But what if he had not suffered? Here was a question, as Irenaeus knew all too well, infinitely more unsettling than any that a Roman governor might think to demand. For some Christians, the teaching within Paul’s letters, and within the four earliest gospels – that Jesus, a man tortured to death on a cross, was also, in some mysterious way, a part of the identity of the One God of Israel – was simply too radical to tolerate. Who, then, might he actually have been? Rather than commingling the earthly with the heavenly, some Christians argued, was it not likelier that his humanity had been mere illusion? How could the Lord of the Universe possibly have been born of a mortal woman, still less have experienced pain and death? Various Christian teachers attempted solutions to these puzzles. In Rome, Irenaeus had come across a range of schools, each with their own opinions: their own haereses. Some taught that Christ was pure spirit; others that the mortal Jesus ‘was merely a receptacle of Christ’;14 others still that Christ and Jesus, although distinct from one another, were both of them supernatural entities, part of a bewilderingly complex cast of divine beings who, far beyond the bounds of the material earth, inhabited what was termed the pleroma, or ‘fullness’. One thing, though, these various ‘heresies’ did tend to have in common: revulsion at the idea that Christ might literally have suffered death. ‘The man who believes that is still a slave.’15 Such was the opinion of Basilides, a Christian living in Alexandria, who taught that Jesus, when the time came for him to be crucified, had swapped his form with that of an unfortunate passer-by. ‘And Jesus had stood laughing, as the man, through ignorance and error, was crucified in his place.’16 To Irenaeus, in his determination to define for the Christian people the true path of belief, the orthodoxia, doctrines such as Basilides’ constituted a treacherous diversion. They made a mockery of any notion that Christ might be imitated. Those who taught that he had been nothing but spirit, so Irenaeus reported, ‘go so far as to mock the martyrs’.17 The implications were devastating. Blandina, far from sharing in Christ’s glory, had been pathetically deluded. Her agonies had been in vain. She had died a slave.
That different Christians might have different views on the nature of their Saviour was, perhaps, inevitable. Irenaeus knew perfectly well that he was competing for customers in an open market. Hence his enthusiasm for the momentous new concept of orthodoxy. Beliefs, after all, did not patrol themselves. They had to be promoted, and upheld against their rivals. This was no less the case in Gaul than it was in Rome. There were Christians in Lyon, even after the devastating persecution of 177, who mocked the ideal of martyrdom, and denied the authority of the local bishop. Irenaeus, who had been elected to the post following the death of his predecessor in a prison cell, was predictably dismissive of them in turn. Their teachings he despised as high-flown gibberish; their rituals as an excuse to foist aphrodisiacs on gullible women. ‘The cunning of necromancers is joined to buffoonery.’18
Yet Irenaeus, despite his occasional expostulations of contempt, never doubted that he was engaged in an authentic battle of ideas. To condemn wild and unfounded haereses was to approve orthodoxia. Truth shone the brighter for being framed by lies. Such was the conviction that Irenaeus brought to his systematic cataloguing of those teachings by self-proclaimed Christians that he condemned as false. If he was unfair in deriving them all from a single source – a Samaritan necromancer named Simon, supposedly converted by Peter – then he was not entirely so. Teachers like Basilides had made sure to trace the origin of their doctrines back to the time of the apostles. This, though, was a battlefield on which Irenaeus found it easy to train overwhelming force. When Basilides claimed that he had received his gospel from a single follower of Peter, by means of a secret channel of communication, it inevitably highlighted how plentiful and public were the sources for the authority claimed by bishops such as Irenaeus himself. ‘Although dispersed throughout the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, the church has received from the apostles, and from the disciples of the apostles, one single faith.’19 To Irenaeus, who in his native Asia had sat at the feet of Polycarp, and in Rome had traced whole generations of bishops back to the time of Peter, the continuity of his beliefs with the primordial beginnings of the Church appeared self-evident. He did not claim any privileged source of wisdom. Just the opposite. Irenaeus, in his attempt to define orthodoxy, was defiantly contemptuous of radical speculations. The Church that he defended rested on foundations that spanned the entire Roman world. Decades earlier, while travelling through Asia Minor on his way to Rome, Ignatius, a bishop from Syria, had proudly defined it as katholikos: ‘universal’.20 This – the catholic Church – was the one with which Irenaeus identified.
Even so, despite his claim to be defending primal Christian tradition, he was not above appropriating the innovations of his rivals when it suited his purpose. Although most of them, as he dismissively pointed out, alleged that ‘truth was to be derived elsewhere than from written documents’,21 the most formidable had not. Marcion was a Christian from the Black Sea coast, a wealthy shipping magnate whose arrival in Rome some four decades before Irenaeus travelled there had generated a sensation. Outraged that the churches in the capital refused to accommodate his teachings, he had indignantly turned his back on them and founded his own. Marcion, like numerous other Christian intellectuals, was revolted by any notion that Christ might have had a human body, with human limitations and human functions – but that was hardly the most eye-opening of his teachings. Altogether more so was his take on the God of Israel, who, so Marcion had insisted, was not the supreme deity at all. Instead, he was the lesser of two gods. The supreme God, the God who was the true father of Christ, had not created the world, nor ever had anything to do with it, until, in his infinite mercy, he had sent his son to redeem it. A novel and startling doctrine – but manifest, so Marcion had claimed, in the contradictions between Jewish scripture and the letters of Paul. Rather than struggle to square these differences, he had instead proposed, as a means of calibrating God’s true purpose, a precise and infallible measuring device, like the chalked string used by carpenters to mark a straight line: in Greek, a canon. Christians, so Marcion had taught, should regard as definitive only a closed selection of writings: ten of Paul’s letters, and a carefully edited version of the gospel written by his follower Luke. Here, in place of Jewish scripture, was a witness to the divine purpose that Christians could authentically regard as their own: a new testament.22 It was a momentous innovation. Never before – so far as we know – had a Christian proposed a canon. The concept was one that Irenaeus found too suggestive to ignore.
Naturally, not sharing Marcion’s contemptuous attitude towards Jewish scripture, he made sure to reinstate it at the head of his own canon. It was, so he declared, essential reading for all Christians: ‘a field in which hidden treasure is revealed and explained by the cross of Christ’.23 Yet Irenaeus, even as he sought to repudiate Marcion’s influence, could not help but betray it. In what role, after all, was he casting Jewish scripture, if not as an ‘old testament’? What hope of finding treasure in it, except by the light of a new? This was why, just as Marcion had done fifty years previously, Irenaeus promoted a corpus of writings from the age of the apostles. Alongside Luke’s gospel, he included John’s, and the two others most widely accepted as authoritative: one attributed to Matthew, a tax-collector summoned by Jesus to follow him, and the second to Mark, the reputed founder of the church in Alexandria. Compared to these, so Irenaeus declared, all other accounts of Christ’s life and teachings were but ‘ropes woven out of sand’.24 As the generations passed, and the memories of those who had known the apostles with them, so could the faithful find in the gospels of Irenaeus’ canon a sure and certain mooring to the bedrock of the past: a new testament indeed.