FOOTNOTES
[1] ἡ καινὴ ἐπιδημία. The book Elchesai, as will presently be seen, is said to have been revealed “in the third year of Trajan” and therefore long anterior to our text. Hippolytus, therefore, probably refers here to a recrudescence of the superstition connected therewith.
[2] This Noetus, whom Epiphanius (Haer., LVII) would make a native of Ephesus, possibly by confusion with the Praxeas against whom Tertullian wrote, was one of the first to teach the heresy called Patripassian, which made the Father as well as the Son to suffer on the Cross. His date is uncertain, but he was “not very long” dead when Hippolytus wrote (see Hippolytus’ Tractate against Noetus in Gallandi, Bibl. Vet. Patr. II, p. 454), and the seeds of the heresy seem to have been sown in the time of Justin Martyr. It was undoubtedly Eastern in origin and passed in Rome chiefly under the name of Sabellius. Hippolytus was evidently its greatest opponent there, Zephyrinus and Callistus maintaining a more tolerant attitude towards it, until the last-named Pope was compelled to excommunicate Sabellius. See Salmon’s articles in D.C.B., s.n.n. “Noetus,” “Praxeas,” “Epigonus” and “Cleomenes,” and Mr. Hugh Pope’s article on “Monarchian” in Hastings’ Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics.
[3] Theodoret (Haer. Fab., III, 3) would reverse this position and make Cleomenes Epigonus’ teacher and not his pupil. He has probably misread Hippolytus on this point, the later heresiologists frequently failing to distinguish the founders of any heresy from their successors.
[4] This is evidently the beginning of Hippolytus’ quarrel with the Primacy. Of Victor, Zephyrinus’ predecessor in the Roman Chair, he speaks well. Cf. p. [128] infra.
[5] Cf. 2 Peter ii. 22.
[6] δυσφημίας.
[7] ἐν τοῖς φιλοσοφουμένοις. The Codex has Φιλοσοφουμένους. He evidently refers to Book I, in which (Vol. I, p. [41]) he has given a few words in the gnomic sayings of Heraclitus. The only other previous reference to them seems to be in Book V (Vol. I, p. [154] supra) where he calls Heraclitus one of the wisest of the Greeks and in Book VI (p. [4] supra) where he attributes Simon’s image of “a fiery God” not to Moses but to Heraclitus. If Cruice’s emendation holds good this shows that Book I was originally published separately and called “Philosophizings,” the rest of the work being known as the Elenchus or “Refutation.” Cf. Introduction supra. Bishop Wordsworth (St. Hippolytus and the Church of Rome, London, 1880), gets over the difficulty by reading the passage ἐν τοὺς Φιλοσοφουμένους ἡμῖν, “in this our Philosophumena,” and this reading has been adopted in this translation.
[8] Cf. Stobaeus, Eclog. Phys., I, xlii.
[9] λόγον αἰῶνα.