By Water & Blood

On Saturnilus

I shall first exhibit the mythology of Saturnilus. This man, similarly to Menander, said that there is one Father altogether unknown; that this one crafted angels and the other powers; that some seven of these made the world and fashioned the human being, and that they themselves said, “Let us make man according to image and according to likeness.” And when the molded thing was unable to stand upright, but crawled like a worm, the divine Power, he says, taking pity, sent down a spark of life and brought the incomplete human being to completion; and that this spark of life, after the dissolution of the living creature, runs back to the Power that sent it.

The Savior and Lord he said is not only unoriginate but also unbegotten, and bodiless, and formless; and that he appeared to human beings rather in fantasy, not in truth. The God of the Jews he said is one of the angels. Then, forgetting the molded thing (for he had styled the Savior unbegotten), he says that the Father of Christ, wishing to destroy along with the other angels also the God of the Jews, sent Christ into the world for the salvation of the human beings who believe in him. He says that there are two differences among human beings, and that some are good and some evil, and that they have received this difference in their nature. And since the evil demons cooperate with the evil, the Savior came, he says, to aid the good. This man first named marriage a teaching of the devil. He also legislates abstinence from living things. Of the prophecies, he said that some were spoken by the world-making angels, and some by Satan; and that this one too is an angel, opposing in a special way the God of the Jews.