By Water & Blood

Panarion 51, Chapter 33: Thyatira, Jezebel, and the Phrygian heresy

Then some of them again take hold of this saying in the same Apocalypse and say in contradiction: ‘He said again, Write to the angel of the church in Thyatira—and there is no church of Christians in Thyatira. How then did he write to one that does not exist?’

And such people are found compelling themselves from the very things they proclaim to confess on behalf of the truth. For if they say, ‘There is now no church in Thyatira,’ they show that John prophesied.

For when those of the Phrygian heresy settled there and seized the minds of the simple faithful after the manner of wolves, they transferred the whole city into their own heresy; and those who deny the Apocalypse campaigned against this saying for its overturning at that time.

But now, because of Christ in this time, after a period of one hundred twelve years, there is a church there and it grows, even if some others are there; but then the whole church was emptied into the Phrygian heresy.

Therefore the Holy Spirit also took care to reveal to us how the church was going to go astray after the time of the apostles, both of John and of those in succession—which was a time after the Savior’s ascension of ninety-three years—as the church there was about to go astray and be fused in the Phrygian heresy.

For so the Lord at once convicts them in the Apocalypse, saying: ‘Write to the angel of the church in Thyatira: These things says he who has his eyes as a flame of fire and his feet like burnished bronze: I know your works and faith and love and service, and that your last works are more than the first.

But I have against you that you allow the woman Jezebel to deceive my servants, who calls herself a prophetess, teaching to eat things sacrificed to idols and to commit fornication. And I gave her time to repent, and she does not wish to repent of her fornication.’

Do you not see, O these people, that he speaks concerning the women who in a conceit of prophecy are deceived and deceive many? I mean concerning Priscilla and Maximilla and Quintilla, whose deceit has not escaped the Holy Spirit,

but it foretold prophetically in the mouth of the holy John, who prophesied before his falling asleep in the times of Claudius Caesar and earlier, when he was on the island of Patmos; for these people themselves also confess that these things have been fulfilled in Thyatira.

Therefore then he wrote by prophecy to those who had lived there in Christ at that time, that a woman was going to call herself a prophetess. And the account invented from every side that rises against the truth has fallen, the word according to the Apocalypse being shown to be prophetic from the Holy Spirit according to truth.