Refutation of All Heresies 8.13.3

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: The Son of Man, unknown to all, is wrongly imagined by creation as born of a woman; his faint rays sustain the world.

Show

Greek text · Duncker–Schneidewin, 426

Γέγονεν οὖν, φησίν, ἀπὸ τοῦ τελείου ἀνθρώπου ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου, ὃν ἔγνωκεν οὐδείς, φαντάζεται δέ, φησίν, ὡς γέννημα θηλείας ἡ κτίσις πᾶσα τὸν υἱὸν ἀγνοοῦσα, οὗ υἱοῦ ἀκτῖνες ἀμυδραὶ πάνυ ἐμπελάζουσαι τῷδε τῷ κόσμῳ συνέχουσι καὶ συγκρατοῦσι τὴν μεταβολήν, τὴν γένεσιν.

English · Claude translation

So from the perfect Man, he says, came the Son of Man, whom no one has known; but the whole creation, not knowing the Son, imagines him, he says, as the offspring of a woman. Very faint rays of this Son, coming near to this world, hold together and control change, that is, generation.

About this passage

Source
Duncker–Schneidewin, 426 · 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, Christology

Notes

Translation notes

  • The allusions are Matt 11:27 and Matt 11:11 (“born of women”).

Notes on the original text

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

Cite this passage

Hippolytus, Haer. 8.13.3 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/8/13/3/).

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

Plain text
Hippolytus, Haer. 8.13.3 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/8/13/3/).

Download citation:BibTeX ·RIS (Zotero, EndNote)

Whole work:BibTeX ·RIS ·Markdown text

Report an error in this passage