By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God:
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Augustine of Hippo
AD 430
Our ears, so to say, are on the alert for discerning of the spirits; and we have been told something, such that thereby we discern not a whit the more. For what says he? Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ came in the flesh, is of God. Then is the spirit that is among the heretics, of God, seeing they confess that Jesus Christ came in the flesh? Aye, here perchance they lift themselves up against us, and say: You have not the Spirit from God; but we confess that Jesus Christ came in the flesh: but the apostle here has said that those have not the Spirit of God, who confess not that Jesus Christ came in the flesh. Ask the Arians: they confess that Jesus Christ came in the flesh: ask the Eunomians; they confess that Jesus Christ came in the flesh: ask the Macedonians; they confess that Jesus Christ came in the flesh: put the question to the Cataphryges; they confess that Jesus Christ came in the flesh: put it to the Novatians; they confess that Jesus Christ came in the flesh. T...
By this is the Spirit of God known. He gives the new converts first this general mark, by which they might have good grounds to think that the teachers they met with in those days had a good spirit, were of God, if they confessed and acknowledged Jesus Christ to have come from heaven and to have been made flesh, or made man; i.e. to be truly God and truly man. But if (ver. 3) they met with teachers of such a spirit as dissolveth Jesus, by denying him either to be the Messias or to be truly God, or to be a true man, they might conclude for certain that such men had not a true spirit, but were heretics, antichrists, and forerunners of the great antichrist. Such, even in St. John's time, was Simon the magician, who, according to St. Epiphanius, (hær. xxi. p. 55. Ed Petav.) pretended among his countrymen, the Samaritans, that he himself was God the Father, and among the Jews that he was God the Son, and that Jesus suffered death in appearance only. His disciple also, Menander, said he was ...
