Marcion, Tatian, and Barbelo

Cerdo took his system from Simon’s followers. He came to live in Rome in the time of Hyginus, who held the ninth place in the line of overseers running down from the apostles, and he taught that the God announced by the law and the prophets is not the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one, he said, was known and the other unknown; and the one was righteous, while the other was good. [a]

Marcion of Pontus came after him and carried the teaching further. In doing it he went on to the most shameless blasphemy against the God whom the law and the prophets announce: he called him the maker of evils, a lover of war, unsteady in his purposes, and even at odds with himself. Jesus, on his account, came from that Father who is above the God who made the world. He came into Judea in the days of the governor Pontius Pilate, who was the procurator of Tiberius Caesar, and he appeared in human form to those who were in Judea, doing away with the prophets and the law and every work of that God who made the world — the God Marcion also calls Cosmocrator. Besides this he cuts up the Gospel according to Luke. He strikes out everything written about the Lord’s birth, and he sets aside a great deal of the Lord’s teaching — the passages where the Lord is recorded as saying most plainly that the Maker of this universe is his Father. He also convinced his followers that he himself was more to be trusted than the apostles who handed the Gospel down to us, though what he supplied them with was not the Gospel but a scrap of it. In the same way he dismembered the letters of Paul, cutting out everything the apostle says about the God who made the world — that this God is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ — along with the passages from the prophetic writings that the apostle quotes in order to teach us that they announced the Lord’s coming beforehand.

Salvation, on his teaching, will be reached only by those souls that had learned his doctrine; the body cannot share in salvation, since it was taken from the earth. On top of his blasphemy against God himself he put forward this too, speaking as with the mouth of the devil and saying everything flat against the truth: that Cain and men like him, and the Sodomites and the Egyptians and others of that sort, and in short all the nations who walked in every kind of filth, were saved by the Lord when he went down into Hades, since they ran to him, and that they welcomed him into their kingdom. But the serpent in Marcion declared that Abel and Enoch and Noah and the other righteous men descended from the patriarch Abraham, together with all the prophets and everyone who pleased God, had no share in salvation. For these men, he says, knew that their God was always putting them to the test, and so this time too they suspected that he was testing them; they did not run to Jesus and did not believe his announcement, and for that reason, he declared, their souls stayed in Hades.

But since this man is the only one who has dared to mutilate the Scriptures openly, and to attack God more shamelessly than anyone else, I intend to refute him in a work of its own, convicting him out of his own writings; and with God’s help I will overthrow him out of those discourses of the Lord and of the apostles that carry authority with him and that he himself uses. For the moment I have been led to mention him only so that you would know that everyone who corrupts the truth in any way, and who damages the preaching of the church, is a disciple and a successor of Simon the magician, of Samaria. They do not confess their master’s name — that way they can lead more people astray — but they teach his doctrines all the same. They hold out the name of Christ Jesus as a kind of bait, while in one way or another they bring in the godlessness of Simon; and so they destroy great numbers, wickedly sowing their own teachings under cover of a good name, and through the sweetness and beauty of that name holding out to their hearers the bitter and deadly poison of the serpent, the great author of the falling away.

Many offshoots have already grown out of the schools I have described. This happens because so many of these men — in fact we may say all of them — want to be teachers in their own right and to break away from the particular heresy they were caught up in. They put one set of doctrines together out of a system of quite different opinions, and then another set out of that, and they insist on teaching something new, announcing themselves the inventors of whatever opinion they have managed to bring into being. [k]

Here is an example. Those who are called Encratites, the self-controlled, came out of Saturninus and Marcion, and they preached against marriage, so setting aside God’s original creation and, in a roundabout way, blaming the one who made male and female for the continuing of the human race. Some who are counted among them have also brought in abstaining from meat, and so show themselves ungrateful to God, who formed all things. They deny, too, that the man who was formed first is saved. That last opinion has only lately been invented among them. A man named Tatian was the first to bring the blasphemy in. He had been a hearer of Justin’s, and as long as he stayed with him he said nothing of the kind; but after Justin was put to death he separated from the church, and, worked up and swollen with the idea of being a teacher, as though he were better than everyone else, he put together a school of his own. He invented certain invisible Aeons, like the followers of Valentinus, and, like Marcion and Saturninus, he declared that marriage is nothing but corruption and sexual immorality. But denying that Adam is saved was an opinion entirely his own.

Others again, following Basilides and Carpocrates, have brought in sexual intercourse without restriction and a plurality of wives, and they are indifferent about eating food sacrificed to idols, holding that God does not much regard such matters. But why go on? It cannot be done — listing everyone who in one way or another has fallen away from the truth.

Besides those I have already spoken of, the Simonians among these people, a crowd of Gnostics has sprung up and appeared like mushrooms growing out of the ground. I will now go through the chief opinions they hold. [o]

Some of them, then, put forward an Aeon who never grows old and who exists in a virgin spirit; him they call Barbelo. Somewhere or other, they declare, there is a Father who cannot be named, and he wanted to reveal himself to this Barbelo. So Ennoia went forward and stood in front of his face and asked him for Prognosis. When Prognosis had come forth, as asked, the two of them asked for Aphtharsia, and she came forth as well, and after her Zoe Aionios. Barbelo gloried in these and looked at their greatness, and, in conceiving, rejoiced in that greatness and gave birth to a light like it. This, they say, was the beginning both of light and of the generating of all things. The Father saw this light and anointed it with his own goodness, so that it might be made perfect. This, they hold, was Christ, who then asked that Nous be given him as a helper; and Nous came forth. Besides these the Father sent out Logos. So the pairs will be formed: Ennoia with Logos, and Aphtharsia with Christ, while Zoe Aionios was joined to Thelema and Nous to Prognosis. And all of these magnified the great light and Barbelo.

They say too that Autogenes was sent out afterwards from Ennoia and Logos, to stand as a representation of the great light, and that he was greatly honored, everything being made subject to him. Aletheia was sent out along with him, and a pairing was formed between Autogenes and Aletheia. From the Light, which is Christ, and from Aphtharsia, they declare, four luminaries were sent out to surround Autogenes; and again four other emissions came out from Thelema and Zoe Aionios to wait on those four luminaries. These they name Charis, Thelesis, Synesis, and Phronesis. Of these, Charis is joined to the great and first luminary, whom they present as Soter and call Armogenes; Thelesis to the second, whom they also name Raguel; Synesis to the third, whom they call David; and Phronesis to the fourth, whom they name Eleleth.

With all this settled, Autogenes then produces a perfect and true man, whom they also call Adamas, since neither he himself nor those he sprang from has ever been conquered; and he too was severed from Armogenes along with the first light. Perfect knowledge was also sent out by Autogenes together with the man and was joined to him, and by it he came to know the one who is above all. Invincible power was conferred on him as well by the virgin spirit, and everything then rested in him, to sing the praises of the great Aeon. This, they declare, is how the mother, the father, and the son were made manifest; and out of Anthropos and Gnosis came that Tree which they also call Gnosis itself.

Next they maintain that the Holy Spirit was sent out from the first angel, who stands beside Monogenes; and they call the Spirit Sophia and Prunicus as well. He then, seeing that all the others had partners while he himself had none, searched for a being he might be joined to. He did not find one, so he strained and stretched himself out to the utmost and looked down into the lower regions, expecting to find a partner there; and still not meeting one, he leaped away from his place in great impatience — impatience that had come over him because he had made the attempt without his father’s good will.

Afterwards, out of simplicity and kindness, he produced a work in which both ignorance and audacity were to be found. This work of his they declare to be Protarchontes, the one who formed this lower creation. But they relate that a mighty power carried him off from his mother, and that he settled far away from her in the lower regions and made the firmament of heaven, where they also affirm that he lives. In his ignorance he made the powers below himself: angels, and firmaments, and everything on earth. Joined to Authadia, they say, he produced Kakia, Zelos, Phthonos, Erinnys, and Epithymia. When these had been generated, the mother, Sophia, was deeply grieved. She fled away, went off into the upper regions, and became the last of the Ogdoad, counting it downwards. Once she had gone, he imagined that he was the only being there was, and on that account declared, “I am a jealous God, and besides me there is no one.” Such are the falsehoods these people invent.