Again, at Ephesus St. John could best combat and confute, both by his words and writings, the subtle and deadly heresies which were especially rife there. "False Christs," such as Simon Magus, the first heretic, Menander, Dositheus, and others, no longer troubled the Infant Church with their blasphemous impostures, but in their stead false teachers had arisen, seeking to "draw away disciples after them" into the more subtle error of misbelief about our Lord and His Incarnation. [Sidenote: Errors of the Corinthians.] [Sidenote: The Docetae, and other variations of Gnosticism.] Thus the Jew Corinthus taught that Christ was a mere man, born like other men, though united to Divinity from His Baptism to His Crucifixion; whilst to the errors of the Corinthians the Docetae added that the Body in which our Blessed Saviour suffered, was only a phantom, and a body but in appearance; both these heresies, {51} and others of a similar nature, appear to have been variations of that Gnosticism to which St. Paul refers in his Epistles, as "science" (or gnosis) "falsely so called[7]," and which was long a source of danger and trouble to the Church. Gnosticism may be traced back to that Simon Magus, with whom St. John first came in contact at Samaria, and in all its varied distortions of the great Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation, through an admixture of Jewish and heathen error, there was always an unvarying denial of our Lord's Divinity. [Sidenote: St. John's universal patriarchate.] For about a third of a century St. John continued to exercise a kind of universal patriarchate over the Church, being regarded, we cannot doubt, with almost unbounded reverence and affection by all its members, and perhaps first presenting that idea of one visible earthly head of the Church, which afterwards found its expression in the popedom. Section 4. _St. John's Writings._ [Sidenote: St. John's writings close the Canon.] The Gospel, Epistles, and Revelation of St. John, written as they were at a long interval after the rest of the New Testament, and closing the Canon of Sacred Scripture, may be usefully referred to, as giving us some idea of the appearance of the Church when its government and theology were finally settled. [Sidenote: How his Gospel differs from the other three.]