other · 100 · Ephesus
Cerinthus is the first opponent in this dataset who is a name attached to a scene rather than to a surviving book. Irenaeus, who had it from Polycarp, says John the apostle went into a bathhouse at Ephesus, learned Cerinthus was inside, and ran out without bathing, saying the building might fall while the enemy of the truth was in it — Eusebius repeats it, and it is the reason a schoolboy of the second century knew the name. His teaching, as reported by opponents and never in his own words, held that the world was made by a lesser power and not by the supreme God; that Jesus was an ordinary man, son of Joseph and Mary, on whom the Christ descended at the baptism and from whom it departed before the passion; and that the kingdom would be an earthly one of a thousand years of pleasure. Every part of that was rejected, and the rejections are load-bearing: the goodness of creation, the unity of the person of Christ, and the nature of the millennium. A tradition also ascribes the Apocalypse to him rather than to John, which the Alogi took up and which the church did not accept.
Why is a minor Asian teacher remembered at all?
For a story about a bathhouse, and for what the church decided he was wrong about.