Irenaeus of Lyons · a new plain-English translation from the original language
WHAT IS SET BEFORE ALL HERETICS, AND WHITHER THEY TEND. Since we hold the standard of truth — namely, that a single all-powerful God exists, who fashioned everything through his Word, shaping and producing all that exists out of what did not exist, so that it might come to be — as Scripture puts it: "The heavens were fixed in place by the utterance of the Lord, and their whole array by the breath issuing from his mouth"; and again, "Through him everything came into being, and apart from him nothing came into being" — of that entire "everything," the Father produced it all through him, whether visible or invisible, whether perceptible or intelligible, whether temporal, on account of a certain arrangement, or eternal and everlasting — and that he made these not by means of angels, nor by any powers cut off from his own thought, for God stands in need of nothing, but through his own Word and Spirit he makes and arranges and governs all things, and grants existence to all things; it is he who made the world (the world too falling under "all things"), he who formed mankind, he who is God to Abraham, God to Isaac, and God to Jacob — beyond whom exists no further deity, no origin, no dominion, no Pleroma; this one is Father to our Lord Jesus Christ, as we intend to demonstrate. Holding fast, then, to this rule, we shall easily refute them as having strayed from the truth, however much they may say and however varied it may be. For almost all the heresies, while professing to say there is one God, corrupt this by their evil opinion, showing themselves ungrateful to him who made them, just as the Gentiles do through idolatry. They despise God, and set themselves against their own salvation, becoming their own bitterest accusers, and false witnesses against themselves. They will indeed be raised bodily, even unwillingly, so as to recognize the might of the one who brings them back from death; yet on account of their unbelief they shall have no place counted with the righteous.
Since, then, the exposure and refutation of all the heretics is varied and manifold, and it is our purpose to contradict every one of them according to their own particular character, we have judged it necessary first to set forth their source and root, so that, coming to know their most sublime Bythos (Depth), you may understand the tree from which such fruits have flowed down. [A further fragment survives only in ruin: "...is established as a dwelling."]