Chapter Thirteen
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
IRENAEUS, HIPPOLYTUS, NOVATIAN
IRENAEUS
The Greek-speaking settlements in south-eastern Gaul were evangelized from the province of Asia—the area, indeed, from which those settlements had been founded many centuries before. Their evangelization took place probably early in the second century, if not earlier (it has been suggested by some that the ‘Galatia’ to which Crescens is said to have gone in 2 Timothy 4:10 was not the Anatolian Galatia but European Gaul). Our first definite knowledge of Christianity in south-eastern Gaul comes from a letter sent by two churches of the Rhône valley, those of Lyon and Vienne, to tell their friends in proconsular Asia of a fierce persecution which they had to endure in ad 177, in the principate of Marcus Aurelius. For our present purpose this letter has an incidental interest in the use that it makes of scripture, one of the most striking instances being the occurrence of the formula ‘that the scripture might be fulfilled’ (common in the gospels to introduce Old Testament quotations) to introduce a quotation of Revelation 22:11.
At the same time as this letter was sent to Asia, another letter was sent to Eleutherus, the bishop of Rome, to acquaint him and his followers with the sufferings of the Gaulish churches. The letter for Rome was entrusted to Irenaeus, a presbyter in the church of Lyon, described by the senders as ‘zealous for the covenant of Christ’.
Irenaeus was born and brought up in the province of Asia. In his youth he came under the influence of Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, and ever remembered with gratitude the instruction which he (with others) had received from him, including his reminiscences of contacts ‘with John and with the others who had seen the Lord’. Later he emigrated to the Rhône valley. One of the martyrs who died in the persecution of 177 was Pothinus, the nonagenarian bishop of Lyon. When the church of Lyon had time to recover somewhat after the persecution, Irenaeus was elected as bishop in place of Pothinus.
Of Irenaeus’s literary works two have survived. The major one is usually called Against Heresies, comprising five books; his own title for it was An Exposure and Refutation of the Knowledge (gnosis) that is Falsely So Called. The original Greek has been lost for the most part: the work has been preserved in a Latin translation of the fourth century and, so far as the fourth and fifth books are concerned, in an Armenian translation. His other surviving work, The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, is shorter; it has been described as a manual of Christian evidences or an outline of the plan of salvation. It has been preserved in an Armenian translation.
Irenaeus is the principal spokesman of the catholic response to Gnosticism and other second-century deviations. He was well placed to fill this rôle because of his links with widely separated areas of the Christian world. The gnostic schools maintained that it was they who best preserved the original teaching of the apostles; some of them claimed that the apostles’ more esoteric teaching had been delivered privately to selected disciples who were worthy or gifted enough to receive it. Irenaeus set himself to examine such claims and to establish the content of the genuine apostolic tradition. This tradition was maintained in living power, he argued, in those churches which were founded by apostles and in which there had been a regular succession of bishops or elders since their foundation; it was summed up in those churches’ rule of faith or baptismal creed. The doctrine maintained in such a church in Irenaeus’s day might be assumed to be that which was first taught by the apostolic founder or founders, and transmitted through an unbroken succession of bishops. The burden of proof lay on those who argued that the doctrine had been changed in the course of transmission between the date of foundation and the time at which Irenaeus wrote. Moreover, the faith confessed in the churches founded by apostles was confessed in other churches of later foundation throughout the world: ‘the churches planted in Germany have not believed or handed down anything different, not yet the churches among the Iberians or the Celts, nor those in the east, nor yet in Egypt and Libya, nor those established in the centre of the world.’
This account of the matter depended on certain presuppositions, some of which Irenaeus declared, while he was perhaps not wholly conscious of others. The Holy Spirit, he declared, gave the apostles perfect knowledge; they received no secret knowledge and delivered no secret tradition. With the churches which they founded they deposited everything that pertains to saving truth, and from these churches it must be learned—the more securely because of the complete and continuous succession or bishops in these churches. He assumed that all the apostles were unanimous in their teaching. It is plain, however, from the New Testament that while (say) Paul, Peter and James were agreed on the basic facts of the gospel (1 Cor. 15:11), there were differences among them on the practical implications of those facts. But whatever differences there were, they were resolved in a second-century synthesis, and to Irenaeus this synthesis was the apostolic tradition.
In all Irenaeus’s argument, moreover, scripture plays a dominant part. It is the abiding witness to the one living and true God, ‘whom the Law announces, whom the prophets proclaim, whom Christ reveals, whom the apostles teach, whom the church believes’. Irenaeus is well able to distinguish ‘the writings of truth’ from ‘the multitude of apocryphal and spurious writings’. The Old Testament writings are indispensable witnesses to the history of salvation; the Septuagint version was divinely inspired, the writings which we call the Apocrypha being evidently invested with the same authority as those translated from the Hebrew Bible. As for the New Testament, Hans von Campenhausen describes ‘the critical period between Marcion and Irenaeus’ as ‘the period in which the “New Testament” as such emerged’. Irenaeus nowhere in his extant writings sets down a list of New Testament books, but it is evident that he had a clear notion of their identity. He makes free use of the phraseology about ‘old covenant’ and ‘new covenant’, but does not yet use the latter expression to denote the collection of authoritative writings thrown up by the new covenant, as Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian of Carthage were soon to do. The collection itself, however, was a reality to him. In using the scriptures to expose and refute subversive teaching, it was important to know which scriptures might effectively be so used, and he knew them, and used them.
There is one place where Eusebius undertakes to reproduce Irenaeus’s testimony to the traditions which he had received about the scriptures. First he quotes his account of the origins of the four gospels; then he quotes his discussion of the number of the beast in Revelation 13:18, and his remark that John saw his revelation ‘not a long time ago, but almost in our own generation towards the end of Domitian’s rule’. Eusebius adds that Irenaeus makes many quotations from 1 John, and also from 1 Peter. Then he points out that Irenaeus cited the Shepherd of Hermas as ‘scripture’ and quoted the book of Wisdom, and also that he referred to Justin Martyr, Ignatius and a certain unnamed ‘apostolic presbyter’. It is not suggested that the three last writers were accorded scriptural status.
If none of Irenaeus’s writings had survived, one could imagine some readers of this passage in Eusebius arguing from it that Irenaeus did not receive as scripture either the Acts of the Apostles or the letters of Paul. Such an argument would overlook what Bishop Lightfoot, in another connexion, called ‘the silence of Eusebius’. To those who argued in his day that Papias said nothing about the gospels apart from what is said in the few extracts from his work that Eusebius reproduces, Lightfoot pointed out that Eusebius is concerned to quote the testimony borne by earlier writers to the ‘disputed’ books; as for the acknowledged books, he takes them for granted, pausing only to mention any anecdotes or other points of interest occurring in those writers’ treatment of them. So here, Eusebius says nothing of Irenaeus’s well attested use of Acts and the Pauline letters, but thinks his remarks on the origins of the four gospels sufficiently interesting to quote:
Matthew published among the Hebrews a gospel in writing also [i.e. in addition to the oral preaching] in their own speech, while Peter and Paul were preaching the gospel and founding the church in Rome. After their death Mark in his turn, Peter’s disciple and interpreter, delivered to us in writing the contents of Peter’s preaching. Luke also, the follower of Paul, set down in a book the gospel preached by him [i.e. by Paul]. Then John, the disciple of the Lord, the one who leaned back on his bosom, gave forth his gospel while he was living at Ephesus in Asia.
There is another passage where Irenaeus expresses himself in often repeated words on the fourfold structure of the gospel record:
As there are four quarters of the world in which we live, and four universal winds, and as the church is dispersed over all the earth, and the gospel is the pillar and base of the church, and the breath of life, so it is natural that it should have four pillars, breathing immortality from every quarter and kindling human life anew. Whence it is manifest that the Word, the architect of all things, who sits upon the cherubim and holds all things together, having been manifested to mankind, has given us the gospel in fourfold form, but held together by one Spirit… Therefore they are guilty of vanity and ignorance, and of audacity also, who reject the form of the gospel and introduce either more or fewer faces of the gospels—in the former case, so that they should have the reputation of having discovered more than the truth, in the latter case, so that they should reject the dispensations of God.
In his warning against either increasing or reducing the number of gospels Irenaeus may have in mind those who gave some degreee of credence to the more recent gnostic gospels or, on the other hand, people like Gaius of Rome and the Alogoi who at that very time were repudiating the Gospel of John. But the general impression given by his words is that the fourfold pattern of the gospel was by this time no innovation but so widely accepted that he can stress its cosmic appropriateness as though it were one of the facts of nature.
Irenaeus uses both the singular ‘gospel’ and the plural ‘gospels’ to designate the fourfold record, but his preference seems to be for the singular. It is the mark of heresy, he says, to concentrate on one of the four to the virtual exclusion of the others, as the Valentinians, according to him, concentrated on the Gospel of John. All four were inspired by the same Spirit as spoke through the prophets. This inspiration extended to the choice of one word rather than another: if Matthew 1:18 says ‘the birth of Christ took place in this way’ (as Irenaeus evidently found it in his copy) and not ‘the birth of Jesus took place in this way’, that is because the Spirit, foreseeing (as the evangelist himself did not) the rise of heretics who would admit that Jesus was born of Mary but maintain that Christ descended on him from heaven at his baptism, refuted them in advance by affirming that Christ was born of Mary.
As for the Acts of the Apostles, it stands or falls with the Gospel of Luke; that is to say, it stands, Irenaeus appeals to Acts in refutation of the Ebionites who refuse to recognize the apostleship of Paul; he appeals to it equally in refutation of the Marcionites who refuse to recognize any apostle other than Paul. He does not list the letters of Paul, but he evidently accepted the whole corpus of thirteen letters (the Pastorals included); the only letter he does not mention is the short letter to Philemon, which he had no occasion to cite. There is a probable quotation from Hebrews 1:3 in the third book Against Heresies, where God is said to have created all things ‘by the word of his power’. Eusebius speaks of a ‘book of various discourses’ by Irenaeus in which he mentions Hebrews and quotes some passages from it, but there is no suggestion that he regarded it as Pauline; indeed, a sixth-century writer named Stephen Gobarus says that (like Hippolytus shortly afterwards) he denied its Pauline authorship.
By contrast with the Pauline corpus, Irenaeus makes little appeal to the catholic epistles. He knows 1 Peter as the work of the apostle Peter; twice he quotes 1 Peter 1:8 (‘without having seen him, you love him …’). He quotes 1 and 2 John as the work of John the evangelist, ‘the disciple of the Lord’. There is one fairly clear quotation of James 2:23 (‘he [Abraham] believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness; and he was called the friend of God’), but its source is not given, nor is any reference made to James. The Apocalypse is quoted frequently towards the end of the treatise Against Heresies as the basis of the eschatology held by Irenaeus and many of his predecessors and contemporaries; it is ascribed to ‘John the disciple of the Lord’, and treated as a genuine prophecy, in keeping with its own claim (Rev. 1:3; 22:7, 10, 18, 19). But when, in a discussion of John’s eschatological teaching, ‘the apostle’ is quoted, the reference is to Paul, ‘the apostle’ par excellence.
Irenaeus, in fact, recognized and appealed to the same collection of Christian writings as is listed in the Muratorian fragment, except that he included 1 Peter, which is not mentioned there. If the Muratorian list is of Roman origin, it may have been during one of his earlier visits to Rome that Irenaeus became acquainted with the contents of the ‘New Testament’ scriptures acknowledged in the church of the capital. Perhaps we should be warned against calling it a ‘closed’ canon by the very fact that it was later added to; but it was envisaged as a coherent corpus, comprising twenty-two books—all the books of the final New Testament, indeed, except Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 3 John and Jude.
The Old and New Testaments together provided Irenaeus with a broad and secure foundation not only for the negative purpose of refuting heresy but even more for the positive exposition of what has been called ‘the biblical theology of St Irenaeus’. From his time on, the whole church in east and west has acknowledged the New Testament collection as making up, together with the Old Testament, the Christian Bible.
HIPPOLYTUS
Hippolytus of Rome (c 170–235), the last significant figure in the Roman church to write in Greek, was the greatest scholar of his age in the west (though neither in scholarly depth nor in intellectual power could he match his younger contemporary Origen in the east). He was for a short time bishop of a dissident group in the Roman church (the first antipope, one might say), but died in communion with the bishop of Rome in Sardinia, to which both of them were exiled; he has been venerated as a saint and martyr. His works include a Refutation of all heresies in ten books, a manual of the church order (the Apostolic Tradition), a commentary on Daniel in four books (the earliest orthodox commentary on any biblical book) and other exegetical works. An incomplete list of his writings preserved on the back of his statue in Rome (rediscovered in 1551 and now in the Vatican Library) mentions one On the Gospel of John and the Apocalypse, possibly identical with his Chapters against Gaius (referred to by the Syrian writer Ebedjesu, c 1300), of which some Syriac fragments survive; this work evidently defended the apostolic authorship of the Gospel and Apocalypse of John against the anti-Montanist Gaius of Rome and the Alogoi. Had the eccentric views of Gaius and the Alogoi been more influential than in fact they were, this work of Hippolytus might have played an important part in the history of the New Testament canon.
As it is, Hippolytus no more than Irenaeus has left us a list of New Testament books. But he evidently placed most of them on the same level of authority as the books of the Old Testament: he refers to ‘all scripture’ as comprising ‘the prophets, the Lord, and the apostles’. He knows Hebrews and quotes it, but not as scripture; he also appears to know (if only slightly) James, 2 Peter and Jude. He quotes on occasion some other early Christian works which in the event did not gain canonical status, such as the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didachē and the Letter of Barnabas, but he does not treat them as scripture.
NOVATIAN
The first substantial work in Latin to come from a Roman Christian is the treatise On the Trinity by Novatian, written about 250, or a little earlier. Like Hippolytus, he was an antipope: the puritan fellowship which followed him became known, after his own name, as the Novatians.
Novatian appeals to what he calls the ‘rule of truth’ (regula veritatis), which is the summary of scriptural teaching. He quotes freely from the Gospels (especially John) and the letters of Paul in support of his arguments, manifestly assigning to them the same authority as the Old Testament writings which he similarly quotes. However, we learn nothing from him about the history of the canon which we do not know from other sources.
The letter is reproduced in Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 5.1.3–2.7.
In Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 5.1.58.
Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 5.4.
Irenaeus, ‘Letter to Florinus’, in Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 5.20.4–8.
A good edition of this work is by W. W. Harvey, Sancti Irenaei Libros Quinque adversus Haereses, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1857, reprinted Ridgewood, N. J., 1965). There is an English translation in ANF I (Grand Rapids, 1956), pp. 309–567. (The ANF divisions, going back to Massuet, 1712, are followed in the references below.)
There is a good English edition by J. A. Robinson (London, 1920).
Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3.3.1.
Heretics might appeal to the text of scripture, but their interpretation was vitiated because it did not accord with the rule of faith—the summary of Christian teaching handed down in the apostolic tradition (Against Heresies, 1.3.6).
The baptismal creed, based on the confessional response of candidates for baptism, was different in origin from the rule of faith, ‘but they came in time to interpenetrate each other, until from the fourth century onward the ecumenical creed supersedes the appeal to the rule of faith’ (F. F. Bruce, Tradition Old and New [Exeter, 1970], p. 116).
Against Heresies, 1.10.2. Elsewhere Irenaeus points out that, even when the tradition is unwritten, ‘many barbarian nations which believe in Christ’ assent to it, ‘having [the way of] salvation written in their hearts through the Spirit’ (3.4.2). Compare the testimony of Hegesippus quoted on p. 123 above.
Against Heresies, 3.1–4.
Against Heresies, 2.30.9.
Against Heresies, 1.20.1.
Against Heresies, 3.21.2.
As in the use made of the story of Susanna and the elders (Against Heresies 4.26.3) and the quotation from 1 Baruch 4:36–5:9 (5.35.1).
The Formation of the Christian Bible E.T. (London, 1972), p. 37.
Cf Against Heresies, 4.32.1.
See pp. 180, 188.
Against Heresies, 3, preface.
Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 5.8.1–8.
Against Heresies, 5.30.1.
Against Heresies, 5.30.3, quoted also in Hist. Eccl. 3.18.2f. If Irenaeus was born c ad 130, ‘almost in our own generation’ means ‘in the generation before mine’.
Against Heresies, 4.20.2 (quoting Mandate 1). In introducing Hermas’s words as ‘the scripture’, Irenaeus does not imply apostolic scripture.
He quotes from Justin’s treatise Against Marcion in Against Heresies, 4.6.2.
He quotes Ignatius, To the Romans 4.1, in Against Heresies, 5.28.4.
Perhaps the ‘apostolic presbyter’ was Clement of Rome (believed to be a disciple of apostles), to whose letter (called scriptura in the sense of ‘writing’) various allusions are made in Against Heresies. 3.3.3.
See J. B. Lightfoot, ‘The Silence of Eusebius’, Essays on the Work Entitled ‘Supernatural Religion’ (London, 1889), pp. 32–58.
Against Heresies, 3.1.1, quoted by Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 5.8.2–4. See J. Chapman, ‘St Irenaeus on the Date of the Gospels’, JTS 6(1904–5), pp. 563–569.
Cf Ps. 80:1 (LXX 79:2). Irenaeus goes on to relate the four gospels to the faces of the four living creatures of Ezek. 1:10 and Rev. 4:7—lion (John), a calf (Luke), a man (Matthew), an eagle (Mark).
Against Heresies, 3.11.8.
It is their repudiation of John that is probably referred to in Against Heresies, 3.11.9. See pp. 168f.
See F. S. Gutjahr, Die Glaubenswürdigkeit des Irenäischen Zeugnisses über die Abfassung des vierten kanonischen Evangeliums (Graz, 1904), pp. 8–10.
Cf Against Heresies, 3.5.1; 3.11.8.
Against Heresies, 3.11.7.
Against Heresies, 3.16.2.
Against Heresies, 3.15.1.
Against Heresies, 3.13.1–14.4.
Against Heresies, 2.30.9.
Hist. Eccl. 5.26. In the same work Wisdom was also cited (see p. 174).
Quoted by Photius, Bibliotheca, 232.
Against Heresies, 4.9.2; 5.7.2. In 4.16.5, 1 Pet. 2:16 is quoted and ascribed to Peter. Elsewhere there are unascribed quotations from the same letters: Irenaeus seems to be specially fond of quoting 1 Pet. 1:12, ‘things into which angels long to look’ (Against Heresies, 2.17.9; 4.34.1; 5.36.2).
1 John 2:18–22 is quoted in part in Against Heresies, 3.16.4; 1 John 4:1–3 in 3.16.7; 1 John 5:1 in 3.16.8; 2 John 7f in 3.16.7; 2 John 11 in 1.16.3.
Against Heresies, 4.16.2.
Against Heresies, 5.26–36.
Against Heresies, 4.20.11; 5.26.1.
Against Heresies, 5.30.2; 5.36.2, 3.
For the part of the Roman church in the fixing of the collection see A. von Harnack, The Origin of the New Testament, E.T. (London, 1925), pp. 104–106; E. J. Goodspeed, The Formation of the New Testament (Chicago, 1926), pp. 67–77.
H. von Campenhausen says that to ascribe to Irenaeus the idea a closed canon, ‘to which nothing may be added and from which nothing is to be deleted’, is to extend to the whole New Testament what he says about the fourfold gospel (The Formation of the Christian Bible, p. 209, n. 207).
Cf J. Lawson, The Biblical Theology of Saint Irenaeus (London, 1948).
Origen heard Hippolytus preach in Rome about 212; in the course of his sermon Hippolytus referred to Origen’s presence in the congregation (Jerome, On Illustrious Men, 61).
Written apparently about 204.
In his Commentary on the Apocalypse Dionysius bar Ṣalibi (died 1171) refers repeatedly to Gaius and to Hippolytus’s refutation of him. Bar Ṣalibi (on Rev. 8:18, etc.) calls Gaius a heretic because of his rejection of the Apocalypse and the Fourth Gospel. But Gaius and the Alogoi appear to have been orthodox in all other respects. See p. 168.
Commentary on Daniel, 4.49.
Translated in ANF V, pp. 611–644.