also, by apostles in Asia, appointed bishop of the cburch in Smyrna, whom I also saw in my early youth, for he tarried [on earth] a very long time, and, when a very old man, gloriously and most nobly suffering martyrdom,[1] departed this life, having always taught the things which he had learned from the apostles, and which the church has handed down, and which alone are true. To these things all the Asiatic churches testify, as do also those men who have succeeded Polycarp down to the present time,—a man who was of much greater weight, and a more stedfast witness of truth, than Valentinus, and Marcion, and the rest of the heretics. He it was who, coming to Rome in the time of Anicetus, caused many to turn away from the aforesaid heretics to the church of God, proclaiming that he had received this one and sole truth from the apostles,—that, namely, which is handed down by the church.[2] There are also those who heard from him that John, the disciple of the Lord, going to bathe at Ephesus, and perceiving Cerinthus within, rushed out of the bath-house without bathing, exclaiming, "Let us fly, lest even the bath-house fall down, because Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is within." And Polycarp himself replied to Marcion, who met him on one occasion, and said, "Dost thou know me?" "I do know thee, the first-born of Satan." Such was the horror which the apostles and their disciples had against holding even a verbal communication with any corrupters of the truth; as Paul also says, "A man that is an heretic, after the first and second admonition, reject; knowing that he that is such is subverted, and sinneth, being condemned of himself."[3] There is also a very powerful[4] epistle of Polycarp written to the Philippians, from which those who choose to do so, and are anxious about
- ↑ Polycarp suffered about the year 167, in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. His great age of eighty-six years implies that he was contemporary with St. John for nearly twenty years.
- ↑ So the Greek. The Latin reads: "which he also handed down to the church."
- ↑ Tit. iii. 10.
- ↑ ἰκανωτάη. Harvey translates this all-sufficient, and thus paraphrases: But his epistle is all-sufficient, to teach those that are desirous to learn.
