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  • 13 - Truth and tradition: Irenaeus

  • from Part III - Community Traditions and Self-Definition
  • Edited by Margaret M. Mitchell, University of Chicago, Frances M. Young, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Christianity
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    19 January 2006, pp 261-273

  • Summary

    Irenaeus has been described as a founder, father, or 'first exponent of a catholic Christian orthodoxy', and there is a remarkable contrast between his writings and those written only a generation or two previously by Christians whom he recognised as being within his own tradition. The basis of the position Irenaeus sought to defend was what he supposed was the traditional, and correct, interpretation of the revelation of God contained in what one call the Old Testament. This understanding was being assailed on the one hand by Gnostics who, if they accepted the Old Testament, interpreted it in ways radically different from the Great Church, and on the other hand by Marcionites, who dismissed it altogether, as being utterly irrelevant to the divine revelation newly made in Jesus. The unity between the gospels and the Old Testament is not something that can be gauged only externally, by the application of the rule of truth.