Refutation of All Heresies 6.42.3

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: Marcus claimed that the Tetrad appeared to him as a woman and revealed the origin of all things.

Greek text · Duncker–Schneidewin, 302

Τούτῳ τὰ ὅμοια τολμῶν ὁ Μάρκος λέγει ἐληλυθέναι πρὸς αὐτὸν σχήματι γυναικείῳ τὴν τετράδα, ἐπειδή, φησί, τὸ ἄρρεν αὐτῆς ὁ κόσμος φέρειν οὐκ ἠδύνατο, καὶ μηνῦσαι αὐτὴν ἥτις ἦν, καὶ τὴν τῶν πάντων γένεσιν, ἣν οὐδενὶ πώποτε οὔτε θεῶν οὔτε ἀνθρώπων ἀπεκάλυψε, τούτῳ μόνῳ διηγήσασθαι οὕτως εἰποῦσαν·

English · Claude translation

Daring things like this, Marcus says that the Tetrad came to him in the form of a woman, since, he says, the world could not bear her male form, and revealed who she was, and the generation of all things, which she had never revealed to anyone, of gods or men, she narrated to him alone, speaking thus:

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 302 · 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. 6.42.3 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/6/42/3/).

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

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 6.42.3 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/6/42/3/).