130 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacy
raises the possibility that 1 Clement and 2 Clement may not have existed together in
the scribe’s exemplar.
How appropriate that such textual and canonical issues should arise from our earli-
est known text of Irenaeus. Not only is he, as Souter said, “the earliest surviving writer
of the Christian era who quotes the New Testament both extensively and accurately.”^79
The earliest surviving fragment of his work opens up for us a unique and previously
obscured scribal window on issues of text, canon, and theology in the late second cen-
tury, issues for which Irenaeus himself is so justly famous.