46 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacy
their associates the purity and culturally uncontaminated faith that had come down
from the apostles and their teaching successors.
The one known figure of Clement on Irenaeus’s succession list thus presents us
with compelling evidence with which to penetrate the clouds of silence that surround
the other names on his list, and to appreciate what in fact the original nature of their
office was. There was no other list such as one might later find in the chronographic
tradition, recording bishops in the spatium historicum of a Chronicon with parallel
columns for consuls and Jewish high priests by means of which dates could be assigned
for their Episcopal “reigns.” Irenaeus, or Hegesippus before him, could compose such
a list for Rome even though there was none at Corinth in which Primus could have
been included: certainly Eusebius mentions no surviving letter of his. It was in Victor’s
time, as has been argued, that at least the first movement toward a monarch bishop
took place when he sought to impose a common, Western date of Easter over Asiatic
congregations in Rome. Victor’s activity has been notoriously misrepresented by
Eusebius who reads his sources in a grossly anachronistic light and reports that Victor
excommunicated overseas dioceses like a fourth-century, Constantinian pope.^55 In
fact, the focus of his activity in the late second century was Asiatic rite groups of
Eastern origins keeping a Quartodeciman date for Easter within the fractionalized
Roman Christian community itself.^56 Before his time, the only example with any
evidence is of Clement, who acts in a secretarial role. Irenaeus knows of no other
evidence than Clement, with the result that his innovatory imposition of a scholastic
definition of the bishop as διάδοχος stands exposed.
Let us at this point summarize where our argument has taken us so far. Irenaeus,
we have argued, was an innovator, imposing upon the presbyteral model of church
order a scholastic concept only partially derivable from Justin before him, and quite
at variance from that presupposed by the evidence of an extensive epistle of Clement
himself, which Irenaeus admits to knowing. In producing an undated succession
list, he was not influenced by any preceding chronographic tradition in which a
succession list of Jewish High priests could be laid out in parallel with a list of Roman
consuls and regarded as the predecessors of bishops: there are no dates in Irenaeus’s
list. Furthermore, his concept was a scholastic and not a sacerdotal one: he never
finds it important to say that the presbyter or bishop is the person entrusted with
offering “the church’s offering.”^57
If therefore Irenaeus drew upon the historiographic tradition in which the suc-
cessions of the philosophers was described and the Hellenic purity of what they
taught established, then by what process did the chronographic tradition enter into
the development of the succession lists? There was clearly a sea change in coming
to regard Episcopal succession as monarchical rather than scholastic and in failing
to grasp the character of that change, archaeologists have allowed themselves to be
grossly misled regarding the nature of the Roman, Christian community at the end of
the second and at the beginning of the third century.
It is to a discussion of how this has occurred that I now turn.