Irenaeus

Steenberg—Tracing the Irenaean Legacy 203

having travelled there from Alexandria (perhaps c. 136) during the reign of pope Hygi-

nus. Whether or not he and Irenaeus would ever have crossed paths—not impossible,

given the lack of clear detail as to his whereabouts in the years leading up to his death

in 160/1, though fairly improbable—is less important than the fact that Valentinus’s

influence emerged out of, and began to blossom in, the city and church that Irenaeus

calls “the greatest and most ancient.”^20 Though by the time he came to write the Refuta-

tion he had travelled to Gaul and succeeded Pothinus (†177) in Lyons, the text itself

clearly betrays his experience of Roman Christianity and its perversions, and seems

to have been written to a friend of that city or its environs (most probably a fellow

presbyter-bishop there, together with those around him^21 ).

In all, we find Irenaeus a participant in the broad Christian milieu of his age, an

inheritor of what he viewed as the authentic apostolic preaching, and a recapitulator

of the theological expression of his teachers and contemporaries. His own writings, for

all their ingenuity of expression and uniqueness of voice, represent the vision of the

church he sought to defend, in harmony with the voices of those others who aimed at

the same ends. Characterizing the portrait of Irenaeus painted by Ziegler’s 1871 study,

Osborn summed up the bishop thus: “What we have in Irenaeus, according to Ziegler,

is not so much his own system but rather the common doctrine of the ancient church.

Irenaeus the bishop wishes to set out the main points of the universal church.”^22

Influencing Future Generations: Irenaeus in the Patristic Heritage

If Irenaeus thus wished to “set out the main points of the universal church,” and, partic-

ularly, if he wished to do so in the face of attacks against that “common doctrine,” then

he aimed to be of influence. Taking up the materials he had been “traditioned” through

his own youth and ministry, he aimed to provide his readers with tools by which to

articulate and defend the apostolic preaching, as he himself says in the introduction to

the Refutation.^23 So what, then, was the extent of this influence? Here we come to the

second heading of our study: the influence of Irenaeus upon future generations in the

patristic age.

Immediate Influence
Writing in the fourth century, the fact that Irenaeus’s name means “peacemaker” was
not lost on Eusebius, who made much of Irenaeus’s role in calming the heated debates
of the Quartodeciman controversy.^24 Much as he was willing to see the beauty of vari-
ous expressions of the one gospel in the fourfold witness of the evangelists, so was
Irenaeus willing to acknowledge a variety of expression of liturgical practice across
the differing Eastern and Western traditions of the period. Peace, concord, and unity,
Irenaeus firmly believed, are the authentic manifestations of the truth.^25 This role as
peacemaker led Osborn to proclaim, “The name of Irenaeus as a peacemaker spread
far and wide.”^26 But we must ask: how far, really? How wide?
The earliest testimony to the Irenaean legacy comes in the Oxyrhynchus papyrus
P.405, which is contemporary to Irenaeus himself and contains a portion of Ref. III.9.2,

3.^27 It should not surprise us terribly that Irenaeus’s Refutation would make its way to
Africa, and to Upper Egypt in particular, where the “Gnostic” problem was yet to reach