Cerinthus

Cerinthus, a heretic who lived at the close of the apostolic age, but of whom we have nothing better than uncertain and confused accounts. He is said to have been a native of Alexandria. He passed from Egypt into Asia Minor, and lived in Ephesus contemporaneously (according to the belief of the church) with the aged apostle John. It is related by Irenæus, on the authority of Polycarp, that John held the heretic in such detestation that, on a certain occasion, when he encountered Cerinthus in the baths of Ephesus, he immediately left the baths, saying to those about him: 'Let us fly, lest the bath fall on us, since Cerinthus is within, the enemy of the truth.' It is also said by Irenæus that the Gospel by St John was written in direct opposition to the tenets of Cerinthus. He held that the world was not made by the highest God, but by some angel or power far removed from and ignorant of the Supreme Being. He is also said to have held coarse and sensual millenarian views, to have believed the Jewish ceremonial law to be in part binding upon Christians, and to have taught that the Divine Spirit was first united with the man Jesus in his baptism by John. Cerinthus being, so far as is known, the oldest teacher of Judaico-Gnostic principles, and, according to Neander, 'the intermediate link between the Judaizing and Gnostic sects,' there would naturally be a greater incongruity and want of harmony in his system than in the later developments of Gnosticism (q.v.).