ABSTRACT
Justin Martyr seems to have been the first Christian author to write a treatise against all heresies (1 Apology 26.5), and the parallel he draws between heresies and the philosophical schools named after their founders, with their successions of teachers and pupils, developing novel lines of interpretation and thus increasingly disagreeing among themselves and departing further from the truth, seems to have profoundly influenced all later heresiology. Thus, echoing Justin, the major heresiologists, Irenaeus in his Adversus haereses of around 185, Pseudo-Hippolytus of Rome in his Refutation of All Heresies of the second decade of the third century, Hippolytus (d. 235), in his lost Syntagma against 32 heresies,1 and Epiphanius of Salamis in his Panarion against 80 heresies of 375-7, reflect an increasingly stereotyped catalogue of Jewish and Christian heresies which includes groups called ‘gnostics’, seeing them as inspired by the Devil and Greek philosophy.
