Voices and influences
Irenaeus
The bishop of Lyons who traced his teaching to the apostle John and wrote the great takedown of the gnostics.
Summary
This site quotes Irenaeus 323 times across 35 books, and lists 0 works.
- Lived died 202.
- Quoted here most in Luke: 46 of 323.
Irenaeus
- Lived
- died 202
- Tradition
- Early Church
5 of 323 quotations
Own words
Quoted in full, because Irenaeus died in 202 and these works are out of copyright. Each citation below names its edition and its year. A citation naming a modernised text means that edition makes its own editorial changes, and that edition's terms are not in this site's record.
And they arose and came from the land of the east; and, as they went through the land, they chanced upon the land of Shinar, which was exceeding broad; where they took in hand to build a tower.
The rest of the quotation
They sought means thereby to go up to heaven, and be able to leave their work as a memorial to those men who should come after them.
Genesis 11:4 “Come,” they said, “let us build for ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens, that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of all the earth.” BSB
If, then, neither Moses, nor Elias, nor Ezekiel, who had all many celestial visions, did see God; but if what they did see were similitudes of the splendour of the Lord, and prophecies of things to come; it is manifest that the Father is indeed…
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invisible, of whom also the Lord said, "No man hath seen God at any time."
Daniel 3:25 “Look!” he exclaimed. “I see four men, unbound and unharmed, walking around in the fire—and the fourth looks like a son of the gods!” BSB
And Zechariah also, among the twelve prophets, pointing out to the people the will of God, says: "These things does the Lord Omnipotent declare: Execute true judgment, and show mercy and compassion each one to his brother.
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And oppress not the widow, and the orphan, and the proselyte, and the poor; and let none imagine evil against your brother in his heart." And again, he says: "These are the words which ye shall utter.
Zechariah 7:10 Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. And do not plot evil in your hearts against one another.’ BSB
And that we may not have to ask, Of what God was the Word made flesh? he does himself previously teach us, saying, "There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.
The rest of the quotation
The same came as a witness, that he might bear witness of that Light. He was not that Light, but [came] that he might testify of the Light." By what God, then, was John, the forerunner, who testifies of the Light, sent [into the world]?
Malachi 3:1 “Behold, I will send My messenger, who will prepare the way before Me. Then the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to His temple—the Messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight—see, He is coming,” says the LORD of Hosts. BSB
Let our opponents-that is, they who speak against their own salvation-inform us [as to this point]: The deceased daughter of the high priest; the widow's dead son, who was being carded out [to burial] near the gate [of the city]; and Lazarus, who had lain…
The rest of the quotation
four days in the tomb, -in what bodies did they rise again? In those same, no doubt, in which they had also died. For if it were not in the very same, then certainly those same individuals who had died did not rise again.
Mark 5:22 A synagogue leader named Jairus arrived, and seeing Jesus, he fell at His feet BSB
Influence, on the record
This site quotes Irenaeus 323 times across 35 books.
This site’s own count of what it does with the voice
The life, in order
The life told as one accountfrom this site's record
Irenaeus was born in Smyrna, in Asia Minor, around 130. As a boy he sat and listened to Polycarp, the old bishop of that city, and he never forgot it. Writing decades later to a former friend who had drifted into heresy, he described the scene from memory: where Polycarp sat as he taught, how he walked, how he looked, and how he told what he had heard from John and from the others who had seen the Lord with their own eyes. That is the chain Irenaeus stood in — John to Polycarp to Irenaeus — and it is the thing he leaned on hardest when the fight came. He went west, to Lugdunum in Gaul, the city now called Lyons, and served as a presbyter there. In 177 the church of Lyons was torn apart by a savage local persecution; the bishop Pothinus, over ninety years old, died in prison, and Christians were tortured in the amphitheatre before crowds. Irenaeus was away when the worst of it happened. The confessors in prison had sent him to Rome with a letter, on a peacemaking errand about Montanism. He came back to find his bishop dead, and was made bishop in his place. His great work is Against Heresies, in five books. The gnostic teachers, above all the school of Valentinus, taught an elaborate scheme of thirty divine beings, a botched creation by a lesser god, and a secret knowledge that saved an elite few. Irenaeus's method was to set their systems out in full, in their own words — the first two books are largely description — on the theory that the plain statement would do half the work. Then he answered: one God, who made the world and called it good; one Christ, truly human and truly divine; a resurrection of the body, not an escape from it; and no secret teaching anywhere, because the apostles founded churches and appointed successors whose names anyone could look up. He also fixed the number of the Gospels at four, no more and no fewer, and argued Christ as the second Adam who runs the whole human story again and gets it right — what he called recapitulation. A second work, the Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, was lost for centuries and turned up in an Armenian manuscript in 1904. When Victor of Rome moved to excommunicate the churches of Asia over the date of Easter around 190, Irenaeus wrote to him and told him to stop — the difference in practice, he said, had never broken the peace before, and the man whose name means peaceable ought to keep it. He died about 202. Later writers, Jerome among them, call him a martyr; Eusebius does not say so, and the record of how he died is not firm. Sources: Irenaeus, Against Heresies and Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching; Eusebius, Church History V.1–8, V.20, V.24; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2.
323 quotations across 35 books
Where this voice is quoted
So they tried to seize Him, but no one laid a hand on Him, because His hour had not yet come.
“With Him is nothing incomplete or out of due season, just as with the Father there is nothing incongruous. For all these things were foreknown by the Father; but the Son works them out at the proper time in perfect order and sequence.”
Jesus replied, “Truly, truly, I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin.
“He does not call mammon Lord when He says, "Ye cannot serve two masters; "but He teaches His disciples who serve God, not to be subject to mammon, nor to be ruled by it.”
So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.
“But again, those who assert that He was simply a mere man, begotten by Joseph, remaining in the bondage of the old disobedience, are in a state of death having been not as yet joined to the Word of God the Father, nor receiving liberty…”
You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out his desires.
“He had indeed been already accustomed to lie against God, for the purpose of leading men astray.”
Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see My day. He saw it and was glad.”
“Therefore Abraham also, knowing the Father through the Word, who made heaven and earth, confessed Him to be God; and having learned, by an announcement [made to him], that the Son of God would be a man among men, by whose advent his seed should…”
“Truly, truly, I tell you,” Jesus declared, “before Abraham was born, I am!”
“The sacred books acknowledge with regard to Christ, that as He is the Son of man, so is the same Being not a [mere] man; and as He is flesh, so is He also spirit, and the Word of God, and God.”
Then He told him, “Go, wash in the Pool of Siloam” (which means “Sent”). So the man went and washed, and came back seeing.
“As, therefore, we are by the Word formed in the womb, this very same Word formed the visual power in him who had been blind from his birth; showing openly who it is that fashions us in secret, since the Word Himself had been made…”
The man who had been dead came out with his hands and feet bound in strips of linen, and his face wrapped in a cloth.
“Let our opponents-that is, they who speak against their own salvation-inform us [as to this point]: The deceased daughter of the high priest; the widow's dead son, who was being carded out [to burial] near the gate [of the city]; and Lazarus, who had lain…”
As a result, Jesus no longer went about publicly among the Jews, but He withdrew to a town called Ephraim in an area near the wilderness.
“Then, when He had raised Lazarus from the dead, and plots were formed against Him by the Pharisees, He withdrew to a city called Ephraim; and from that place, as it is written "He came to Bethany six days before the passover," and going up…”
Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.
“He is therefore one and the same God, who called Abraham and gave him the promise. But He is the Creator, who does also through Christ prepare lights in the world, [namely] those who believe from among the Gentiles.”
If you had known Me, you would know My Father as well. From now on you do know Him and have seen Him.”
“For no one can know the Father, unless through the Word of God, that is, unless by the Son revealing [Him]; neither can he have knowledge of the Son, unless through the good pleasure of the Father.”
Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me—or at least believe on account of the works themselves.
“And such or so important a dispensation He did not bring about by means of the creations of others, but by His own; neither by those things which were created out of ignorance and defect, but by those which had their substance from the wisdom…”
You heard Me say, ‘I am going away, and I am coming back to you.’
“For if any one should inquire the reason why the Father, who has fellowship with the Son in all things, has been declared by the Lord alone to know the hour and the day [of judgment], he will find at present no more suitable, or…”
But I tell you the truth, it is for your benefit that I am going away.
“This Spirit did David ask for the human race, saying, "And stablish me with Thine all-governing Spirit;" who also, as Luke says, descended at the day of Pentecost upon the disciples after the Lord's ascension, having power to admit all nations to the entrance of…”
Now this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent.
“Now to whom is it not clear, that if the Lord had known many fathers and gods, He would not have taught His disciples to know [only] one God, and to call Him alone Father?”
And now, Father, glorify Me in Your presence with the glory I had with You before the world existed.
“In the beginning, therefore, did God form Adam, not as if He stood in need of man, but that He might have [some one] upon whom to confer His benefits.”
After He had said this, He showed them His hands and His side. The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.
“In the same manner, therefore, as Christ did rise in the substance of flesh, and pointed out to His disciples the mark of the nails and the opening in His side (now these are the tokens of that flesh which rose from the dead), so…”
But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name.
“Therefore did the Lord also say to His disciples after the resurrection, "O thoughtless ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory?"”