development of the Trinitarian doctrine
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Randy Kluth
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When the Jews questioned the Deity of Christ, such as the Ebionites, there had to be an explanation of how the man Christ can also be the divine God. The heretic Cerinthus suggested that Jesus began as a man and became Divine, which just raises questions, such as, how can a Man in time become the eternal God?
Christians knew that Jesus was never just a man, and did not "become God." But they had to explain how a man in time can also be a God in eternity.
ProverbsInPink
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This is a article worth our time I think.
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But the Cerinthus Valentinus had no such problem. There was more than one Cerinthus.
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Cerinthus was remembered as the adversary of John, the ‘disciple of the Lord’ who resided in the city of Ephesus in the late first century CE. This ‘John’ was either one of Jesus’s twelve apostles or another prominent Christian leader who ministered in the region of Asia Minor and came to be confused with the apostle of the same name (cf. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.4; 5.33.4; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.31.3; 3.39.4–7; 5.20.5–6; 5.24.2; 7.25.16). There are obstacles for the historian attempting to reconstruct Cerinthus’s biography because Cerinthus did not leave any writings for posterity and the sources about him were composed by uniformly hostile witnesses. For instance, the students of the second-century bishop Polycarp of Smyrna retold a tale about the day John noticed Cerinthus in a public bathhouse in Ephesus and exclaimed that the walls might collapse because the ‘enemy of the truth’ was inside the building (cf. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.4). The problem with the sources also means that it is difficult to reconstruct Cerinthus’s teachings while his name is associated with a debate about the authorship of both the Gospel of John and the Apocalypse of John.https://www.cdamm.org/articles/cerinthus
According to Irenaeus of Lyons, Cerinthus was learned in Egyptian Gnosticism. If true, that’d make him by far the earliest among a collection of early Gnostic sages originally from Alexandria (the list of those includes Basilides, Valentinus, and Carpocrates). But he was reportedly most active elsewhere, especially in the Levant.
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In classical times, Christian “heresy hunters” classified Cerinthus as a Gnostic. However, they did so well after his own time (the earliest of them was Irenaeus, who wrote about him anywhere from 70 to 100 years later). According to their reports, Cerinthus taught that the physical realm had been created by a lesser being than the one true Supreme God.
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In classical times, Christian “heresy hunters” classified Cerinthus as a Gnostic. However, they did so well after his own time (the earliest of them was Irenaeus, who wrote about him anywhere from 70 to 100 years later). According to their reports, Cerinthus taught that the physical realm had been created by a lesser being than the one true Supreme God.
Early Christian History / Heresies: The Sage Cerinthus
Discussion of the life and teachings of the Sage Cerinthus, including its Gnostic and non-Gnostic elements.
earlychristianhistory.net
Epiphanius helps but you have to speculate who is a Merinthus and who is a Cerinthus. The mystery is solved a bit this way, and we do know Ignatius was a Valentinian who thought Jesus was the one true God, and not a trinity at first. Jesus was a morpher in his view.
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