DeConick A.D

156
JOHN AND THE DARK COSMOS
At the center of the controversy, Irenaeus places Cerinthus, a man who
was remembered as a contemporary of Jesus’ disciple John (see Broek
2005). From what Irenaeus tells us about Cerinthus’s catechism, it is obvious
that Cerinthus knew the fourth Gospel very well. He taught about it
point by point from the perspective of its old Gnostic sentiment.
From Irenaeus’s record we can see that Cerinthus was teaching that the
Father of Jesus in the fourth Gospel was a different God from the biblical
Creator YHWH. Cerinthus believed that the fourth Gospel taught about
Christ as a spirit from above, which descended upon Jesus and eventually
left him to ascend back to its home.
Cerinthus did not think that the first verses of John referred to the
creation of the material world at all. Rather, he thought they referred to
the creation of entities in the spiritual world, when the Father originally
diversified himself as the Only Begotten and his son, the Logos. The
material world was not created by the Logos but by a power that resided
far below the Father in a region shut off from the invisible and ineffable
realms (Irenaeus, Against the Heresies 3.11.1).
We actually know quite a bit more about what Cerinthus believed,
because several of the Apostolic Catholic leaders mention him. Cerinthus
taught that the primary supreme God is an unknown Father separate from
the creator and ruler of our world (1.26.1). This lesser creator and ruler
god was an angel who represented the God of the Jews and was the giver
of the Mosaic law (Pseudo-Tertullian, Prescriptions xlviii).
Cerinthus thought that Jesus was born a natural child, the biological
son of Mary and Joseph. As he matured, he grew to be an exceedingly
righteous holy man, so that, at his baptism, “Christ descended upon him
in the form of a dove.” Cerinthus identified the Christ entity with the
Spirit that had descended out of the heavens from the Father. After he was
invested with the Christ Spirit, Jesus proclaimed the unknown Father and
performed miracles no one else could do. At the crucifixion, the Christ
Spirit left Jesus, so Jesus the man suffered while the Spirit remained “impassible”
(Irenaeus, Against the Heresies 1.26.1).
To put an end to Cerinthus’s Gnostic teachings about the fourth Gospel
and to give credence to the Apostolic Catholic interpretation as original,
Irenaeus claims that the apostle John wrote the fourth Gospel to
stamp out Cerinthus’s teachings. Irenaeus designed this claim to apostolic