Irenaeus

• 1. Introduction

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  Irenaeus was a Greek bishop who, around the year 180, sat down to dismantle a rival vision of Christianity that promised secret wisdom to a chosen few. His weapon was a book whose full title runs On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis, though history remembers it by its shorter name, Against Heresies. He had a personal claim to authority that few of his contemporaries could match. As a boy in Smyrna he had seen and heard Polycarp preach, and Polycarp was said to have heard John the Evangelist himself. That chain of memory shaped everything he wrote. How does a man use a childhood memory to settle a war over what Christianity even is? Why would a bishop in southern Gaul become the figure who first insisted that exactly four gospels, no more and no fewer, belonged together? And why, more than eighteen centuries later, in 2022, would Pope Francis give him a brand-new title no one had carried before?

• 2. From Smyrna To Lyon

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  Smyrna, in Anatolia, the city now called İzmir in Turkey, gave Irenaeus his start, and it gave him Polycarp. He was born some time before Polycarp's death, around 155 AD. Unlike many believers of his day who converted as adults, he grew up inside a Christian family. That upbringing set him apart from contemporaries who came to the faith late.

  A persecution of Christians struck the area around Lyon during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor from 161 to 180. Irenaeus was then a priest of the Church of Lyon, a city where many of the clergy were imprisoned for their faith. In 177 those clergy sent him to Rome carrying a letter to Pope Eleutherius about the heresy of Montanism. The errand was also a testimony to how much they trusted him.

  While Irenaeus was away in Rome, the Lyon persecution ran its course and claimed the bishop Saint Pothinus as a martyr. Returning to Gaul, Irenaeus succeeded Pothinus and became the second bishop of Lyon. He divided his work between the duties of a pastor and those of a missionary, though only brief and uncertain records of that activity survive. Gnosticism was not a distant problem for him; he wrote that followers of a teacher called Marcus the Magician were living and teaching in the Rhone valley.

• 3. The Case Against Gnosis

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  Against Heresies was built like a prosecutor's brief, in five books. In Book I, Irenaeus describes the Valentinian Gnostics and their predecessors, tracing them back as far as the magician Simon Magus. Book II argues that Valentinianism has no merit in its doctrines. Book III tries to prove the doctrines false using counter-evidence from the Gospels. Book IV gathers the sayings of Jesus and presses the unity of the Old Testament and the Gospel, while Book V turns to more sayings of Jesus and the letters of Paul.

  Greek merchants had reportedly begun a speaking campaign in Irenaeus's bishopric, teaching that the material world was the accidental creation of an evil god, a place to escape through gnosis. Irenaeus answered that the true gnosis is knowledge of Christ, which redeems bodily existence rather than fleeing it. He praised the Church directly, writing that the apostles had placed all that pertains to truth in her "as in a rich treasury, the apostles have placed all that pertains to truth, so that everyone can drink this beverage of life. She is the door of life."

  Until the discovery of the Library of Nag Hammadi in 1945, this book was the best-surviving description of Gnosticism. Some scholars argued the Nag Hammadi findings exposed Irenaeus as inaccurate and polemical. The religious historian Elaine Pagels faulted him for casting Gnostic groups as sexual libertines, when some of their own writings urged chastity more strongly than orthodox texts did. Yet the modern consensus holds that he was fairly accurate, since the Nag Hammadi texts show not one unified system but the divergent beliefs of many sects, some libertine and some sternly chaste.

• 4. Four Gospels, One Faith

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  Before Irenaeus, Christians could not agree on which gospel to favor. The Christians of Anatolia preferred the Gospel of John, while the Gospel of Matthew was the most popular overall. Irenaeus insisted that all four gospels, John, Luke, Matthew, and Mark, were canonical scripture, listing them in that order in his four-pillar narrative in Against Heresies III 11,8. He stands as the earliest witness to the assertion of the four canonical Gospels, possibly reacting to Marcion, who edited the Gospel of Luke and claimed it as the one true gospel.

  The novelty of his position shows in his own pages. Against Heresies 3.11.7 admits that many heterodox Christians used only one gospel, while 3.11.9 admits that some used more than four. The success of Tatian's Diatessaron, a harmony of the four gospels composed around 160 to 175, signals that the fourfold gospel Irenaeus sponsored was not yet broadly recognized.

  Irenaeus reached further into the New Testament than the gospels alone. Scholars contend he quotes from 21 of the 27 New Testament books, citing the New Testament roughly 1,000 times, with about a third of those citations drawn from Paul's letters. He may refer to Hebrews and James but does not cite Philemon, and the frequency table of his Pauline references shows zero allusions to Philemon against 102 to First Corinthians. He is also the earliest to name John the Apostle as the author of the Gospel of John and Luke, the companion of Paul, as the author of the Gospel of Luke.

• 5. The Chain Of Witnesses

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  Apostolic succession was Irenaeus's answer to a Gnostic boast. His opponents claimed a secret oral tradition handed down from Jesus himself, so he argued that the bishops of different cities could be named all the way back to the Apostles. That public lineage, he said, was a safe guide to interpreting Scripture, while the Gnostics had no such traceable claim.

  The Roman church served as his prime example of an unbroken chain of authority. That passage became a fixture of later Catholic-Protestant argument, used to assert the primacy of Rome over the Eastern churches. The succession of bishops and presbyters mattered to him because it established a chain of custody for orthodoxy.

  His deeper point was about agreement rather than any single throne. All the Apostolic churches, he argued, had preserved the same teachings through many independent streams of transmission. The unanimous agreement among those separate streams was what proved the orthodox faith true. He also relied on what he called the Rule of Faith, a proto-creed resembling the Apostles' Creed, as a key for reading Scripture correctly.

• 6. A Benign Infection

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  Unity and goodness sit at the center of Irenaeus's idea of God, set against the Gnostic picture of many divine emanations, called Aeons, and a split between the Monad and the Demiurge. He drew on Logos theology, common in second-century Christian thought, and spoke of the Son and the Spirit as the "hands of God," while also calling the Son the "Logos." His emphasis on one God carried into one continuous story of salvation, planned by God from the start.

  Humanity, in his view, was created immature, and God intended his creatures to take a long time to grow into the divine likeness. He believed the world was deliberately made a difficult place, where people must make moral decisions in order to mature. He likened death to the great fish that swallowed Jonah, since only in the belly of the whale could Jonah turn to God and act according to the divine will.

  Christ stands as the new Adam who systematically undoes what Adam did. Where Adam disobeyed over the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Christ obeyed even to death on the wood of a tree. Irenaeus was the first to draw a comparison between Eve and Mary, contrasting the faithlessness of one with the faithfulness of the other. He conceived salvation as coming chiefly through the Incarnation: by uniting himself to human nature in Christ, the immortal and incorruptible God conveyed those qualities to us, spreading, as it were, like a benign infection.

• 7. How Old Was Jesus

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  Recapitulation required Christ to pass through every stage of human life, from infancy to old age, sanctifying each one with his divinity. That conviction led Irenaeus to an unusual claim: that Jesus did not die until he was older than is conventionally portrayed. The Gnostics held that Jesus, baptized at thirty as Luke 3:23 says, preached only one year and suffered while still a young man.

  Irenaeus marshaled scripture to add years to that timeline. He counted three separate visits to Jerusalem in the gospels, the first around the turning of water into wine and the Paschal feast, the second around the curing of the paralytic at Passover, and the third when Jesus eats the Passover and suffers the following day. He also pointed to John 8:57, where opponents say Jesus was not yet fifty, arguing that if Jesus were merely in his thirties they would have said he was not yet forty rather than weaken their own case.

  For his witnesses he cited the Elders of Asia who had conferred with John the Lord's disciple, noting that John "abode with them until the times of Trajan." In his other surviving work, The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, he recounts how Pontius Pilate, governor of Judaea, sent the bound Christ to Herod the king as an occasion for reconciliation. Pilate was prefect of the Roman province of Judaea from AD 26 to 36, serving under Emperor Tiberius, while Herod Antipas ruled as tetrarch of Galilee and Perea from 4 BC to 39 AD.

• 8. Bones, Books, And A New Title

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  Irenaeus's last recorded action came around 190 or 191, reported by Eusebius 150 years later. During the Quartodeciman Controversy, Pope Victor I tried to force a universal fasting practice until Easter and threatened to excommunicate the Christian communities of Anatolia, led by Polycrates, who kept the old paschal feast. Irenaeus and other bishops judged this a step too far and pressed Victor not to cut them off.

  Nothing certain is known of the date of his death, which must have fallen at the end of the second century or the beginning of the third. He was buried under the Church of Saint John in Lyon, later renamed St Irenaeus in his honor, and the building was devastated in 1562 by the Huguenots. Several relics said to be his survive in Lyon's churches. Two crania were carbon-dated to the Middle Ages, but a piece of heelbone kept in the Lyon Cathedral comes from the right period.

  His influence outlived most of his writing. Both Hippolytus and Tertullian drew freely on him, yet only Against Heresies and The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching survive, the latter recovered as an Armenian copy in 1904. His literal hope of an earthly millennium may have made him uncongenial reading in the Greek East. No complete Greek text of Against Heresies remains, only a full ancient Latin version, thirty-three fragments of a Syrian version, and a complete Armenian version of books 4 and 5. His works were first translated into English by John Keble in 1872. On the 21st of January 2022, Pope Francis declared him the 37th Doctor of the Church and gave him a title no one else holds, Doctor unitatis, the Doctor of Unity.