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Prodicians

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Prodicus

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a body of Antinomian Gnostic heretics, took their name from their founder, Prodicus, a heretic of the 2d century, who instituted the sect of the Adamites. Prodicus maintained that he and his followers were the sons of the most high God, a royal race (εὐγενεῖς ), and therefore, in crazy self- conceit, thought themselves bound by no laws. They rejected the Sabbath; dispensed with prayer and all ordinances of external worship, which they considered to be necessary only for those who were under the power of the Demiurge. They indulged in open profligacy, calling themselves Adamites, because they professed to imitate the condition of bodily life which marked our first parents before their fall. Their maxim was that they were restored by Christ to a state of innocence equal to that which characterized Adam before his transgression; and that, therefore, whenever they appeared together, they should not be ashamed to appear as Adam did in the time of his innocence. They were in the habit of appealing to the authority of certain apocryphal books which were attributed to Zoroaster. Prodicus is placed by Baronius in A.D. 120, before Valentinus. His followers are sometimes identified with the Adamites, and sometimes with the Origenists. See Clement Alex. Strom. i, 304; 3, 438; 7:722; Theodoret, Fab. Hoeret. i. 6; Farrar, Ecclesiastes Dict. s.v.; Neander, Church Hist. i, 451.