CERINTHUS.—Gnostic; according to Irenaeus (Adv. haer., I, 21; ed. W. Harvey, p. 211; ed. A. Stieren, I, 26, p. 253), C. taught that the world had been created by an inferior power that did not know the highest God.
Jesus, begotten by Joseph and Mary, was a man like others, only more righteous and wiser. At the Baptism, Christ descended upon him in the form of a dove, and from that moment Jesus began to preach the unknown Father and to perform miracles. In the end Jesus and Christ separated again: the former suffered, while the latter ascended into heaven and remained impassible. In Irenaeus’s list of heretics, C. appears between Carpocrates and the Ebionites. With Carpocrates he teaches the distinction between the highest God and the power that created the world; with the Ebionites he affirms the human nature of Jesus. C., who according to Irenaeus taught in Asia Minor, must be a representative of an ancient Judeo-Christian gnosis. The gnosis is linked to the Baptism in which the Holy Spirit, identified with Christ, descends. The relationship between Christ and the unknown Father does not become clear in Irenaeus’s account, but the contrast between the supreme God and the power that created the world presupposes a polemic against the Jewish idea of a God who created the world. According to pseudo-Tertullian (Adv. omnes haereses, 3), this creator of the world is an angel, just as the angels also gave the law. Christ’s descent at the Baptism presupposes his passage through the world of the angels, and the ascent into heaven probably occurs when, at the moment of death, the body and the Pneuma-Christ separate. According to Irenaeus, Jesus would have suffered and risen again for C.; Hippolytus, who generally follows Irenaeus, has (X, 21, 3; ed. Wendland, p. 281, 15) omitted the mention of Jesus’ Resurrection. The report of Jesus’ Resurrection is suspect,
because it presupposes an excessively positive evaluation of Jesus’ body. According to Epiphanius (Panar., 28, 6, 1; ed. K. Holl [CB, XXV] p. 318, 4), C. denied the Resurrection of Jesus, expecting it on the day of the general resurrection. In Christian tradition C. became either the adversary of John, who according to Irenaeus (op. cit., III, 11, 7; ed. W. Harvey, p. 40; ed. A. Stieren, II, 1, p. 462) polemicized against C. in his Gospel, or the adversary of Paul as a representative of those Judeo-Christians opposed by the Apostle of the Gentiles (Epiphanius, Panar., 28, 2, 3; 28, 3, 4). Epiphanius’s theory is untenable, because the adversary of the Jewish God (Irenaeus) could not at the same time be the defender of the law against Paul. Epiphanius presupposes an identification of C. with Ebion, which moreover also underlies Gaius’s assertion that C., a Judeo-Christian millenarian, was the author of the Gospel and the Apocalypse of John. The title of pseudo-apostle given to C. in the so-called Epistle of the Apostles likewise derives from this false identification of C. with the adversaries of St. Paul. According to Irenaeus (op. cit., III, 3, 4; ed. Harvey, p. 13; ed. Stieren, p. 434), C. was a contemporary of John the “disciple of the Lord” (the encounter in the bathhouse at Ephesus), but his error had already been taught, “multo prius,” by the Nicolaitans (Irenaeus, op. cit., III, 11, 7; ed. Harvey, p. 40). If Hippolytus, Philaster, and pseudo-Tertullian make C. a “successor” of Carpocrates, they are mistaken. C. was a heretic of the apostolic age.