Kerinth

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Kerinth ( ancient Greek Κερίνθος Kerinthos , Latinized Cerinthus ) was a Gnostic teacher at the turn of the 1st  to the 2nd century AD.

Since none of his writings have survived, his life and teaching must be reconstructed from reports and mentions by other writers, mostly church fathers . He seems to have worked in Ephesus (Asia Minor).

Live and act

Kerinth distinguished between God and a separate creative force ( demiurge ). As is often the case in Gnosticism, it separates the human Jesus from Christ . Recent research doubts that he adhered to Jewish law and was a chiliast .

In the apocryphal writing Epistula Apostolorum (Letter of the Apostles) it is stated in chapter 1: "The letter is Catholic, intended for everyone and was written on the occasion of the appearance of the False Apostles Simon and Kerinth, so that no one would join them." Both will be added Mentioned again in chapter 7 as “who have come to wander the world [...] beware of them, for in them there is defilement and death. (Variant: 'and distress') In the end you are threatened with judgment and ruin. ”(Variant:“ and being lost ”).

The theologian Klaus Berger comments on this: “Kerinth was a Christian teacher of the 2nd century who, on the one hand, is said to have roughly sensual expectations for the millennium , but on the other hand is suspected of being a Gnostic. An angel christology is also linked to it. The latter would be a Jewish-Christian way of imagining or setting up the majesty of Jesus ”(Berger / Nord, p. 988).

In the exegesis of 1 John it is discussed whether the heresies mentioned there refer to the teachings of Kerinth. According to Irenaeus of Lyon , the Gospel according to John was also written against Gnostic tendencies. For Irenaeus it is the Nicolaitans on the one hand and Kerinth on the other, as the primary opponents of his text.

Teaching of Kerinth

According to Irenaeus, Kerinth taught that Jesus was only a particularly righteous person and that Christ was a heavenly being who was different from Jesus. At the baptism at the Jordan it came down in the shape of a dove. Then Jesus, united with Christ, preached, taught and worked miracles. Before the suffering of Jesus, his passion , Christ had flown away from him again and thus remained without suffering. That means:

  • Jesus is not the Christ .
  • the redeeming Christ did not come in the flesh, or not really become flesh.
  • both were only temporarily united in Jesus.
  • Christ only “in the water”, that is to say at the baptism , but not “in the blood”, he was no longer present at the suffering on the cross .

Kerinth founded a group that expected a future kingdom of Christ , whose bliss also consisted in earthly pleasures, in the satisfaction of the stomach and sexuality as well as in festivals, the sacrifice and the slaughter of sacrificial animals .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wilhelm PratscherKerinth. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 3, Bautz, Herzberg 1992, ISBN 3-88309-035-2 , Sp. 1387-1388.
  2. Klaus Berger , Christiane Nord : The New Testament and early Christian writings. Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1999, pp. 990 and 993. ISBN 3-458-16970-9 .
  3. Cf. Hans-Josef Klauck : The first letter of John (= EKK - Evangelical-Catholic Commentary on NT Volume XXIII / 1). Neukirchener Verlagshaus, Neukirchen-Vluyn 1994, ISBN 978-3-545-23122-1 and Rudolf Schnackenburg : Die Johannesbriefe (= Herder's theological commentary on the New Testament. Volume 13). 7th edition. Herder, Freiburg 1984, ISBN 3-451-01150-6 , who tends to reject this.
  4. Hans-Jochen Jaschke : The Gospel of John and the Gnosis in the testimony of Irenaus of Lyon. Munich Theological Journal Volume 29, 1978, Issue 4, pp. 337–376, here pp. 344–345 ( PDF 1.374 kB; 40 pages on mthz.ub.lmu.de)
  5. ^ Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 1.26.1.
  6. Ludwig Neidhart : Johanneische question and Johannesbriefe. 2010, p. 9 ( PDF 162 kB; 25 pages at www.philso.uni-augsburg.de)