Cerinthus

(end of first century)

   Early Heretic.

   Cerinthus was a Gnostic who taught that God was far too exalted to have created the universe. Instead it came into being through the activities of angels or an inferior deity. He maintained that Jesus had been an ordinary human being who had become possessed by a supernatural power at his baptism. This left him just before his crucifixion. There is a legend recorded by eusebius of caesarea that the Apostle John fled from a bath-house when he heard that Cerinthus had entered it, thinking that his arrival would cause the roof to fall in! Irenaeus argued that the Fourth Gospel was written as a refutation of the views of Cerinthus.

   Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiae, translated by G.A. Williamson (1965);

   Irenaeus, ‘Adversos haereticos’, in F.R.M. Hitchcock (ed.), Early Christian Classics, 2 vols (1916).