98 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacythe credibility of Irenaeus’s recollections of Polycarp based on Irenaeus’s tender years.
Because one part of Irenaeus’s testimony concerns Polycarp’s alleged contact with the
apostle John, the registering of doubts about the accuracy of Irenaeus’s “childhood
memories” has been almost a stock element in many commentaries on the Gospel of
John.^8 While some are content to pronounce his youthful reminiscences “vivid but
confused,” others seem inclined to charge Irenaeus with deliberate fabrication.^9
Before addressing the issue of Irenaeus’s age and memory directly, it is interesting
to note the one-way direction of thought here. Why is it that, when it comes to his
reports about Polycarp, the only time Irenaeus may be trusted to tell the unvarnished
truth is when he mentioned his age? How do we know, for instance, that the other
things he reported are not “true” and that it was not his youthful inexperience which
he exaggerated for effect, as when Solomon declared he was “only a little child”^10 when
he asked God for wisdom, though he had already taken a wife? Or, to take a less cynical
approach, why is it that the only part of Irenaeus’s memory which was somehow able
to escape the ravages of time was the part that stored information about his age? But
what I hope to show here is that there is really no need to question the credibility of
Irenaeus’s testimony, or his ability to learn, based on his reported age.
a. There are two places in Irenaeus’s extant works where he says something about
his age at the time when he knew Polycarp. One is in his letter to Florinus, where he
uses the word παῖς (boy; child) to describe himself. Moll is in line with many who
assume that this must mean someone very young indeed.
In our parlance, childhood is usually perceived as ending at about the time when
adolescence starts, or when a person becomes a teenager. But this is not necessarily
how it was in Irenaeus’s day. Various schemes of “ages” or life stages are discoverable
in various authors (I have come across three-age, four-age, five-age, six-age, seven-age,
and ten-age schemes). A scheme attributed to Hippocrates, by Philo (On the Creation
of the World 105) posits a new stage of life every seven years, the age of the παῖς seen
as beginning at seven and lasting to fourteen.^11 Pythagoras, on the other hand, accord-
ing to Diogenes Laertios (Life of Pythagoras 8.10), used the word παῖς for boys up to
twenty years, though this may have been Pythagoras’s schematic judgment, not “actual
social practice.”^12 Indeed, artificial systems like these and others were, as Wiedemann
says, “philosophical ideas toyed with by intellectuals; they perhaps led to interesting
speculation about the ‘ideal’ age, but had no application to real life.”^13 He continues,
“It is difficult to believe that any of them led people to believe that some other divi-
sion was more important than that between the child and the adult capable of bear-
ing arms.”^14 And that transition, among both Greeks and Romans, took place at the
age of seventeen or eighteen. From at least the fifth century b.c.e., Leinieks indicates,
“An Athenian almost certainly ceased to be a παῖς and became a νεανίσκος when he
reached the age of emancipation at eighteen.”^15 And for the Romans, Wiedemann says,
“the crucial division between child and adult was at seventeen: the age at which a male
could learn to fight.”^16
If one were to insist that Irenaeus was a παῖς for the entire time he knew Polycarp,
I think it fair to point out that there seems to be nothing he reports of the presbyter in
Hae r. IV.27-32 which a boy of, let’s say, sixteen to eighteen is not capable of learning