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.
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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…
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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
As it is written in Isaiah the prophet: “Behold, I will send My messenger ahead of You, who will prepare Your way.”
“Wherefore also Mark, the interpreter and follower of Peter, does thus commence his Gospel narrative: "The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God; as it is written in the prophets, Behold, I send My messenger before Thy face, which shall prepare…”
“What do You want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have You come to destroy us? I know who You are—the Holy One of God!”
“And through the Word Himself who had been made visible and palpable, was the Father shown forth, although all did not equally believe in Him; but all saw the Father in the Son: for the Father is the invisible of the Son, but the Son…”
“Why does this man speak like this? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”
“Now the commandment was given to man by the Word. For Adam, it is said, "heard the voice of the Lord God."”
On hearing this, Jesus told them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
“For no persons of any kind would act properly, if they should advise blind men, just about to fall over a precipice, to continue their most dangerous path, as if it were the right one, and as if they might go on in safety.”
Indeed, no one can enter a strong man’s house to steal his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can plunder his house.
“For as in the beginning he enticed man to transgress his Maker's law, and thereby got him into his power; yet his power consists in transgression and apostasy, and with these he bound man [to himself]; so again, on the other hand, it was necessary…”
A synagogue leader named Jairus arrived, and seeing Jesus, he fell at His feet
“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…”
His disciples answered, “You can see the crowd pressing in on You, and yet You ask, ‘Who touched Me?’”
“They further maintain that the passion which took place in the case of the twelfth Aeon is pointed at by the apostasy of Judas, who was the twelfth apostle, and also by the fact that Christ suffered in the twelfth month.”
You have disregarded the commandment of God to keep the tradition of men.”
“For the tradition of the elders themselves, which they pretended to observe from the law, was contrary to the law given by Moses.”
Then He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and that He must be…
“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?"”
After six days Jesus took with Him Peter, James, and John, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There He was transfigured before them.
“He asserts that the fruit of this arrangement and analogy has been manifested in the likeness of an image, namely, Him who, after six days, ascended into the mountain along with three others, and then became one of six (the sixth), in which character He…”
“If You can?” echoed Jesus. “All things are possible to him who believes!”
“And not merely in works, but also in faith, has God preserved the will of man free and under his own control, saying, "According to thy faith be it unto thee;" thus showing that there is a faith specially belonging to man, since he has…”
“You do not know what you are asking,” Jesus replied. “Can you drink the cup I will drink, or be baptized with the baptism I will undergo?”
“They maintain that those who have attained to perfect knowledge must of necessity be regenerated into that power which is above all.”
The Son of Man will go just as it is written about Him, but woe to that man by whom He is betrayed!
“But Judas having been once for all cast away, never returns into the number of the disciples; otherwise a different person would not have been chosen to fill his place.”
While they were eating, Jesus took bread, spoke a blessing and broke it, and gave it to the disciples, saying, “Take it; this is My body.”
“Giving directions to his disciples to offer to God the first fruits of his creatures—not as if he stood in need of them, but that they might be themselves neither unfruitful nor ungrateful—he took that created thing, bread, and gave thanks, and said, "This is…”
After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, He was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God.
“Also, towards the conclusion of his Gospel, Mark says: "So then, after the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, He was received up into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God;" confirming what had been spoken by the prophet: "The Lord said to…”