Refutation of All Heresies 9.27.2

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 claims the Greeks borrowed from the Jews, whose religion is older than that of all nations.

Greek text · Duncker–Schneidewin, 484–486

Ἀλλὰ καὶ ἕτερα τούτων δόγματα πολλοὶ τῶν Ἑλλήνων σφετερισάμενοι ἰδίας δόξας συνεστήσαντο. Ἔστι γὰρ ἡ κατὰ τούτους ἄσκησις περὶ τὸ θεῖον ἀρχαιοτέρα πάντων ἐθνῶν, ὡς δείκνυσθαι πάντας τοὺς περὶ θεοῦ εἰπεῖν τετολμηκότας ἢ περὶ τῆς τῶν ὄντων δημιουργίας μὴ ἑτέρωθεν παρειληφέναι τὰς ἀρχὰς ἢ ἀπὸ τῆς Ἰουδαϊκῆς νομοθεσίας,

English · Claude translation

But many of the Greeks too, appropriating other doctrines of theirs, composed their own opinions. For their discipline concerning the divine is older than that of all nations, so that it is shown that all who have dared to speak about God or about the creation of the things that exist took their principles from nowhere else than from the Jewish lawgiving,

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 484–486 · 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.

Cite this passage

Hippolytus, Haer. 9.27.2 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/9/27/2/).

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

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 9.27.2 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/9/27/2/).