EPIGONUS ('Επιγονός). - A manifestation of the monarchian-modalist tendency, which was active shortly after A.D. 200, alongside Noetus of Smyrna. It taught that if Christ is God, He is one with the Father; if He suffered, being God, it was the Father who suffered (patripassianism). Insisting on the concept of the unity of God, outside of which there is no other God, it concluded that if Christ is God, He is God in nature and in person, and drew the inference that the Passion of Christ was an act, a modality of the very life of the Father.
According to the testimony of Hippolytus, E. went at the beginning of the 3rd century to Rome and, propagating the heresy of Noetus, founded a patripassian sect of which Cleomenes and Sabellius were subsequently leaders. His teaching gave rise to that theological controversy in which Tertullian and Hippolytus were opponents.
EPI
LATIN AND GREEK CHRISTIAN EPIGRAPHY. - Epigraphy may justly be called the eye of