Irenaeus

(Nandana) #1

Notes to Chapter 11 241


Press, 2006). Isidore goes on to specify different modifications of the diple (with one or two dots, with obelisk,
reverse diple, and so on) that serve other critical functions in literary texts.



  1. Page 1, col. B (1.5 Yonge).

  2. On page 18, col. B (24.116 Yonge), he quotes the proverb “the beginning is half of the whole” and on
    page 31, col. B (39.189 Yonge) he quotes a line from the poet, “with thee I’ll end, with thee I will begin,” with
    no diplai, though by this time the scribe seems to have stopped marking even Scriptural quotations.

  3. Vaticanus does not mark Luke 11:49 with diplai, where Jesus says, “the Wisdom of God said, ‘I will
    send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute.’” Presumably this is because there
    is no specific Old Testament passage that corresponds very closely to Jesus’ quotation (and cf. Matt. 23:34).

  4. “For in him we live and move and have our being.” It is possible, of course, that this was not perceived
    as a quotation.

  5. ἡμᾶς is also read in P^74 (7th c.), 049, 326, 614, 1646c, 1837, 2344 (the last of these has ἡμᾶς σοφῶν instead
    of ἡμᾶς ποιητῶν).

  6. The scribe does not mark the quotation “the Lord rebuke you” in Jude 9.

  7. Despite its advocacy by Tertullian, and its occasional favorable citation by other Fathers, 1 Enoch is
    absent from all the fourth- and fifth-century canon lists, nor is it contained in any of the great uncial codices,
    including Codex Vaticanus itself.

  8. It may be of interest to note that diplai are present for the marking of both Deuteronomy 25:4 and
    Luke 10:7 in 1 Timothy 5:18.

  9. For example, Haer. II.27.2 (the Gospels); III.1.1; III.16.2. See D. Jeffrey Bingham, Irenaeus’s Use of Mat-
    thew’s Gospel in Adversus haereses, Traditio Exegetica Graeca 7 (Louvain: Peeters, 1998).

  10. The origins of the practice of abbreviating the nomina sacra are still under discussion. One aspect of
    that discussion concerns the suggestion that the abbreviations were invented to save time or space. We may be
    sure that at least the “diplai sacra” were not adopted as a time-saving measure.

  11. P.Mich. 764 (mentioned above), however, is roughly contemporary and so possibly is older. It too
    contains a nomen sacrum. Paris Bib. Nat. P.Gr. 1120 (Philo), is the next oldest.

  12. Rectissime scientes quia Scripturae quidem perfectae sunt, quippe a Verbo Dei et Spiritu eius dictae (A.
    Rousseau and L. Doutreleau, Irénée de Lyon: Contre les Hérésies Livre ii, vol. 2, SC 294 [Paris: Cerf, 1982]).

  13. Larry Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins (Grand Rapids/
    Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2006), 58.

  14. Metzger and Ehrman, Text, 67.

  15. Souter, “The New Testament Text of Irenaeus,” cxii.

  16. The Heart of Irenaeus’s Theology

  17. See my paper from the 2003 International Conference on Patristic Studies at Oxford: “How Much Did
    Irenaeus Learn from Justin?” Studia Patristica XL, ed. Edward J. Yarnold, Maurice F. Wiles, and Paul Parvis
    (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), 515–20.

  18. Joseph Caillot, “La grâce de l’union selon saint Irénee,” in Penser la foi, ed. Joseph Doré and Christoph
    Theobald (Paris: du Cerf, 1993), 391–412.

  19. Yoshifumi Torisu, Gott und Welt. Eine Untersuchung zur Gotteslehre des Irenäus von Lyon, Studia Ins-
    tituti Missiologici Societatis Verbi Divini Sankt Augustin 52 (Nettetal: Steyler, 1991). The passage is on p. 15:
    “God is actually unknowable, but according to Irenaeus God has revealed himself in history to all, through his
    own hands, i.e., through the Son and the Holy Spirit, and he leads humanity to himself through the economy
    of salvation” (my translation).

  20. Irenaeus, haer. I.6.2; III.2.1-2.

  21. haer. III.15.2. The translation, here and elsewhere in this article, is my own.

  22. For an exhaustive study of the background of these terms, see Harald A. T. Reiche, “A History of the
    Concepts θεοπρεπές and ἱεροπρεπές,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1955.

  23. See the brief discussion in Robert M. Grant, After the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
    1967), 104–5; idem, Jesus after the Gospels (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1990), 96–99.

  24. The citations in Irenaeus are in haer. I.12.2; II.13.3 and 8; II.28.4; and IV.11.2.

  25. Grant, After the New Testament, 105.

  26. He has already referred to this axiom in haer. I.15.5, cited it in I.22.1, and appealed to it again in II.4.2.
    It may be implied in haer. IV.6.2, where Irenaeus is quoting from Justin Martyr. For an excellent analysis of
    where this axiom comes from and how Irenaeus’s use of it goes beyond that of his predecessors, see William

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