A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

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EPIPHANIUS’ WITCHHUNT
DURING the mid-370s, Epiphanius, the Nicene Bishop of Salamis in Cyprus,
compiled his Panarion, ‘a medicine chest’ of remedies against heresies. ‘Able
but anti-intellectualist, of wide but ill-digested learning and intransigent zeal for
“correct” doctrine, inordinately lacking in judgement, tact and charity, but also
inordinately venerated for his force of personality, impressive bearing and
rigorous asceticism’, Epiphanius was a scourge of heretics. 1 He had the ability
to humiliate the diffident and to draw strength from the prejudices and fears of
the credulous. Epiphanius assumed that there had once been a pure faith but that
it had been sullied, first of all, of course, by the sin of Adam in the Garden of
Eden, but later by Hellenism and Judaism. These had their own heretical
offspring; in the case of Hellenism, the followers of Plato, the Stoics, Pythagoras
and Epicurus. Epiphanius then recorded no fewer than sixty Christian heresies,
many associated with the debates over the Trinity, that emerged after the
Incarnation. The Panarion is, in fact, one of the best sources for the diversity of
early Christian belief. It also documents the growing obsession with heresy.
Originally, the Greek word heiresis had meant a choice, in particular the choice
of the school of philosophy an individual may have elected to follow. Now, in
Christian terminology, it had come to mean a wilful rejection of orthodoxy, and
any heretic was subject to the threat of eternal hell fire.
The Church had always prided itself on its apostolic tradition, the doctrine that
faith had been handed on in pure form from the teachings of Christ through the
apostles and on through a succession of bishops. With the declaration of the
Nicene Trinity as orthodoxy, it had now to be assumed that this was the doctrine
the Church must always have taught. Gregory the Great, pope from 590 to 604,
claimed that even the patriarchs who lived before Moses ‘knew that one
Almighty God is the Holy Trinity’, although he had to admit that there was little
evidence that they preached about it. So where did this leave those earlier
theologians who had openly preached subordinationism?
The greatest missionary of the fourth century was undoubtedly Ulfilas, who
converted the Goths to Christianity in the 340s. He also translated the Bible into