Pagan Origin of Partialist Doctrines

by John Claudius Pitrat

St. Epiphane in his work Hære. 36, and Bergier, inform us that the Heracleonites, whose chief was Heracleon, and who were widely spread, particularly in Sicily, believed that the Word divine did not create the world, but that it had been created by one of the Eons, or spirits. In their opinion, there were two worlds, the one corporeal and visible, and the other spiritual and invisible, and they only ascribed the formation of the latter to Jesus Christ, who was one of the greatest Eons, or spirits. The Heracleonites were organized as a sect in the year 140.

The Colarbasians did not believe the doctrine of the supreme divinity of Jesus Christ.

Sanderus and Bergier say, that the Barules professed to believe that the Son of God had but a fantastical body; that there was no original sin; that all our souls had been created before the world, and all had sinned in that former state of existence; and that Jesus Christ was not God.

The Bardesanists, thus named from their founder, Bardesanes, a Syrian, who lived in the second century, became a large sect. Beausobre in his History of Manicheanism, tome 2, book 4, chap. 9, writes, that they believed in two Principles, originators of all things, the one good and the other bad. They denied that the eternal Word, or Son of God, had taken a human flesh; they said that he had taken only a celestial and aerial body. They denied the future resurrection of the body. Bergier, Feller, etc., say the same.

Then the Bardesanists did not believe the doctrine of the supreme divinity of Jesus Christ.

The Marcosians rejected the doctrine of the supreme divinity of Jesus Christ, and held only that he was one of the principal Eons, or spirits. The Marcosians were founded by Marc in the second century.

The Theodotians, Bergier says, believed that Jesus Christ was not God but a man; that he was above the other men only by his miraculous birth, and by his extraordinary virtues. Theodote, a native of Bysance, founded them in the second century.

The Artemonians also denied the doctrine of the supreme divinity of Jesus Christ.

The Docetes held that Jesus Christ was only the Son of God, and that he had but apparently suffered humiliations, torments, and death.

The Tatianists did not believe the doctrine of the supreme divinity of Jesus Christ. Tatian gave them his name when he organized them as a Christian denomination, in the second century. Bergier pretends that some passages of the writings of this learned author can be understood of the supreme divinity of Jesus Christ, but Fauste Socin, and others, in the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, in ten volumes, in folio, proves the contrary; and at the same time they prove that Clement of Alexandria and other Fathers of the second century disbelieved the doctrine of the supreme divinity of Jesus Christ. Bergier confesses, however, that it is doubtful that Tatian had been Orthodox about the generation of the Word.