Chapter 3

§ 1.

The Tradition therefore of the Apostles, made manifest in all the world, all may look back upon, who wish to see things truly: and we are able to recount those whom the Apostles appointed to be Bishops in the Churches,¹ and their successors², quite down to our time; who neither taught nor knew any such thing as they fondly devise. Yet surely, if the Apostles had known any hidden mysteries, which they used to teach the perfect, apart and unknown to the rest, they would deliver it to those, even more than others, to whom they were entrusting the Churches themselves. For very perfect and blameless in all things would they have them to be, whom they were leaving to be their actual successors, committing to them their own place of Presidency: whose correct dealing would be a great advantage, their failure again an extreme calamity.

§ 2.

But because it were very long in such a work as this to reckon up the Successions in all the Churches;³ there is one, very great, and most ancient and known to all, the Church founded and established at Rome by two most glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul, whose Tradition which it hath from the Apostles, and her faith proclaimed unto men by succession of Bishops coming down even unto us, we point to, thereby confounding all those, who in any way form undue assemblies, on account either of self-pleasing ways, or of vain glory, or of blindness and wrong opinion. For with this Church, on account of its higher original⁴, the whole Church (I mean the faithful on all sides) must needs agree; wherein the Tradition which is of the Apostles hath ever been preserved by them of all countries.

§ 3.

The blessed Apostles, then, having founded and builded the Church,⁵ committed the ministry of the Episcopate to Linus. Of this Linus, Paul makes mention in the epistles to Timothy.⁶ And his successor is Anencletus: and after him in the third place from the Apostles the Bishopric is allotted to Clement, who had both seen the blessed Apostles, and conferred with them, and had the doctrine of the Apostles yet sounding in his ears, and their tradition before his eyes; not singly, for still many were left of those who had been instructed by the Apostles.

In the time then of this Clement,⁷ no small tumult having occurred among the brethren which were in Corinth, the Church in Rome wrote a most effective letter to the Corinthians, urging them to be at peace together, and renewing their faith,⁸ and [setting forth] the tradition which it had recently received from the Apostles; which tradition proclaims One God Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, Framer of Man; Who brought on the Flood, and called Abraham, Who led the people out of the land of Egypt, Who conversed with Moses, Who ordained the Law and sent the Prophets, Who prepared fire for the Devil and his Angels. That He is set forth by the Churches as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, those who will, may learn from the letter itself, and discern the Apostolical Tradition of the Church, the Epistle being ancienter than our present false teachers and devisers of another god, above the Artificer and Creator of all things that exist.

This Clement again Evaristus succeeds, and Evaristus, Alexander: then Xystus in like manner is appointed, sixth from the Apostles: and after him Telesphorus, who was also a glorious Martyr: afterwards Hyginus, then Pius, and after him Anicetus. Anicetus having been succeeded by Soter, the Bishop’s office is now held, in the twelfth place from the Apostles, by Eleutherius. By the same order, and in the same succession, both the Tradition from the Apostles in the Church, and the preaching of the truth, hath come down to us. And this is a very full demonstration of the unity and sameness of the lifegiving faith, which from the Apostles even until now hath been preserved in the Church, and passed onward in the truth.

§ 4.

And Polycarp too, who had not only been trained by the Apostles,⁹ and had conversed with many of those who had seen Christ, but also had been constituted by the Apostles, Bishop over Asia, in the Church of Smyrna:—whom we also saw in the first age of our life; for he tarried with us long, and in extreme old age, by a glorious and distinguished martyrdom, departed this life; having always taught these things, which he learned from the Apostles, which the Church delivers, which alone are true. These things are witnessed by all the Churches in Asia, and by those who down to our time have succeeded Polycarp:—a far more credible and surer witness to the truth, than Valentinus and Marcion, and the rest with their bad opinions. And he, sojourning in Rome under Anicetus, converted to God’s Church many of the forementioned Heretics, proclaiming himself to have received from the Apostles that one and only truth, which hath been handed on by the Church. And there are some who have been told by him, how that John, the Lord’s disciple, in Ephesus, going to bathe, and seeing Cerinthus in the place, leaped out of the bath without using it, adding, Let us fly, lest the very bath fall on us, where Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is. And Polycarp too himself, when Marcion came into his sight, and said, Knowest thou me? replied, I know the first-born of Satan. Such pious care had the Apostles and their disciples, not to communicate so much as by word with any of those who put a false stamp on the truth: as Paul also said,¹⁰ A man that is a heretic, after the first and second admonition, reject: knowing that such an one is perverted, and sinneth, being self-condemned.

And there is also an Epistle of Polycarp, written to the Philippians, a very powerful one, from which both the stamp of his Faith, and his preaching of the truth, may be learned by those who will, and who are careful of their own salvation. Yea, and the Church in Ephesus, having had both Paul for its founder, and John to abide among them until the times of Trajan, is a true witness of the Apostles’ tradition.