Book V is interposed and is entirely taken up with the

Ophites, or worshippers of the Serpent, to whom he does not attempt to assign a philosophic origin. In Book yi he carries out his promise in Book IV by going at lengtH into the doctrines of Simon, Valentinus and the followers of this last, and in Book VII he takes us in like manner through those of Basilides, Menander, Marcion and his successors, Carpocrates, Cerinthus and many others of the less-known heresiarchs. Book VIII deals in the same way with a sect that he calls the Docetae, Monoimus the Arabian, Tatian, Hermogenes and some others. In the case of the Ophite teachers, Simon, and Basilides, he gives us, as has been said, extracts from documents which are entirely new to us, and were certainly not used by Irenceus, while he adds to the list of heresies described by his predecessor, the sects of the Docetae, Monoimus and the Quartodecimans. In all the other heresies so far, he follows Irenaeus' account almost word for word, and with such closeness as enables us to restore in great part the missing Greek text of that Father. With Book IX, how- ever, there comes a change. Mindful of the intention expressed in Book I, he here begins with a summary of the teaching of Heraclitus the Obscure, which no one has yet professed to understand, and then sets to work to deduce from it the heresy of Noetus. This gives him the op- portunity for the virulent attack on his rival Callistus, to whom he ascribes a modification of Noetus' heresy, and he next, as has been said, plunges into a description of the sect of the Elchesaites, then only lately come to Rome, and quotes from Josephus without acknowledgment and with some garbling the account by this last of the division of the Jews into the three sects of Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes. Noetus' heresy was what was known as Patripassian, from its
1 8 PHILOSOPHUMENA
involving the admission that the Father suffered upon the Cross, and although he manages to see Gnostic elements in that of the Elchesaites, there can be little doubt that these last-named ''heretics/' whose main tenet was the prescrip- tion of frequent baptism for all sins and diseases, were connected with the pre-Christian sect of Hemerobaptists, Mogtasilah or "Washers" who are at once pre-Christian, and still to be found near the Tigris between Baghdad and Basra. Why he should have added to these the doctrines of the Jews is uncertain, as the obvious place for this would have been, as has been said, at the beginning of the volume : 1 but a possible explanation is that he was here resuming a course of instruction by lectures that he had before abandoned, and was therefore in some sort obliged to spin it out to a certain length.