Brent—How Irenaeus Has Misled the Archaeologists 45of the former is chosen to say the prayer of consecration and to lay hands on the can-
didate. But as Ratcliff pointed out, the instruction to the presbyters to remain silent is
indicative that a rite is being edited and their original, spoken role is being edited out.^54
You write rubrics to instruct people to do things, and not simply to keep silence unless
they needed to where they were accustomed to speaking. Originally, we may conclude
that following what Clement described as the “approval of the whole church” the new
presbyter-bishop was ordained, like Timothy, “through the imposition of hands of the
presbyterate.”
But on such an occasion, the secretary would be there with his fellow presbyters,
particularly if the “whole church” had gathered together in some hired lecture hall to
dispute an issue of faith. This is precisely the scene that is described after Irenaeus and
the Victor whom he criticized as recorded in the Hippolytan Refutation of All Heresies.
When the writer claims that Zephyrinus and Callistus had surreptitiously sided with
Sabellius, and had denounced him and his group as “ditheists,” it would have been
every congregation in the confederation of house churches that so gathered. It would
have been the secretary that kept the records, and, if as articulate as Callistus was with
the ambition to transform his office into one of greater power, would have cast what
was said and decided in his own mould.
This therefore was the figure, so clearly portrayed in Clement’s own letter and in
his description in Hermas, upon which Irenaeus (or Hegesippus) now alighted in his
desire to make church order correspond to the διαδοχή of a philosophical school with
a single διάδοχος or προεστώς with the right to preside over the transmission of the
founder’s teaching. Rome was the perfect example because in its archives it had not
only Clement’s letter that has survived but also others, no doubt more mundane, which
have not. Since the archives would have contained the notes of the authorship of such
letters on their copies, whether the secretary’s name appeared on them or whether they
were written anonymously in the name of “the whole church,” Irenaeus or Hegesippus
or both could now construct their διαδοχή ἀποστόλων by taking note of and construct-
ing a list of those names in chronological order.
As I have said, Justin owned the title of προεστώς of a Christian congregation
whilst Clement did not, with a role understood in a Hellenistic, scholastic sense.
But his office was too local over a single congregation. But Irenaeus might see Clem-
ent’s contemporary successor in the company of the assembled presbyterate when
an extra-ordinary meeting “of the whole church” was gathered. Here the presbyter
with secretarial office, who was the epistolary representative of the presbyterate to
external churches, would “stand out [προεστώς],” from the rest with a better known
name, like that of Polycarp, though for perhaps other reasons, or like Clement him-
self, as he stood listening to Hermas’s reading out of his vision to the presiding
presbyters of the church of Rome. It was this figure that Irenaeus was now to endow
with the features of a διάδοχος in a Hellentistic philosophical school, according
to the historiographic program of Diogenes Laertius and his predecessors in the
genre of diadochic literature. As they had used the concept to establish the cultural
coherence of Hellenistic philosophy and to remove from it all taint of barbarian cor-
ruption, so too could Irenaeus establish against Valentinus, Basilides, Marcion, and