The Line from the Apostles

You did indeed lay it on me, my very dear friend, to bring the Valentinian teachings out into the light — hidden, as their followers imagine them to be — to display their variety, and to write a treatise refuting them. So I undertook to show that they spring from Simon, the father of all the heretics, to set out both their doctrines and their lines of succession, and to lay arguments against every one of them.

Since convicting these men and exposing them is at many points one and the same job, I have sent you these books. The first takes in the opinions of all of them and displays their customs and the character of their conduct. In the second their perverse teachings are pulled down and overturned, and laid bare, open to view as they really are. In this third book I will bring forward proofs out of the Scriptures, so that I may fall short in nothing you asked of me — indeed, so that beyond what you counted on you may receive from me the means of fighting and defeating those who in one way or another are spreading falsehood. For the love of God is rich and ungrudging, and gives the one who asks more than he knows how to ask of it.

So call to mind what I set down in the two preceding books, and take this one together with them; then you will have from me a very full refutation of all the heretics, and you will resist them faithfully and hard, in defense of the only true and life‑giving faith, the faith the Church received from the apostles and passed on to her children. For the Lord of all gave his apostles the power of the good news; through them we too have come to know the truth, that is, the teaching of the Son of God. To them the Lord also declared: “Whoever listens to you listens to me; and whoever rejects you rejects me, and the one who sent me.”

We learned the plan of our salvation from no one else but the men through whom the good news came down to us. They proclaimed it publicly at one time, and later, by the will of God, handed it down to us in the Scriptures, to be the ground and pillar of our faith. It is not permissible to claim that they preached before they had “perfect knowledge,” as some even dare to say, boasting of themselves as men who improve on the apostles. For after our Lord rose from the dead, the apostles were clothed with power from on high when the Holy Spirit came down on them; they were filled with all his gifts, and they had complete knowledge. Then they went out to the ends of the earth, announcing the good things that had come to us from God and proclaiming the peace of heaven to men — and they all, equally and each one singly, possess the good news of God. [e]

Matthew, for his part, published a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own language, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome and laying the foundations of the church there. After their departure, Mark, Peter’s disciple and interpreter, handed down to us in writing what Peter had preached. Luke too, Paul’s companion, set down in a book the good news that Paul preached. Afterward John, the Lord’s disciple — the one who leaned back on his chest — himself published a Gospel while he was living at Ephesus in Asia.

All of them declared to us that there is one God, Maker of heaven and earth, announced by the law and the prophets, and one Christ, the Son of God. Anyone who does not agree with this despises the men who kept the Lord company; more than that, he despises Christ the Lord himself; more still, he despises the Father as well. He stands self‑condemned, resisting and fighting against his own salvation — which is what every one of the heretics does.

When they are refuted out of the Scriptures, though, they turn around and accuse the Scriptures themselves, as if these were not accurate and carried no authority. The Scriptures are ambiguous, they say, and nobody who does not know the tradition can get the truth out of them. The truth, they claim, was not handed on in written documents but by the living voice — which, they say, is why Paul declared, “We do speak wisdom among those who are perfect, but not the wisdom of this world.” [k]

And this wisdom, as each of them tells it, is the fiction he himself invented — so that on their showing the truth resided now in Valentinus, now in Marcion, now in Cerinthus, and after that in Basilides, or just as well in any other objector who had nothing to say that had anything to do with salvation. For every one of them, thoroughly perverse in his disposition, corrupting the system of the truth, is not ashamed to preach himself.

But when we point them instead to the tradition that comes from the apostles and is kept in the churches through the succession of elders, they object to tradition too. They are wiser, they say, not only than the elders but than the apostles, because they have found the truth unadulterated. The apostles, they hold, mixed matters belonging to the law in with the Savior’s words; and not the apostles only — the Lord himself, they say, spoke sometimes out of the Demiurge, sometimes out of the middle place, and sometimes out of the Pleroma, while they themselves know the hidden mystery beyond doubt, unstained and pure. That is to blaspheme their own Maker, and in the most shameless way. So it comes to this: these men now agree neither with Scripture nor with tradition.

These are the opponents we have to deal with, my very dear friend — slippery as snakes, trying to get away at every point. That is why they must be resisted at every point: if we cut off their retreat, we may perhaps succeed in turning them back to the truth. For while it is not easy for a soul that has fallen under error to repent, it is not altogether impossible to escape error once the truth is set down beside it.

Anyone in any church who wants to see the truth can therefore look plainly at the tradition of the apostles, which has been made known throughout the whole world. We can list the men the apostles appointed as overseers in the churches, and their successors down to our own time — men who neither taught nor knew of anything like what these people rave about. For if the apostles had known hidden mysteries, which they were in the habit of passing on privately to “the perfect,” apart from everyone else, they would have handed them over above all to the men they were entrusting the churches themselves to. They wanted these men, whom they were leaving behind as their successors and handing their own place of leadership to, to be thoroughly complete and blameless in everything. Carrying out their duty honestly, such men would be a great benefit; falling away, they would be the worst of disasters. [n]

It would take far too long, in a book like this, to count up the successions of every church. So I take the very great and very ancient church that everyone knows, founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul, and I point to the tradition it has from the apostles and to the faith preached to men, which has come down to our own time through the successions of its overseers. By that I put to shame all those who gather in unauthorized meetings, whether from a bad wish to please themselves, or from vanity, or from blindness and wrong opinion. For with this church, on account of its more powerful pre‑eminence, every church must agree — that is, the faithful from everywhere — since in it the tradition that comes from the apostles has always been preserved by those who come from every quarter.

The blessed apostles, then, having founded and built up the church, handed the office of overseer to Linus. Paul mentions this Linus in the letters to Timothy. Anacletus succeeded him, and after him, third from the apostles, Clement received the office. This man had seen the blessed apostles and had talked with them; you could say he still had their preaching sounding in his ears and their traditions in front of his eyes. Nor was he alone in that, for many were still alive who had been taught by the apostles.

In Clement’s time a serious quarrel broke out among the brothers at Corinth, and the church in Rome sent the Corinthians a very forceful letter, urging them to peace, renewing their faith, and announcing the tradition it had lately received from the apostles: that there is one God, almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth, who formed man, who brought on the flood and called Abraham, who led the people out of the land of Egypt, who spoke with Moses, who set out the law and sent the prophets, and who has prepared fire for the devil and his angels. Anyone who wishes can learn from that document that the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is the God the churches preached, and can understand the Church’s apostolic tradition — for the letter is older than the men who are now spreading falsehood and conjuring up another god above the Creator and Maker of everything that exists.

Evaristus succeeded Clement, and Alexander followed Evaristus; then Sixtus was appointed, sixth from the apostles; after him Telesphorus, who bore glorious witness in his death; then Hyginus; after him Pius; and then Anicetus. Soter succeeded Anicetus, and Eleutherius now holds the inheritance of the office, twelfth from the apostles. In this order and by this succession the tradition of the church from the apostles, and the preaching of the truth, have come down to us. And that is proof in the fullest measure that the life‑giving faith is one and the same, preserved in the Church from the apostles until now and handed down in truth.

Polycarp, too, was not only taught by apostles and in conversation with many who had seen Christ; he was also appointed overseer of the church in Smyrna by apostles in Asia. I saw him myself when I was young, for he stayed on a very long time, and left this life at a great age, after a glorious and altogether noble death as a witness. He had always taught what he learned from the apostles, what the Church has handed down, and what alone is true. All the churches in Asia bear witness to this, and so do the men who have succeeded Polycarp down to the present — and he carried far more weight, and was a steadier witness to the truth, than Valentinus and Marcion and the rest of the heretics. It was he who came to Rome in Anicetus’s time and turned many away from the heretics I have named, back to the church of God, announcing that he had received from the apostles this one and only truth, the truth the Church hands down.

There are people who heard him tell how John, the Lord’s disciple, went to bathe at Ephesus, saw that Cerinthus was inside, and rushed out of the bathhouse without bathing, calling out, “Let us get out of here, before the bathhouse falls in — Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is inside.” And when Marcion met him one day and said, “Do you recognize me?” Polycarp answered, “I recognize you — the firstborn of Satan.”

That is how deep a horror the apostles and their disciples had of exchanging even a word with anyone who corrupts the truth. Paul says the same: “Reject a man who makes divisions, after a first and a second warning, knowing that such a person has turned aside and is sinning, self‑condemned.” There is also a letter of Polycarp written to the Philippians, entirely sufficient, from which anyone who wishes and who cares about his own salvation can learn what his faith was like and how he preached the truth. And the church at Ephesus, founded by Paul, where John stayed on among them right up to Trajan’s time, is a true witness of the apostles’ tradition.

Since we have proofs like these, there is no need to look elsewhere for the truth that is easy to get from the Church. The apostles deposited in her hands, in the fullest measure, everything that belongs to the truth, the way a rich man puts his money in a bank, so that anyone at all who wants to may draw the water of life from her. She is the entrance to life; all the others are thieves and robbers. So we are bound to keep away from them, and to choose what belongs to the Church with the greatest care, and to take hold of the tradition of the truth. For how does the matter stand? Suppose some small question came up among us. Would we not go back to the oldest churches, the ones the apostles were constantly in touch with, and learn from them what is certain and clear about the question in hand? And what if the apostles had left us no writings at all? Would we not then have to follow the line of the tradition they handed on to the men they entrusted the churches to? [x]

That is the course many nations of barbarians agree to — those who believe in Christ, who have salvation written in their hearts by the Spirit without paper or ink, and who carefully preserve the old tradition. They believe in one God, the Maker of heaven and earth and everything in them, through Christ Jesus the Son of God; who, out of his overflowing love for what he had made, submitted to be born of the virgin, himself uniting man to God through himself; who suffered under Pontius Pilate, and rose again, and was taken up in splendor; who will come in glory as the Savior of those who are saved and the Judge of those who are judged, sending into eternal fire those who alter the truth and despise his Father and his coming.

Those who have believed this faith without any written documents are barbarians as far as our language goes; but in their teaching, their habits, and the whole run of their lives they are, because of that faith, very wise indeed, and they please God, ordering their way of life in all righteousness and purity and wisdom. If someone were to preach the heretics’ inventions to these people, speaking to them in their own language, they would stop their ears at once and run as far away as they could, unable to bear even the hearing of such blasphemous talk. So, held by that ancient tradition of the apostles, they do not let their minds take in anything at all of the monstrous talk of these teachers, among whom no church and no teaching has ever been established.

For before Valentinus there were no followers of Valentinus, and no followers of Marcion before Marcion; in short, none of the malicious people I listed earlier existed before the men who started and invented their perversity. Valentinus came to Rome while Hyginus was there, was at his height under Pius, and stayed on until Anicetus. Cerdo too, who came before Marcion, arrived in Hyginus’s time — Hyginus being the ninth overseer. He kept coming into the church and making public confession, and went on like this, now teaching in secret, now confessing publicly again, until at last he was denounced for corrupt teaching and cut off from the gathering of the brothers. Marcion followed him and was at his height under Anicetus, who held the tenth place in the line of overseers.

The rest, who are called Gnostics, take their start from Menander, Simon’s disciple, as I have shown; and each of them turned out to be both the father and the high priest of the teaching into which he had been initiated. But all of these broke out into their revolt much later, well on in the Church’s middle period.