How to read this volume
Apelles was Marcion’s best-known disciple. He taught at Rome in the second half of the second century. He broke with his master, went to Alexandria, came back teaching one first principle in place of Marcion’s two Gods, and wrote, among other things, a long work called the Syllogisms against the books of Moses. None of his writings survive. What is known of him comes from his opponents: Rhodon, who met him in his old age, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Origen, Ambrose and the later writers against heresy.
This book gives in English the three studies that Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) devoted to Apelles over almost fifty years. They are printed in the order in which they appeared.
The first is his Latin dissertation De Apellis gnosi monarchica, “On the Monarchian Gnosis of Apelles,” which he defended at Leipzig on 9 July 1874, at the age of twenty-three, to gain the right to lecture there. It is translated complete, from the title page to the table of contents. Because it is long, it is divided here into three chapters: the Prolegomena (pages 1–8), Part One on the sources (pages 9–54) and Part Two on the doctrine of Apelles (pages 55–92).
The second is a short German essay of 1891, “Sieben neue Bruchstücke der Syllogismen des Apelles” (“Seven New Fragments of the Syllogisms of Apelles”), printed in the series Texte und Untersuchungen, volume 6, part 3, pages 111–120. It is translated complete.
The third is Appendix VII of Harnack’s Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott (Leipzig, 1921), “Apelles, der Schüler Marcions und Sectenstifter” (“Apelles, the Disciple of Marcion and Founder of a Sect”), pages 323*–339*. It gathers the ancient witnesses to Apelles with Harnack’s comments. It is translated complete, except that five Latin passages from Ambrose which Harnack prints twice, once in 1891 and again in 1921, are given in full only once, in the 1891 essay, and the 1921 appendix refers to them there.
The page numbers of the original printings are marked throughout, so any passage can be checked against them. A page marker records where the printed page turns. It does not end the sentence. The pages of the 1921 appendix carry an asterisk because Harnack numbered his appendices that way. Harnack’s notes stay with the page they belong to and keep the numbers he gave them.
Greek and Latin quotations are given as Harnack printed them, and after any Greek or Latin passage of a clause or longer an English rendering follows in square brackets. Harnack’s own Latin in 1874 is translated into English; the Latin of the ancient writers he quotes is kept in Latin with an English rendering, as are the German sentences he quotes from other scholars. Bible references are given in modern form, chapter and verse. References to the Church Fathers keep the numbering Harnack used. Where Harnack reports the view of Tertullian, Hippolytus, Epiphanius, Lipsius, Neander or another writer, the English keeps it as that writer’s view and not his. No True Testament reading has been brought into the English.
What Harnack argues
The dissertation of 1874. Part One is a study of the sources. Harnack begins with Rhodon’s account of his conversation with the old Apelles, preserved by Eusebius, and then turns to Tertullian. He argues that Tertullian wrote a separate book against the followers of Apelles, now lost, and that the short notice of Apelles in the work against heresies printed under Tertullian’s name (Pseudo-Tertullian) was drawn partly from that lost book. He then reconstructs the lost treatise of Hippolytus against heresies from Pseudo-Tertullian, Epiphanius and Philastrius, and argues that Epiphanius copied Hippolytus’ chapter on Apelles nearly whole, refutation included. Hippolytus, he holds, had a little book by Apelles in front of him and quoted Apelles’ own words; hence the repeated “he says” in Epiphanius, and hence the insistence, in a hostile account, that Apelles’ Christ had real flesh. Harnack then treats the Refutation of All Heresies (the Philosophumena), which he thinks used both Hippolytus’ earlier treatise and Tertullian’s lost book, the later writers who copied these, and the fragments of the Syllogisms in Origen and Ambrose.
His chief result is that the two best witnesses do not agree because Apelles himself changed. Hippolytus shows the earlier Apelles, who called the creator evil and an enemy of the good God, and promised salvation to those who come to knowledge. Tertullian and Rhodon show the later Apelles, after his return to Rome and his association with the prophetess Philumene: a creator who is just and obedient, a separate fiery angel who is the God of Israel and the author of the law and of sinful flesh, and, at the end of his life, salvation for all who hope in the Crucified, if only they are found in good works.
Part Two sets out the doctrine. Apelles taught one God, who made a higher world, the souls of men and the angels. The first of these angels made this world, imperfectly, in imitation of the higher one, and later asked the good God to send his Son to correct it. The fiery angel lured the souls down with earthly food and clothed them in flesh. The Old Testament is for the most part the work of that angel, and Apelles wrote the Syllogisms to show that the books of Moses could not be from God. Christ came suddenly, not born, with a real and solid body which he made for himself from the stars and the elements as he came down, which was truly crucified, buried and raised, and which he gave back to the elements when he ascended. Harnack thinks Apelles kept only one gospel, Luke as Marcion had already cut it, which he altered further, and Marcion’s Apostle. At the end he compares Apelles with Tatian, Hermogenes and the Montanists, and gives his verdict: neither Marcion nor Apelles was really a Gnostic, both rightly saw that the church of their day was turning the gospel into a new law, and both were nevertheless strangers to obedience to Christ; the church kept the gospel better than they would have done.
The essay of 1891. Sixteen years later Harnack found seven more objections of Apelles in Ambrose’s treatise On Paradise, chapters 6–8, next to the three that Ambrose names as Apelles’ own. He prints all ten, argues from their form and content that they come from the Syllogisms, and thinks Ambrose took them from Origen. He also gives his estimate of the Syllogisms: Marcion criticized the Old Testament on religious grounds but took its history as fact; Apelles was the first to call the books of Moses myth.
The appendix of 1921. In his book on Marcion Harnack gathered every ancient witness to Apelles he knew: Rhodon, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Origen, Cyprian, Firmilian, a fragment of Anthimus of Nicomedia, the Armenian Paul of Taron and the pseudo-Clementine Homilies. On some points he had changed his mind since 1874. In 1874 he defended the reading “illum” in Tertullian, Prescription 34, against Hilgenfeld’s “alium”; in 1921 he conjectures “alium” himself. In 1874 he called the story of Philumene and the loaf in the glass flask a worthless marginal note that copyists had carried into the text of Augustine; in 1921 he assigns it to Tertullian’s lost book against the Apelleians. In the main text of the same book, on page 213, note 1, he says that his dissertation “has been made out of date by the new account,” and he refers to an essay of 1916, “Rhodon und Apelles,” which he partly reproduces there. That main text and the 1916 essay are not part of this book.
What this book is not
This is a translation of a dissertation written at twenty-three and of two later studies by the same man, made with the evidence and the assumptions of their day. The verdicts in them, on Marcion, on Apelles, on the church and on the Gnostics, are Harnack’s. Apelles left Marcion’s teaching of two Gods for a teaching of one first principle; the True Testament Assembly reads the question differently, and this edition does not argue it in Harnack’s pages. It is not a reconstruction of the Syllogisms, and it is not the True Testament.