Page:The Apocryphal Acts of Paul, Peter, John, Andrew and Thomas.djvu/219

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Leucian Acts of Andrew, like those of other apostles, are mentioned first by Eusebius (loc. cit., III, 25). Ephiphanius (d. 403) states that the Acts of Andrew were in favor with the Encratites (i.e., those sects which rejected as absolutely unlawful the use of marriage, of flesh meat, and of wine, hæres, 47, where the Acts of John, Thomas, and other Acts are also mentioned); the Apostolics (also called Apotactici, i. e., " Renunciants," who condemned marriage and rejected private property. They appealed chiefly to the Acts of Andrew and of Thomas, hæres, 61); the Origenians, or eunuchs (hæres, 63). These sects point to Asia Minor, where the Leucian Acts, as we stated above, were composed. Augustine (d. 430) mentions that the Acts of the Apostles, written by Leucius Charinus—"discipulus diaboli" (i. e., a disciple of the devil), as Pope Gelasius (d. 496) calls him—were held in estimation by the Manichseans (contra adversar. legis et prophet., I, 20). Philastrius of Brescia (hæres, 88) speaks of two kinds of Acts of Andrew. The authorship generally is attributed to Leucius by early writers; Innocentius, I. (d. 417), however, says that the Acts of Andrew were composed by the philosophers Nexocharis and Leonidas, which may perhaps be a mistake for Leucius Charinus.

Of the material of the Acts of Andrew, which still recently has come to us, two passages preserved by Euodius of Uzala, a cotemporary of Augustine, in his De fide contra Manichæos, c. p. XXXVIII, have been designated as original. Later revisions of the original Acts made it impossible to obtain a true state of the original Acts, and it is due to the labors of Prof. Bonnet, that we now have what may be considered a part of the ancient Acts. Following Hennecke, who also gives a critique of the sources, we give:

a. [Listen what you hear in the Acts of Leucius, which he wrote under the name of the apostles