Less distinctive than this, although equally noticeable, is the play of words which is here frequently employed. This is not unknown among other ecclesiastical writers of the time, and seems to have struck Charles Kingsley when, fresh from a perusal of St. Augustine, he describes him as “by a sheer mistranslation” twisting one of the Psalms to mean what it never meant in the writer’s mind, and what it never could mean, and then punning on the Latin version.[75] Hippolytus when writing in his own person makes but moderate use of this figure. Sometimes he does so legitimately enough, as when he speaks of the Gnostics initiating a convert into their systems and delivering to him “the perfection of wickedness”--the word used for perfection having the mystic or technical meaning of initiation as well as the more ordinary one of completion[76]; or when he says that the measurements of stellar distances by Ptolemy have led to the construction of measureless “heresies.”[77] At others he consciously puns on the double meaning of a word, as when he says that those who venture upon orgies are not far from the wrath (ὀργή) of God.[78] Sometimes, again, he is led away by a merely accidental similarity of sounds as when he tries to connect the name of the Docetæ, which he knows is taken from δοκεῖν, “to seem,” with “the _beam_ (δοκός) in the eye” of the Sermon on the Mount.[79] He makes a second and more obvious pun on the same word later when he says that the Docetæ do more than _seem_ to be mad; but he is most shameless when he derives “prophet” from προφαίνειν instead of πρόφημι[80]--a perversion which one can hardly imagine entering into the head of any one with the most modest acquaintance with Greek grammar.
But these puns, bad as they are, are venial compared with some of the authors from whom he quotes. None can equal in this respect the efforts of the Naassene author, whose plays upon words and audacious derivations might put to the blush those in the _Cratylus_. Adamas and Adam, Corybas and κορυφή (the head), Geryon and Γηρυόνην (“flowing from earth”), Mesopotamia and “a river from the middle,” Papas and παῦε, παῦε (“Cease! cease!”), Αἰπόλος (“goat herd”) and ἀεὶ πολῶν (“ever turning”), _naas_ (“serpent”) and ναός (“temple”), Euphrates and εὐφραίνει (“he rejoices”) are but a few of the terrible puns he perpetrates.[81] The Peratic author is more sober in this respect, and yet he, or perhaps Hippolytus for him, derives the name of the sect from περᾶν (“to pass beyond”),[82] although Theodoret with more plausibility would take it from the nationality of its teacher Euphrates the Peratic or Mede; and the chapter on the Sethians does not contain a single pun. Yet that on Justinus makes up for this by deriving the name of the god Priapus from πριοποιέω, a word made up for the occasion.[83] “The great Gnostics of Hadrian’s time,” viz.:--Basilides, Marcion and Valentinus, seem to have had souls above such puerilities; but the Docetic author resumes the habit with a specially daring parallel between Βάτος (“a bush”) and βάτος (Hera’s robe or “mist”)[84] and Monoimus the Arab follows suit with a sort of jingle between the Decalogue and the δεκάπληγος or ten plagues of Egypt, which would hardly have occurred to any one without the Semitic taste for assonance.[85] Of the less-quoted writers there is no occasion to speak, because there are either no extracts from their works given in our text or they are too short for us to judge from them whether they, too, were given to punning.