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| Chapter XXXV
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Chapter
XXXV.
It is our practice, indeed, to make use of the
words of the prophets, who demonstrate that Jesus is the Christ
predicted by them, and who show from the prophetic writings the events
in the Gospels regarding Jesus have been fulfilled. But when
Celsus speaks of “circles upon circles,” (he perhaps
borrowed the expression) from the aforementioned heresy, which includes
in one circle (which they call the soul of all things, and Leviathan)
the seven circles of archontic demons, or perhaps it arises from
misunderstanding the preacher, when he says: “The wind
goeth in a circle of circles, and returneth again upon its
circles.”4459
The
expression, too, “effluents of an earthly church and of
circumcision,” was probably taken from the fact that the church
on earth was called by some an effluent from a heavenly church and a better
world; and that the circumcision described in the law was a symbol of
the circumcision performed there, in a certain place set apart for
purification. The adherents of Valentinus, moreover, in keeping
with their system of error,4460
| 4460 κατὰ τὴν
πεπλανηένην
ἑαυτῶν
σοφίαν. | give the name of
Prunicos to a certain kind of wisdom, of which they would have the
woman afflicted with the twelve years’ issue of blood to be the
symbol; so that Celsus, who confuses together all sorts of
opinions—Greek, Barbarian, and Heretical—having heard of
her, asserted that it was a power flowing forth from one Prunicos, a
virgin. The “living soul,” again, is perhaps
mysteriously referred by some of the followers of Valentinus to the
being whom they term the psychic4461
creator of the
world; or perhaps, in contradistinction to a “dead” soul,
the “living” soul is termed by some, not
inelegantly,4462
the soul of
“him who is saved.” I know nothing, however, of a
“heaven which is said to be slain,” or of an “earth
slaughtered by the sword,” or of many persons slain in order that
they might live; for it is not unlikely that these were coined by
Celsus out of his own brain.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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