bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him
up and sealed the bottomless pit upon him, in order that he should not deceive
the nations till the thousand years should be fulfilled: after that, he must be loosed
a little season, ].
(Ms. Rich. 7185, f. 9v, line 8)
'On this Caius the heretic objected : that Satan is bound here, |403 according to that which is written, that Christ went up into the strong man's house and bound him, and spoiled his goods for us [St. Matth. xii. 29].
Hippolytus answered this and said : If the Devil has been bound, how does he deceive the faithful and persecute and plunder men ? And if you say that he has been bound as regards the faithful, how did he draw near against Christ, Him who aid no sin? according to the text, The Prince cometh and findeth no sin in me [St. John, xiv. 30 ]. And if then he has been bound, how did the Lord teach us to pray, that we should be delivered front the evil one [St. Matth. vi. 13] ? and why did he desire to tempt Simon and the Apostles [St. Luke, xxii. 31]? And how was one who had been bound able to sift and trouble the disciples [ ib .]?
And truly for us the conflict is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, and against the rulers of the darkness of this world [Eph. vi. 12]. If he had been bound, he would not maintain the conflict, or catch away the word which was sown [St. Matth. xiii. 19], as is said in the Parable of the Seed. That He has bound the strong man; the meaning of it is this : that He has rebuked and cast scorn on those who did not come unto Him when He went against the Devil in order to purify them from his bondage and make them sons unto the Father.
And this is proved by what He said just after, that he that is not with me is against me, and he that gathereth not with me, scattereth abroad [St. Matth. xii. 30]. Accordingly, in the end of times, the Devil is to be bound and to be flung into the bottomless pit, when the Lord comes ; even as Esaias hath said, that the wicked shall be taken away in order that he see not the glory of the Lord [Isai. xxvi. 10----LXX. (Syr. Hex.)].
And the number of the years is not the number of days, but it represents the space of one day, glorious and perfect; in which, when the King comes in glory with His slain, the creation is to shine : according to the text, The sun shall shine twofold [marg., |404 sevenfold; Isai. xxx. 26]; while the righteous eat with Him and drink of His vine. This is the day which the Lord hath made [Ps. cxviii. 24], which David spoke of.
Accordingly, when with the eye of the spirit John saw the glory of that day, he likened it to the space of a thousand years ; according to the saying, One day in the world of the righteous is as a thousand years [2 Pet. iii. 8 ?]. And by the number he shows that day to be perfect, for those that are faithful.
But as for what he has said, that after the thousand years he shall be loosed, and shall deceive the nations [Rev. xx. 7, 8], it is this: that justly he is to be loosed, and to be cast into the burning, and to be judged [ ib. 10, 12] ; with those who from old time were gathered together with him, when he gathered the strangers of the kingdom, and Gog and Magog [ ib. 8].'
----
These passages are conclusive on the main question that has been in dispute concerning Caius. They prove that he refused to admit the Apocalypse as the work of St. John. And they prove that Hippolytus wrote a reply to the arguments by which Caius maintained his opinion. These arguments, we may assume, were put forth in a written treatise; and the purport of them appears to have been (so far as they are reported to us by Barsalibi), that the teaching of the Apocalypse, especially as regards its eschatology, is contradictory to that of our Lord, as reported in the Synoptic Gospels, and of St. Paul. Hence it follows that he rejects its claim, not merely to be the work of St. John, but to be an authentic part of the New Testament Canon. The work of Hippolytus whence Barsalibi derived his knowledge of this controversy was, no doubt, the Heads against Caius, mentioned by Ebediesu, which was evidently a distinct treatise from his Exposition of the Apocalypse and Gospel of St. John. The passages as they stand in Barsalibi's Commentary are, probably, not actual excerpts from the ' Heads '; they have the air rather of brief summaries of the arguments |405 on either side: those of Caius (whom it will be observed Barsalibi brands as a 'heretic') being stated in the barest possible form, while those of Hippolytus are given in more detail, yet highly compressed.
The objections of Caius are, as will be seen, those of a somewhat captious critic, and indicate little breadth of scriptural learning or of eschatological conceptions ; while the replies of his antagonist are not only fair ad hominem retorts, but display a large and thorough knowledge of his subject. But, on the other hand, it is observable that none of the objections at all resembles in character or tone the passage above cited (from Eusebius), in which Caius condemns the spurious 'revelations' which he accuses Cerinthus of attempting to pass off as the work of 'a great Apostle'; nor does any of them, in the remotest degree, answer to the account given by Dionysius of Alexandria of the attack made by certain unnamed writers on the canonical Revelation as being carnal in its promises of millennarian felicity. And this remark applies with especial force to the last of our five passages, which deals with the millennial binding of Satan [Rev. xx. 2, and following verses]. We may assume that if Caius not only denied the Revelation to be written by St. John, but ascribed it to Cerinthus, and interpreted the millennium it foreshows as being one of sensual joys, devised by an 'enemy of the Church of God who desired to deceive,' this would be the place where he would put forward that view. If so, it is not to be supposed that Hippolytus would leave so gross a misconstruction unrefuted; and it is, to say the least, improbable that Barsalibi would omit, in his summary of their controversy, to include this which would be obviously beyond comparison the most important and interesting part of it. But, instead of this, we find the point at issue between the two disputants to be merely whether Satan has or has not been already ' bound,' and therefore whether |406 it is or is not in accordance with our Lord's teaching to speak of the 'binding' as deferred till the millennium. Besides, the error which in his reply Hippolytus imputes to Caius is, not that he represented the millennium as sensual and unworthy, but merely that he understood the 'thousand years' literally, and not as denoting the spiritual fulness and perfection of ' the day which the Lord hath made.' And Hippolytus does not himself hesitate to speak of the righteous as 'eating and drinking' in that day with the Lord in His glory, without giving any hint that the promise of a grosser 'eating and drinking' had been attributed by Caius to the Apocalyptist.
It is hardly necessary to add that in none of these objections do we find any trace of doubt cast by Caius on the Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel. He does not, indeed, expressly cite any Gospel by name in any of these passages, and the texts he uses are from St. Matthew only. But it will be perceived that Hippolytus, in replying to him, once at least cites St. John's Gospel, evidently as an authority admitted by his opponent; and this fact of course excludes the supposition----for which, indeed, no ground exists----that Caius, like the Ἄλογοι of whom Epiphanius tells us ( Haer. xxxi. [li.]), rejected that Gospel as well as the Apocalypse.
In the fourth passage, however, there occurs a point of contact between the views of Caius and those of the Alogoi, as stated by Epiphanius ( ut supr .), as regards their objections against Rev. ix. 15. It extends, however, only so far as this, that he demurred, as they did, to the idea of angels 'making war';----not, however, because he found it ridiculous, as they professed to do, but because he regarded |407 it as unscriptural ('it is not written '). But it is highly interesting to compare the reply of Hippolytus to this objection, with the arguments with which Epiphanius refutes the Alogoi, the substance of which is as follows :----
'By the four angels he signifies the four nations who dwell by the Euphrates----the Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes, and Persians. . . That the nations are put in. charge of angels, Moses testifies . . . He set the boundaries of the nations after the number of the angels of God [Deut., as above]. The loosing of the angels implies, therefore, that these nations, after being for a while restrained in the longsuffering of God, are in due time to be let loose, stirred up by their several angels to work vengeance on such nations as have done despite to the saints of God.'
Here, as will be seen, we have every one of the points put forward by Hippolytus reproduced. In both these passages we have the explanation of 'angels' as representing nations; in both the same passage of Deuteronomy is adduced in support of it; both name the same four nations; both represent the 'binding' as a delay of the vengeance of which these nations are to be the instruments, till God shall command; and the ' loosing,' as the signal given for its execution on the oppressors of His people. That Epiphanius here borrowed from Hippolytus there can be no question; and thus we draw from the comparison of these passages a striking confirmation of the ingenious and convincing theory of Lipsius ( Quellenkritik des Epiphanios ), who has made it practically certain that in this part of his Panarion Epiphanius (in common with Philaster, in his similar Treatise on Heresies) is borrowing from the lost Refutation of the Thirty-two Heresies of Hippolytus. The passage, as thus reproduced by Epiphanius, is not indeed identical with that translated by Barsalibi; but the agreement between them, in substance, is complete, and there is a close resemblance in diction (so far as the Syriac version of the |408 latter passage enables us to judge ). And this is just the sort of affinity to be expected between two passages from different works by the same author.
The results at which the discovery of these passages has enabled us to arrive may be conveniently summed up as follows:----
1. They establish the separate identity of Caius, of whom hitherto so little has been certainly known, that Bishop Lightfoot was able to make out a strong case in favour of the hypothesis that Caius was but Hippolytus under a different name.
2. They prove that Caius (apparently in a written treatise----possibly his Dialogue against Proclus) rejected the Apocalypse from the New Testament Canon, as containing predictions, mainly eschatological, irreconcilable with the words of our Lord and the teaching of St. Paul.
3. They prove that Hippolytus wrote a work in refutation of this view----probably the Heads against Caius, named by Ebediesu----
These conclusions are direct and certain; and it may be added as a safe inference from them----
4. That Caius was not (as some have supposed), the author of the Muratorian Fragment, in which the Apocalypse is included in the Canon.