Irenaeus of Lyons · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Who is the spiritual disciple, who judges all things but is himself judged by no one; and who are those who are judged. How the Gentiles will be judged. How the Jews will be judged. A demonstration that the prophets announced two comings of Christ. Such a spiritual disciple, truly receiving the Spirit of God, who from the beginning has been present with men in all the dispositions of God, and has announced the things to come, and shown the things present, and told the things past, judges all, but is himself judged by no one. He passes sentence on the Gentiles, since they render service to what was made rather than to the Maker, and, their minds gone corrupt, spend their whole energy on emptiness. He judges also the Jews, who do not receive the word of freedom, nor wish to depart free, though they have the liberator present with them; but, out of season, pretend to serve a law that needs nothing, while God needs nothing, and do not recognize, nor wish to understand, the coming of Christ, which he brought about for the salvation of men — namely, that all the prophets announced two comings of his: one, in which he was made a man of suffering, knowing how to bear weakness, and sitting upon the colt of an ass, and the stone rejected by the builders, and led as a sheep to the sacrifice, and by the stretching out of his hands dissolving Amalek, and gathering together the scattered children from the ends of the earth into the fold of the Father, and of his dead who had fallen asleep before, and descending to them, that he might rescue them; and the second, in which he will come upon the clouds, bringing on the day that burns like an oven, and smiting the earth by the utterance of his mouth, and by the breath of his lips putting the ungodly to death, and holding the winnowing-fork in his hand, and clearing out his threshing floor, gathering the grain into the storehouse but consuming the husks in fire that cannot be put out. How those who follow Marcion will be judged. How those who follow Valentinus, and the rest of the Gnostics, will be judged. For how does Marcion's doctrine allow for two deities, set apart from one another by a boundless gulf? Or how will that god count as good, seeing he draws men away from the one who fashioned them, summoning them instead into a kingdom of his own? And why does his goodness fail, in that he does not save all? And why does he appear good toward men, while toward the very one who made men he appears most unjust, taking away from him what is his? And how is the Lord just, if he belongs to another father, if, taking the bread of this creation which is around us, he confessed it to be his body, and affirmed the mixed contents of the cup to be his own blood? And on what basis did he name himself Son of Man, unless he had truly undergone the birth that comes by way of man? And how could he forgive us our sins, which we owe to our Maker and God? And how, if he did not have flesh, but appeared as a man in seeming only, was he crucified, and did those who buried him lay him in a tomb? And what was that which rose from the dead? He will likewise judge every follower of Valentinus, because on their lips they profess a single God who is Father, and say all things stem from him, while in the same breath calling the very maker of everything the offspring of a defect or a fault; and on their lips too they profess a single Lord, Jesus Christ, God's Son, while in their private teaching they assign a distinct emanation to the Only-begotten, another to the Word, and another to Christ, and yet another to the Savior; so that, according to them, all things are said to be as if one, while each of them is understood separately, and has its own emission according to its own conjunction. Thus their tongues alone come together into one confession, while their opinion and understanding — those things that are, as they say, profound — being searched out, fall away from that unity, and fall into the manifold judgment of God, when they will be questioned by Christ about the things which they have devised for themselves — Christ, whom they say was born after the Pleroma of the Aeons, and whose emission came after a diminution or defection, and on account of that suffering which occurred in Sophia; they affirm that they themselves have been delivered by that very travail. But their own poet, Homer, from whom, having been schooled, they have invented such things, will accuse them, saying these very words of him: for he is hateful to me even as the gates of hell, who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another. He will judge also the empty talk of the wicked Gnostics, showing them to be disciples of Simon Magus. How the Ebionites will be judged. How those who say the Lord appeared only in seeming will be judged. How the false prophets will be judged.