heresiology

“The Gospel of Judas can be dated even more narrowly, since a version of it figures in the writing of Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons, who composed the first major surviving "heresiology," or account of heretical theologies and groups, around 180 CE.”

The Case for Judas, Continued

“If interest in the heresies he combated may be said to be confined to-day to scholars who study them as a chapter in heresiology, or seek in them a bone of contention, the interest in the points of ecclesiastical order delineated by him was never more intense than now.”

The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886

“As in heresiology, polemics sets itself the task of determining the intangible point of dogma, the fundamental and necessary principle that the adversary has neglected, ignored or transgressed; and it denounces this negligence as a moral failing; at the root of the error, it finds passion, desire, interest, a whole series of weaknesses and inadmissible attachments that establish it as culpable.”

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