Cerinthus

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Cerinthus was a Christian teacher active in Roman Asia, around the end of the first century, whose name survives entirely in the writings of those who set out to refute him. No work of his own is preserved; everything attributed to him comes secondhand, through the heresiologists, and the portrait they assemble does not fully agree with itself.

The most quoted notice is a story rather than a doctrine. Irenaeus, writing in the later second century and claiming the memory of Polycarp, reports that the apostle John once fled a bathhouse at Ephesus on finding Cerinthus inside, unwilling to share a roof with so dangerous a man. Whether the encounter ever happened, the anecdote fixed Cerinthus in Christian memory as the archetypal opponent of the beloved disciple — a placement that later writers extended, some even crediting him, polemically, with authorship of the Gospel and Revelation ascribed to John.

The teaching the sources report has two strands that sit awkwardly together. On one side, Cerinthus is said to have held that the world was made not by the supreme God but by a lesser power, ignorant of the God above it — a demiurgic picture close to the gnostic currents of the period. His Christology divided what orthodoxy would later insist on holding as one: Jesus was an ordinary man, born of Joseph and Mary, on whom the Christ, a higher spiritual power, descended at the baptism and from whom it withdrew before the crucifixion, so that the Christ neither suffered nor died. On the other side, the same reports make him a keeper of the Jewish Law and an expectant of an earthly, sensual messianic kingdom — features that pull toward Jewish-Christian observance rather than toward the world-denying gnosis the first strand suggests.

That tension is the central problem scholarship has with him. The accounts are late, hostile, and partly contradictory; it is not certain that a single coherent figure stands behind them, and some of what is reported may be the work of heresiologists assembling a composite enemy out of several tendencies they wished to condemn together. What can be said with confidence is narrower: that a teacher of this name was remembered in Asia Minor as an early and serious challenge to emerging orthodoxy, and that the two questions his name attaches to — who made the world, and how the divine was joined to the man Jesus — were exactly the questions the next two centuries of Christian argument would turn on.

His followers, the Cerinthians, are mentioned by later writers but leave little trace as a continuing body. The name endured less as a movement than as a marker: one of the first points at which the line between what would be called the church and what would be called heresy was drawn, and drawn around the nature of Christ.

→ In the library: Mead — The Gnosis According to its Foes (1906)

→ Related: Carpocrates · Sabellius · Gnosis