Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
These, I think, are the kinds of adulterated doctrines that we learn, from the apostles themselves, existed under the apostles. And yet among all these various perversities we find not a single teaching that stirred up controversy about God the creator of all things. No one dared to suspect a second god; it was easier to raise a question touching the Son than to raise one touching the Father, right up to the moment Marcion introduced, beside the Creator, a separate deity of pure benevolence. Apelles made the creator some glorious angel or other of a higher God, the god of the Law and of Israel, asserting him to be fiery; Valentinus scattered abroad his Aeons and traced the flaw of a single Aeon back into the origin of the creator God. To these alone, and to these as the first, the truth of divinity was revealed -- winning, no doubt, a greater dignity and a fuller grace from the devil, who wanted, in this way too, to rival God: so that out of doctrines of poison -- what the Lord refused -- he himself made disciples greater than their master. So let all the heresies, taken together, pick whatever dates they like for themselves -- since it makes no difference when they existed, so long as they are not of the truth -- and in any case, whatever did not exist under the apostles cannot have existed at all. For if they had existed, they would have been named, so as themselves to be reined in; but those that did exist under the apostles stand condemned by that very naming. So then, whether these same heresies now are somewhat more polished versions of the crude ones under the apostles, they carry their condemnation forward from there; or whether some were one thing then and others sprang up afterward, borrowing some opinion from the earlier ones -- by sharing fellowship of teaching with them they must also share fellowship of condemnation, given that the case already made above about their lateness applies beforehand: even if they had no part in the condemned matter itself, they would be prejudged on the ground of date alone, all the more adulterous for not even having been named by the apostles. Hence it stands all the more firmly established that these are the very ones that were even then being announced as still to come.