that Saviour [became flesh] who was formed by a special dispensation [out of all the Æons], and was of later date than the Word. 3. Learn then, ye foolish men, that Jesus who suffered for us, and who dwelt among us, is Himself the Word of God. For if any other of the Æons had become flesh for our salvation, it would have been probable that the apostle spoke of another. But if the Word of the Father who descended is the same also that ascended, He, namely, the Only-begotten Son of the only God, who, according to the good pleasure of the Father, became flesh for the sake of men, the apostle certainly does not speak regarding any other, or concerning any Ogdoad, but respecting our Lord Jesus Christ. For, according to them, the Word did not originally become flesh. For they maintain that the Saviour assumed an animal body, formed in ac- cordance with a special dispensation by an unspeakable providence, so as to become visible and palpable. But flesh is that which was of old formed for Adam by God out of the dust, and it is this that John has declared the Word of God became. Thus is their primary and first-begotten Ogdoad brought to nought. For, since Logos, and Monogenes, and Zoe, and Phōs, and Soter, and Christus, and the Son of God, and He who became incarnate for us, have been proved to be one and the same, the Ogdoad which they have built up at once falls 330 to pieces. And when this is destroyed, their whole system sinks into ruin,—a system which they falsely dream into existence, and thus inflict injury on the Scriptures, while they build up their own hypothesis. 4. Then, again, collecting a set of expressions and names scattered here and there [in Scripture], they twist them, as we have already said, from a natural to a non-natural sense. In so doing, they act like those who bring forward any kind of hypothesis they fancy, and then endeavour to support133 them out of the poems of Homer, so that the ignorant imagine that Homer actually composed the verses bearing upon that hypothesis, which has, in fact, been but newly constructed; and many others are led so far by the regularly-formed sequence of the verses, as to doubt whether Homer may not have composed them. Of this kind134 is the following passage, where one, describing Hercules as having been sent by Eurystheus to the dog in the infernal regions, does so by means of these Homeric verses,—for there can be no objection to our citing these by way of illustration, since the same sort of attempt ap- pears in both:— ““Thus saying, there sent forth from his house deeply groaning.”—Od., x. 76. “The hero Hercules conversant with mighty deeds.”—Od., xxi. 26. “Eurystheus, the son of Sthenelus, descended from Perseus.”—Il., xix. 123. 133 It is difficult to give an exact rendering of μελετᾶν in this passage; the old Lat. version translates it by meditari, which Massuet proposes to render “skilfully to fit.” 134 Tertullian refers (Præscrip. Hær.) to those Homeric centos of which a specimen follows. We have given each line as it stands in the original: the text followed by Irenæus differs slightly from the received text. 874 Chapter IX.—Refutation of the impious interpretations of these heretics