Did Heretics’ Texts Describe Their Incestuous Rituals?
In my previous post I talked about the church Father Epiphanius's attack on a heretical group of Gnostics called the Phibionites. They allegedly based their practices on a now-no-longer-surviving book the Greater Questions of Mary (Magdalene). Epiphanius indicates he knows the book. Did he? Did it actually exist. Here I conclude the discussion, from my book Forgery and Counterforgery. ****************************** The prior question is whether Epiphanius’s description of the activities of the group is at all plausible. Historians have long treated Epiphanius in general with a healthy dose of skepticism.[1] No Patristic source is filled with more invective and distortion; Epiphanius frequently makes connections between historical events that we otherwise know are unrelated, and he expressly claims to write horrific accounts precisely in order to repulse his readers from the heresies he describes (Pan. Proem. I. 2). His description of the Phibionites and their sex rituals, nonetheless, has been taken as historically grounded by a dismaying number of competent scholars. For Stephen Gero, the fact that other heresiological sources down into the Middle Ages mention [...]