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Dear catholic.com visitors: This Catholic Answers website, with all its free resources, is the world’s largest source of explanations for Catholic beliefs and practices. We receive no funding from the institutional Church and rely entirely on your generosity to sustain this website with trustworthy, accessible content. If every visitor this month donated $1, catholic.com would be fully funded for an entire year. If you’ve never made a gift, now is the time. Your donation will be matched dollar for dollar this week only. Thanks and God bless.

Apelles

Founder of a Gnostic sect (d. late in the second century)

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Apelles, founder of a Gnostic sect; d. at an advanced age late in the second century. What little is known of his life is gleaned chiefly from fragments of the writings of his antagonist Rhodon, preserved by Eusebius (Hist. Eccl., V, xii), and from Tertullian‘s “Prescription against Heretics” (xxx). At Rome he separated from Marcion, whose most famous pupil he was, and went to Alexandria, where he met the visionary Philumene, whose utterances he regarded as inspired. Besides collecting her oracles in a book entitled “Manifestations”, he wrote an extensive work, Eullogismoi an attack on Mosaic theology. The moral character of Apelles is differently estimated according as one is influenced either by Rhodon’s uncolored picture of the aged heresiarch, or by the stories of scandals in his early life to which Tertullian, not without exaggeration, refers.

JOHN B. PETERSON


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