By Water & Blood

On Cerinthus

About the same time Cerinthus also began another heresy. He spent a very long time in Egypt and was educated in the philosophical sciences; later he came to Asia, and he named his own disciples from his own designation. He taught that there is one God of all things, yet that he himself is not the craftsman of the world, but certain powers separated from him and utterly ignorant of him. Jesus, he said, much like the Hebrews, was by nature born of a man and a woman, Joseph and Mary, yet shone in temperance and righteousness and the other goods. But Christ came down upon him from above in the form of a dove, and then proclaimed the unknown God and performed the recorded wonders. At the time of the passion, Christ withdrew, while Jesus endured the suffering.

He also fabricated certain revelations as if he himself had seen them, and composed teachings of certain threats, and said that the Lord’s kingdom would be earthly. He dreamed of eating and drinking, and imagined pleasures and marriages and sacrifices and festivals celebrated in Jerusalem, and that these would be completed for a thousand years. For so long, he thought, the Lord’s kingdom would hold sway. Against him not only those already mentioned wrote, but with them also Gaius and Dionysius, bishop of the Alexandrians. This man, they say, the godlike John the evangelist saw bathing—for it happened that he too, through illness, was using the bath—and said, “Let us flee from here, lest, if the bath fall because of Cerinthus, we too share in the harm.”