Hippolytus offers elaborate retellings of Gnostic celestial mythologies, with the goal of showing how thoroughly plagiarized they were from the famous philosophers of pagan Greek antiquity, especially Plato and Pythagoras. But that habit of copious quotation is fatally counter-productive for his cause. He wants to uproot heresy and destroy their memory. What he does is to preserve massive details that otherwise would have been eradicated, and some of what he quotes is really attractive and even inspiring.There are other cases where quotations by ancient zealous debunkers preserved the only substantial portions of works the debunkers opposed. Works that, without their interference, would have been lost and forgotten. Origen's Contra Celsum comes to mind.
By the way, the surviving manuscript of The Refutation of All Heresies is anonymous. Its attribution to Hyppolytus has been challenged as tenuous in recent years. For details, see David Litwa's recent edition, a review of which is noted here.
This post is a continuation of Professor Jenkins's Lost and Found Scriptues series. For earlier posts, see here and links.
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