Hegesippus

In the middle of the second century the gnostic teachers were making a specific claim: that alongside the public teaching of the apostles there had been a secret one, handed down privately, and that they had it. Hegesippus decided to check. He was a Jewish Christian, probably from Palestine — he quotes from Hebrew and Aramaic sources and from Jewish tradition in a way that suggests he was raised in it. Sometime around the 150s he traveled west, stopping at churches along the way, and stayed for a time at Corinth. Then he went to Rome, arriving under bishop Anicetus, and stayed there through the terms of Anicetus, Soter, and Eleutherus. At each church he did the same thing: he asked what they taught, and he asked who had led them, in order, back to the beginning. At Rome he drew up a written list of the bishops in succession. His verdict, in his own words, was that in every succession and in every city things held exactly as the Law and the Prophets and the Lord preach. He had gone looking for the secret gospel and found the same public one everywhere. He wrote the results up in five books called Memoirs. They are lost. Every line we have comes from quotations Eusebius made about a hundred and fifty years later, and those quotations happen to preserve some of the most valuable material in early church history. He recorded the martyrdom of James the brother of the Lord at Jerusalem — James the Just, called Oblias, whose knees, Hegesippus wrote, were worn hard as a camel's from praying in the temple for his people; thrown from the temple parapet, stoned, and finished with a fuller's club while he prayed for the men killing him. He recorded the succession of Simeon son of Clopas to lead the Jerusalem church. And he recorded the strangest story of the lot: how the emperor Domitian, hunting for descendants of David, had the grandsons of Jude the brother of the Lord brought before him, looked at their farming calluses and their thirty-nine acres, heard them explain that the kingdom they expected was not of this world and would come at the end of the age, and dismissed them as harmless. He died about 180. Nothing is known of his end. Sources: Eusebius, Church History II.23, III.11, III.19–20, III.32, IV.8, IV.22; the fragments of Hegesippus (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 8); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2.