Fate: Condemned as heretical by the late 1st century; community disappears by mid-2nd century. No writings survive — known only through hostile accounts of Irenaeus, Epiphanius, and Eusebius.

Cerinthus taught a sharp distinction between the supreme God and the inferior creator-god (demiurge) who made the world — anticipating the fuller Gnostic systems of the 2nd century. His Christology was adoptionist: the divine Christ descended on the human Jesus at baptism and departed before the crucifixion, meaning the man Jesus suffered but the divine Christ did not. Irenaeus claims the Gospel of John was written specifically to refute Cerinthus. Eusebius preserves a story of the apostle John fleeing a bathhouse when Cerinthus entered, crying ‘Let us flee before the bathhouse falls, for Cerinthus the enemy of truth is inside.’ Whether historical or not, the story captures the patristic intensity of the opposition.

What happens when a group is declared heretical: The process is rarely sudden. It typically begins with episcopal letters condemning a teaching, escalates to synodal condemnation at a regional council, and — after Constantine — can be ratified by an ecumenical council backed by imperial authority. Once condemned: (1) Leaders are excommunicated, exiled, or — in later centuries — handed to secular authorities for execution. (2) Writings are ordered burned; possession becomes a criminal offense. Eusebius records that after Nicaea, Constantine ordered Arian books destroyed under penalty of death. The same logic applied to Gnostic texts — which is why the Nag Hammadi library was buried in a sealed jar around 367 AD, the same year Athanasius’s Easter letter listed the NT canon and ordered non-canonical books removed from churches. (3) Communities are dissolved by force where state power reaches; in regions beyond imperial reach they survive for centuries. (4) Memory is controlled — the only surviving accounts of most heresies are hostile summaries by their opponents (Irenaeus, Tertullian, Epiphanius’s Panarion), meaning we are largely reading prosecution briefs, not the groups’ own self-understanding.