208 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacycrown.^47 There is no evidence that Gregory actually knew Irenaeus’s works; the passage
in question seems to be drawn from a local Gallic passion account.
Assertions made of an Irenaean lineage present in Novatian (for example his lan-
guage of God’s eyes, ears, and so on, in On the Trinity 6), Hilary of Poitiers (in his
commentary on Psalm 129:3), and Victricius of Rouen (Praise of the Saints 8) are
debatable.^48 There is, however, an open question with respect to On the Status of the
Soul I.21, by Claudianus Mamertus of Vienne (d. c. 473). This whole tract addresses the
question of a corporeality of the soul, which Irenaeus treated at Ref. II.19.6 and II.33.4;
though Mamertus speaks decidedly against it (claiming it to be un-apostolic), whereas
Irenaeus had granted the soul a nonmaterial corporeality. It would hardly surprise us
if an inhabitant of Irenaeus’s own city, brother to the bishop of Vienne, was shown to
know the works of Irenaeus; yet Mamertus seems to give more credible evidence of the
ongoing fascination with the soul’s nature in the era, than he does any specific aware-
ness of Irenaeus’s thought.
In the sixth century, amidst the flurry of translations of Christian texts into eccle-
siastical Armenian, the Refutation and Demonstration are both translated into this
language, from the Greek. We might speculate that the translation of the Refutation
was complete, and that the extant manuscripts of books IV and V only are the result
of losses through history (it could be argued that the Armenian translators would
have found the earlier segments, dealing with various Italian and African hereti-
cal groups, less interesting than the later theological discussions and thus decided
against translating them; but this could hardly account for the absence of the theo-
logically significant book III). The translation of the Demonstration, the Greek of
which had been known to (but not quoted by) Eusebius,^49 is our only extant version
of that important tract.^50
Irenaeus also finds his way into Syriac—never, so far as can be ascertained, through
a complete or even partial translation of his works into that language, but through the
inclusion of quotations and passages in various Syriac texts.^51
So, in the centuries following his death, we find Irenaeus in Greek, Latin, Armenian,
and Syriac, incorporated into the writings of a wide array of authors. The Latin transla-
tion has come down to us, as has the Armenian of the books mentioned; but one of the
great mysteries in the legacy of Irenaeus is the loss of his Greek original. What came of
it? Given this relatively wide spread of Irenaeus’s readership in later generations, it is
surprising that the original version should altogether disappear.
We can identify traces of the Greek version that at least give us a potential chron-
ological limit to its existence as a more or less complete document. In the seventh
century, a hundred or so years after the Greek text had been used as a foundation
for the Armenian translation, John of Damascus (c. 676–749) has access to it when
writing his Sacra Parallela, as well as the Catenae, in which it features.^52 Then, two
centuries later, Photius (c. 810—c. 893) is known to have read a Greek copy, presum-
ably in Baghdad, which he summarizes in the Bibliotheca as a complete, five-volume
work.^53 This, though, is the last we hear of a Greek version. Unger, following other
scholars, speculated that the copy known to Photius—perhaps the last, or at least the
last known in public circles—was destroyed in the sack of Baghdad in 1258.^54 Perhaps.