Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacy

Notes

214 Notes The Writings of Irenaeus 1. Published by Grenfell and Hunt in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, vol. 3 (1903), 10–11, and again in vol. 4 (1904), 264–65. Discussed by Louis Doutreleau in Contra les hérésies, Livre IV, vol. 1 (SCh 210), 126–31, and by Charles E. Hill, “Irenaeus, the Scribes, and the Scriptures: Papyrological and Theological Observations from P.Oxy. 405” in this volume. 2. Discussed by Rousseau in Contra les hérésies, Livre V, vol. 1 (SCh 152), 119–57, with a reconstruction of the text at 355–77. 1. Who Was Irenaeus: An Introduction to the Man and His Work 1. There is an excellent general account of Irenaeus in Denis Minns, Irenaeus, An Introduction (London: T&T Clark, 2010)—an expanded and updated version of Minns, Irenaeus, Outstanding Christian Thinkers (London: Chapman, 1994). 2. For the various editions Eusebius produced and their date, see Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 128. 3. There has been an enormous amount of discussion of the exact date, with 155, 156, or 167 often being canvassed. But 157 now appears to have been conclusively established: Timothy D. Barnes, Early Christian Hagiography and Roman History (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 367–78. For a very vivid and plausible reconstruction of the events surrounding the martyrdom, see Sara Parvis, “The Martyrdom of Polycarp,” in The Writings of the Apostolic Fathers, ed. Paul Foster (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 126–46. 4. Whether Polycarp is to be identified with the anonymous “elder” whose teaching Irenaeus reports in Haer. IV is debated in this volume by Sebastian Moll, “The Man with No Name: Who Is the Elder in Irenaeus’s Adversus haereses IV?” and Charles E. Hill, “The Man Who Needed No Introduction: A Response to Sebastian Moll.” 5. That mistake seems to me to be made in, for example, Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1982), where we have a rather romantic picture of the healthy diversity of quasi-egalitarian Gnostic groups squashed by the power of jack-booted bishops and hierarchical authority. 6. Clearly in place by the time of Leo the Great in the fifth century. 7. Irenaeus is cited here from the ten-volume edition by Adelin Rousseau in the Sources chrétiennes series. For details of this edition and available translations, see “The Writings of Irenaeus.” 8. The relevance and importance of the “successions” in the schools was developed in the seminal work by Alain Le Boulluec, La notion d’hérésie dans la littérature grecque IIe-IIIe siècles, 2 vols. (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1985) and is explored by Allen Brent in his contribution to this volume, “How Irenaeus Has Misled the Archaeologists.” 9. On so-called “Asia Minor theology”—a notion developed above all by the great historian of dogma Theodor Zahn—see, for example, Zahn’s classic Marcellus von Ancyra: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Theologie (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1867). 10. Jared Secord’s contribution to this volume, “The Cultural Geography of a Greek Christian: Irenaeus from Smyrna to Lyons” has an illuminating discussion of what Irenaeus might have meant by this and demonstrates conclusively Irenaeus’s continuing Eastern perspective. 11. It has been very plausibly argued that on his way west Irenaeus in all probability spent some time in Rome and there heard Justin Martyr (who was executed about 165): Michael Slusser, “How Much Did Irenaeus Learn from Justin?” Studia Patristica XL (2006), 515–20. Notes to Chapter 1 215 12. The conventional date is 177, but that simply follows Eusebius’s reconstruction of events and, while it cannot be very far out, is not a hard date. See Barnes, Early Christian Hagiography, 61–63, and, for the whole incident, Les martyrs de Lyons (Paris: du Cerf, 1978). 13. That is, the Roman province of Asia, centered around the great city of Ephesus on the Asia Minor coast—the same province that Irenaeus himself was from. 14. For a recent and concise presentation, with a useful, annotated bibliography, see Christoph Markschies , Gnosis, An Introduction, trans. John Bowden (London: T&T Clark, 2003). There is an excellent anthology of Gnostic texts—from Nag Hammadi and patristic sources, including Irenaeus—in Bentley Leyton, The Gnostic Scriptures (Garden City: Doubleday, 1987). For a complete translation of the fourteen codices that comprise the Nag Hammadi find, see James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988). 15. For a brief but very helpful discussion...