The first century church was already seeing the results of many heresies,

each of them the result of the same error.

There is this danger amongst Christians to want to find certainty in the wrong place.

We want to find certainty by the Holy Spirit still guaranteeing that we're right,

or we want to find certainty by an infallible bishop that is always reliable no matter what happens.

And the truth is when we look into the Word of God we discover there's only one place for certainty

and that's in the Bible. Our tendency for error is built into our sinful hearts.

We desire to find our own way and we're going to see that plainly in today's edition of renewing your mind.

We welcome you to our program today as we continue Dr. W. Robert Cotfrey series,

a Survey of Church History. Today he concentrates on some of the heresies of the early church,

but also the defenders of the faith, the early apologists from the first and second centuries.

Let's join Dr. Cotfrey now.

We're returning to our subject of defenders of the faith, the apologists who in those early days,

which were no golden age, had to face all sorts of faults teaching, all sorts of challenges,

all sorts of difficulties that the church confronted. We look last time a little bit at Justin

Martyr in the way in which he tried to explain how Christians were inheritors of the Old Testament,

how he tried to answer paganism. And today we want to look a little bit at some of the other challenges,

what we might call heretical challenges, challenges from people who claimed they were Christians,

indeed better Christians than the main line of the church and were constantly challenging the church.

One large group that goes under a very broad label of challenge is a movement known as Nosticism.

Nosticism is a movement derived from the Greek word Knosus for knowledge. The Nostics claimed that

they had special knowledge, that they had more knowledge. The Nostics appealed to several factors in

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