Notes to Chapter 1 215
- 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). - 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. - For a recent and concise presentation, with a useful, annotated bibliography, see Christoph Mark-
schies, Gnosis, An Introduction, trans. John Bowden (London: T&T Clark, 2003). There is an excellent anthol-
ogy 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). - For a brief but very helpful discussion of the problem, see Mary Ann Donovan, One Right Reading? A
Guide to Irenaeus (Collegeville: Liturgical, 1997). There is a careful and detailed look at one vitally important
gnostic text, the Apocryphon of John, and the corresponding account in Irenaeus in Alastair Logan, Gnostic
Truth and Christian Heresy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996). - That there is a key to “the various gnostic systems” is itself a highly contentious claim. What groups
should be included under the umbrella term and, indeed, whether such an umbrella term has any utility or mean-
ing at all are keenly debated issues. For a careful, deconstructionist view, see Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking
“Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). - It is older than Augustine, who quotes it at Contra Julianum I.3.5, written in 421.
- The Armenian of IV and V was first published in 1910 and first systematically exploited by Rousseau.
For publication data, see The Writings of Irenaeus in the front of this volume. - Near the end of the text (Dem. 99), Irenaeus denounces the “heretics” as “wicked men and blasphem-
ers against their Creator and Father, as we have shown in the ‘Exposure and overthrowal of knowledge falsely
so called’” (translation from St. Irenaeus, Proof of the Apostolic Preaching, trans. Joseph P. Smith, Ancient
Christian Writers 16 [Westminster: Newman, 1952], 108). - There is a valuable discussion of categorizations of age in antiquity in Charles E. Hill, “The Man Who
Needed No Introduction: A Response to Sebastian Moll” in this volume. - For the origins of the legend in Jewish tradition, see the Letter of Aristeas in The Old Testament Pseude-
pigrapha, ed. James H. Charlesworth, 2 vols. (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1983–1985), ii:12–34. - Including Hebrews, the formative role of which in the thought of Irenaeus is discussed by D. Jeffrey
Bingham in his paper “Irenaeus and Hebrews” in this volume. - For a brief discussion of Irenaeus’s “canon,” see, for example, Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New
Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 153–56. Metzger reckons that 1,075 quotations from the books of our
New Testament (154) appear in the text of Irenaeus. - For Irenaeus’s knowledge of other Gospels, see Paul Foster, “Irenaeus and the Noncanonical Gospels,”
in this volume. - “Saving plan” is here oikonomia—“economy, disposition, arrangement.” It refers to the whole mode of
God’s dealings with the created order and above all to the divine game plan of salvation. - It may be noted that the second of these affirmations speaks of God, Son, and Spirit, while the former
speaks only of the “one God” and of “Christ Jesus, the Son of God.” Both twofold (binitarian) and threefold
(trinitarian) forms are found elsewhere in Irenaeus as well. In this collection, Alistair Stewart, “‘The Rule of
Truth... which He Received through Baptism’ (Hae r. I.9.4): Catechesis, Ritual, and Exegesis in Irenaeus’s
Gaul,” proposes a liturgical explanation for this curious phenomenon. - On Irenaeus’s views on the last things, see Minns, Irenaeus, 140–47, and Brian E. Daley, The Hope of the
Early Church, A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2003), 28–32. - The importance of the body in Irenaeus’s theology is discussed by Sophie Cartwright, “The Image of
God in Irenaeus, Marcellus, and Eustathius” in this volume. - Eusebius says that Irenaeus also wrote “to very many other rulers of the churches” on the matter
(V.24.18). That may well be true: Eusebius obviously had access to a substantial dossier of documents on the
controversy, though his tendency to generalize— to assume that if he knows of one martyr or one orthodox
writer of a given period or one work of a given author, there must have been many—can never be ignored. - In HE V.7.1-6, Eusebius collected and cited three passages from Hae r. to show that charismatic gifts
remained in the church in the time of Irenaeus.