Refutation of All Heresies 1.9.5

Authorship disputed: The work names no author. Book 1 was long printed among Origen's works as the Philosophumena; after books 4–10 were found in a manuscript from Mount Athos (published 1851), it was assigned to Hippolytus, the usual view today, though some scholars ascribe it to another Roman writer of the same circle. Books 2 and 3 are lost, and book 4 lacks its beginning.

Summary: Archelaus taught that living things first arose from warm mud.

Greek text · Duncker–Schneidewin, 24

Περὶ δὲ ζώων φησίν, ὅτι θερμαινομένης τῆς γῆς τὸ πρῶτον ἐν τῷ κάτω μέρει, ὅπου τὸ θερμὸν καὶ τὸ ψυχρὸν ἐμίσγετο, ἀνεφαίνετο τά τε ἄλλα ζῶα πολλὰ καὶ ἀνόμοια πάντα τὴν αὐτὴν δίαιταν ἔχοντα ἐκ τῆς ἰλύος τρεφόμενα, ἦν δὲ ὀλιγοχρόνια· ὕστερον δὲ αὐτοῖς καὶ ἐξ ἀλλήλων γένεσις ἀνέστη,

English · Claude translation

Concerning living things he says that when the earth was first warmed in its lower part, where the hot and the cold were mixed, many other living things appeared, all unlike one another but having the same way of life, nourished from the mud; and they were short-lived. Later, generation from one another also arose among them,

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 24 · Ludwig Duncker and F. G. Schneidewin, eds., S. Hippolyti episcopi et martyris Refutationis omnium haeresium librorum decem quae supersunt (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1859); section divisions from Paul Wendland, ed., Hippolytus Werke 3: Refutatio omnium haeresium, GCS 26 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1916) · Greek text: L. Duncker and F. G. Schneidewin, Refutationis omnium haeresium (Göttingen, 1859), digitized by the Perseus Digital Library; section divisions from P. Wendland (GCS 26, 1916), digitized by the First Thousand Years of Greek project (Open Greek and Latin); both CC BY-SA 4.0

Text

As printed in Duncker–Schneidewin. Manuscript variants and the editor's apparatus are not reproduced; no textual problem is noted in this passage.

Translation

Claude translation (claude-opus-5-5), 2026-09-27 · Translated by Claude from the Greek text of Duncker–Schneidewin; made independently of existing English translations.

Compare

Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5 (1886) (an older public-domain English translation, whole volume at CCEL; checked against ours only after ours was made) · Its chapter numbers differ from the standard (Wendland) numbering used here.

Cite this passage

Hippolytus, Haer. 1.9.5 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/1/9/5/).

The SBL abbreviation for this work has not been checked yet.

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 1.9.5 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/1/9/5/).