CERIN'TIIIIS (abusively named MEnumrcs, i.e., a halter), a heretic who lived at the close of the apostolic age, but of whom we have nothing better than uncertain and con fused accounts. It is said that he was a Jew by birth, and studied philosophy in Alex andria. From Egypt he passed into Asia Minor, and lived in Ephesus contemporane ously (according to the belief of the church) with the aged apostle John. Tradition tells us that John held the heretic in such detestation, that, on a certain occasion, when he encountered C. in the baths of Ephesus, he immediately left the place, saying to those about him: "Let us flee home, lest the bath should fall while Cerinthus is with in." It was believed in the ancient church, that the gospel of St. John was written in opposition to the tenets of C.; and the Roman presbyter Caius (about she close of the 2d c.) supposed that C. had revenged himself by falsely ascribing the authorship of the Apocalypse to St. John—it being in reality his own work! The fathers contradict one another in their accounts of Cerintlius. Some describe him as a complete Gnostic, in which case he would be the earliest recorded teacher of that sect; others say that lie held coarse and sensual millenarian views, making the millennium (q.v.), with
the licentious fancy of an Arab, consist chiefly in " nuptial delights;" and that lie believed the Jewish ceremonial law to be in part binding upon Christians. There can be no doubt that C. made use of the Jewish law at least as a symbol for his Gnostic doctrines, and also employed millenarian terms in a symbolical manner; a very natural thing for him to do, on the hypothesis which Neander and others have suggested—that Gnosticism originated, not among the minds which had received a true Hellenic cul ture, but among the Judaizing sects, whose theosophy was a jumble of the spiritual and the material. C. being the oldest teacher of Judaico-Gnostic principles, there would naturally be a greater incongruity and want of harmony in his language and ideas than characterized Gnosticism at a later period of its development; and subsequent ecclesi astical writers, destitute as all of them were of precise historical knowledge and sound principles of criticism, could hardly avoid misunderstanding a system which is not con sistent throughout, but bears evident marks of being formed in a transition epoch.— Paulus Ilistoria Cerinthi (Jena, 1799); Neander, Eirchengeschkhte, vol. i., part 2.