Refutation of All Heresies 6.52.9

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, 336

Ἐπειδὴ δὲ ὁ δωδέκατος αἰὼν καταλείψας τοὺς ἕνδεκα καὶ ἀποστὰς κάτω ἐχώρησε, φάσκουσι κατάλληλον καὶ τοῦτο. Ὁ γὰρ τύπος τῶν γραμμάτων διδάσκει· ἑνδέκατον γὰρ τῶν γραμμάτων κεῖσθαι τὸ λάμβδα, ὅ ἐστιν ἀριθμὸς τῶν τριάκοντα, καὶ κεῖσθαι αὐτὸ κατʼ εἰκόνα τῆς ἄνω οἰκονομίας, ἐπειδὴ ἀπὸ τοῦ ἄλφα, χωρὶς τοῦ ἐπισήμου, αὐτῶν τῶν γραμμάτων ὁ ἀριθμὸς ἕως τοῦ λάμβδα συντεθειμένος, κατὰ τὴν παραύξησιν τῶν γραμμάτων σὺν αὐτῷ τῷ λάμβδα τὸν ἐνενηκονταεννέα ποιεῖται ἀριθμόν.

English · Claude translation

And since the twelfth Aeon left the eleven and departed and went down below, they say that this too is fitting. For the form of the letters teaches it: lambda lies eleventh among the letters, and it is the number thirty; and it lies after the image of the economy above, since from alpha, without the episemon, the number of the letters themselves up to lambda, added together according to the increase of the letters, with lambda itself, makes the number ninety-nine.

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 336 · 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

Translation notes

The letter name is unreadable in the digital text and is supplied from the next section.

Notes on the original text

Digital text corrected (unread word in the digital text; certain from the next section): τὸ (??), ὅ ἐστιν → τὸ λάμβδα, ὅ ἐστιν; ἕως τοῦ (??) συντεθειμένος → ἕως τοῦ λάμβδα συντεθειμένος; αὐτῷ τῷ (??) τὸν → αὐτῷ τῷ λάμβδα τὸν.

Cite this passage

Hippolytus, Haer. 6.52.9 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/6/52/9/).

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

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 6.52.9 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/6/52/9/).