Brent—How Irenaeus Has Misled the Archaeologists 37- It can mean “I composed a succession list” of names “up until the time of
Anicetus,” in which case Irenaeus takes over from Hegessipus a named but
undated succession list, or alternately, - It can mean “I established that there was a succession” without naming names.^5
Certainly Hegesippus does not claim that he has a list of names of bishops for Corinth
“up until the time when Primus was bishop of Corinth.” If διαδοχὴν ἐποιησάμην means
that he did compile a list of names for Rome, it is simply to demonstrate the coher-
ence of doctrine between one generation and another and one geographically distant
church from another: “In each succession [διαδοχῇ, or ‘succession list’] and in each city
the situation is as the law proclaims along with the prophets and the Lord.”^6
Certainly Eusebius believes that Hegesippus “when travelling as far as Rome min-
gled with many bishops” and regards the bishops of the second century as those of the
fourth who acted as supreme teacher in their diocese that they governed monarchi-
cally, as shown also in the Didascalia and in the Apostolic Constitutions.^7 Eusebius,
notoriously, believes that if monarch bishops reigned over their sees in the fourth cen-
tury, then they would have done so from the first, and he is heir to a chronographic
tradition that would so rank them. His description of structures of ecclesial authority
in the distant past will always be suspect. But what of Irenaeus’s testimony and his (or
Hegesippus’s) succession list? Do they suppose such a monarchical interpretation of
the nature of Church Order?
It is now worth reflecting further on what was the model of Hegesippus and Ire-
naeus for constructing a succession list and what it might or might not have had to
do with the chronographic tradition that emerges in a Christian form in the works of
Julius Africanus, the writer of the Hippolytan Chronographia, the Chronographer of
354, and indeed Eusebius himself. Ehrhardt believed that it was such a chronographic
model that lay at the basis of Irenaeus’s construction of a succession list, regarding
the origin of the Hegesippean concept in the succession list of Jewish high priests,
described by Eusebius as “a catalogue [κατάλογον]... of the succession of the high
priests [τῆς τῶν ἀρχιερέων διαδοχῆς] .”^8 Though Eusebius had four Episcopal succes-
sion lists from which he compiled his Chronicon, (i) Jerusalem, (ii) Alexandria, (iii)
Antioch, and (iv) Rome, (i) was the earliest and modelled on succession lists of Jewish
high priests. The original of such lists was found in the book of Chronicles in the Old
Testament, but continued by Jason of Cyrene and Nicolaus of Damascus for the Mac-
cabaean succession and used by Josephus.^9 It was thus possible for Telfer to connect
the origins of an Ignatian episcopacy that he believed to be monarchical with James
and the Church of Jerusalem and the form of sacral-monarchical church order that
continued there following his martyrdom and in succession to him.^10
I have noted, however, a number of objections to this point of view.^11 My funda-
mental objection was the lack of any sacerdotal reference or emphasis in what Irenaeus
says on apostolic succession. Telfer claimed at one point that “It is thus the sacerdotal
character of the bishop which Irenaeus sees as passing from the order of the apostles to
the order of bishops.”^12 But in the passage on which he relies, Irenaeus is talking about