Refutation of All Heresies 5.7.41

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.

Summary: They read Joshua's parting of the Jordan as Jesus reversing the flow of generation.

Show

Greek text · Duncker–Schneidewin, 148–150

Οὗτος, φησίν, ἐστὶν ὁ μέγας Ἰορδάνης, ὃν κάτω ῥέοντα καὶ κωλύοντα ἐξελθεῖν τοὺς υἱοὺς Ἰσραὴλ ἐκ γῆς Αἰγύπτου (ἤγουν ἐκ τῆς κάτω μίξεως· Αἴγυπτος γάρ ἐστι τὸ σῶμα κατʼ αὐτοὺς) ἀνέστειλεν Ἰησοῦς καὶ ἐποίησεν ἄνω ῥέειν.

English · Claude translation

This, he says, is the great Jordan, which, flowing down and preventing the sons of Israel from going out of the land of Egypt (that is, out of the intercourse below; for Egypt, according to them, is the body), Jesus held back and made to flow upward.

About this passage

Source
Duncker–Schneidewin, 148–150 · 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.
Scripture
Topics
Heresy

Notes

Translation notes

  • The allusion is Josh 3:13–16; Joshua and Jesus have the same name in Greek (Ἰησοῦς).

Notes on the original text

  • Digital text corrected (wrong accent in the digital text): ὅν κάτω → ὃν κάτω.

Cite this passage

Hippolytus, Haer. 5.7.41 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/5/7/41/).

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

Plain text
Hippolytus, Haer. 5.7.41 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/5/7/41/).

Download citation:BibTeX ·RIS (Zotero, EndNote)

Whole work:BibTeX ·RIS ·Markdown text

Report an error in this passage