Book X seems at first sight likely to solve many of the questions

which every reader who has got so far is compelled to ask. It begins, in accordance with the habit just noted, with the statement that the author has now worked through “the Labyrinth of Heresies” and that the teachings of truth are to be found neither in the philosophies of the Greeks, the secret mysteries of the Egyptians, the formulas of the Chaldæans or astrologers, nor the ravings of Babylonian magic.[60] This links it with fair closeness to the reference in Book IV to the ideas of the Persians, Babylonians, Egyptians and Chaldæans, only the first-named nation being here omitted from the text. It then goes on to say that “having brought together the opinions[61] of all the wise men among the _Greeks_ in four books and those of the heresiarchs in five,” he will make a summary of them. It will be noted that this is in complete contradiction to the supposition that the missing Books II and III contained the doctrines of the Babylonians, as he now says that they comprised those of the Greeks only. The summary which follows might have been expected to make this confusion clear, but unfortunately it does nothing of the kind. It does indeed give so good an abstract of what has been said in Books V to IX inclusive regarding the chief heresiarchs, that in one or two places it enables us to correct doubtful phrases and to fill in gaps left in earlier books. There is omitted from the summary, however, all mention of the heresies of Marcus, Satornilus, Menander, Carpocrates, the Nicolaitans, Docetæ, Quartodecimans, Encratites and the Jewish sects, and the list of omissions will probably be thought too long to be accounted for on the ground of mere carelessness. But when the summarizer deals with the earlier books, the discrepancy between the summary and the documents summarized is much more startling. Among the philosophers, he omits to summarize the opinions of Pythagoras, Empedocles, Ecphantus, Hippo, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Academics, Brachmans, or Druids, while he does mention those of Hippasus, Ocellus Lucanus, Heraclides of Pontus and Asclepiades, who were not named in any of the texts of Book I which have come down to us. As for the tenets and practices of the Persians, Egyptians and others, supposed on the strength of the statement at the beginning of Book V to have been narrated in Books II and III, nothing further is here said concerning them, and, by the little table of contents with which Book X like the others is prefaced, it will appear that nothing was intended to be said. For this last omission it might be possible to assign plausible reasons if it stood alone; but when it is coupled with the variations between summary and original as regards Book I, the only inference that meets all the facts is that the summarizer did not have the first four books under his eyes.

This has led some critics to conclude that the summary is by another hand. There is nothing in the literary manners of the age to compel us to reject this supposition, and similar cases have been quoted. The evidence of style is, however, against it, and it is unlikely that if the summarizer were any other person than Hippolytus, he would have taken up Hippolytus’ personal quarrel against Callistus. Yet in the text of Book X before us the charge of heresy against Callistus is repeated, although perhaps with less asperity than in Book IX, the accusations against his morals being omitted. Nor is it easy to dissociate from Hippolytus the really eloquent appeal to men of all nations to escape the terrors of Tartarus and gain an immortality of bliss by becoming converted to the Doctrine of Truth with which the Book ends, after an excursion into Hebrew Chronology, a subject which always had great fascination for Hippolytus. Although the matter is not beyond doubt, it would appear, therefore, that the summary, like the rest of the book, is by Hippolytus’ own hand.

In these circumstances there is but one theory that in the opinion of the present writer will reconcile all the conflicting facts. This is that the foundation of our text _is_ the synopsis that Hippolytus made, as Photius tells us, after receiving instruction from Irenæus; that those notes were, as Hippolytus himself says, “set forth” by him possibly in the form of lectures, equally possibly in writing, but in any case a long time before our text was compiled; and that when his rivalry with Callistus became acute, he thought of republishing these discourses and bringing them up to date by adding to them the Noetian and other non-Gnostic heresies which were then making headway among the Christian community, together with the facts about the divinatory and magical tricks which had come to his knowledge during his long stay in Rome. We may next conjecture that, after the greater part of his book was written, chance threw in his way the documents belonging to the Naassene and other Ophite sects, which went back to the earliest days of Christianity and were probably in Hippolytus’ time on the verge of extinction.[62] He had before determined to omit these sects as of slight importance,[63] but now perceiving the interest of the new documents, he hastily incorporated them in his book immediately after his account of the magicians, so that they might appear as what he with some truth said they were, to wit, the fount and source of all later Gnosticism. To do this, he had to displace the account of the Jewish and Samaritan sects with which all the heresiologists of the time thought it necessary to begin their histories. He probably felt the less reluctance in doing so, because the usual mention of these sects as “heresies” in some sort contradicted his pet theory, which was that the Gnostic tenets were not a mere perversion of Christian teaching, but were derived from philosophic theories of the creation of things, and from the mystic rites.

Next let us suppose that at the close of his life, when he was perhaps hiding from Maximin’s inquisitors, or even when he was at the Sardinian mines, he thought of preserving his work for posterity by re-writing it--such copies as he had left behind him in Rome having been doubtless seized by the Imperial authorities.[64] Not having the material that he had before used then at his disposal, he had to make the best summary that he could from memory, and in the course of this found that the contents of the Books I, II, and III--the material for which he had drawn in the first instance from Irenæus--had more or less escaped him. He was probably able to recall some part of Book I by the help of heathen works like those of Diogenes Laertius, Aetius, or perhaps that Alcinous whose summary of Plato’s doctrines seem to have been formerly used by him.[65] The Ophite and other Gnostic heresies he remembers sufficiently to make his summary of their doctrines more easy, although he omits from the list heresiarchs like Marcus, Satornilus and Menander, about whom he had never had any exclusive information, and he now puts Justinus after instead of before Basilides. Finally, he remembered the Jewish sects which he had once intended to include, and being perhaps able to command, even in the mines, the work of a Romanized but unconverted Jew like Josephus, took from it such facts as seemed useful for his purpose as an introduction to the chronological speculation which had once formed his favourite study. With this summary as his guide he continued, it may be, to warn the companions in adversity to whom he tells us he had “become an adviser,” against the perils of heresy, and to appeal to his unconverted listeners with what his former translator calls not unfitly “a noble specimen of patristic eloquence.” That he died in the mines is most probable, not only from his advanced age at the time of exile and the consequent unlikelihood that he would be able to withstand the pestilential climate, but also from the record of his body having been “deposited” in the Catacombs on the same day with that of his fellow-Pope and martyr Pontianus.[66] Yet the persecution of Maximin, though sharp, was short, and on the death of the tyrant after a reign of barely three years, there is no reason why the transcript of Book X should not have reached Rome, where there is some reason to think it was known from its opening words as “the Labyrinth.” Later it was probably appended to Books IV to IX of Hippolytus’ better known work, and the whole copied for the use of those officials who had to enquire into heresy. To them, Books II and III would be useless, and they probably thought it inexpedient to perpetuate any greater knowledge than was necessary for their better suppression, of the unclean mysteries of either pagan or Gnostic. As for Book I, besides being harmless, it had possibly by that time become too firmly connected with the name of Origen for its attribution to this other sufferer in the Maximinian persecution to be disturbed in later times.

It only remains to see how this theory fits in with the remarks of Photius given above. It is fairly evident that Photius is speaking from recollection only, and that the words do not suggest that he had Hippolytus’ actual work before him when writing, while he throughout speaks of it in the past tense as one might speak of a document which has long since perished, although some memory of its contents have been preserved. If this were so, we might be prepared to take Photius’ description as not necessarily accurate in every detail; yet, as we have it, it is almost a perfect description of our text. The 32 heresies, as we have shown above, appear in our text as in Photius’ document. Our text contains not only the large excerpts from Irenæus which we might expect from Photius’ account of its inception, but also the “refutations” which do not appear in the _Adversus Omnes Hæreses_. It extends “up to,” as Photius says, Noetus and the Noetians, and although it does not contain any mention of Dositheus or the Dositheans, this may have been given in the part which has been cut out of Book X.[67] If that were the case, or if Photius has made any mistake in the matter, as one might easily do when we consider that all the early heresiologies begin with Jewish and Samaritan sects, the only real discrepancy between our text and Photius’ description of Hippolytus’ work is in the matter of length. But it is by no means certain that Photius ever saw the whole work put together, and it is plain that he had never seen or had forgotten the first four books dealing with the philosophers, the mysteries and the charlatans. Without these, and without the summary, Books V to IX do not work out to more than 70,000 words in all, and this might well seem a mere “booklet” to a man then engaged in the compilation of his huge _Bibliotheca_. Whether, then, Hippolytus did or did not reduce to writing the exposition of heresies which he made in his youth, it seems probable that all certain trace of this exposition is lost. It is certainly not to be recognized in pseudo-Tertullian’s _Adversus Omnes Hæreses_, and the work of Hippolytus recorded by Photius was probably a copy of our text in a more or less complete form.

5. THE STYLE OF THE WORK

Photius’ remark that Hippolytus did not keep to the Attic style is an understatement of the case with regard to our text. Jacobi, its first critic, was so struck by the number of “Latinisms” that he found in it as to conjecture that it is nothing but a Greek translation of a Latin original.[68] This is so unlikely as to be well-nigh impossible if Hippolytus were indeed the author; and no motive for such translation can be imagined unless it were made at a fairly late period. In that case, we should expect to find it full of words and expressions used only in Byzantine times when the Greek language had become debased by Slav and Oriental admixtures. This, however, is not the case with our text, and only one distinctly Byzantine phrase has rewarded a careful search.[69] On the other hand neologisms are not rare, especially in