Heresy V, Of the Gospel of John

OF THE GOSPEL OF JOHN — Heresy V (De Evangelio Ioannis haeresis V)

That the Gospel which is carried about according to John, for the very reason that it is in no wise John’s, is not to be received; or, if it is to be received as John’s, it must be believed that it is contaminated in many places by falsifiers.

ASSERTORES HVIVS HAERESEOS [The Assertors of this Heresy]

The first part of this heresy is counted by Philastrius among the anonymous heresies. For thus he writes in his Catalogue: ¹ “After these there are heretics who do not accept the gospel Κατὰ Ἰωάννην [according to John] and his Apocalypse; and since they do not understand the virtue of the scripture, nor desire to learn, they remain in heresy, perishing — so that they even dare to say that it is Cerinthus the heretic’s; and likewise that the Apocalypse is not of the blessed John the evangelist and apostle, but of Cerinthus the heretic.” And Augustine, in the book On Heresies, chapter thirty, says that these heretics were once called Alogi — that is, “without the word” (for λόγος in Greek means “word”) — because they would not receive the gospel of John, in which the Word of God is described. And Epiphanius first imposed this name upon them; who, writing against them, speaks of them thus: ² “The Alogi therefore say — that is, those brutish men, and lacking the word (for I impose this appellation on them, and from this day they shall be so called, and thus, O dearest ones, let us impose the name on them): since they do not receive the word preached by John, they shall be called Alogi, that is, without the word.” And in the very next words he adds that these Alogi affirm that the gospel of John which we now have was put forth by Cerinthus under the name of John. After these Alogi, as Epiphanius relates in the same book, ³ Theodore of Byzantium, the leather-worker (coriarius), succeeded in the same error, who defended the first part of this heresy. But the second part of this heresy Faustus of old with his Manichaeans, and now the Anabaptists of our times, defend — denying that the gospel of John is had among us entire, inviolate, and intact, such as its first author once wrote it; and this by the fault of falsifiers, who, since they had nothing whence they might conciliate credit to their own dogmas, mixed those things into this gospel, that under the name of John they might find credit with readers.

IMPVGNATIO [The Refutation]

But it is not very difficult to confute the defenders of the first assertion — the Alogi. For how (as Epiphanius says) shall this gospel be Cerinthus’s, ⁴ which utterly overturns the whole doctrine of Cerinthus? For Cerinthus preaches Christ as a recent and bare man; but John preaches him as the sempiternal Word, God always existing with God, and at the last born temporally according to the flesh. Again — what cause could or should have moved Cerinthus to inscribe a gospel written by himself with another’s name, whereby he would defraud himself of the honor of his own labor and honor another for his own works? — and especially John the apostle, his enemy, with whom he had implacable enmities, and to whom he knew himself to be so hateful on account of his heresy that John could not bear even the sight and presence of him. For John (as Irenaeus writes), ⁵ when he had entered the baths at Ephesus for the sake of washing, and had seen Cerinthus there, straightway leapt out unwashed, saying: “Let us flee hence, lest the very baths fall in, in which Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is bathing.” Finally, why should he inscribe his own gospel with the name of John — he who [strove] utterly [to destroy] John’s

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gospel he denies, and besides the Gospel of Matthew — which he called “according to the Hebrews” — rejected every other Gospel, as we have said above? From these things, therefore, the Alogi are convicted. And as for the Anabaptists, they will be sufficiently refuted by us if, when they have produced the things which they calumniate as adulterated in this Gospel, we show those same things to be entire and in every part intact.

OBIECTIONES HAERETICORVM [The Objections of the Heretics]

1. First then (as it is had from Epiphanius), the Alogi said this Gospel was unworthy to be read in the church, because it is insufficient, diminished, disordered (incompositum), and having no [orderly] sequence of things done. ⁶ Its author, Cerinthus, passed over — as if through ignorance or forgetfulness, or through malice — many things which pertain to the truth of the history. For when he had recounted the eternal generation of the Son of God, saying, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was made flesh,” he immediately added that John the Baptist, crying aloud in the desert, proclaims: “This is he of whom I said to you: Behold the lamb of God,” and the rest. ⁷ But he passes over the conception and birth of John the Baptist, and the annunciation of Christ, and his temporal nativity in Bethlehem, his circumcision, and the purification of Mary, the coming of the Magi with gifts to Christ, the boy’s flight into Egypt, the slaughter of the infants, the return of Jesus out of Egypt to Nazareth, the exercise of his boyhood under his parents, the Baptism of John together with his sermons (concionibus), and Christ’s fast and the diabolical temptations in the desert, and the other things of this sort of which the other evangelists have spoken.

2. But neither does he say things consonant with the other evangelists. ⁸ For he writes that the first of Christ’s miracles was done in Cana of Galilee, when, the wine failing at the marriage, water was turned into wine (for this, says he, is the beginning of the signs of Jesus in Cana of Galilee); ⁹ whereas Luke recounts another miracle done long before this one, by Christ while yet a boy, when in the twelfth year of his age he displayed his divine wisdom, sitting in the midst of the Doctors and disputing, to the great stupor of all that heard. Again, John relates that the second miracle was put forth by Christ when he healed the paralytic son of the Centurion; ¹⁰ but Luke describes many other miracles done by Christ before this. Thus the Alogi.

3. But Faustus asserts that this Gospel is vitiated in various places, but chiefly in the fifth chapter, in which he judges that those words of Christ to the Jews were added by falsifiers: ¹¹ “There is one who accuseth you, Moses, in whom you hope; for if you believed Moses, you would believe me also: for he wrote of me.” And Faustus is moved to this judgment of his by these conjectures. First: because if Christ, when the matter seemed more to demand it, did not use the testimony of Moses before the Jews, much less is it to be believed that he called in Moses as witness when he had no need of his patronage. For when he had called himself the light of the world, and the Jews, indignant, cried out against him — “Thou givest testimony of thyself; thy testimony is not true” — then most of all the place demanded that he should say that Moses had prophesied of him; ¹² which nevertheless he did not do, but, as having no testimony from Moses, answered as a stranger [to him]: “In your law it is written that the testimony of two men is true. I am one who give testimony of myself, and he who sent me giveth testimony of me.” ¹³ Why then did he pass over the testimony of Moses, which above all would have been more opportune to that cause? Secondly: it is not likely that the Jews could have kept silence when Christ said that Moses had written of him, but that straightway — being, as they were, malignant and astute — they would have asked what that might be which he thought was written of him by Moses. Whence this taciturnity of theirs signifies that Jesus said no such thing. Thirdly — what moves more — is this: that in Moses there is found no vaticination or testimony concerning Christ. For if Moses wrote anything of Christ, certainly it is that (as we [Manichaeans] say): “A Prophet will I raise up to them from the midst of their brethren, like unto thee.” ¹⁴ But that these things in no wise regard Christ is manifest, because Christ is not a prophet like Moses: seeing that the one was man, the other God; the one a sinner, the other holy; the one born of coition, the other — according to you — of a virgin; the one, his God being offended, is slain on the mountain, while the other, well-pleasing to the Father, suffers of his own will. Since therefore Moses foretold nothing of Christ, the consequence is either to pronounce that chapter false, or to judge — which is impious (nephas) — that Jesus, the author of truth, lied. Thus Faustus.

4. After him the Anabaptists complain that many things have been superadded in this same Gospel; and among the rest, the history of the adulterous Woman taken in adultery, written in the eighth chapter of John — which many ancient fathers attest was formerly by no means in this Gospel. And first of all Eusebius, in the third book of the Ecclesiastical History, chapter 39, speaking of Papias, has these words: “Papias subjoins a certain history concerning an adulterous woman, who was accused by the Jews before the Lord. Moreover, this parable is had written in the Gospel which is called ‘according to the Hebrews.’” These words show that not only in the times of Papias, but long after, this history was not in the Gospel of John, but in a certain apocryphal Gospel “according to the Hebrews”; otherwise Eusebius would not have called it “a certain [history] out of the Gospel according to the Hebrews,” as signifying it little known to him — rather he would have pronounced it certain and undoubted, of the Gospel of John. Jerome likewise, in the second book against the Pelagians, sets down these words concerning this history: “In the Gospel according to John, in many codices both Greek and Latin, there is found [the history] of the adulterous woman, who was accused before the Lord” — signifying by these words that there were many Greek and Latin exemplars which did not have this history. Which the commentaries of the Greeks upon John also indicate: in which, while the other chapters of John are found explained, of this history no mention — much less exposition — is found in them. Whence it is well enough established that it was translated into this Gospel by some audacious fellow out of the Gospel according to the Hebrews, which Epiphanius, book 2, attests was composed by Tatian the heresiarch. ¹⁵

5. And the Anabaptists say that the comment [fabrication] of the same audacious man was that history of the sick man lying at the Probatic pond, which the passage in which

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John writes that it was done renders altogether suspect of falsity: both because in the Old Testament nothing whatever is recorded of this pond with five porches; and because Josephus — the most diligent writer of the Hebrew antiquities, and especially of the three constructions of the temple, namely under Solomon, Zorobabel, and Herod — writes nothing either of the pond or of the water frequently and divinely troubled by an angel. Nor is it likely that Josephus, favoring his own Hebrews beyond measure, would have passed over so signal a favor of the divine goodness toward his fatherland — he who in other matters of lighter moment, and which seemed to make less for the beauty and glory of his city, wrote even to superfluity — if the miracle of so great a thing had taken place, and that in his own time and on his own natal soil. And this suspicion the very explicators of this history increase, while they adorn it the more with certain fabricated appendices, seeking out many things about the place, about the virtue of the place, and the cause of the virtue. Some write that this pond was in the courtyard of the temple; whereas that is read neither in the books of Kings, nor in the books of the sacred Annals [Chronicles], or of Esdras, in which the structure of the earlier as well as of the later temple is described. Others, placing it beside the walls of the city, and contending among themselves about the cause of its virtue, add much more uncertain narrations: of whom Petrus Comestor, the author of the Scholastic History, affirms that the healing virtue was put into the water from the presence of the wood from which afterward the Lord’s cross was fabricated; which wood, as it lay in the bottom of this pond, an angel, moved with reverence for that wood, descended from heaven and troubled (agitabat) the water. Now Solomon (he says) had ordered that wood to be sunk in that pond many ages before, the queen of Saba admonishing it, who had foreseen that from that wood the final ruin threatened the city of Jerusalem. But the author of the history of the Lord’s cross adds certain fabulous things about Adam and Seth, who first planted this wood, being warned by God that in it the sin of them [both] should be blotted out through Christ. Others again, laughing at the fable of this wood, hand down that this virtue was planted in the water not from the wood of the cross, but from the sacred hosts and victims, which, before they were burned on the altar, were washed by the priests in that pond — against that which is written in the fourth chapter of the second of Paralipomenon: that the victims were wont to be washed not in a pond, but in ten bronze basins (conchis) constructed for that work by Solomon. Narrations so various and so uncertain seem to call this whole history back into doubt.

DILVTIO OBIECTORVM [The Dissolution of the Objections]

1. “They are ignorant (says Epiphanius), erring and blinded in mind, the Alogi — of how John, who wrote fourth and last after the other Evangelists, now an old man and an octogenarian, did not care to put forth the things which before him had been honestly (probe) expounded by others, but wished to insist chiefly upon those things which had not been related by them. ¹⁶ Wherefore, since he had seen that the eternal generation of the Son of God and the divine colloquies of Christ had not been sufficiently explicated by the others, therefore — his temporal nativity being passed over, together with the other things which the Alogi commemorate — he bent himself wholly to this one thing: to describe Christ, the Son of God, [begotten] from eternity, equal in all things to the Father, against the impious doctrine of Ebion and Cerinthus — beginning his Gospel from the eternal generation of the Word.” But perhaps the demented Alogi will say: If he passed over the writing of these things because they had already been abundantly explicated by the other Evangelists, why did he not by the same reasoning pass over many other things also which he wrote of Christ, since of these too the Evangelists before him had treated fully and more than enough? To whom we answer: that this was done, God willing it, for the certitude of the faith and for our salvation — [God] who would not grant to the individual Evangelists that each one of them should recount all things both universally and singly, but so distributed to each of them, in proportion of writing, through parts, that sometimes one would say those same things which another Evangelist had already narrated — so that, from the things which two, or three, or four had said consonantly and equally, they might show that they had received from one and the same fountain of truth; and sometimes one would pass by certain things in silence and leave them, which another by explication would supply — lest perchance, if we had all the things that are written of Christ in one or two Evangelists, we should disdain the other Evangelists as repeating the same things superfluously, and, embracing only those who had written out everything, should neglect the labor of the other Evangelists as useless and superfluous. And in this manner that holy four-horsed chariot (quadriga) of the Evangelists would be dissolved, which the Lord willed to be indissoluble. Therefore, that it might remain indissoluble, he so tempered the harmony of the Gospels themselves that the narration of one cannot stand without the narration of another, but from all joined together at once there results the most consonant and most perfect history of our salvation. In vain therefore do the irrational Alogi complain of the things which by John — through the will of the Spirit — were passed over, or were narrated together with the other Evangelists.

2. But it is ridiculous and futile what they oppose to John — that he writes things contrary to the other Evangelists — since there is no contradiction between him and Luke. For John does not say that that miracle of the marriage was absolutely the first of all Christ’s miracles, but the first sign which Jesus did after his baptism and the taking-up of his disciples; ¹⁷ meanwhile not denying that many miracles were also done by Christ before his baptism — of which Luke described that one which was done by Christ, yet a boy, in the temple, together with many others — for the confuting of the heresy of those who deny that Jesus was God before his baptism, but affirm that he was then first deified when, he being baptized, the Spirit, the heavens being opened, with the paternal voice attesting, descended upon him. In like manner is solved what they object about the Centurion’s boy: that John did not say this was the second miracle of Christ after the disciples were taken up, but the second after he had removed from Judaea into Galilee — the Evangelist himself saying: “This again is the second sign that Jesus did, when he was come from Judaea into Galilee.” ¹⁸

3. Further, not less feeble and nerveless is the argument which Faustus brings against the fifth chapter of John, saying that Christ ought then to have used the testimony of Moses — if he had known anything attested of himself by Moses — when the Jews objected to him that he ¹⁹

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gave testimony of himself. For if we diligently inspect what Christ then answered the Jews, we shall see that he brought forth a grand testimony about himself out of Moses. ²⁰ For when he said, “In your law it is written that the testimony of two is true; I am one who give testimony of myself, and there giveth testimony of me the Father who sent me” — what else did this sound like, to those who understood rightly, than that that number of witnesses was consecrated in the law of Moses by the prophetic spirit, and commended by Moses, that even thus the future revelation of the Father and of the Son might be fore-announced — of whom the Spirit is, in that inseparable Trinity, the Holy Spirit? ²¹ But as to what [Faustus] adds — that it is not to be believed that Christ said Moses wrote of him, because if he had said this, the Jews could not have restrained themselves from straightway asking what that might be which was written of him — it is puerile. For just as it could come to pass that, after the miracles they had beheld, the hard infidelity of the Jews remained, so it could come to pass that, when Christ said Moses had written of him, they — fearing in their malignant astuteness whence they might be convicted — would not seek to hear at all what Moses had written of him. ²² And when he subjoins that no testimony is found in Moses which Christ could have produced for himself — because that testimony of Deuteronomy speaks nothing of Christ ²³ — he lies most impudently. For there are such and so many testimonies of Christ in the books of Moses (as we shall show in the following book) that Moses plainly wrote nothing which is not referred to Christ as to the last end of the whole law. Nor does that pretty Antithesis avail anything at all, with which he wished as it were to paint and color his muddy discourse, while, comparing Christ to Moses, he strives to show him unlike: as though, when something is called “like,” it must be understood as like in every part and in every manner, so that no unlikeness at all should remain between the things that are alike — as happened in Christ, who, the unlikeness of divinity being reserved to himself from Moses, is in this called like Moses: because he was man; because he was made in the likeness of flesh, born of a woman; because he was sent to free the people of God — not from Egypt, but from the captivity of sins; not from Pharao, but from the power of darkness. Like again, because he died by a true death on the mount [of Calvary]; but unlike, because [he was] God, born of the Holy Spirit from a virgin, dead on the mount not for his own sins, but that he might placate the wrath of God, offended by us, bearing the crimes of men in his own body.

4. But let the Anabaptists rave as much as they will: since Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and most of the Greeks attest that this history [of the adulteress] always stood in the ancient codices of the Greeks, just as it now stands in these; and the catholic Church has bestowed on it authority equal with the other chapters of John the Evangelist. Nor, because Papias cited it out of the Gospel according to the Hebrews, is it to be believed that it was not written in the Gospel of John, or that the same is not true because it is read in the Gospel according to the Hebrews: otherwise nothing in the sacred books will be true that is found written in the other scriptures of the nations. Vain are these arguments, and unworthy of response. But they press on: the history is rendered suspect for this reason — that it is produced out of the Gospel according to the Hebrews, which is the work of Tatian the heresiarch. But these unskilled men are deceived out of ignorance of the histories. For the Gospel according to the Hebrews cited by Papias, and the Gospel commemorated by Epiphanius, differ much between themselves. For Eusebius, writing of both, says that the Gospel which Papias remembers was of old, in that primeval church, in great authority, and that — although it was not in the canon — the Jews converted to Christ were accustomed to use it; ²⁴ but the other, which Epiphanius relates, put forth by Tatian the heretic, he says was altogether exploded by the church.

But as for that which the same heretics bring forward to shake the credit of the history — namely, that the Greeks do not have this history in their commentaries — I know not whence they could know it, since there are extant in the present age no entire commentaries of the Greeks upon John except those of Chrysostom alone, and of Theophylact and Euthymius, his abbreviators; in which, though that history is not explicated, yet it is not repudiated by them; and it is possible that Chrysostom did expound that history, and that that exposition was afterward drawn out of the codex of Chrysostom by some heretic whom either the history itself, or the explanation of the history, did not please. Concerning the words of Jerome, there is nothing else I care to answer except what we have said elsewhere: that those consecutions are ridiculous — from a particular affirmative to a particular negative — namely: “this history is in many volumes: therefore in many volumes it does not exist.” These things are certainly cheap and elementary, unworthy to be answered; but we are to be excused, in that the improbity of the heretics compels us to descend to this pettiness.

5. But who would not laugh at the madness of those men, in that they refuse to believe the history of the languid man at the pond for this reason — that they have read it neither in the Old Testament nor in Josephus? ²⁵ As though the Miracles of Christ were not to be believed by us because Josephus did not write them! “But nothing,” say they, “is written of this pond in the Old Testament.” We concede that nothing is openly affirmed of it in the Old Testament — but neither is it openly denied. Nay, if we diligently consider the things which are written in the second book of Paralipomenon, the fourth chapter, we shall gather by necessary consecution that there was a certain pond, or receptacle of waters, at Jerusalem in the region which by John is named Probatica [the Sheep-place]. ²⁶ For thus in Greek, says he: ἔστι δὲ ἐν Ἱεροσολύμοις ἐπὶ τῇ προβατικῇ κολυμβήθρα [“Now there is at Jerusalem, by the Sheep-gate, a pond”]. This pond perhaps had been built at the lowest roots of the mount which sustained the temple, so that into it might flow all that force of waters which was daily poured out, as much from the brazen Sea in which the priests washed as from the ten basins in which the holocausts were washed. For — to say nothing of the basins — the Sea alone, as is read in the same chapter, held three thousand measures (metretas). It was needful, therefore, that there be certain grand receptacles of waters into which so many vessels might be discharged. With which reasoning the testimony of Aristeas, a most ancient writer, also seems to consent: for he, concerning water-receptacles of this kind serving the temple of Jerusalem, speaks in this manner in the book On the Seventy Interpreters, [addressed] to Philocrates:

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(the quotation of Aristeas, begun on the previous page, continues:)

The receptacles of the waters — which [water] is poured out in great abundance for washing away the blood of the slaughtered victims — are hidden in convenient places. For on feast days many thousands of victims are slain; and indeed so great is the continual flux of the waters led in, that you would think a perennial fountain was overflowing. But more marvelous, and almost unspeakable, is the magnitude of the subterranean reservoirs, which penetrates everything round the whole circuit of the temple for as much as five stadia; and leaden pipes descend to them everywhere through the walls and the floor of the temple, by which all things are washed away and made clean. There are also at the base of the Altar frequent apertures, unknown to all except those who minister, by whose influx and rush all the gore from the multitude of victims is purged. Now the multitude of the waters received we conjectured in this manner: for when they had led us four stadia beyond the city to a certain place, they bade us listen to the sound of the waters flowing together beneath — which to me indeed seemed the confluence of great vessels.

Thus far Aristeas. From whose words I conjecture that it could easily have come to pass that those waters flowed through hidden pipes into this pool, and again out of it were poured forth through other channels outside the city. But that no mention of this pool was made in the Old Testament is not to be wondered at: because that place, at that time, was not so celebrated as to seem worthy of a particular narration. But after that, in the last times of the Hebrews, it had been made illustrious by the nobility of the miracle, it is verisimilar that the place itself was then first adorned with five porches, for the convenience of the languishing who lay beneath them, awaiting the motion of the water. Wherefore nothing ought to derogate from the faith of the Evangelical history, if the aforesaid authors dissent somewhat among themselves about the site and the virtue of the place — especially since the author of the Scholastic History, in that he reports out of the opinion of others what concerns the wood of the cross, does not himself assert it, but only writes it as a thing learned by fame, and not by certain truth. For us it is enough that this history of the languid man has always stood in all codices, as well Greek as Latin; that it was expounded by the Greek and by the Latin fathers; and that it has been approved by the authority of the whole Church through so many ages. Wherefore there is no cause why we should hereafter call it back into doubt on account of certain empty conjectures of dreaming Anabaptists. And concerning John, thus far.