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He owns that the Cerinthians and Ebionites long before that had affirmed that Jesus had no existence previous to Mary's conception, and was literally and physically the carpenter's son, and so asserted the mere humanity of the Redeemer, 'but, he adds, 'they admitted I know not what unintelligible exaltation of His nature upon His Ascension by which He became no less the object of worship than if His nature had been originally divine. He acknowledges that the Cerinthian Gnostics denied the proper divinity of Christ, but, he adds very pertinently, 'if you agree with me in these opinions, it is little to your purpose to insist that Justin Martyr's reflections are levelled only at the Gnostics.
Suppose, however, the truth of the Irenæan tradition; that the Creed of Cerinthus was what Irenæus states it to have been; and that John, at the instance of the Asiatic Bishops, wrote his Gospel as an antidote to the Cerinthian heresy; does there not thence arise, in his utter silence, an almost overwhelming argument against the Apostolicity of the 'Christopædia', both that prefixed to Luke, and that concorporated with Matthew?
The occasion of this was an attack which had been made upon him at Cambridge, where certain learned dons discovered on his appointment to the professorship of history that he was a 'Cerinthian. I do not pretend to guess at their meaning.
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