John’s Opponents, yet again

The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica mentions Wurm’s thesis that John’s opponents were Jewish Christians, but concludes that “the antithesis of John and Cerinthus, unlike that of Paul and Cerinthus (Epiph. Haer. xxviii.), is too well based in the tradition of the early Church to be dismissed as a later dogmatic reflection, and the internal evidence of this manifesto corroborates it clearly.”

But that assumes that Cerinthus was not Jewish, an assumption contradicted by the very source that the Encyclopedia cites – Number 28 from Epiphanius’s “medicine chest” of heresies, which describes Cerinthus as a Jewish heretic who advocated circumcision.