I introduce now, however, another intriguing possibility which does in fact involve Gaius’ name. There may be an unnoticed reference to Gaius in Tertullian’s De praescriptione haereticorum 33. 10, written between 200 and 203,89 very close to the time when Gaius published his Dialogue.90 In a section in which he is pointing to examples of heresies encountered by the apostles, Tertullian says, ‘John, however, in the Apocalypse is charged to chastise those ‘‘who eat things sacrificed to idols,’’ and ‘‘who commit fornication.’’ There are even now another sort of Nicolaitans. Theirs is called the Gaian heresy (Gaiana haeresis dicitur).’ There has been disagreement, however, over the original reading. All the extant manuscripts (A P X) read Gaiana, and this was the reading printed by Rhenanus in his editio princeps of Tertullian’s works in 1521.91 But in Rhenanus’ third edition he printed Cainana (Cainites), which was then repeated in all the remaining sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions of Tertullian’s works.92 This seems to have been simply his conjecture,93 based perhaps on an inability to identify a group of ‘Gaians’, and on the fact that Tertullian elsewhere reports that a female representative of the heresy of the Cainites, whom Tertullian calls a viper, had a few years earlier come to Carthage and had ‘carried away a great number with her most venomous doctrine’ (De bapt. 1. 2). But here there is a textual problem as well! Codex Trecensis 523 (12th cent.), the only manuscript of De baptismo now surviving, has de canina haeresi vipera, but the edition of Martin Mesnart from 1545, curiously, has de Gaiana haeresi vipera.94 Quasten writes that the text of De baptismo in Mesnart’s edition, taken from an unidentified and now lost manuscript, is inferior to that of Trecensis. Based on a passage from Jerome, where he speaks of Caina haeresis and calls it a viper, Harnack in 1914 proposed that the true reading in both De praescriptione and De baptismo must have been Caina.95 This corresponds perfectly with the reference in De baptismo 1. 2 and is fairly taken as evidence that the text of Tertullian known to Jerome had de Caina haeresi there. What is more, the reference to vipers would be fitting in the case of a Cainite, as the Cainites are associated with the Ophites in Ps. Tertullian, Against All Heresies 2 (cf. Irenaeus, AH 1. 30, 31).96 But does this decide the case as well for De praescriptione 33. 10, as assumed by Harnack and others?97 The immoral practices of the Cainites, hinted at by Irenaeus (AH 1. 31. 2), might be seen as analogous to the practices of the Nicolaitans censured by John, to which Tertullian is comparing the heresy in question in De praescriptione 33. 10. On the other hand, in De baptismo, where Tertullian is faced with problems arising from the Cainites, he never refers to their morals (nor are bad morals mentioned in Ps. Tertullian). And the united reading of the three extant manuscripts of De praescriptione,98 Gaiana, is a reading which, unlike Cainana, is unlikely to have arisen through a conscious scribal attempt to make sense of an otherwise inscrutable reference. In addition, there is the matter of the reading of the lost text of De baptismo 1. 2 used by Mesnart in 1545, which evidently read de Gaiana haeresi vipera. If we presume that the original of this text read Caina, we must imagine that a Gaian heresy made more sense to some copyist than did a Cainite one. It is unlikely that Mesnart himself made this change, because in his edition of De praescriptione 33. 10, he had followed Rhenanius’ third edition in reading Cainana, not Gaiana which the surviving texts have. Thus, to account for the possibility of an original Gaiana in De praescriptione 33. 10 and an early scribal change from Caina to Gaiana in De baptismo 1. 2, we may now say that we know of a Gaius who might have shown himself, in Tertullian’s eyes, no less an enemy of the apostle John and his Revelation than the Nicolaitans were in John’s own day. It is also potentially important that whatever Gaius might have said about the Apocalypse of John (note that the Gospel is not here implicated!) was said in a Dialogue with a man named Proclus, a Montanist teacher whom we know Tertullian later came to hold in very high esteem (Val. 5; Scap. 4. 5).99 If Gaiana is the original reading of De praescriptione 33. 10—and I must emphasize that this is not certain—we then surely have an extremely important, contemporary evaluation of the views (some views) of someone named Gaius.100 It is interesting that Tertullian mentions ‘the Gaian heresy’ in a reference to the Apocalypse, not in a reference to the Gospel. The only fragment from Gaius’ Dialogue we possess which possibly bears on the Johannine literature is his comment which seems to link the Johannine Apocalypse with the carnal millennialism of Cerinthus. If Gaiana is the correct reading, the importance of this short comment lies not only in confirming that Gaius said something about Revelation (as he likely did in the Dialogue) which was known by Tertullian in Carthage at least as early as 200–3, but in revealing Tertullian’s dismissal of Gaius’ position on the Apocalypse as a heresy, as a fitting successor to the disgusting practices of the Nicolaitans. Whether it was already known by the name ‘the Gaian heresy’ or whether this was Tertullian’s own coinage we cannot of course tell. But this text would offer the earliest witness to Gaius’ views on the Apocalypse from orthodox quarters, and that witness is unarguably negative. There are critical questions surrounding both the alleged response by Hippolytus to Gaius and this possible reference to Gaius by Tertullian. But, such as they are, they are our only potentially contemporary responses101 and they unite in discouraging the idea that Gaius could have been representing a traditional position of the orthodox in Rome in charging that the Apocalypse of John taught the carnal chiliasm associated with Cerinthus, or in criticizing the contents of either Johannine work. On the contrary, they would be consistent with the results of the earlier portion of this study, which indicated that, based on the circumstantial evidence of various writers who had connections with Rome, both the Fourth Gospel and the Apocalypse must have been highly regarded by the major representatives of the Church there for quite some time prior to Gaius’ Dialogue. A later portion of this study will follow the fortunes of the Johannine literature through the fourth century or so. Here it may be said that, though Gaius may indeed stand at the beginning of a chain of events which would have negative consequences for the recognition of the Apocalypse of John in areas of the Christian Church, what is ironic, in the light of the OJP, is that he had no such effect on the continuing reception of the Gospel according to John. Outside of the ‘Alogi’ and Dionysius bar Salibi’s ‘Gaius’, I do not know of a defender of the position attributed to these figures, inside or outside the Church. This could be one more indication that Gaius indeed did not criticize the Gospel and that the legacy which has grown up around him is unhistorical. But if he did reject the Fourth Gospel, either simply as being in conflict with the other three or also as being the product of the heretic Cerinthus, we shall have to agree with Hengel in pronouncing his enterprise of Gospel criticism a colossal failure in the ancient Church. Its path to success did not begin until ad 1888.
88 ‘These all start with the same principles of the faith, so far as relates to the one only God the Creator and His Christ, how that He was born of the Virgin, and came to fulfil the law and the prophets. Never mind if there does occur some variation in the order of the narratives, provided that there be agreement in the essential matter of the faith, in which there is disagreement with Marcion.’
89 Quasten, Patrology, ii. 272, ad 200; Barnes, Tertullian, 55, ad 203.
90 Eusebius places the Dialogue in Rome at the time of Zephyrinus (199–217) (HE 2. 25. 7; 6. 20. 3). If this is so, then the debate may have taken place just after the new bishop was elected.
91 B. Rhenanus, Opera Q. S. Fl. Tertulliani (Basle, 1521); 3rd edn. 1539.
92 Martin Mesnartius (Paris, 1545, considered a 4th edn. of Rhenanus); S. Gelenius (Basle, 1550, considered a 5th edn. of Rhenanus); J. Pamelius (Paris, 1583/Antwerp, 1584, considered a 6th edn. of Rhenanus); N. Rigaltius (Paris, 1634). (Note the helpful annotations on early edns. by Roger Pearse, ‘Early Editions 1450–1859’, at
www.tertullian.org/editions/editions.htm.)
93 It is possible that this was the reading of codex Gorziensis, which Rhenanus collated in the 3rd edn. but which is now lost. But the editor of the CCL edn. does not list it as a reading of Gorziensis as detectible from Rhenanus’ 3rd edn.
94 None of the MSS which contain De Praescr. has De Bapt.
95 A. von Harnack, ‘Tertullians Bibliothek christlicher Schriften’, Sitzungsberg. d. ko¨n. Preuss. Akad. d. Wiss. zu Berlin (1914), 303–34, at 323. Jerome’s text reads, et consurgit mihi Caina haeresis atque olim emortua vipera contritum caput levat (Epp. 59. 1). See Barnes, Tertullian, 279.
96 Barnes, Tertullian, 280.
97 CCL 2. Barnes, Tertullian, 279, also assumes this reading
98 Codex Parisinus Latinus 1622 (Agobardensis), 9th cent. (A); Codex Paterniacensis 439, 11th cent. (P); Codex Luxemburgensis 75, 15th cent. (X), though X is a descendant of P.
99 Praescr. was written before Tertullian’s conversion to Montanism. But his later reverence towards Proclus could suggest a sympathy towards this man even from the time of his reading of Gaius’ Dialogue. Perhaps it played a role in Tertullian’s eventual adoption of the New Prophecy.
100 There is, finally, one more possible reference to Gaius in the writings of Tertullian. In an ironical jab in Val. 32. 4 Tertullian mentions a ‘Marcus or a Gaius’ as ending up the brides and parents, by some angelic aeon, of aeonic offspring. But rather than being a reference to real people (Marcus the Valentinian and someone named Gaius) these appear to be names for common men (slaves, according to the note in the ANF).
101 It is possible that Gaius’ criticism was known already to the Ephesian Apollonius, who in his own refutation of Montanism in about ad 200 establishes the role of John in Asian Christianity. I have observed above that, unlike Gaius, Apollonius evidently used the Johannine Apocalypse positively against Montanism. If Apollonius wrote after Gaius and in knowledge of his work, he obvi-