SEVERO. - A Gnostic whom Eusebio (Hist. eccl., IV, 29, 4 ff.) includes in the history of Encratism. Shortly after Taziano, the sect of the Severians is said to have appeared. The name Severians presupposes a certain independence from the group of the Encratites.
According to Eusebio, the sect accepted the Old Testament and the Gospels, while rejecting the letters of Paolo and the Acts of the Apostles. This fact reveals the relations existing between Judeo-Christians and Encratites. The notice of Eusebio (cf. also Teodoreto, Haer. fab., I, 21 and s. Girolamo, De vir. ill., 29) interrupts the account of Taziano in 29, 4–5: it was therefore inserted from another source. Now Epifanio (Haer., 45, ed. Holl. p. 199 ff.) speaks of the Severians and provides information concerning their speculation. The devil, son of Jaldabaoth and Sabaoth, having fallen from heaven, is said to have mingled with the earth in the form of the serpent of paradise; from his seed the vine was said to have arisen. It is a kind of etiological myth intended to explain abstinence from wine and marriage among the Encratites. It presupposes a Jewish theory identifying the tree of knowledge in paradise with the vine; Apocalypse of Abraham (v.) the vine is the tree of paradise that caused the carnal union of the first parents (v. in the edition of Bonwetsch, p. 33, 18). Talmudic texts also 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 observe these Jewish traditions in Encratism and Gnosticism. Erik Peterson