Appendix: Against All Heresies
This short treatise survives as an appendix to Tertullian's De Praescriptione Haereticorum, cataloguing heresies from Simon Magus down through the Valentinians, Marcionites, and the modalist Praxeas. Its authorship has long been disputed among scholars; the Latin style and doctrinal horizon differ from Tertullian's authenticated works, and many regard it as a later addition by an unknown hand, sometimes associated with the heresiological tradition running through Hippolytus and Epiphanius rather than with Tertullian himself. Whoever wrote it was working in the genre established by Justin Martyr's lost Syntagma and continued by Irenaeus: a doxography of error meant to demonstrate that heresy has a traceable lineage, each deviation begetting the next.
The work proceeds as a sequence of brief entries rather than sustained argument. Each heresiarch is named, his teaching summarized in a few lines, and his departure from the rule of faith noted, usually by tracing his error back to a prior heretic or pagan philosophical source. The organizing move is genealogical: heresy is not many separate inventions but one continuous corruption, passed from teacher to disciple, so that refuting the fountainhead in principle refutes the whole stream. The catalogue format itself makes a polemical claim — that heresies multiply and contradict one another, while the church's teaching remains singular and stable by comparison.
Its continued interest lies less in theological originality than in what it preserves: a compact register of second- and third-century sects, their supposed founders, and the terms by which the early church classified deviation. It is a source for historians reconstructing the shape and self-understanding of the heresiological tradition, and for anyone tracing how questions of authorship and canon formation attached themselves even to texts transmitted under a great name.
Who should read this: students of early Christian heresiology and manuscript transmission, and readers of Tertullian who want to understand how his corpus was expanded and contested after his death. Readers wanting Tertullian's own argumentative voice should turn instead to De Praescriptione Haereticorum or Adversus Marcionem; this catalogue offers information, not polemic.
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- OTHER Adversus Omnes Haereses (CCEL) PDTrans. Peter Holmes and S. Thelwall · 1885Adversus Omnes Haereses in the same Ante-Nicene Fathers translation (volume 3, 1885) by S. Thelwall, hosted by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library with chapter-by-chapter navigation and downloadable as EPUB or PDF. Choose this over the single-page copies if you want to move around the text or take it offline. The attribution is not secure — this piece travels under Tertullian's name but is generally treated as Pseudo-Tertullian.
- OTHER Adversus Omnes Haereses (New Advent) PDTrans. Peter Holmes and S. Thelwall · 1885Adversus Omnes Haereses in the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation (volume 3, 1885), translated by S. Thelwall, on New Advent as a single continuous page with the chapter divisions kept and the editors' notes gathered at the foot. No introduction and no apparatus — the plainest way to read it straight through. A manageable single sitting for most readers. The attribution is not secure — this piece travels under Tertullian's name but is generally treated as Pseudo-Tertullian.
- OTHER Adversus Omnes Haereses (The Latin Library (Latin)) LatinAdversus Omnes Haereses in Tertullian's Latin, unaccompanied: no translation, no introduction and no notes — just the text, section-numbered, on one page at The Latin Library. For readers working with the original, or checking an English rendering against it. The attribution is not secure — this piece travels under Tertullian's name but is generally treated as Pseudo-Tertullian.