Refutation of All Heresies 7.31.8

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, 398

Ταῦτα μὲν οὖν τὰ Μαρκίωνι δόξαντα, διʼ ὧν ἐπλάνησε πολλοὺς τοῖς Ἐμπεδοκλέους λόγοις χρησάμενος, καὶ τὴν ὑπʼ ἐκείνου ἐφηυρημένην φιλοσοφίαν ἰδίᾳ δόξῃ μετάγων αἵρεσιν ἄθεον συνεστήσατο, ἣν ἱκανῶς ἠλέγχθαι ὑφʼ ἡμῶν νομίζω μηθέν τε καταλελεῖφθαι, ὧν κλεψιλογήσαντες παρʼ Ἑλλήνων τοὺς Χριστοῦ μαθητὰς ἐπηρεάζουσιν, ὡς τούτων αὐτοῖς γενομένους διδασκάλους. Ἀλλʼ ἐπεὶ καὶ τὰ τούτου ἱκανῶς ἡμῖν δοκεῖ ἐκτεθεῖσθαι, ἴδωμεν τί λέγει καὶ Καρποκράτης.

English · Claude translation

These, then, are the opinions of Marcion, by which he led many astray, using the words of Empedocles; and, transferring the philosophy invented by him to his own opinion, he put together a godless heresy. I think it has been sufficiently refuted by us, and that nothing has been left out of the things which, having stolen them from the Greeks, they use to abuse the disciples of Christ, as though he had been their teacher in these things. But since his teachings too seem to us to have been sufficiently set out, let us see what Carpocrates says as well.

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 398 · 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 last clause is loosely constructed; the sense is that the heretics falsely make Christ the source of what they took from the Greeks.

Notes on the original text

Digital text corrected (wrong accent: οὖν): μὲν οὗν → μὲν οὖν.

Cite this passage

Hippolytus, Haer. 7.31.8 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/7/31/8/).

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

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 7.31.8 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/7/31/8/).