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>The Cerinthians, supposedly named after a heretical teacher named Cerinthus, were another Jewish Adoptionist sect that was also semi-Gnostic. Like the Gnostics, they believed that the world had been created by a Demiurge who was not the highest god, but unlike the Gnostics they believed the Demiurge was good, equivalent to the Logos or “Word” of God referenced by both the Gospel of John and the Jewish Middle Platonist Philo. According to Epiphanius, the Cerinthians only used the Gospel of Matthew, but he also said that there were also anti-Logos followers of Jesus in Anatolian Phrygia who claimed that the Gospel of John had been written by Cerinthus. That certainly would not be true of our canonical version of John but my own speculation is that a Cerinthian wrote an earlier version of John hypothesized by the famed Lutheran theologian and Biblical scholar Rudolf Bultmann called the Signs Gospel. The Cerinthians appear to have combined Jewish and Platonic ideas together, such as having an Endtime eschatology consist of not one but two apocalypses, the first one ushering in the Jewish idea of the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth centered in Jerusalem with the Platonic idea of the second apocalypse consisting of souls exiting their bodies and going up to heaven. This perfectly matches up with the dual-resurrection eschatology and Logos terminology in the Apocalypse of John (Rev. 20), indicating that our version of that book also had a Cerinthian editor. This Cerinthian “Premilliannialism” was ultimately declared heretical by the Council of Nicaea in 325. The Cerinthian version of the Gospel of Matthew included the genealogy but, following an Adoptionst Christology, it did not include the virgin birth narrative
