The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Martyrs' Church
Hegesippus
died c. 180Early Church
The traveler who listed every bishop in order to prove the faith had not been quietly swapped out.
Summary
- Lived died c. 180.
- Stood in The Martyrs' Church (AD 100–313).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Early Church.
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived5 moments · AD 100–313
- c. 107Ignatius of Antioch is marched to RomeThe bishop of Antioch was sent under guard across Asia Minor to die in the arena. He wrote seven letters along the road, begging the Roman church not to rescue him: "I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ" (*To the Romans* 4). The exact year is uncertain; historians place it somewhere between about 107 and 117.
- c. 112Pliny writes to Trajan for instructionsPliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia-Pontus, had already been executing Christians and wrote to ask the emperor whether he was doing it correctly. His letter (*Letters* 10.96) says they met before dawn on a fixed day, sang "a hymn to Christ as to a god," and bound themselves by oath not to steal, cheat, or commit adultery. Trajan answered that Christians must not be hunted down, but must be punished if properly accused and unwilling to recant.
- c. 155Polycarp of Smyrna is burned in the stadiumThe old bishop had been a disciple of the apostle John. When the governor told him to curse Christ and go free, the account written by his own congregation records his answer: "Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me any injury: how then can I blaspheme my King and my Saviour?" The traditional date is 155 or 156; some scholars argue for as late as 167.
- c. 165Justin Martyr is beheaded at RomeThe philosopher who had written open letters defending Christians to two emperors was tried by the city prefect Rusticus with six companions. The court record survives as the *Acts of Justin*. Asked what teachings he held, he explained them; asked to sacrifice, he refused, and the group was scourged and beheaded.
- 177The martyrs of Lyons and VienneMob violence in Gaul turned into arrests, torture, and days in the amphitheater. The churches there wrote an account that Eusebius preserved (*Church History* 5.1). Two names stayed: Pothinus, the bishop, over ninety years old, who died in prison, and Blandina, a slave woman whose owners feared she would break first and who outlasted them all.
In their own words
“From these men also come the Menandrianists, and the Marcionists, and the Carpocratians, and the Valentinians, and the Basilidians, and the Saturnilians. Each of these leaders in his own private and distinct capacity brought in his own private opinion. From these have come false Christs, …”
Fragments from His Five Books of Commentaries on the Acts of the Church. · on Acts 20:30
“Even from your own number, men will rise up and distort the truth to draw away disciples after them.”
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Hegesippus at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Traveled church to church listing every bishop in order, to prove the faith had not been quietly swapped out.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Martyrs' Church · 40 on this stretch of wall
A 22-year-old mother who kept a diary in prison and walked into the arena at Carthage singing.
Stayed with his people through plague and persecution, then walked to his own beheading and paid the executioner.
Traced his teaching straight back to the apostle John through Polycarp, and wrote the first great takedown of the gnostics.
Kept wearing his philosopher's cloak after he met Christ, argued the faith to the emperor's face, and was beheaded for it.
Wanted to die with his martyred father as a boy, and spent the rest of his life laying six versions of the Old Testament side by side.
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The lawyer who gave the church the word Trinity and told Rome that the blood of the martyrs is seed.