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The Soon Coming Judgment Of God Upon America and How To Escape It 424
but rather clothed with precepts of pagan philosophy.”
1336
Clement was a student of Tatian and Tatian was a student of Justin Martyr. Both of these
men are well known to be heretics. Justin Martyr was born the same year the Apostle John died
in 100 A.D. He is a pagan who became a Christian. Although he became a Christian, he was
never able to put his pagan philosophy behind him and therefore, he was never truly able to
accept the Gospel message in purity. He brought pagan traditions and customs into Christianity;
he is said to have died a heathen.
1337
Tatian, a student a Martyr’s, began to put Martyr’s heretical teachings into writing. Tatian
wrote what is called the Diatessaron, which means four in one. The Diatessaron was a harmony
of the four Gospels. This was a heretical work, Wilkinson writes:
The Gospels were so notoriously corrupted by his hand that in later years a
bishop of Syria, because of the errors, was obliged to throw out of his churches no
less than two hundred copies of this Diatessaron, since church members were
mistaking it for the true Gospel.
1338
The heretical work of corrupting the word of God was passed on to his student Clement
of Alexandria. Wilkinson writes: “All the writings of the outstanding heretical teachers were
possessed by Clement, and he freely quoted from their corrupted MSS. As if they were the pure
words of Scripture.” Clement passed on his heretical mission to his student Orien.
According to Wilkinson, it is Orion “who did the most of all to create and give direction
to the forces of apostasy down through the centuries.”
1339
Wilkinson further writes: “Orion had so
surrendered himself to the furore of turning all Bible events into allegories that he, himself, says,
'The Scriptures are of little use to those who understand them as they are written.'”
1340
Alexandria was not only the home of heretical Christians (those who doubted the
teachings of Jesus and the rest of the New Testament) but also of sincere Christians. These
sincere Christians were undoubtedly influenced by their heretical counterparts. In this situation
you would have purposeful corruption of scripture by the heretics and efforts of sincere
Christians to correct what they believed to be errors in the text. Edward Hills writes of this in his
expose, “The Magnificent Burgeon.” He writes:
The early Christians of Alexandria were probably much influenced by the
heretics who flourished there and who are known to have corrupted the New
Testament text, by Basilides, for example, and Valentinus and their disciples.
Moreover, the only Alexandrian Christian of whose New Testament textual
criticism we have specimens is Origen, and his decisions in this field seem
fanciful rather than sound….
It is likely, moreover, that there were other Christian scholars at
Alexandria who were even less restrained in their speculations than Origen. These
well-meaning but misguided critics evidently deleted many readings from the
original New Testament text, thus producing the abbreviated text found in B and
ALEPH and in other manuscripts of their type.
1341
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