According to Irenaeus, a 2nd century Church Father, the church at Rome was founded directly by the apostles Peter and Paul.

According to some biblical scholars, the findings at Nag Hammadi have shown Irenaeus ' description of Gnosticism to be largely inaccurate and polemic in nature.

According to Irenaeus, the high point in salvation history is the advent of Jesus.

According to Irenaeus, Polycarp was a companion of Papias, another " hearer of John " as Irenaeus interprets Papias ' testimony, and a correspondent of Ignatius of Antioch.

According to Irenaeus, during the time his fellow Syrian, Anicetus, was Bishop of Rome, in the 150s or 160, Polycarp visited Rome to discuss the differences that existed between Asia and Rome " with regard to certain things " and especially about the time of the Easter festivals.

According to Irenaeus, it was during his pontificate that the aged Polycarp of Smyrna, a disciple of John the Evangelist, visited Rome to discuss the celebration of Passover with Anicetus.

According to Irenaeus, the Judaistic Ebionites charged less than one hundred years after the Apostles that the Christians overruled the authority of Scripture by failing to keep the Mosaic Law ( see also Biblical law in Christianity ).

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, Melito was a Chiliast, and believed in a Millennial reign of Christ on Earth, and followed Irenaeus in his views.

According to Irenaeus the Aeon Autogenes emits the true and perfect Anthrôpos, also called Adamas ; he has a helpmate, " Perfect Knowledge ", and receives an irresistible force, so that all things rest in him.

According to Irenaeus, Polycarp told the story that John the Apostle, in particular, is said to have so detested Cerinthus that he once fled a bathhouse when he found out Cerinthus was inside, yelling " Let us flee, lest the building fall down ; for Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is inside!

According to Hippolytus, Basilides was apparently a pantheistic evolutionist ; and according to Irenaeus, a dualist and an emanationist.

According to the writings of Irenaeus ( d. c. 202 ), the Roman church had celebrated Easter on a Sunday at least since the time of Bishop Xystus ( Sixtus I, 115 – 125 ).

According to Hippolytus, Basilides was apparently a pantheistic evolutionist ; and according to Irenaeus, a dualist and an emanationist.

According to both Hippolytus and Irenaeus, the Basilidians denied that the God of the Jews was the supreme God.

According to Irenaeus, the Basilidians believed the God of the Jews was inferior to the 365 sets of Archons above him, as well as the powers, principalities, Dynamis and Sophia, Phronesis, Logos, Nûs, and finally the Unbegotten Father.

According to Frederik Wisse ( 1981 ) all subsequent accounts appear to be largely dependent on Irenaeus.

According to Irenaeus, the Valentinians believed that at the beginning there was a Pleroma, also known as the ‘ fullness ’.

According to it the Gallican Rite was referred to an original brought to Lyon from Ephesus by St. Pothinus and St. Irenaeus, who had received it through St. Polycarp from St. John the Divine.

According to Irenaeus, Papias was " a hearer of John and a companion of Polycarp, a man of primitive times ," who wrote a volume in " five books.

According to the teaching of Arius, the preexistent Logos and thus the incarnate Jesus Christ was a created being ; that only the Son was directly created and begotten by God the Father, before ages, but was of a distinct, though similar, essence or substance from the Creator ; his opponents argued that this would make Jesus less than God, and that this was heretical.

According to Arminius, " God regards no one in Christ unless they are engrafted in him by faith.

According to this view, though Mark has Jesus as the Son of God, references occurring at the strategic points in 1: 1 (" The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God ", but not in all versions, see Mark 1 ), 5: 7 (" What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?

According to Hippolytus of Rome ( Philosophumena, VII, xxiii ) Theodotus taught that Jesus was a man born of a virgin, according to the Council of Jerusalem, that he lived like other men, and was most pious ; but that at his baptism in the Jordan the " Christ " came down upon the man Jesus in the likeness of a dove.

According to the synoptic gospels, Christ generalised the law into two underlying principles ; The first is Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one ; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.

According to Paul the Apostle, marriage is a social obligation that has the potential of distracting from Christ.

According to Christian Science, Christ is " the divine manifestation of God, which comes to the flesh to destroy incarnate error.

According to Clement, it is through faith in Christ that we are enlightened and come to know God.

According to Clement, there is no way of empirically testing the existence of God the Father, because the Logos has revelatory, not analysable meaning, although Christ was an object of the senses.

According to Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, the purpose of modern Christology is to formulate the Christian belief that " God became man and that God-made-man is the individual Jesus Christ " in a manner that this statement can be understood consistently, without the confusions of past debates and mythologies.

According to a number of scholars, the Christ story contains mythical themes such as descent to the underworld, the heroic monomyth, and the " dying god " ( see section below on " mythical themes and types ").

According to this tradition, when Christ is crucified, his blood falls on Adam's skull, buried at the foot of the cross, and redeems him.

According to Christian tradition, Christ descended to hell after his death, in order to free the souls there ; this event is known as the harrowing of hell.

According to tradition, bits of hay are spread beneath the tablecloth as a reminder that Christ was born in a manger.

According to their website, one of the reasons for transitioning from COCU to CUIC is so that member churches " stop ' consulting ' and start living their unity in Christ more fully.

According to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, such spiritual practices are, in and of themselves, inspired by promptings from the light of Christ or the Holy Spirit that are communications with an individual's divine essence or spirit that is linked directly to God through pre-existence as his offspring.

According to this tradition, after the Ascension of Jesus, Mary went to the Emperor of Rome and greeted him with " Christ has risen ," whereupon he pointed to an egg on his table and stated, " Christ has no more risen than that egg is red.

According to Jesuit scholar Joseph Fitzmyer, the book, " overwhelms the reader by the density and sublimity of the topic with which it deals, the gospel of the justification and salvation of Jew and Greek alike by the grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ, revealing the uprightness and love of God the father.

According to one scholar, John portrays Jesus Christ as " a brief manifestation of the eternal Word, whose immortal spirit remains ever-present with the believing Christian.

* " The Hound of Heaven " is the title of the fifth chapter in Robert L. Short's 1965 book The Gospel According to Peanuts where he describes Snoopy as a " little Christ " carrying out " Christ's ambivalent work of humbling the exalted and exalting the humble.

According to Lampridius, the emperor Alexander Severus ( 222 – 235 ), who was not a Christian, had kept a domestic chapel for the veneration of images of deified emperors, of portraits of his ancestors, and of Christ, Apollonius, Orpheus and Abraham.

According to John of Damascus, anyone who tries to destroy icons " is the enemy of Christ, the Holy Mother of God and the saints, and is the defender of the Devil and his demons.