SEVERUS. - Gnostic whom Eusebius (Hist. eccl., IV, 29, 4 ff.) inserts into the history of Encratism. Shortly after Tatian the sect of the Severians would have appeared. The name of Severians presupposes a certain independence in relation to the group of the Encratites.
According to Eusebius the sect would have accepted the Old Testament and the Gospels, rejecting the letters of Paul and the Acts of the Apostles. This fact reveals the relations that exist between Jewish Christians and Encratites. Eusebius' notice (cf. also Theodoret, Haer. fab., I, 21 and St. Jerome, De vir. ill., 29) interrupts at 29, 4,5 the narrative about Tatian: it is therefore inserted from another source. Now Epiphanius (Haer., 45, ed. Holl. p. 199 ff.) speaks of the Severians and informs us about their speculation. The devil, son of Jaldabaoth and Sabaoth, fallen from heaven, would have mingled with the earth in the form of the serpent of paradise; from his seed the vine would have been born. It is a kind of etiological myth to explain the abstinence from wine and from marriage among the Encratites. A Jewish theory is presupposed that identifies the tree of knowledge in paradise with the vine; in the Jewish Apocalypse of Abraham (v.) the vine is the tree of paradise, which caused the carnal union of the first parents (v. in the edition of Bonwetsch, p. 33, 18). Talmudic texts too know a similar theory (H. L. Strack-P. Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament, III, Munich 1926, p. 250 and note; L. Ginzberg, Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, Breslau 1899, p. 122 ff.). It is important to ascertain these Jewish traditions in Encratism and in Gnosis.
Erik Peterson