Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
On top of this I bring forward a review of the doctrines themselves that existed under the apostles, exposed and sworn against by those very apostles. For they will be more easily convicted this way, once it is caught out either that they already existed then, or that they took their seeds from things that did exist then. Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, marks out deniers and doubters of the resurrection: that opinion belongs properly to the Sadducees. A part of it is appropriated by Marcion and Apelles and Valentinus, and by whoever else undermines the resurrection of the flesh. And writing to the Galatians he inveighs against those who observe and defend circumcision and the Law -- that is exactly the heresy of Ebion. Instructing Timothy, he also lashes those who forbid marriage -- so teach Marcion and his follower Apelles. He likewise touches on those who would say the resurrection has already happened: that is precisely what the Valentinians assert of themselves. And when he speaks of interminable genealogies, Valentinus is recognized, in whose system that Aeon, whoever he is -- new and of more than one name -- begets Sense and Truth out of his own Charis; and these in turn beget Word and Life between them, and these again beget Man and Church, from which first eightfold of Aeons ten others and then twelve more Aeons arise under weird names into a sheer fairy-tale of thirty Aeons. That same apostle, when he condemns those who are slaves to the elements, points to something of Hermogenes, who, introducing matter as unborn, compares it to the unborn God, and so, making a goddess of the mother of the elements, is free to serve her while comparing her to God. John, in the Apocalypse, is commanded to castigate those eating food offered to idols and committing fornication: there are others still today who are Nicolaitans, called the Cainite heresy. And in his epistle he calls those above all antichrists who would deny that Christ came in the flesh, and who would not believe that Jesus is the Son of God: the first charge Marcion has claimed for his own, the second Ebion. As for the discipline of Simonian magic, being a servant of angels, it too was of course counted among the idolatries, and was condemned by the apostle Peter in the person of Simon himself.