3. The Credibility of Hippolytus
Assuming, then, that our author was Hippolytus, schismatic Bishop of Rome from about 218 to 235, we must next see what faith is to be attached to his statements. This question was first raised by the late Dr. George Salmon, Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, who was throughout his life a zealous student of Gnosticism and of the history of the Church during the early centuries. While working through our text he was so struck by the repetition in the account of four different sects of the simile about the magnet drawing iron to itself and the amber the straws, as to excogitate a theory that Hippolytus must have been imposed upon by a forger who had sold him a number of documents purporting to be the secret books of the heretics, but in reality written by the forger himself.[22] This theory was afterwards adopted by the late Heinrich Stähelin, who published a treatise in which he attempted to show in the laborious German way, by a comparison of nearly all the different passages in it which present any similarity of diction, that the whole document was suspect.[23] The different passages on which he relies will be dealt with in the notes as they occur, and it may be sufficient to mention here the opinion of M. Eugène de Faye, the latest writer on the point, that the theory of Salmon and Stähelin goes a long way beyond the facts.[24] As M. de Faye points out, the different documents quoted in the work differ so greatly from one another both in style and contents, that to have invented or concocted them would have required a forger of almost superhuman skill and learning. To which it may be added that the mere repetition of the phrases that Stähelin has collated with such diligence would be the very thing that the least skilful forger would most studiously avoid, and that it could hardly fail to put the most credulous purchaser on his guard. It is also the case that some at least of the phrases of whose repetition Salmon and Stähelin complain can be shown to have come, not from the Gnostic author quoted, but from Hippolytus himself, and that others are to be found in the Gnostic works which have come down to us in Coptic dress.[25] These Coptic documents, as the present writer has shown elsewhere,[26] are so intimately linked together that all must be taken to have issued from the same school. They could not have been known to Hippolytus or he would certainly have quoted them in the work before us; nor to the supposed forger, or he would have made greater use of them. We must, therefore, suppose that, in the passages which they and our text have in common, both they and it are drawing from a common source which can hardly be anything else than the genuine writings of earlier heretics. We must, therefore, agree with M. de Faye that the Salmon-Stähelin theory of forgery must be rejected.
If, however, we turn from this to such statements of Hippolytus as we can check from other sources, we find many reasons for doubting not indeed the good faith of him or his informants, but the accuracy of one or other of them. Thus, in his account of the tenets of the philosophers, he repeatedly alters or misunderstands his authorities, as when he says that Thales supposed water to be the end as it had been the beginning of the Universe,[27] or that “Zaratas,” as he calls Zoroaster, said that light was the father and darkness the mother of beings,[28] which statements are directly at variance with what we know otherwise of the opinions of these teachers. So, too, in Book I, he makes Empedocles say that all things consist of fire, and will be resolved into fire, while in Book VII, he says that Empedocles declared the elements of the cosmos to be six in number, whereof fire, one of the two instruments which alter and arrange it, is only one.[29] Again, in Book IX, he says that he has already expounded the opinions of Heraclitus, and then sets to work to describe as his a perfectly different set of tenets from that which he has assigned to him in Book I; while in Book X he ascribes to Heraclitus yet another opinion.[30] Or we may take as an example the system of arithmomancy or divination by the “Pythagorean number” whereby, he says, its professors claim to predict the winner of a contest by juggling with the numerical values of the letters in the competitors’ names, and then gives instances, some of which do and others do not work out according to the rule he lays down. So, too, in his unacknowledged quotations from Sextus Empiricus, he so garbles his text as to make it unintelligible to us were we not able to restore it from Sextus’ own words. So, again, in his account of the sleight-of-hand and other stage tricks, whereby he says, no doubt with truth, the magicians used to deceive those who consulted them, his account is so carelessly written or copied that it is only by means of much reading between the lines that it can be understood, and even then it recounts many more marvels than it explains.[31] Some of this inaccuracy may possibly be due to mistakes in copying and re-copying by scribes who did not understand what they were writing; but when all is said there is left a sum of blunders which can only be attributed to great carelessness on the part of the author. Yet, as if to show that he could take pains if he liked, the quotations from Scripture are on the whole correctly transcribed and show very few variations from the received versions. Consequently when such variations do occur (they are noted later whenever met with), we must suppose them to be not the work of Hippolytus, but of the heretics from whom he quotes, who must, therefore, have taken liberties with the New Testament similar to those of Marcion. Where, also, he copies Irenæus with or without acknowledgment, his copy is extremely faithful, and agrees with the Latin version of the model more closely than the Greek of Epiphanius. It would seem, therefore, that our author’s statements, although in no sense unworthy of belief, yet require in many cases strict examination before they can be unhesitatingly accepted.[32]