Irenaeus

89

Chapter Seven

The Man with No Name

Who Is the Elder in Irenaeus’s Adversus haereses IV?

Sebastian Moll

I

n Adversus haereses IV.27-32, Irenaeus repeatedly refers to the teachings of a certain

elder. Despite the fact that the teachings of this man seem to be of high importance to

Irenaeus, he omits revealing his name. This omission on Irenaeus’s part has given rise

to much speculation regarding the identity of his source, starting as early as in the 1575

edition of Irenaeus’s works by François Feuardent. For some time, however, the books

on this issue appeared to be closed. Scholars started to content themselves with the

anonymity of this elder as no satisfying solution could be found—until recently, when

Charles Hill tried to demonstrate that this anonymous individual can be nobody else

but Polycarp of Smyrna and thus renewed the debate.^1 The complexity of Hill’s work

makes it impossible to portray his thesis in full here, but there is one passage in his

book that, from my perspective, sums up the key elements of his argument quite well:

We must now observe that it is precisely in this letter to Florinus, on the sole

sovereignty of God and against the notion of God being the creator of evil, a

work written to refute some version of Marcionism, a work which parallels so

closely the teaching of the elder in Hae r. 4.27-32, that Irenaeus gives his well-

known description of Polycarp. It is this letter in which Irenaeus claims to have

heard Polycarp on many occasions and to have listened so attentively that he

could still reproduce many of his teacher’s actual words (HE 5.20.4)! Simply

stated, in Hae r. 4.27-32 Irenaeus recounts from memory the anti-Marcionite,

oral teaching of a respected “presbyter, a disciple of apostles” (4.32.1), and in

the letter to Florinus, a letter devoted to the very same aspects of Marcion’s

teaching, Irenaeus claims he could remember much of the oral teaching of

Polycarp of Smyrna, whom he calls “that blessed and apostolic presbyter” (HE

5.20.7). I submit that it would be too great a coincidence if these two apostolic

presbyters were not the same individual, namely, Polycarp of Smyrna.^2

In this passage we can find the three elements that Polycarp and the elder in Haer. 4.27-

32 have, according to Hill, in common, and which thus suggest the identity of the two: