The Gospel of Cerinthus

is, at one level, yet another Gnostic text, but this time with a difference. The "school" that he established followed Jewish law, though it is unclear what that entailed as he operated in the interregnum between the rule of the Sadducees and that of the Pharisees, which is to say around the time of the destruction of the Temple (70CE), when traditional Jewish practice came to an end, but before the inception of the Talmud Yeru-Shalmi, in which the new forms of Jewish practice were defined by the now unchallenged Pharisaic Rabbis.

Certainly they used "The Gospel according to the Hebrews" as their official text for the life and teachings of Jesus, as well as a version of "The Gospel of Matthew", but they also denied that Elohim was the creator of the physical world, and rather more heretically they denied the divinity of Jesus, insisting that he was born a normal mortal, but that Christ came to him at his baptism, guided him throughout his ministry, and then left him at the Crucifixion - a claim that only makes sense if their word that is rendered in Greek as Christ and in English as Messiah was Mashiyach, the role of the anointed priest-king, and not Moshi'a, which in Biblical Judaism was the "spiritual redemption" role of the deity, not of his representative on Earth; Christianity has managed to get these two completely confused.

Cerinthus's followers believed that Jesus would return to Earth, and bring with him a thousand-year reign of sensuous pleasure that would end with the resurrection of souls - no "spiritual redemption" there either! Though the Council of Nicaea did not recognise in this teaching the ancient cults of Osher (Osiris), Adonis, Dionysus and Tammuz-Dumuzi, it was clearly that version of the Risen Lord which Cerinthians adhered to, a position that conflicts with their conviction that they were following Jewish law, given that the practices of the Risen Lord cults were already heresies in Judaism long before the Council of Nicaea declared Cerinthus a heretic.

There are also similarities in his teaching with those of the Ebionites, and Gnostic elements, particularly their insistence that a Demiurge created the world. Early Christian tradition regards Cerinthus as both a contemporary of, and an opponent of, John the Evangelist, the presumed author of the two "Epistles of John" in which changes to the original Gospel are announced and advertised. Like Marcion, we know more about Cerinthus from his opponents than from any other source, so caveat lector is the order of the day.

On the other hand, "The Gospel of Cerinthus" may not be "The Gospel of Cerinthus" at all, but "The Gospel of Merinthus". This latter belongs to the apostolic period, immediately after the Crucifixion, according to Epiphanius, the Bishop of Salamis on the island of Cyprus, writing at the end of the 4th century CE. Epiphanius states that "St Luke, in the beginning of his gospel by these words 'forasmuch as many have taken in hand' etc, and does intimate there had been many undertakers; among which I say were Cerinthus and Merinthus and others." Epiphanius then goes on to assume that Merinthus and Cerinthus were in fact the same person, "as we see now by the accounts we now have". Beyond this, there is nothing to add.

But on the subject of Cerinthus himself, there is a great deal more, which can be found, splendidly collated, by clicking here. No text, alas; that is long lost.

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