Another sect of Judaic heretics was that of the Cerinthians, whose leader was Cerinthus, a contemporary of the Apostles. It is said that St. John the Evangelist once met Cerinthus at a public bath, whither he himself had gone to wash and thereupon rushed out again, crying: “Let us fly from this place, lest the bath crumble in; for Cerinthus is here, the enemy of truth “ Like all the Jewish heretics, Cerinthus denounced St. Paul as an enemy to circumcision, and rejected his Epistles. His teaching on the Savior was curious; for he asserted that originally Jesus was a mere man, the son of Joseph and Mary, but that when he was baptized in the Jordan, Christ descended upon him in the form of a dove and gave the man Jesus power to perform the miracles of His public ministry. At the Crucifixion, Christ and Jesus were separated; Christ ascending again to Heaven, while Jesus, abandoned to his human frailty, suffered death on the Cross. Cerinthus is also held by some to be the author of the heresy of Chiliasm or Millenarianism, a false doctrine based on the Psalmist's saying that a thousand years in the sight of the Lord are but as a single day. From this it deduces that since the world was created in six days, followed by the Sabbath, it will therefore continue to exist for six thousand years, after which will come a millennium of feasting and sensual delights, which will be the Messianic age. A kind of spiritual millennium was preached by certain of the Christian Fathers during the persecutions, inspired by the belief that Christ would soon return again, bringing them salvation. But the gross delusion of imaginations fevered by materialistic Jewish dreams.

Gnostics.

   While the Judaic heresies sought to graft Christianity on to Judaism, the Gnostics tried, with a strange lack of judgment and unbridled imagination, to adulterate the divine Revelation with the inventions of human philosophy. The doctrines of these heretics, too, were many and various, some of them (those of the Alexandrians) being influenced by Platonic philosophy, while others (those of the Syrians) were based on Persian dualism; but certain characteristics were common to all Gnostics. They believed themselves to be the privileged recipients of a special revelation from pod, which they called “gnosis,” or knowledge, and by virtue of which they were able to solve the problems of life. Since the hardest problem of all is the existence of evil, they imagined that they had solved it by attributing it to matter, in which the fallen souls from the world of light are held captive. But because God, as He is portrayed in the Gospels, is a God of goodness, and it was not possible for evil matter to proceed from a good God, they were driven to the supposition that there were two Gods, — the God of the New Testament, Who ruled over the kingdom of light, and the God of the Old Testament, Who created matter and was the “Demiurgus,” or Creator of the universe. According to the Gnostics, therefore, matter and the flesh are to be abhorred as creations of the God of Evil; and many of them submitted their body to unheard-of torments and privations, while others, on the contrary, degraded it with every form of vice in order to show their contempt for the flesh. Christ, in the opinion of most Gnostics, was simply a divine emanation, — a spirit sent from the world of light to liberate the souls that were groaning in the bonds of matter. But if Christ were a spirit, and belonged entirely to the kingdom of light (so the Gnostics reasoned), His connection with matter would be utterly impossible and incongruous. Christ, then, did not put on fleshly form; God and man did not unite in the person of the Savior, and the alleged Incarnation was only an “appearance,” an illusion, a figment of the imagination of the beholders.

Manichaeans.

   Another heresy based on Persian dualism was Manichaeism, which was started in the third century by the Persian Mani. He also believed in the existence of two principles, uncreated and eternal, perpetually warring against each other; God, Lord of the kingdom of light, and Satan, Lord of the kingdom of darkness. Satan, tempted by the kingdom of light, had once tried to enter into it, whereupon God brought forth man from the Mother of Life and sent him to fight against the powers of darkness. But the powers of darkness, in their struggle with man, attacked his soul, and would have utterly destroyed him, had not God hastened to the rescue by clothing Christ, Who dwelt in the sun, with an imaginary body and sending Him down to earth, where by His teaching He achieved the redemption of man. But, unfortunately, according to the Manichaeans, the Galileans (that is, the Apostles) had misinterpreted the teaching of Christ, Who therefore sent Mani, greater than the Apostles (for he was the Comforter foretold by Christ), to disentangle truth from error. Hence the Manichaeans rejected all the canonical books of the New Testament, substituting gospels and epistles of their own invention. They considered Mani and his successors as the representatives of Christ, and appointed about them 12 teachers and 72 bishops, corresponding to the 12 Apostles and 72 Disciples of the Lord. Further, they divided themselves into two classes, — the Hearers or outer circle, and the Initiate or inner circle. On the latter was imposed not only strict celibacy, but also abstention from all animal food, and scrupulous respect for the life of insects and flowers.

Antitrinitarians.

   Among the heretics who appeared during the first few centuries of Christianity must be numbered the Antitrinitarians of the second and third centuries, who tried to elucidate the supernatural doctrine of the Holy Trinity by human reasoning. The problem which they set themselves was to reconcile the doctrine of the Trinity with Christian Monotheism. Some, like Theodotus the Tanner and Paul of Samosata, ascribed divinity to the Father alone, and relegated the Son to the status of a prophet, great indeed and unique, but a mere mortal man who had received inspiration and illumination from on high. Others, like Noetus of Smyrna and Sabellius the Libyan, acknowledged a single divine Person Who manifested himself in different forms according to the different needs of the world, adopting at the Creation the figure of the Father, at the Redemption that of the Son, and during His guidance of the Church, that of the Holy Ghost. These individual opinions, which had nothing in common with the Christian faith, were condemned sporadically by the early Fathers, until more violent discussions on the person of the Savior impelled the Church to define and interpret her teaching clearly at successive Ecumenical Synods.