P. Parvis—Packaging Irenaeus: Adversus haereses and Its Editors 185syndic of the Faculty of Theology—had published a book of Annotationes cataloguing
the errors of Erasmus. In August—the very month in which Irenaeus was published—
intervention from Francis I, who was generally supportive of the humanist cause,
forced the withdrawal of Beda’s book from sale in Paris. But it was reissued that same
month in Cologne. By the end of the next year, 1527, Beda’s agitation would have borne
fruit in the formal condemnation of Erasmus’s works by the Faculty of Theology.^10
On the other side, 1526 saw Erasmus’s final and bitter break with Luther. Two years
earlier, Erasmus had, in De libero arbitrio διατριβή sive collatio, rejected Luther’s posi-
tion on the bondage of the will. The Exocet from Luther, De servo arbitrio, was pub-
lished at the end of 1525—on New Year’s Eve, in fact. Erasmus, Luther declares, is a
closet atheist; he harbors in his heart “a Lucian, or some other pig from Epicurus’s
sty who, having no belief in God himself, secretly ridicules all who have a belief and
confess it.”^11 Erasmus worked at frantic pace to get a reply (the first part of his Hyper-
aspistes) out, from Froben, in time for the Frankfurt book fair in March.
Even worse, the radicals were gaining ground in his beloved Basel. By 1525 he was
engaged in an acrimonious quarrel with Oecolampadius and Pellican, who were mis-
representing his position on the Eucharist. By April 1529 he had moved to the safety
of Freiburg im Bresgau.^12
That is the climate in which Erasmus produced his edition of Irenaeus, the eloquent
and learned man of peace.
The edition itself is something of an anticlimax. It offers Latin text only, with no
Greek fragments—that is, of course, one reason why Erasmus could view with sympa-
thy the idea that Hae r. was written in Latin.^13 The reader is not given much help. Books
II to V, though not the complex Book I, are each introduced by a short argumentum
by Erasmus. The chapter divisions and titles of the manuscript tradition are provided
for Books I to IV (V is undivided in the MSS). And there is an index rerum at the end.
But there are no notes and only brief and rare marginalia. A few of the marginalia are
catchwords; a number offer some Greek—the original of words transliterated in the
Latin, the original of some Homeric tags, an occasional suggestion of the Greek phrase
that might have been in Irenaeus’s mind when he wrote his clumsy Latin. But these
skimpy annotations become even rarer after about II.20.
And the hastily produced text is hardly faultless. One of Erasmus’s successors, Mas-
suet, noted with some annoyance in his own edition of 1710 that “his [Erasmus’] edi-
tion swarms with so many blunders, errors, and faulty and corrupt sentences that one
often searches for Irenaeus in the very (work of ) Irenaeus and it is difficult to follow
his thought.”^14 But it is the editio princeps, and of course it retains some critical value
because of the possibility that some of his readings represent a lost manuscript rather
than Erasmus’s own conjectures.
Gallasius
The next edition that can be deemed major came nearly half a century later. It was by
Gallasius—Nicolas des Gallars—and was published in 1570.
Gallasius was an influential member of the Company of Pastors at Geneva and a
reasonably close associate of Calvin’s. In the spring of 1560, Calvin had dispatched