My teaching semester is about to begin in a few weeks. In the first semester, I always teach an introductory class entitled “Jesus and the Gospels” where we look at the life, teachings, miracles, death, and resurrection of Jesus as portrayed in the four canonical Gospels and at the origins of those Gospels. I am also teaching an advanced exegetical unit on the Gospel of John, where I get students to write a topical essay on the “disciple whom Jesus loved” and an exegetical essay on a particular passage as well as a creative presentation. The third unit that I am teaching is an introduction to New Testament Greek, which is a little easier than our standard Greek units that go over two semesters and is intended to give them a basic familiarity with the language so that they can utilize lexicons and commentaries. Finally, I am supervising a number of graduate students as they complete their research methods class, which sets up the major project that they want to write on for the end of their degree, and a few PhD students. Since I hope to do some writing for publication, I will only blog sporadically until I come up with an idea for a new series. I wish you all a happy start to 2024.

Since I am interested in the reception of Mark’s Gospel, I read with interest Craig Evans review of John’s Transformation of Mark (ed. Eve-Marie Becker, Helen K. Bond, and Catrin H. Williams; London: T&T Clar, 2021). My current opinion on the literary relationship between the Gospels of Mark and John is that the agreements in their larger literary structures or in their wording at very specific points (e.g., the cost of the ointment in Mark 14:5 and John 12:5) probably shows the latter author’s knowledge of the former’s work to some degree, though I still think that this later evangelist was also relying on independent traditions and does reflect the distinctive perspective of an elite Judean disciple “whom Jesus loved” who was not a member of the Twelve. Anyways, since I have not read the book in question yet, I found Evan’s summary of its contents helpful and would like to read it more after his positive review. However, I found his closing suggestion to be quite interesting for reasons that I will explain in a moment:

“The question of John’s relation to Mark needs to be considered in the light of the Papian tradition (and taking care not to be influenced by its tendentious treatment at the hands of Eusebius). According to Papias, Mark committed to writing the teaching of Peter οὐ µέντοι τάξει, ‘not in order’ (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.14–15). We know from Lucian of Samosata (Quo. hist. 4–6) and Galen of Pergamum (Ind. 30; Lib. prop. 14) that notes that are ‘not in order’ are not ready πρὸς ἔκδοσιν, ‘for distribution,’ that is, publication. In reference to what Mark wrote down ‘not in order,’ Papias is describing prepublication material, not the finished product that the church would eventually recognize as canonical Mark. At least three of the contributors to the book under review (Labahn, Luther, and Zumstein) remain unconvinced that John made use of Mark; rather, they think John drew on pre-Markan tradition. Papias, moreover, also says that he learned these things from the ‘Elder,’ who should be understood as the apostle John (again we must guard against Eusebian tendentiousness; see Irenaeus, Haer. 5.33.4: ‘Papias, a man of the early period, a hearer of John’).”

In my own published work, I have explained why I reject this identification of Papias’s Elder John as the Apostle John and as the author of the Johannine corpus. In my view, Eusebius was right to distinguish the Apostle John from the Elder John, contrary to Irenaeus, and his tendentiousness only comes into play when he tries to ascribe the book of Revelation to the Elder John in order to diminish its statue. Check out my series on Papias of Hierapolis for more details. However, what I found most interesting was his point that Papias was referring to Mark’s prepublication notes before his Gospel was finally published. This view has been defended by the classicist George Kennedy in “Classical and Christian Source Criticism,” The Relationship among the Gospels: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (ed. W.O. Walker; San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1978), 130-37. However, I have argued that this was the Elder John’s assessment of Mark’s text itself, seeing it as a textualization of earlier oral preaching that was incomplete and lacking a sophisticated rhetorical arrangement. Later, Mark’s text would be described as hypomnēmata or “notes,” at least according to Eusebius in one of his paraphrases of Clement’s lost Hypotyposes (see Ecclesiastical History 2.15.2). This characterization of Mark’s Gospel is examined in more depth in the ground-breaking work of Matthew D. C. Larsen and Nicholas A. Elder, which I hope will have a significant impact on academic debates from the Synoptic Problem to comparisons between the Gospels and other Jewish or Graeco-Roman literature. Larsen would consider all of the Synoptic Gospels to fit into the category of hypomnēmata or apomnēmoneumata, while I would side with Elder in viewing the writings of Matthew and Luke as more refined literary publications.

Update: Craig Evans goes into more depth defending Kennedy’s view that Papias was referring to Mark’s preliminary notes, not his finished Gospel, in Jesus and the Manuscripts (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2020), “Introduction.”

I recently came across two online discussions of my book Tax Collector to Gospel Writer: Patristic Traditions about the Evangelist Matthew. The first one was written in response to a podcast interview with Stephen Boyce about whether Levi and Matthew were alternate names for the same tax collector (see Matthew 9:9; 10:3; Mark 2:13-14; Luke 5:27-28) and, over at the blog The Amateur Exegete, Chrissy Hansen helpfully summarizes some of my conclusions. The second was part of a series in five parts (here, here, here, here, here) in response to Hansen’s post at Triggermanblog. The second and fifth posts of this series are more critical of my work, though I am happy to receive a few positive comments that I offer “an interesting twist to the assumption of Markan priority” and make “an excellent observation.” 🙂 The observations about naming practices and the lists of disciples in the Gospels and Acts in this series provide much food for thought. I do want to respond to a few points:

• The blogger commends Armin Baum’s article on the historiographical form of the Gospels. I grant that Matthew’s Gospel is an ancient bios (“life”), but I actually reference Baum’s view that it differs from other Graeco-Roman biographies inasmuch as the author’s identity is kept purposefully anonymous and this is done in imitation of the historiographical books in the Hebrew Bible and in the ancient Near East.
• While the blogger makes a interesting case for why the words “called Matthew” in Matthew 9:9 signal that this was the toll collector’s alternate name rather than the “name” (onoma) that he was given at birth in the fourth post, I am not persuaded that Levi took on Matthew as an alternate name for the reasons that are summarized in the second post. That is, I followed the commentators who observed that the Gospel writer uses the participle legomenos when referring to proper names such as “Matthew” in 9:9 and the article with legomenos when using nicknames such as Simon “the once called Peter” in 4:18. By the way, the point that Second Temple Jews rarely if ever had two popular Semitic names is not disproved by pointing out that Simon was known by the Aramaic Kēp̄ā (transliterated into Greek as Kēphas and translated as Petros), since the latter term for “rock” was not a popular name but a nickname.
• I did not simply assume Markan priority. I briefly covered some of the arguments in support of it and how it makes sense of the phenomenon of the elimination of names when moving from passages that Matthew and Luke took over from Mark’s Gospel on pages 14-16, but a good introduction to the case for Markan priority can be found in chapter 3 of Mark’s Goodacre’s The Synoptic Problem: A Way through the Maze that is freely accessible online. The evidence is that the extensive agreements in both wording and order between the first three Synoptic Gospels is too great to posit that these texts are written independently of one another and, given the further evidence for Markan priority, there needs to be an explanation for why the name was changed from Levi to Matthew if it is unlikely that the same person bore both names. I pointed out a clear example where one character (i.e. Salome) is switched with another character (i.e., the mother of James and John) in Matthew 27:56 as an analogy for what happened in Matthew 9:9. I offered the theory, admittedly incapable of proof in the absence of further textual evidence, that Levi and Matthew may have been two different toll collectors, so it was easy enough to substitute one for the other in this type scene where Jesus calls a toll collector to follow him.
• My stance on the Patristic evidence is that it sheds more light on the reception of the Gospels by these later authors than the historical circumstances for how they originated. Thus, the Elder John’s attribution of a Gospel to Peter’s interpreter Mark, Papias’s claim that Matthew carefully arranged the Hebrew oracles, Justin Martyr’s commendation of the memoirs of the apostles, Irenaeus’s defence of the four Gospels, or Epiphanius’s and Jerome’s contentions that they got a hold of different versions of Matthew’s Gospel served specific purposes in their own times and places. I do not think my handling of the Patristic data is inconsistent.

Anyways, I appreciate both writers for engaging with my work, which encourages me to reflect on the strengths or weaknesses of my arguments. I agree with Dale C. Alison’s testimonial on the back of the book that “Nothing can be the last word because scholarship never stands still.” I recognize that the book may become part of apologetic or counter-apologetic debates. There are probably points in the book that will make both sides happy or unhappy: I argue that the Gospels were originally anonymous and deconstruct the later traditions about the evangelists, but I also accept the historicity of the identification of the Apostle Matthew as a tax collector and argue that the anonymous author of the Gospel named after Matthew was a Jewish Christ follower writing around 70-100 CE who closely followed the earlier written sources about Jesus. And nothing that I have written calls into question the theological value of this Gospel.

This will be the final post in this series about the Alogi. After my introduction to the series, I looked at the data provided by  Ebed-Jesu, Dionysius bar Salibi, Filaster of Brescia, Epiphanius of Salamis, Eusebius of Caesarea, Dionysius of Alexandria, Origen of Alexandria, Hippolytus of Rome, Gaius of Rome, Irenaeus of Lyon, and Polycarp of Smyrna. In terms of historical reconstruction, I will first outline the points that I am reasonably confident about and then the points that I am less certain on:

1. Irenaeus inherited a story from Polycarp or his students about a conflict between John, “the disciple of the Lord,” and Cerinthus.
2. Irenaeus opposed certain individuals, in Asia Minor or Rome, who rejected the Gospel of John because of the misuse of its passages about the Paraclete. It is plausible that this controversy was over Montanism.
3. Gaius of Rome undermined the apostolic authorship of Revelation at the very least, and possibly implicitly claimed that Cerinthus wrote it, while Dionysius of Alexandria (either independently from Gaius or not) explicitly claimed that “some” people were saying that Cerinthus wrote it. By claiming that Cerinthus forged Revelation, they could dismiss both Cerinthus’s interpretation of the future millennial rule of Jesus and Revelation itself because of its endorsement of the millennium. Gaius was likely likening the eschatological views of Proclus, a Montanist interpreter of Revelation, to Cerinthus’s.
4. Hippolytus wrote a lost apology that likely defended the thesis that the Apostle John wrote the Gospel of John and Revelation and the title of this work is attested on the Hippolytan statue.
5. There are a number of Patristic sources that express anxiety over the differences between the Gospel of John and the Synoptic Gospels and Origen of Alexandria explicitly noted how their chronologies were irreconcilable.
6. Epiphanius created the Alogi as a construct compiled from various sources that referred to various individuals who blasphemed the Paraclete in the Gospel of John, attributed Revelation to Cerinthus, defended the apostolic authorship of the Gospel of John and Revelation, and debated the accuracy of John’s chronology or the intelligibility of Revelation’s imagery.

What I am less certain on is what was Epiphanius’s and Dionysius bar Salibi’s exact source(s) for the objections against the content of Revelation and the chronology of the Gospel of John. I do think that Dionysius bar Salibi was dependent on Epiphanius for the portrayal of Cerinthus, but the question is whether they both also independently relied on Hippolytus’s lost apology. Any of the following options seem feasible to me at the moment:

• Hippolytus’s lost apology was their shared source for the rebuttals against Gaius’s criticisms of Revelation, which included the claim that Gaius may have made in his dialogue with the Montanist Proclus that Revelation contains a false prophecy about the “church” in Thyatira since the Montanist congregation there did not constitute a true “church,” and critiques of John’s chronology. Hippolytus also defended the apostolic authorship of both the Gospel and Revelation of John in response to Gaius’s claim that Cerinthus was at least an interpreter of Revelation if not its author.
• Hippolytus’s lost apology was their shared source for the rebuttals against Gaius’s criticisms of Revelation, but Gaius never criticized the Gospel of John as otherwise Eusebius would have mentioned it. Hippolytus also defended the apostolic authorship of both the Gospel and Revelation of John in response to Gaius’s claim that Cerinthus was at least an interpreter of Revelation if not its author. Epiphanius may have relied on Origen for the objections against John’s chronology and Dionysius bar Salibi was not reliant on Hippolytus’s lost apology when constructing the debate between “Gaius” (or an unknown “heretic”) and “Hippolytus” on John’s chronology.
• Hippolytus’s lost apology did not survive until the time of Dionysius bar Salibi and we cannot know that it was even directed against Gaius. Epiphanius relied on Origen for the objections against Revelation and the Gospel of John. Dionysius bar Salibi relied on Eusebius and Epiphanius, the former for naming Gaius as someone who associated Revelation with Cerinthus and placing him around the time of Hippolytus and the latter for the objections from the Alogi, and on other later sources (e.g., catenae) for further objections and rebuttals concerning Revelation and the Gospel of John. Finally, Ebed-Jesu created the titles in his catalogue after reading Dionysius bar Salibi’s commentary.

At a minimum, I would tentatively argue that there is evidence in the late second and early third century CE that some Christians who Irenaeus would have otherwise regarded as “orthodox” rejected the Gospel of John due to the conflict with Montanism and others, including Gaius of Rome and unnamed persons in Alexandria, rejected Revelation by associating it with Cerinthus. Epiphanius’s account of the Alogi needs to still be approached with critical caution, since this heresiologist is well known for his misuse of earlier sources and imaginative reconstructions of earlier “heresies.” However, if we would ever fortunate enough to rediscover either Gaius’s lost Dialogue with Proclus or Hippolytus’s lost apology, we might be able to say more about whether or not Epiphanius really was responding to “Gaius” when refuting the “Alogi” and whether Dionysius bar Salibi’s portrayal of the “heretic Gaius” is accurate.

Irenaeus believed that his own teacher, Polycarp, knew John, “the disciple of the Lord,” and the other apostles who had appointed him as the bishop of Smyrna (Against Heresies 3.3.4). John allegedly lived until the early years of the reign of Trajan, the Roman emperor from 98-117 CE. In the same passage, Irenaeus presents the examples of how Polycarp and John engaged, or rather avoiding engaging, with the “heretics” Marcion and Cerinthus respectively. Here is the story about John’s chance meeting with Cerinthus as translated by Lorne Zelyck in “The Story of John Meeting Cerinthus” in New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures: Volume 3 (ed. Tony Burke and Brent Landau; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2023):

“There are also those who heard from him [Polycarp] that John, the disciple of the Lord, going to bathe at Ephesus, and perceiving Cerinthus within, rushed out of the bath-house without bathing, exclaiming, ‘Let us flee, lest even the bath-house fall down, because Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is within.’”

Lorne Zelyck has also offered a summary and compiled a short bibliography on this story in his entry “John and Cerinthus” for the North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature “e-clavis: Christian Apocrypha.” As Zelyck notes, Irenaeus interprets the story to mean that the evangelist John wrote his Gospel to refute Cerinthus’s view that Jesus was only a human. There are a number of commentators on the Johannine epistles who associate the statements that Jesus is not the Christ, that Jesus Christ has not come in the flesh, and that Jesus Christ came in water only rather than in water and blood (cf. 1 John 2:22; 4:22-23; 5:6) with the “separationist Christology” entertained by Cerinthus (i.e., the view that the human Jesus was temporarily united with the divine Christ aeon between his baptism and his crucifixion). For a list of commentators who have held this view, see Daniel R. Streett’s They Went Out from Us: The Identity of the Opponents in First John (BZNW 177; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), 53n.185, 133n3, 176n.11, 276n.87. However, some scholars have argued that John’s Gospel was more amenable to Cerinthus’s Christology because it omits an account of Jesus’s birth and could have identified the logos (“word”) in John 1:1 and 14 with the Spirit that possesses Jesus at his baptism (here is a list of commentators who interpret John’s Christology in this way). Thus, it has been argued that the bathhouse story was invented to delegitimize Cerinthus’s interpretation of the Gospel of John in April D. DeConick’s The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 155-160 and M. David Litwa’s Found Christianities: Remaking the World of the Second Century CE (London: T&T Clark, 2022), 33-44.

On the contrary, I have argued in several publications, including my most recent book Tax Collector to Gospel Writer: Patristic Traditions about the Evangelist Matthew, that Irenaeus confused the Apostle John with the Elder John. He referred to John as “the disciple of the Lord” because of his belief that John was the beloved disciple in the Gospel of John. Otherwise, the anecdotes that he heard about an elderly figure named John who ran away from a bathhouse in Ephesus and died and was buried during the reign of Trajan were originally about the Elder John. In the same publication and in my earlier work The Beloved Apostle? The Transformation of the Apostle John into the Fourth Evangelist, I also argue that the Elder John was Papias’s source about the origins of Mark’s Gospel, but had nothing to do with the origins of the Johannine Gospel or Epistles. Regardless of whether the bathhouse story is historical or was meant to be taken as a joke, I think that it may reflect the real rivalry between the Elder John and Cerinthus, two prominent Christian figures residing in Ephesus. If I am right, the bathhouse story originally had nothing to do with the Gospel of John.

The oldest source on the possible critics of the Gospel of John is Irenaeus, the late second century bishop of Lyon and the author of On the Detection and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So-Called (it is commonly referred to by the shorter title Against Heresies) and Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching as well as other works. Here is a translation from Robert M. Grant’s Irenaeus of Lyon (The Early Church Fathers; London and New York: Routledge, 1997) of Irenaeus’s criticisms of some “others” who rejected the Gospel of John:

“Others, to reject the gift of the Spirit poured out in the last times on the human race by the will of the Father, do not accept the form of the Gospel according to John, in which the Lord promised to send the Paraclete (John 15:26), but drive out both the Gospel and the prophetic Spirit at the same time. They are truly unfortunate when they say there are false prophets and use this as a pretext to drive out prophetic grace from the church, behaving like those who abstain from relations with the brethren because of people who come out as hypocrites. Usually people of this sort do not accept the apostle Paul, for in the letter to the Corinthians he spoke precisely about spiritual gifts and knew men and women who prophesied in the church (1 Cor. 14:1-40; 11:4-5). In all these ways they sin against the Spirit of God and fall into the unforgivable sin (Matt. 12:31-32).” (Against Heresies 3.11.9; Grant, Irenaeus, 132-33).

Some scholars have proposed certain textual amendments to the Latin text or offered different interpretations of it, but the general consensus is that the motivation for rejecting the Gospel of John was that the Montanists were misusing its passages about the promised advent of the Paraclete or “Advocate” (cf. 14:16–17, 26; 15:26; 16:7). A full discussion can be found in August Bludau, Die Ersten Gegner der Johannesschriften (Freiburg: Herder & Co, 1925), 10-40. There is some debate as to whether the Montanists began claiming that the Paraclete was on the side of their own prophets and prophesies in Asia Minor or Rome, so check out the debate between Ronald Heine and Christine Trevett in the linked bibliography. Since Irenaeus is silent about whether his opponents rejected Revelation too or ascribed the Gospel and Revelation to Cerinthus, Bludau distanced them from both Gaius of Rome and the Alogi. In Bludau’s view, they were a group of anti-Montanists in Asia Minor. Another possibility is that Irenaeus’s opponents was opposed to the exercise of the prophetic gifts or other charismatic activity without necessary specifically focusing on Montanism as argued in T. Scott Manor, Epiphanius’ Alogi and the Johannine Controversy (SVC 135; Leiden: Brill, 2016), 169-70.

Alternatively, Eduard Schwartz and Joseph Daniel Smith Jr. argue that Irenaeus was concealing the fact that he was attacking Gaius of Rome by referring to plural unnamed “others.” This led Schwartz to date Gaius’s dialogue with the Montanist Proclus before the publication of Irenaeus’s Against Heresies around 180, which contradicts Eusebius’s dating of the dialogue during the pontificate of Zephyrinus (ca. 199-217 CE), while Smith Jr. argued that Irenaeus had heard about Gaius’s negative assessment of John’s Gospel before he wrote his opinions down in his Dialogue with Proclus. See Eduard Schwartz, “Über den Tod der Söhne Zebedaei: in Beitrag zur Geschichte des Johannesevangeliums” in Gesammelte Schriften: Zum Neuen Testament und zum Frühen Christentum (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1963), 5.90, 106; Joseph Daniel Smith Jr., “Gaius and the Controversy over the Johannine Literature” (Ph.D. Diss., Yale University, 1979), 164, 168. If this is correct, Gaius rejected the Gospel of John because Proclus appealed to it.

The last theory that I will note was put forward in Charles E. Hill’s The Johannine Corpus in the Early Church (Oxford: OUP, 2004). 113–17, 191. Hill identifies the unnamed group in Against Heresies 3.11.9 with the theologians who held that Jesus was only a human who was only temporarily indwelled by a divine aeon that was called “Christ” in 3.11.7, because Irenaeus placed them between his references to Marcion and the Valentinians in both instances, and conjectures that their low Christology and rejection of the Gospel of John are paralleled in the Apocryphon of James. If Hill is right, then Irenaeus would not have regarded these critics of John’s Gospel as “orthodox” at all.

I am not convinced by Hill’s efforts to present these opponents as unorthodox. I suspect that Irenaeus would have regarded them as fellow Christians, but Irenaeus still condemned them as false prophets and blasphemers of the Spirit because of their efforts to suppress the ongoing work of the Paraclete. This simplest solution, in my opinion, is that this group was opposed to Montanism.

If Hippolytus was not Epiphanius’s source, then there is another possibility that has been defended most fully in T. Scott Manor’s Epiphanius’ Alogi and the Johannine Controversy (SVC 135; Leiden: Brill, 2016). Origen of Alexandria (ca. 185-253) may have been the most brilliant Christian scholar, philosopher, and textual critic in antiquity. He was also well known for his allegorical interpretive method. In his Commentary on John, he challenges those who insist on interpreting the Gospel only on the literal level, because he could not find a way to harmonize the chronologies of the four Gospels and thus supposed that the four evangelists had other reasons for arranging their materials in the way that they did. Manor highlights the following examples as possible sources for the objections of the Alogi (see his translations reproduced below on pp. 19-20, 184-85, 190):

“They say—those who accept the four Gospels and who suppose that the discrepancy is not to be resolved though anagogical interpretation—they will have to explain the difficulty noted beforehand, about the forty days of the temptation, a period for which there is no room that can be found in the account of John, (and) when the Lord came into Capernaum… But how can they claim both the account of Matthew and Mark be true—that it was on account of Him hearing that John was delivered up that he withdrew into Galilee—and that according to John, [which states] after a number of other events than just his stay in Capernaum alone, namely his going up into Jerusalem, and His journey from there to Judea, that John was not yet cast into prison, but was baptizing in the Aenon near Salim?” (Comm. Jo. 10.2)

“Three Gospels place these events [i.e. the triumphal entry and cleansing of the temple], which are assumed to be the same as those written by John, as occurring in one journey of the Lord to Jerusalem. But John places them in connection with two visits, which are divided from each other, in between which there were many acts of the Lord and journeys made to other places.” (Comm. Jo. 10.15)

As for the Alogi’s objections about Revelation, Manor notes that there are 39 scholia on Revelation that have been attributed to Origen. He points out that, in one fragment, “Origen interprets the ‘voice of the trumpet’ (Rev 4:1) spiritually as the ‘magnitude of understanding with perspicuity that came to [John]'” and in another “regarding Rev. 2:21 Origen speaks of Jezebel as one who had a ‘damned nature'” (p. 225).

If Manor is right, Epiphanius treated Origen’s criticisms against literalistic harmonizations of the Gospels and interpretations of Revelation’s imagery as akin to rejecting these writings. However, Origen certainly regarded the Gospel of John as authoritative and as authored by the Apostle John in accordance with the church tradition, in contrast to Epiphanius’s Alogi. However, since Eusebius had noted that “some” people had attributed Revelation to Cerinthus, Epiphanius’s made the inference that these same people must have attributed the Gospel of John to Cerinthus as well. Manor’s thesis entails that the Alogi were not a real group, but was Epiphanius’s own construction based on the criticisms that he encountered of the Gospel of John and Revelation in his various sources.

According to the Medieval Syriac sources, the “heretic Gaius” put forward a number of objections against the content of the book of Revelation, and possibly against the chronology of the opening chapters of the Gospel of John, and ascribed both writings to Cerinthus. Hippolytus responded to each objection and defended the apostolic authorship of both writings. There are also the references to one or two works allegedly written by Hippolytus in defence of the Gospel and Revelation of John and against Gaius. In Epiphanius’s Panarion, it is the Alogi who ascribe these writings to Cerinthus. Further, there is some overlap between the Alogi’s and “Gaius’s” objections and “Hippolytus’s” and Epiphanius’s rebuttals.

If Epiphanius and Dionysius bar Salibi had a shared source from Hippolytus, what was it? There is a reference to Hippolytus’s non-extant Syntagma against Thirty-Two Heretics in a ninth century text, the Bibliotheca (121), by Photius I of Constantinople. On his academia.edu page, Luke J. Stevens has provided an English translation of R. A. Lipsius’s book on the heresiological sources, which also includes Lipsius’s defence of the theory that he developed that Hippolytus’s heresiological catalogue was the source of Epiphanius, Filaster, and “Pseudo-Tertullian” (i.e. the author of an appendix that had been added to Tertullian’s The Prescription against the Heretics) on pages 91-137. However, Lipsius offers a number of reasons for why the Alogi were not included in Hippolytus’s Syntagma (pp. 94-115), which includes the fact that Pseudo-Tertullian never mentions any critics of the Gospel and Revelation of John at all. Thus, it is unlikely that this was Epiphanius’s and Dionysius bar Salibi’s shared source.

The majority opinion among scholars is that Epiphanius and Dionysius bar Salibi had access to a lost apology, or apologies, written by Hippolytus of Rome (ca. 170-235 CE), the title(s) of which are reproduced on the statue of Hippolytus and in Ebed-Jesu’s catalogue. Hippolytus either correctly perceived that Gaius had ascribed both of these writings to the “heretic” Cerinthus or completely misinterpreted Gaius if he only ascribed Revelation to Cerinthus or even just claimed that Cerinthus was a reader of Revelation. Perhaps Hippolytus assumed that an attack on Revelation constituted an attack on the Gospel of John, since he held that the Apostle John was the author of both texts. There is an extensive review of the scholarship on this question in J.D. Smith Jr., “Gaius and the Controversy over the Johannine Literature” (Ph.D. Diss., Yale University, 1979). However, the strongest challenge against the thesis that Hippolytus’s apology was Epiphanius’s and Dionysius bar Salibi’s shared source can be found in T. Scott Manor’s Epiphanius’ Alogi and the Johannine Controversy (SVC 135; Leiden: Brill, 2016).

It should be acknowledged that the quotations from Gaius of Rome and Dionysius of Alexandria in their third century writings have been mediated to modern scholars by the fourth-century historian Eusebius of Caesarea. And Eusebius juxtaposition of these two quotes together in Ecclesiastical History 3.28.2-5 shows that he concluded that both Gaius and Dionysius provided attestation to the claim that Cerinthus forged the book of Revelation. Eusebius’s bias against this apocalyptic text is easily documented:

• He was aware of the traditional identification of the author of Revelation as the Apostle John and the dating of the book’s composition during the reign of the Emperor Domitian (3.18.1-3; cf. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.30.3).
• He notes that opinion was divided over whether Revelation should be accepted as an undisputed, authoritative writing (3.24.17). He acknowledges that some classify it as an undisputed text (3.25.2), but suggests that others would include it among the rejected writings (3.25.4).
• He includes the negative comments about Cerinthus’s interpretation of the millennium (3.28.2-5)
• He discerns that two separate individuals named John are mentioned in the prologue of Papias of Hierapolis’s Exposition of the Oracles of the Lord, one an apostle and the other not one, and argues that the non-apostolic John wrote Revelation (3.39.6). He also insults Papias’s intelligence because he believed that the kingdom of Christ would be established on earth for a thousand years after the resurrection of the dead and faults him for persuading other ecclesiastical leaders such as Irenaeus to adopt a similar view (3.39.12-13).
• He repeats Dionysius of Alexandria’s case for differentiating the John who wrote Revelation from the Apostle John, including his notice about the two tombs for two separate Johns in Ephesus (7.25; cf. 3.39.6).

One other point should be noted is that Eusebius cited Gaius’s claim that Cerinthus was the author or at least a reader of Revelation, but a millennium later Dionysius bar Salibi related that “Gaius” attributed both the Gospel of John and Revelation to Cerinthus. This is also the view of Epiphanius‘s Alogi. There are a few different options here:

• Gaius attributed both of these texts to Cerinthus, but Eusebius suppressed his criticisms of the Gospel of John because, unlike Revelation, he valued the fourth Gospel and only wanted to reproduce Gaius’s critique of Revelation.
• Gaius attributed both of these texts to Cerinthus, but his criticisms of the Gospel of John had already been suppressed by the copyists of his Dialogue with Proclus before Eusebius got a hold of it. This may be why Eusebius could still regard Gaius as an “ecclesiastical man” because he only knew his criticism of Revelation, a book that Eusebius also regarded as a disputed text.
• The attribution of both of these texts to Cerinthus predates the writing of Gaius’s dialogue, but Gaius only repeated the attack on the authorship of Revelation and this is why Eusebius could still regard him as an “ecclesiastical man.”
• Gaius was the first one to associate Revelation or another apocalyptic text to Cerinthus, but did not attack the authorship of the Gospel of John at all. It is unlikely that Eusebius would have regarded Gaius as an “ecclesiastical man” if he was a known critic of the Gospel of John. Dionysius bar Salibi misread Eusebius and Epiphanius when imagining that Gaius was the one behind the “Alogi’s” claims about the authorship of the Gospel of John and Revelation.

I am currently leaning towards the last option that Gaius only rejected the book of Revelation. Epiphanius’s claim that the “Alogi” attributed both the Gospel of John and Revelation to Cerinthus, then, may have been based on a different source.

According to Eusebius, Gaius was an “ecclesiastical man” who was active in ministry when Zephyrinus was the bishop of Rome (ca. 199-217 CE) and wrote a dialogue with Proclus, a leader of the “Phrygian sect” or the Montanist movement in Rome (2.25.6). He adds that he was very “learned” (6.20.3). Both descriptions are far more positive that Dionysius bar Salibi’s characterization of this same Gaius as a “heretic”! Eusebius provides three extracts from Gaius’s work. First, Gaius boasted that Roman Christians knew where Peter and Paul were buried and that these burial places were their “trophies” (2.25.7). This may have been to counter the boast of Christians in Asia Minor, where Montanism originated, that they knew where John the Lord’s disciples and the daughters of the Evangelist Philip who were prophetesses were buried. Second, Gaius was interested in limiting the books that Christians counted as authoritative, which is likely the context for his exclusion of Hebrews from the collection of Paul’s letters and his rejection of other new (Montanist) writings (6.20.3). Third, here is the quote about Cerinthus‘s views about the millennium from Jeremy Schott’s Eusebius of Caesarea: The History of the Church. A New Translation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 151:

“But Cerinthus, who wrote revelations as though they were by a great apostle, introduces us to mind-blowing wonders, lying that they had been shown to him by angels, and saying that after the resurrection the kingdom of Christ will be upon the earth and once again the flesh will live in Jerusalem governed by the flesh, to serve lusts and pleasures. He is an enemy of the scriptures of God, and wishing to lead people astray, he says that the ‘marriage feast’ will last for a period of a thousand years.” (3.28.2)

The Greek may be even more ambiguous and scholars have defended the following interpretive options: a) Gaius was claiming that Cerinthus forged the book of Revelation in the name of the Apostle John, b) Gaius was claiming that Cerinthus was misinterpreting the book of Revelation and denying that it was written by the Apostle John, or c) Gaius was claiming that Cerinthus had written or at least had a copy of another apocalyptic text that he attributed to an unnamed Apostle. I lean towards either options 1 or 2. Dionysius of Alexandria was more clear that the claim was that Cerinthus authored Revelation, but there is debate over whether he was dependent on Gaius or whether they both provide independent attestation to this claim in Rome and in Alexandria.