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We have understood that at this time Cerinthus, the author of another
heresy, made his appearance. Caius, whose words we quoted above, in
the Disputation which is ascribed to him, writes as follows concerning
this man: "But Cerinthus also, by means of revelations which he
pretends were written by a great apostle, brings before us marvelous
things which he falsely claims were shown him by angels; and he says
that after the resurrection the kingdom of Christ will be set up on
earth, and that the flesh dwelling in Jerusalem will again be subject
to desires and pleasures. And being an enemy of the Scriptures of
God, he asserts, with the purpose of deceiving men, that there is to
be a period of a thousand years a for marriage festivals." And
Dionysius, who was bishop of the parish of Alexandria in our day, in
the second book of his work On the Promises, where he says some
things concerning the Apocalypse of John which he draws from
tradition, mentions this same man in the following words: "But
Cerinthus, who founded the sect which was called, after him, the
Cerinthian, desiring reputable authority for his fiction, prefixed
the name. For the doctrine which he taught was this: that the kingdom
of Christ will be an earthly one. And as he was himself devoted to
the pleasures of the body and altogether sensual in his nature, he
dreamed that that kingdom would consist in those things which he
desired, namely, in the delights of the belly and of sexual passion,
that is to say, in eating and drinking and marrying, and in festivals
and sacrifices and the slaying of victims, under the guise of which he
thought he could indulge his appetites with a better grace." These
are the words of Dionysius. But Irenaeus, in the first book of his
work Against Heresies, gives some more abominable false doctrines of
the same man, and in the third book relates a story which deserves to
be recorded. He says, on the authority of Polycarp, that the
apostle John once entered a bath to bathe; but, learning that
Cerinthus was within, he sprang from the place and rushed out of the
door, for he could not bear to remain under the same roof with him.
And he advised those that were with him to do the same, saying,
"Let us flee, lest the bath fall for Cerinthus, the enemy of the
truth, is within."
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