Reading Prayer To Saints Into Hippolytus

Prayer to saints is absent and contradicted among the relevant sources during the thousands of years of history of the Biblical era. It's also widely absent and contradicted among the earliest extrabiblical Christians. For the evidence to that effect, see here.

So, advocates of the practice have resorted to claiming that it's supported by material like the Mount of Transfiguration account in the gospels and Matthew 27:47. They also appeal to various apocryphal documents, anonymous inscriptions and manuscript fragments, etc. I've responded to such arguments in other posts. Since the lack of support for prayer to saints among the earlier church fathers is so problematic for advocates of the practice, they read it into some of those fathers to try to make the practice seem more credible. Among the earlier fathers, Hippolytus is the one who's most abused in this context. And I've addressed those abuses in other posts over the years, like here.

In the remainder of this post, I want to focus on a few other efforts advocates of prayer to saints have made to find the practice in Hippolytus. I'll start by quoting the relevant passage with emphasis added (in bold, italics, and underlining):

Did Hippolytus support prayer to saints?

Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have been citing him in support of the practice for a long time, including in response to Gavin Ortlund's recent video on praying to saints. Few Protestants have addressed Hippolytus' view to any significant extent. I've been writing about it for many years, like here. You can go there for an overview of some relevant material in Hippolytus, some of the arguments involved, and so forth. For the purposes of this post, I'll just quote one passage, the one advocates of prayer to saints keep bringing up:

Is there support for December 25 as Jesus' birthdate prior to the Council of Nicaea?

A book on the origins of the Christmas holiday came out earlier this year, Jozef Naumowicz's The Origin Of The Feast Of The Nativity In The Patristic Perspective (Berlin, Germany: Peter Lang GmbH, 2024). A section of the book describing the author refers to Naumowicz as "a member of the Committee of Historical Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is the author and editor of many publications in the field of ancient Christianity and patrology, as well as the editor of the Library of the Church Fathers series." He argues that the December 25 date for Jesus' birth and the celebration of his birth on that day aren't found in any source prior to the Council of Nicaea, but he also argues that the date and the holiday weren't influenced by paganism in any significant way. So, he assigns a late date to the holiday, but denies that it's pagan or an attempt to compete with paganism. I disagree with him on the first point, but agree with him on the second. I'll explain why I disagree with him in this post, then I'll cite some of his comments where I agree with him in a later post. The book is worth getting for his material on the pagan influence issue, even if you disagree with him on the dating of the December 25 date and the holiday.

Early Roman Opposition To Praying To The Dead And Angels

One of the most neglected issues in debates between Protestants and Roman Catholics (and Protestants and Eastern Orthodox) is who we should pray to. Prayer is a major aspect of life, and there's strong Biblical and extrabiblical evidence for the Protestant view that we should pray only to God, but the issue is seldom brought up in discussions between Protestants and Catholics. And when it is brought up, the evidence for the Protestant view is typically highly underestimated (including by the Protestant side). For a collection of links to some of our posts on the subject, see here.

What I want to focus on in this post, however, is the evidence we have for early opposition to praying to the deceased and angels in the city of Rome. That has a lot of significance in the context of evaluating Roman Catholicism. Regarding some evidence from Hermas, an early Roman Christian, see here and here. On Justin Martyr, who spent some time in Rome, see here. Irenaeus also spent some time in Rome. The post here discusses his view of prayer, among other issues. And see here on Hippolytus. Since Hippolytus is sometimes misrepresented as having supported prayers to the dead in his commentary on the book of Daniel, I want to note that we have some posts in our archives refuting that misrepresentation, such as here.

Did Hippolytus pray to Daniel's companions?

Roman Catholics and other advocates of praying to the dead often appeal to a passage in Hippolytus as evidence of the supposed earliness of the practice. For example, Catholic theologian Ludwig Ott wrote:

"The invocation of the saints is first attested by St. Hippolytus of Rome, who turns to the three companions of Daniel with the prayer: 'Think of me, I beseech you, so that I may achieve with you the same fate of martyrdom.' (In Dan. II, 30)." (Fundamentals Of Catholic Dogma [Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1974], 319)

There are a lot of problems with that use of Hippolytus, and I've discussed some of those problems before. What I want to do in this post is address a line of evidence I don't recall having seen anybody else mention.

Hippolytus And Prayers To The Dead

Praying to the deceased is an unbiblical and antibiblical practice with no foundation in the earliest generations of church history. See the articles on the subject linked here. The Roman Catholic theologian Ludwig Ott wrote: