Refutation of All Heresies 5.6.2

Authorship disputed: The work names no author. Book 1 was long printed among Origen's works as the Philosophumena; after books 4–10 were found in a manuscript from Mount Athos (published 1851), it was assigned to Hippolytus, the usual view today, though some scholars ascribe it to another Roman writer of the same circle. Books 2 and 3 are lost, and book 4 lacks its beginning.

Summary: The heresiarchs patched together old errors and presented them as new.

Greek text · Duncker–Schneidewin, 130

Περιλείπεται τοίνυν ἐπὶ τὸν τῶν αἱρέσεων ἔλεγχον ὁρμᾶν, οὗ χάριν καὶ τὰ προειρημένα ἡμῖν ἐκτεθείμεθα, ἀφʼ ὧν τὰς ἀφορμὰς μετασχόντες οἱ αἱρεσιάρχαι δίκην παλαιορράφων [συγκ]αττύσαντες πρὸς τὸν ἴδιον νοῦν τὰ τῶν παλαιῶν σφάλματα ὡς καινὰ παρέθεσαν τοῖς πλανᾶσθαι δυναμένοις, ὡς ἐν τοῖς ἀκολούθοις δείξομεν.

English · Claude translation

It remains, then, to press on to the refutation of the heresies, for whose sake we have also set out what was said before; from which the heresiarchs took their starting points and, like cobblers of old shoes, stitching together to suit their own mind the errors of the ancients, set them out as new to those who can be led astray, as we shall show in what follows.

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 130 · Ludwig Duncker and F. G. Schneidewin, eds., S. Hippolyti episcopi et martyris Refutationis omnium haeresium librorum decem quae supersunt (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1859); section divisions from Paul Wendland, ed., Hippolytus Werke 3: Refutatio omnium haeresium, GCS 26 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1916) · Greek text: L. Duncker and F. G. Schneidewin, Refutationis omnium haeresium (Göttingen, 1859), digitized by the Perseus Digital Library; section divisions from P. Wendland (GCS 26, 1916), digitized by the First Thousand Years of Greek project (Open Greek and Latin); both CC BY-SA 4.0

Text

As printed in Duncker–Schneidewin. Manuscript variants and the editor's apparatus are not reproduced; no textual problem is noted in this passage.

Translation

Claude translation (claude-opus-5-5), 2026-09-27 · Translated by Claude from the Greek text of Duncker–Schneidewin; made independently of existing English translations.

Compare

Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5 (1886) (an older public-domain English translation, whole volume at CCEL; checked against ours only after ours was made) · Its chapter numbers differ from the standard (Wendland) numbering used here.

Topics

Heresy

Cite this passage

Hippolytus, Haer. 5.6.2 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/5/6/2/).

The SBL abbreviation for this work has not been checked yet.

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 5.6.2 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/5/6/2/).