Book I ; while in Book X he ascribes to Heraclitus yet

another opinion.2 Or we may take as an example the system of arithmomancy or divination by the " Pythagorean number" whereby, he says, its professors claim to predict the winner of a contest by juggling with the numerical values of the letters in the competitors' names, and then gives instances, some of which do and others do not work out according to tlie rule he lays down. So, too, in his unacknowledged quotations from Sextus Empiricus, he so garbles his text as to make it unintelligible to us were we not able to restore it from Sextus' own words. So, again, in his account of the sleight-of-hand and other stage tricks, whereby he says, no doubt with truth, the magicians used to deceive those who consulted them, his account is so carelessly written or copied that it is only by means of much reading between the lines that it can be understood, and even then it recounts many more marvels than it explains.3 Some of this inaccuracy may possibly be due to mistakes in copying and re-copying by scribes who did not understand what they were writing ; but when all is said there is left a sum of blunders which can only be attributed to great carelessness on the part of the author. Yet, as if to show that he could take pains if he liked, the quota- tions from Scripture are on the whole correctly transcribed and show very few variations from the received versions. Consequently when such variations do occur (they are noted later whenever met with), we must suppose them to be not the work of Hippolytus, but of the heretics from whom he quotes, who must, therefore, have taken liberties with the New Testament similar to those of Marcion.
1 p. 41 ; IT, p. 83 infra. 2 II, pp. 1 19, 151 infra.
3 For the arithmomancy see p. 83 ff. infra; the borrowings from Sextus begin on p. 70, the tricks of the magicians on p. 92. For other mistakes, see the quotation about the Furies in II, p. 23, which he ascribes to Pythagoras, but which is certainly from Heraclitus (as Plutarch tells us), and the Categories of Aristotle which a few pages earlier are also assigned to Pythagoras. His treatment of Josephus will be dealt with in its place.
INTRODUCTION n
Where, also, he copies Irenreus with or without acknowledg- ment, his copy is extremely faithful, and agrees with the Latin version of the model more closely than the Greek of Epiphanius. It would seem, therefore, that our author's statements, although in no sense unworthy of belief, yet require in many cases strict examination before they can be unhesitatingly accepted.1
4. The Composition of the Work
In these circumstances, and in view of the manifest dis- crepancies between statements in the earlier part of the text and what purports to be their repetition in the later, the question has naturally arisen as to whether the document before us was written for publication in its present form. It is never referred to or quoted by name by any later author, and although the argument from silence has generally proved a broken reed in such cases, there are here some circumstances which seem to give it unusual strength. It was certainly no reluctance to call in evidence the work of a schismatic or heretical writer which led to the work being ignored, for Epiphanius, a century and a half later, classes Hippolytus with Irenreus and Clement of Alexandria as one from whose writings he has obtained information,2 and Theodoret, while making use still later of certain passages which coincide with great closeness with some in