had dared. Marcia got what she asked from Commodus and handed the letter of release to Hyacinthus, an elderly eunuch. He took it, sailed to Sardinia, delivered it to the man who was then governor of the province, and succeeded in having the martyrs freed — all but Callistus. But Callistus dropped to his knees, weeping, and begged to be released as well. Hyacinthus, worn down by the prisoner’s pleading, asked the governor to grant a release, claiming that Marcia had given him leave to do it and that he would arrange matters so that the governor ran no risk. The governor was persuaded, and released Callistus too.

When Callistus reached Rome, Victor was very much distressed at what had happened; but since he was a compassionate man, he took no action. Still, guarding against the reproach of many — for what this Callistus had attempted was not old news — and because Carpophorus was still hostile, Victor sent Callistus to live at Antium and settled a monthly food allowance on him. And after Victor’s death, Zephyrinus, who had taken Callistus as a fellow worker in managing the clergy, honored him to his own ruin; he brought him back from Antium and put him in charge of the cemetery.

Callistus was always at Zephyrinus’s side and, as I have already said, served him with a hypocrite’s service; and by the contrast he showed Zephyrinus up as a man who could neither form a judgment about what was said to him nor see through the design of Callistus, who made a practice of talking to Zephyrinus about whatever pleased him. So, after Zephyrinus died, thinking he had got the position he had chased so hard, he expelled Sabellius on the ground that Sabellius did not hold right opinions. He did it out of fear of me, imagining that in this way he could wipe out the charge against him among the churches, as though he did not hold strange opinions himself.

He was a cheat and a swindler, and in time he carried many away with him. With poison lodged in his heart, forming no sound opinion on any subject, and yet ashamed to say what he really thought, he devised a heresy of this kind — partly because of what he kept saying publicly against us, by way of insult, “You are worshipers of two Gods,” and partly because Sabellius kept accusing him of having broken with his first faith.

Callistus says that the Word himself is Son and himself Father, and that though he is called by a different title, he is in reality one indivisible spirit. He maintains that the Father is not one person and the Son another, but that they are one and the same, and that all things are full of the divine Spirit, both those above and those below. He says that the Spirit who took flesh in the virgin is not other than the Father, but one and the same. And he adds that this is what the Savior declared: “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?” For what is seen, which is a man, he takes to be the Son; and the Spirit contained in the Son, he takes to be the Father.

“I will not profess belief in two Gods, Father and Son, but in one,” he says. “For the Father, who was within the Son himself, after he had taken our flesh upon himself, made it God by bringing it into union with himself, and made them one; so that Father and Son must be called one God, and this one person cannot be two.” In this way Callistus maintains that the Father suffered along with the Son; for he does not want to say that the Father suffered and is one person, being careful to avoid blasphemy against the Father. How careful he is! A senseless, dishonest man, who improvises blasphemies in every direction only so as not to seem to be speaking against the truth, and who is not ashamed to be caught at one moment in Sabellius’s position and at the next in Theodotus’s.

Having ventured on opinions like these, the impostor Callistus set up a school against the church, teaching the system just described. And he was the first to invent the device of letting people indulge their bodily pleasures, saying that everyone had his sins forgiven by him. If a man who attends someone else’s congregation and is called a Christian commits any offense, they say the sin is not charged to him, provided only that he hurries off and attaches himself to Callistus’s school. Plenty of people were glad of his rule, since their consciences were stinging them and they had been thrown out by any number of sects; and some of them, too, had been forcibly ejected from the church by us, under our sentence of condemnation. Disciples like these came over to these followers of Callistus and filled up his school.

This man laid it down that an overseer who has committed any sin, even a sin that leads to death, ought not to be deposed. It was around his time that men who had been married twice and three times began to be kept in the clergy as overseers, elders, and deacons. And if a man already in the clergy married, Callistus allowed him to stay in it as though he had not sinned. To back this up, he claims that what the apostle said was said about such a man: “Who are you to judge someone else’s servant?” He asserted that the parable of the weeds was spoken about him as well: “Let the weeds grow along with the wheat” — in other words, let those in the church who are guilty of sin remain in it. He also claimed that Noah’s ark was made as a symbol of the church, since it held dogs and wolves and ravens and everything clean and unclean; and he says things should stand the same way in the church. Whatever passages of Scripture he could collect that bore on this view, he interpreted to the same effect.

Callistus’s hearers are delighted with his teachings and stay with him, making fools of themselves and of many others; and crowds of these dupes stream together into his school. So his pupils multiply, and they preen themselves on the crowds — crowds that come for the sake of pleasures Christ did not allow. In contempt of him they put no restraint on the committing of any sin, saying that they pardon anyone who agrees with them.

For he even allowed a woman, if she was unmarried and was burning with passion at an age hardly suitable for it, or if she was unwilling to lose her own standing by a legal marriage, to take whatever man she chose as her bedfellow, whether a slave or a free man, and to count such a companion a husband though she was not legally married to him. From this, women who passed for believers began to resort to drugs to make themselves sterile, and to bind themselves tight in order to expel what had been conceived, because they did not want a child by a slave or by some worthless man, for the sake of their family and their great wealth. See how far that lawless man has gone in godlessness, teaching adultery and murder in one breath! And after such reckless acts, they have lost all shame and try to call themselves a universal church! And some go along with them, supposing they will do well by it. It was while he was overseer that a second baptism was first presumed upon among them.

These, then, are the practices and opinions that the astonishing Callistus established. His school survives, keeping its customs and its tradition, not discerning whom they ought to be in communion with, but offering communion to everyone alike. And they take their name from him: because Callistus was a foremost champion of such practices, they are called Callistians.

When the teaching of this Callistus had been noised abroad throughout the whole world, a cunning man, and a thoroughly desperate one, named Alcibiades, who lived in Apamea, a city of Syria, examined the business carefully. Judging himself the more formidable character and the more ingenious at tricks of this kind than Callistus, he came to Rome, bringing a certain book which, he claimed, a righteous man named Elchasai had received from Serae, a town of Parthia, and had given to a man called Sobiai. He claimed that the contents of this volume had been revealed by an angel ninety-six miles tall and sixteen miles wide, twenty-four miles from shoulder to shoulder; and the prints his feet leave are fourteen miles long, six miles wide, and two miles deep. He says there is a female with him as well, whose measurements, he says, follow the standards already given. The male, he asserts, is the Son of God, and the female is called the Holy Spirit. By reeling off these marvels he imagines he confounds fools, while at the same time he pronounces this sentence: “A new forgiveness of sins was proclaimed to men in the third year of Trajan’s reign.” He also lays down a baptism, and I will explain this too. He lays it down that anyone who has been caught up in every kind of lewdness and filth and wickedness — provided only that he is a believer — should, on turning around and obeying the book and believing what it says, receive forgiveness of sins by baptism. [v]

He dared to contrive these frauds, taking his opportunity from the doctrine Callistus had stood forward to champion. Seeing that many were delighted by a promise of that kind, he judged the moment right for the attempt just described. Even so we resisted it, and did not let many be led astray for any length of time. We carried conviction to the people when we said that this was the work of a counterfeit spirit and the invention of a heart swollen with pride, and that this man had risen like a wolf against many wandering sheep whom Callistus, by his arts of deception, had scattered abroad. But since we have begun, we will not keep silent about this man’s opinions. First we will expose his life and show that his supposed discipline is a mere pretense. Then I will set out the main heads of what he asserts, so that the reader, looking hard at Elchasai’s treatises, may be made aware what sort of heresy this man has had the nerve to attempt.

This man puts forward as a decoy a way of life authorized by the Law, saying that believers ought to be circumcised and live according to the Law — while at the same time he tears fragments out of the heresies already described. He asserts that Christ was born a man in the same way as everyone else; that Christ was not on earth for the first time when he was born of a virgin, but that he had been born before, and often, and would be born again. So Christ would appear and live among us from time to time, undergoing changes of birth and having his soul transferred from body to body. Here he is making use of that doctrine of Pythagoras I mentioned earlier. [z]

But the Elchasaites have reached such a height of pride that they even claim to be endowed with the power of foretelling the future, using as their starting point, obviously, the measures and numbers of that same Pythagorean art. They also give themselves to the doctrines of mathematicians and astrologers and magicians as if these were true, and they fall back on them in order to confuse simple people, who are led to suppose that these heretics share in some doctrine of power. They teach certain incantations and set formulas for people bitten by dogs, or possessed by demons, or seized by other diseases; and I will not keep silent about even such practices of theirs. Now that I have explained their principles well enough, and the causes of their presumptuous attempts, I will go on to give an account of their writings, through which my readers will come to know both the trifling and the godless efforts of these Elchasaites.