Refutation of All Heresies 5.17.8

Authorship disputed: The work names no author. Book 1 was long printed among Origen's works as the Philosophumena; after books 4–10 were found in a manuscript from Mount Athos (published 1851), it was assigned to Hippolytus, the usual view today, though some scholars ascribe it to another Roman writer of the same circle. Books 2 and 3 are lost, and book 4 lacks its beginning.

Greek text · Duncker–Schneidewin, 198

Οὐδεὶς οὖν, φησί, δύναται σωθῆναι δίχα τοῦ υἱοῦ οὐδὲ ἀνελθεῖν, ὅς ἐστιν ὁ ὄφις. Ὡς γὰρ κατήνεγκεν ἄνωθεν τοὺς πατρικοὺς χαρακτῆρας, οὕτως πάλιν ἐντεῦθεν ἀναφέρει τοὺς ἐξυπνισμένους καὶ γεγονότας πατρικοὺς χαρακτῆρας ὑποστάτους ἐκ τοῦ ἀνυποστάτου ἐντεῦθεν ἐκεῖ μεταφέρων.

English · Claude translation

“No one, then,” he says, “can be saved or go up without the Son, who is the serpent. For as he brought down the paternal characters from above, so again he carries up from here those who have been awakened and have become paternal characters, transferring them from here to there, made substantial from the insubstantial.”

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 198 · Ludwig Duncker and F. G. Schneidewin, eds., S. Hippolyti episcopi et martyris Refutationis omnium haeresium librorum decem quae supersunt (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1859); section divisions from Paul Wendland, ed., Hippolytus Werke 3: Refutatio omnium haeresium, GCS 26 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1916) · Greek text: L. Duncker and F. G. Schneidewin, Refutationis omnium haeresium (Göttingen, 1859), digitized by the Perseus Digital Library; section divisions from P. Wendland (GCS 26, 1916), digitized by the First Thousand Years of Greek project (Open Greek and Latin); both CC BY-SA 4.0

Text

As printed in Duncker–Schneidewin. Manuscript variants and the editor's apparatus are not reproduced; no textual problem is noted in this passage.

Translation

Claude translation (claude-opus-5-5), 2026-09-27 · Translated by Claude from the Greek text of Duncker–Schneidewin; made independently of existing English translations.

Compare

Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5 (1886) (an older public-domain English translation, whole volume at CCEL; checked against ours only after ours was made) · Its chapter numbers differ from the standard (Wendland) numbering used here.

Topics

Heresy, Christology

Notes

Notes on the original text

Digital text corrected (missing space in the digital text; stray space in the digital text): ἀνελ θεῖν → ἀνελθεῖν; ὅςἐστιν → ὅς ἐστιν.

Cite this passage

Hippolytus, Haer. 5.17.8 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/5/17/8/).

The SBL abbreviation for this work has not been checked yet.

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 5.17.8 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/5/17/8/).