Codex 121

[Hippolytus, Against Heresies]

Read the tractate of Hippolytus,[1] the pupil of Irenaeus, entitled Against the Thirty-two Heresies.It begins with the Dositheans,[2] and goes down to the heresies of Noetus [3] and the Noetians, which he says were refuted by Irenaeus in his lectures, of which the present work is a synopsis. The style is clear, somewhat severe and free from redundancies, although it exhibits no tendency to atticism. Some of the statements are inaccurate, for instance, that the epistle to the Hebrews is not the work of the apostle Paul. Hippolytus is said to have addressed the people after the manner of Origen, with whom he was very intimate and whose writings he so much admired that he urged him to write a commentary on the Bible, for which purpose he supplied, at his own expense, seven shorthand writers and the same number of calligraphists. Having rendered this service, he persistently demanded the work, whence Origen, in one of his letters, calls him a “hustler.” He is said to have written a large number of other works.