By Water & Blood

On Tatian and the Encratites

Tatian the Syrian had first been a sophist, and then became a disciple of the inspired Justin the martyr. After the teacher’s perfection, he longed to become the leader of a heresy. He collected the starting points of his fiction from Valentinus as to the projections of the Aeons, and from Saturnilus and Marcion as to abhorring marriage and the partaking of living things and of wine. Those called Hydroparastatae and Encratites have this man as founder. They are named Hydroparastatae as offering water instead of wine; and Encratites as neither drinking wine nor partaking of living things. They abstain from these as abominating them as evil. They also practice celibacy, naming marriage fornication, and calling lawful communion diabolical. This man also composed the so-called Gospel through Four, cutting away the genealogies and the other things that show the Lord born according to the flesh from the seed of David. Not only those of his company used this, but also those who follow the apostolic doctrines, not recognizing the wickedness of the composition, but using the book more simply as a concise one. I myself also found more than two hundred such books honored in the churches among us, and gathering them all I put them away, and introduced in their place the Gospels of the four evangelists.