4. What is the system according to the Sithians, and that they have patched together their doctrine by plagiarizing from those wise men according to the Greeks, (to wit) Musæus and Linus and Orpheus.
5. What Justinus imagined and that his doctrine is not framed from the Holy Scriptures, but from the marvellous tales of Herodotus the historiographer.
1. Naassenes.[1]
p. 138.6. I consider that the tenets concerning the Divine and the fashioning of the cosmos (held by) all those who are deemed philosophers by Greeks and Barbarians have been very painfully set forth in the four books before this. Whose curious arts I have not neglected, so that I have undertaken for the readers no chance labour, exhorting many to love of learning and certainty of knowledge about the truth. Now therefore there remains to hasten on to the refutation of the heresies, with which intent[2] also we have set forth the things aforesaid. From which philosophers the heresiarchs have taken hints in common[3] and patching like cobblers the mistakes of the ancients on to their own thoughts, have offered them as new to those they can deceive, as we shall prove in (the books) which follow. For the rest, it is time to approach the subjects laid down before, but to begin with those who have dared to sing the praises of the Serpent, who is in fact the cause of the error, through certain systems invented by his action. Therefore p. 139. the priests and chiefs of the doctrine were the first who were called Naassenes, being thus named in the Hebrew tongue: for the Serpent is called Naas.[4] Afterwards they called themselves Gnostics alleging that they alone knew the depths.[5] Separating themselves from which persons, many men have made the heresy, which is really one, a much divided affair, describing the same things according to varying opinions, as this discourse will argue as it proceeds.
These men worship as the beginning of all things, according to their own statement, a Man and a Son of Man. But this Man is masculo-feminine[6] and is called by them Adamas;[7] and hymns to him are many and various. And p. 140. the hymns, to cut it short, are repeated by them somehow like this:—
“From thee a father, and through thee a mother, the two deathless names, parents of Aeons, O thou citizen of heaven, Man of great name!”[8]
But they divide him like Geryon into three parts. For there is of him, they say, the intellectual (part), the psychic and the earthly; and they consider that the knowledge of him is the beginning of the capacity to know God, speaking thus: “The beginning of perfection is the knowledge of man, but the knowledge of God is completed perfection.” But all these things, he says, the intellectual, and the psychic and the earthly, proceeded and came down together into one man, Jesus who was born of Mary;[9] and there spoke together, he says, in the same way, these three men each of them from his own substance to his own. For there are three kinds of universals[10] according to them (to wit) the angelic,[11] the psychic and the earthly; and three churches, the angelic, the psychic and the earthly; but their names are: Chosen, Called, Captive.[12]
p. 141.7. These are the heads of the very many discourses which they say James the brother of the Lord handed down to Mariamne.[13] So then, that the impious may no longer speak falsely either of Mariamne, or of James, or of his Saviour, we will come to the Mysteries, whence comes their fable, both the Barbarian and the Greek, and we shall see how these men collecting together the hidden and ineffable mysteries of the nations[14] and speaking falsely of Christ, lead astray those who have not seen the Gentiles’ secret rites. For since the Man Adamas is their foundation, and they say there has been written of him “Who shall declare his p. 142. generation?”[15] learn ye how, taking from the nations in turn the undiscoverable and distinguished[16] generation of the Man, they apply this to Christ.