Hegesippus, the earliest of the Christian church historians; of his life we know nothing save that he was almost certainly a Jewish convert and that he flourished about the middle of the 2d century. From a statement of his own, preserved in Eusebius (iv. 22), we learn that he made a journey to Rome, visiting Corinth upon the way, and when at Rome compiled a list of the bishops of the Roman see down to Anicetus (156–67 A.D.). Further, he is represented as adding 'to Anicetus succeeds Soter; and to Soter, Eleutherus' (175–89). Hegesippus must thus have written most of his history previous to 167 A.D., and he most probably published it early in the episcopate of Eleutherus. This agrees well with the statement of St Jerome that Hegesippus had bordered on the apostolic age (vicinus apostolicorum temporum), for if born so early as 120 he came very near the age of St John. His work was entitled Five Memorials of Ecclesiastical Affairs, and appears not to have been a complete and continuous history, although extending from the death of Christ to the writer's own age. Unhappily it survives only in a few fragments which Eusebius had embodied in his own history, the most important of which are his account of the martyrdom of St James and also of St Simeon of Jerusalem. Eusebius commends his doctrinal fidelity, and St Jerome the simplicity and unpretentiousness of his style. The question has been much discussed whether Hegesippus belonged to the Judaizing Christian party or not. Baur went so far as to pronounce him a declared enemy to St Paul, relying mainly upon a passage preserved in Photius, in which Hegesippus declares that an opinion of many, corresponding exactly to what is said in 1 Cor. ii. 9, is contradictory to the express word of the Lord himself in Matt. xiii. 16. But it is much more likely that Hegesippus is here aiming at the Gnostic misconception of these words rather than that of St Paul, for the reference is obviously to their claims to special spiritual insight; while a further passage preserved, used by the Tübingen school to fortify their inference—viz. that those who were trying to destroy the sound rule of saving doctrine as yet hid themselves in holes of darkness—can by no possibility be understood as a reference to the fearless and vehement apostle of the Gentiles.
The fragments of Hegesippus will be found in vol. i. of Routh's Reliquiae Sacrae (1847), and in vol. ii. of Grabe's Spicilegium.