Epiphanius

← Encyclopedia

Epiphanius (c. 310–403) was a Christian bishop of Salamis — the city the Romans called Constantia — on Cyprus, and the most thorough heresy-hunter the early Church produced. Born at Besanduk near Eleutheropolis in Palestine, in the hill country southwest of Jerusalem, he spent his formative years among the monks of Egypt, where he first met the Gnostic teachers whose doctrines he would devote his life to refuting. Returning to his homeland, he founded a monastery near his birthplace and governed it for some thirty years before being raised, around 367, to the see of Salamis, which he held until his death. He wrote in Greek, read widely in the writings he meant to destroy, and was remembered in his own lifetime as a man of formidable learning and unbending orthodoxy. Jerome, who knew him and shared his quarrels, called him pentaglossos, five-tongued, for his command of Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic, and Latin — a range that let him read the sects in their own languages and gave his catalog its reach.

The medicine chest

His reputation rests on one enormous book. The Panarion — the title means “medicine chest,” the work offered as an antidote — catalogs eighty heresies in order, from the errors he traced back before Christ to the movements of his own day, describing each and then refuting it. He began it around 374 and finished some three years later, near the close of a century in which the Church had spent its energies fighting Arius and was turning to settle accounts with its older enemies. The number eighty he did not choose at random: he drew it from the Song of Songs, where the bride speaks of threescore queens and fourscore concubines, reading the eighty concubines as so many false teachings ranged against the one true bride. Behind that arithmetic lies a vision of history as a single contagion. Before Christ he set four great primordial errors — Barbarism, Scythianism, Hellenism, and Judaism — the wrong worship of the ages between Adam and the Incarnation, conceived less as sects than as the successive climates of unbelief out of which the later errors grew. Beneath the Hellenic mother he ranged the philosophical schools, Pythagoreans and Platonists and Stoics among them; beneath the Jewish, the parties of Pharisees, Sadducees, and the rest. Only with the Christian era does the catalog become a true list of named sects, and there he marched through them in their generations — Simonians and Nicolaitans, Ophites and Sethians, Valentinians and Marcionites, Manichees and Arians — ending with the Collyridians, women of Arabia who offered cakes to the Virgin, and the Messalians, the praying enthusiasts of his own day. He sealed the whole with a positive statement of the orthodox faith, De Fide, so that the cabinet of poisons should close on the one sound medicine. The eighty he reckoned not as eighty isolated mistakes but as a single river of error running from the first wrong worship to the latest, each heresy fed by those upstream — the heresiologist’s conviction, inherited and intensified, that truth was original and singular and error always derivative and late.

The Panarion’s governing image is medical and zoological at once. Each heresy is a venomous creature — a viper, an asp, a basilisk — and Epiphanius the physician who identifies the bite, describes the beast, and compounds the cure from Scripture. He laid out each sect on a fixed plan: its descent from those before it, its teachings, then the refutation, then the comparison to some serpent whose habits matched its character. A briefer companion, the Anacephalaeosis, summarized the eighty in a recapitulation that circulated on its own and became, for many later readers, the form in which the catalog was known.

Alongside it stands the Ancoratus, “the well-anchored man,” written a little earlier, around 374 — a defense of orthodox doctrine, and of the Trinity in particular, against the doubts Epiphanius saw pulling believers adrift in the wake of the Arian crisis. He composed it at the request of churchmen in Pamphylia who had asked him to steady their people, and it served him as a storehouse of arguments he would reuse in the larger work. Two further treatises round out the surviving corpus and show the antiquarian cast of his mind: On Weights and Measures, compiled around 392, a handbook of biblical metrology, canon, and the Greek versions of Scripture, valued now for what it records of the early text of the Bible and the order of its books; and On the Twelve Gems, an exposition of the stones in the high priest’s breastplate, in which each jewel yields a moral and an etymology. They reveal a mind that hoarded information — lists of measures, names of stones, genealogies of error — and trusted accumulation as a form of argument. The method throughout is combative: he quotes his opponents in order to condemn them, and his summaries are shaped by the verdict he has already reached. But the same impulse that made him a relentless prosecutor made him an indefatigable collector, and the two cannot be separated; the prosecutor’s need to expose a doctrine in full is precisely what left the doctrine on the page.

Preserved by attack

That hostility is exactly what makes him valuable. For several Gnostic and other early sects, Epiphanius is among the fullest sources that survive, and in some cases the only one — he transcribed passages from texts that have otherwise vanished, preserving by attack what no friendlier hand kept. The Gospel of the Ebionites, a Jewish-Christian gospel now lost in full, survives only in the handful of passages he set down in his chapter against the Ebionites in order to expose them. In the same chapter he recounts a long story he heard in person, decades before he wrote, from a Jewish convert named Joseph of Tiberias, whom he had met at Scythopolis — an aged man, once a figure of standing in the Jewish patriarch’s household, who described finding sealed Hebrew copies of Christian writings in a locked treasury. The notice is unique to Epiphanius, and historians of fourth-century Jewish-Christian relations have no other window onto it. So too his chapters on the Sethians, the Archontics, and the Valentinian school, where he sometimes copies out documents in full: his catalog carries the letter of Ptolemy the Gnostic to Flora, a rare piece of Valentinian teaching in a Valentinian’s own voice, and for the systems of Basilides and Carpocrates he stands beside Irenaeus and Hippolytus as a principal witness. He also preserved documents of the controversies nearer his own time — letters of Arius and of Marcellus of Ancyra — that the orthodox archive might otherwise have let fall.

Modern scholarship reads him with caution on this account. His descriptions are detailed but tendentious; he sometimes multiplied a single group into several to fill out his count, repeated lurid charges of secret obscenity that he could not have verified, and arranged his sects into family trees of descent that owe more to the heresiologist’s instinct for genealogy than to anything the groups would have recognized. The discovery of the Coptic Gnostic library at Nag Hammadi in 1945 made the test possible: where his summaries can now be set beside the texts their authors actually wrote — the writings of the Nag Hammadi library — the comparison is uneven, careful in places and a caricature in others. The names he gives the sects and the lines of succession he draws between them are, by general agreement, the least trustworthy part of his report. The Panarion must therefore be weighed as polemic before it can be used as record. What it loses as a neutral account it keeps as a quarry; the documents embedded in it outlast the frame that condemned them.

His debts run back through the genre he inherited. Irenaeus of Lyon had set its pattern two centuries before, tracing the Valentinians and others back to Simon Magus as a single corrupt lineage; the Refutation of All Heresies ascribed to Hippolytus pressed the charge that the heretics had borrowed from Greek philosophy; and from a lost early summary, the Syntagma of Hippolytus, both Epiphanius and others seem to have drawn. Epiphanius took up these materials and swelled them into something larger and more systematic than any predecessor had attempted — a survey that meant to leave no error uncataloged, and in the attempt became the most capacious record of dissent the early Church bequeathed. Where Irenaeus had written against the Valentinians who threatened his own congregations and Hippolytus against the teachers of third-century Rome, Epiphanius wrote against the whole sweep of error from the beginning of the world, gathering the living disputes of his day and the long-cold sects of two centuries before into one continuous indictment. The encyclopedic ambition was new, and it had consequences. A heresiology meant to be exhaustive must list groups its author never met and doctrines he knew only at second hand, so the Panarion mingles eyewitness report — the Gnostics he had encountered as a young monk in Egypt, whose books he says he was shown — with hearsay, older texts recopied, and inference dressed as fact. The seams are visible to a careful reader, and learning to find them is much of what the modern study of the work consists in.

The wars of his time

He was also a combatant in the doctrinal wars of his time, and the fiercest of them turned on the legacy of Origen, the great Alexandrian theologian whose allegorical reading of Scripture and speculations about the pre-existence and fall of souls Epiphanius regarded as the hidden root of half the heresies in his book. He had condemned Origen in the Ancoratus and in the Panarion; in the 390s he carried the fight into the open. Around 393, already an old man, he traveled to Jerusalem and preached against Origen in the very presence of its bishop, John, whom he suspected of sharing the Alexandrian’s errors — and the two prelates fell into open conflict, each casting the other as a heretic of the opposite kind. The breach widened when Epiphanius ordained a monk, the brother of his ally Jerome, within John’s own jurisdiction, an act that violated the prerogatives of the see and bound Epiphanius and Jerome together against the bishop of Jerusalem. This was the opening phase of the first Origenist controversy, a struggle that drew in the monasteries of Egypt and the patriarchate of Alexandria, and that Epiphanius pursued with a vehemence that strained his standing with churchmen who thought the old saint’s certainties had hardened into rancor.

It carried him to his end. In 402, summoned into the campaign that Theophilus of Alexandria was waging against the Origenist monks known as the Tall Brothers, Epiphanius came to Constantinople to lend his authority against the city’s bishop, John Chrysostom, who had given the fugitive monks shelter. There he ordained a deacon without Chrysostom’s leave and pressed for condemnations he could not secure; finding the ground turning under him, and reportedly warned that neither he nor his accuser would see the matter out, he set sail for home and died at sea, in 403, before he reached Cyprus.

A document from this same struggle gave Epiphanius an afterlife he can hardly have foreseen. In a letter to John of Jerusalem, written in 394 and surviving in the Latin translation Jerome made of it, he describes coming upon a village church at Anablatha and finding a curtain hung across its doorway embroidered with the image of a man — Christ, he thought, or one of the saints; he could not recall which. Holding that no image of a human figure should hang in a church of Christ against the authority of Scripture, he tore it down and told the custodians to use the cloth to wrap a pauper for burial, promising another curtain in its place. Other passages against images later circulated under his name, and when the Byzantine Empire was convulsed by the disputes over icons three and four centuries later, the iconoclasts reached for Epiphanius as a father of their cause, while the defenders of images argued the texts were forged. The genuineness of those fragments remains contested; the torn curtain at Anablatha, attested in the letter Jerome rendered, is generally taken as his own act — a single, vivid instance of the literalism with which he read the second commandment and everything else.

The same literalism governed his reading of Origen. Where the Alexandrian had treated the difficult passages of Scripture as veils to be lifted toward a spiritual sense, Epiphanius distrusted allegory as the door through which heresy entered, and held that the text meant what it plainly said. This was the deeper ground of his hostility, beneath the particular charges about pre-existent souls and universal restoration: two ways of reading the Bible, and behind them two ways of imagining God, the one cautious of speculation and bound to the letter, the other confident that the letter opened onto something higher. The controversy he helped ignite did not end with him. It flared again in the sixth century, when a council at Constantinople in 553 anathematized a set of Origenist propositions and attached Origen’s name to them — the verdict that consigned much of the Alexandrian’s work to neglect, and that Epiphanius, dead a hundred and fifty years, had done as much as anyone to prepare.

Scholarship and texts

The critical foundation for all study of Epiphanius is Karl Holl’s edition of his works in the Berlin Griechische christliche Schriftsteller series, issued in three volumes between 1915 and 1933 — the Ancoratus and the first part of the Panarion (1915), the central sects (1922), and the final sects with De Fide (1933, its notes completed after Holl’s death by Hans Lietzmann). It runs to some fifteen hundred pages and remains the text scholars cite. The earlier learned editions stand behind it: Dionysius Petavius’s Greek-and-Latin opera omnia of 1622, reprinted in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca XLI–XLIII (1858), and Franz Oehler’s Corpus haereseologicum (1859–1861) — the Latin forms in which most Western readers, G. R. S. Mead among them, encountered the work before a complete English version existed.

That English version was long in coming. Uniquely among the major heresiologists, Epiphanius had no complete pre-1945 English translation; the nineteenth-century patristic libraries, which rendered Irenaeus and Hippolytus many times over, passed him by. The gap was closed only by Frank Williams, whose two-volume The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis appeared in Brill’s Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies — Book I in 1987, Books II and III in 1993, with revised editions following in the Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies series — and remains the standard English text (Brill: NHMS 79). Young Richard Kim produced the first English Ancoratus in 2014 in the Fathers of the Church series. On the use and abuse of the work, the indispensable study is Aline Pourkier’s L’hérésiologie chez Épiphane de Salamine (1992), which carried forward the nineteenth-century source-criticism of Richard Adelbert Lipsius and analyzed how Epiphanius handled his materials — establishing, among much else, the case that his refutation of the Noetians preserves a fragment of Hippolytus’s lost Syntagma (review, persee.fr). The most significant recent reassessment is Andrew S. Jacobs’s Epiphanius of Cyprus: A Cultural Biography of Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2016), which rescues its subject from the long caricature of the anti-intellectual heresy-hunter and reads the Panarion as a learned antiquarian compilation, central rather than marginal to the culture of late antiquity (UC Press). For the pre-1945 Anglophone tradition, the selective English extracts in Mead’s Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906) — his chapters on the Carpocratians, Basilidians, and others — give a sympathetic but unreliable surrogate, valuable now as historiography rather than translation, hosted in the Library.

Epiphanius was canonized as a saint in both the Eastern and Western churches, remembered there for asceticism and defense of the faith. To the historian of religion he is something more particular. He meant the Panarion for a medicine chest, every venom drawn off and safely labeled; what he assembled was a treasury, the single richest hoard of the doctrines he loathed, and the most tendentious catalog in the literature turns out to be the chief witness we have for sects that left no witness of their own.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906): The Gnosis According to its Foes · Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906): index

→ Related: Gnosis · Gnosticism · Neoplatonism · Patristic Heresiology · Irenaeus · Hippolytus · Origen · Jerome · Ebionites · Basilides