Refutation of All Heresies 6.52.1

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: Hippolytus judges Marcus's system to be astrology and Pythagorean arithmetic, not godly knowledge.

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Greek text · Duncker–Schneidewin, 330

Ταῦτα μὲν οὖν πρόδηλα εἶναι πᾶσιν ἐλπίζω τοῖς ὑγιαίνοντα νοῦν κεκτημένοις ὄντα ἄκυρα καὶ μακρὰν τῆς κατὰ θεοσέβειαν γνώσεως, ὄντα μέρη ἀστρολογικῆς ἐφευρέσεως καὶ ἀριθμητικῆς Πυθαγορείου, καθὼς οἱ φιλομαθεῖς εἴσεσθε, ἐν τοῖς προμεριμνηθεῖσιν ἡμῖν ἐκκειμένων τούτων τῶν δογμάτων.

English · Claude translation

These things, I hope, are plain to all who possess a sound mind to be invalid and far from the knowledge that accords with godliness, being parts of astrological invention and Pythagorean arithmetic, as you lovers of learning will know, since these doctrines were set out in what we worked out earlier.

About this passage

Source
Duncker–Schneidewin, 330 · 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

Notes

Notes on the original text

  • Digital text corrected (wrong accent in the digital text): Ταῦτα μὲν οὗν → Ταῦτα μὲν οὖν.

Cite this passage

Hippolytus, Haer. 6.52.1 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/6/52/1/).

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Plain text
Hippolytus, Haer. 6.52.1 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/6/52/1/).

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