Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume VI/Archelaus/Acts of Disputation/Chapter XI

by Archelaus

11. He holds also that God has no part with the world itself, and finds no pleasure in it, by reason of its having been made a spoil of from the first by the princes, and on account of the ill that rose on it. Wherefore He sends and takes away from them day by day the soul belonging to Him, through the medium of these luminaries, the sun and the moon, by which the whole world and all creation are dominated. Him, again, who spake with Moses, and the Jews, and the priests, he declares to be the prince of the darkness; so that the Christians, and the Jews, and the Gentiles are one and the same body, worshipping the same God: for He seduces them in His own passions, being no God of truth. For this reason all those who hope in that God who spake with Moses and the prophets have to be bound together with the said deity,^[1] because they have not hoped in the God of truth; for that deity spake with him in accordance with their own passions. Moreover, after all these things, he speaks in the following terms with regard to the end,^[2] as he has also written: When the elder has displayed his image,^[3] the Omophorus then lets the earth go from him, and so the mighty fire gets free, and consumes the whole world. Then, again, he lets the soil go with the new æon,^[4] in order that all the souls of sinners may be bound for ever. These things will take place at the time when the man’s image^[5] has come.^[6] And all these powers put forth by God,^[7]—namely, Jesus, who is in the smaller ship,^[8] and the Mother of Life, and the twelve helmsmen,^[9] and the virgin of the light, and the third elder, who is in the greater ship, and the living spirit, and the wall^[10] of the mighty fire, and the wall of the wind, and the air, and the water, and the interior living fire,—have their seat in the lesser luminary, until the fire shall have consumed the whole world: and that is to happen within so many years, the exact number of which, however, I have not ascertained. And after these things there will be a restitution of the two natures;^[11] and the princes will occupy the lower parts proper to them, and the Father the higher parts, receiving again what is His own due possession.—All this doctrine he delivered to his three disciples, and charged each to journey to a separate clime.^[12] The Eastern parts fell thus to the lot of Addas; Thomas^[13] obtained the Syrian territories as his heritage; and another, to wit, Hermeias, directed his course towards Egypt. And to this day they, sojourn there, with the purpose of establishing the propositions contained in this doctrine.^[14]

Footnotes

1. μετ᾽ αὐτοῦ ἔχουσι δεθῆναι.
2. ἐπὶ τέλει.
3. The text is κάθως αὐτὸς ἔγραψεν· ῾Ο πρεσβύτης, etc. The Codex Bobiensis gives, “Sicut ipse senior scripsit: Cum manifestam feceris,” etc., = As the elder himself wrote: When thou hast, etc. The elder here is probably the same as the third elder farther on.
4. The Greek is, ἀφίησι τὸν βῶλον μετὰ τοῦ νέου αἰῶνος; but the Latin version has the strangely diverse rendering, “dimittunt animam quæ objicitur inter medium novi sæculi” = they let go the soul that is placed in the midst of the new age. [Routh has τὴν βῶλον.]
5. ἀνδριάς.
6. But the Latin gives, “cum statuta venerit dies” = when the appointed day has come.
7. αἱ δὲ προβολαὶ πᾶσαι.
8. πλοίῳ. [See Routh, p. 68, on this locus mire depravatus.]
9. κυβερνῆται.
10. τεῖχος.
11. τῶν δύο φύσεων. But the Latin version gives duorum luminarium, and the Codex Casinensis has luminariorum, the two luminaries.
12. Reading κλίματα, with Petavius, for κλήματα.
13. The Codex Casinensis makes no mention of Thomas.
14. Here ends the Greek of Epiphanius.