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Midwife of the Christian Bible
Irenaeus identified the books of the New Testament, then showed the church how they fit with the Old.

Irenaeus was a living link to the apostles. Although he became bishop of Lyons, in France, he was originally from the East. He was probably born in Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) around A.D. 130-140. As a youth he had seen and heard Polycarp of Smyrna, who, as Irenaeus put it, had received the things concerning the Lord from "the eyewitnesses of the Word of Life" (the name of John the disciple is often mentioned as one of these).

Irenaeus used these reports of Jesus, given "according to the Scriptures," delivered in the beginning by the apostles, to defend the truth of Christianity against a bewildering variety of early anti-Christian and heretical groups. As he did so, he gave the church a clear vision of the scriptural framework of its faith.

At the heart of this vision was Irenaeus's teaching of the right use of both the New Testament and the Old. Before Irenaeus, there was no New Testament. He is the first Christian writer to use, as Scripture, almost all the books that are in our New Testament today. And he insisted that these books could be properly used only by those people who accepted four authorities:

1. The "rule [canon] of truth"; that is, the belief in one God, one Son, and one Holy Spirit—the basis of the later creeds.

2. The whole canonical body of Scripture, Old and New.

3. The apostolic tradition; that is, the deposit handed down, once for all, by the apostles and preserved intact in the church to the present—referring to the contemplation of Christ according to the Scriptures.

4. The bishops whose very lives—as direct successors to the apostles—

provided the church with a visible witness that the true teaching about Christ was still being preserved and preached.

For all his decisive importance, we know very little about the life of Irenaeus. On his journey westward he probably visited Rome, where he would have encountered teachers such as the apologist Justin Martyr.

He also probably led the church in Vienne (near Lyons) during a violent persecution in 177, and then he assumed responsibility for the community in Lyons when its bishop, Pothinus, was imprisoned awaiting martyrdom.

Irenaeus is remembered as a martyr—though the claim dates from long after his death, which cannot be dated precisely. Only two of his written works have survived. The first is the collection of five books entitled The Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So-called, also known as Against the Heresies. The other, the Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, was discovered only at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Rightly uniting the Word
The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching provides the best insight into Irenaeus' vision. Here he links the preaching of the apostles—the New Testament writers—to its source in the Law, the Psalms and the Prophets.

First he outlines the faith handed down by the elders, who had known the apostles, epitomized in the three articles of the "canon of faith"—the one God and Father; the one Lord, the crucified and risen Jesus Christ; and the one Holy Spirit.

Then he recounts, in the manner of the great apostolic speeches in Acts, the scriptural narrative of God's work of salvation culminating in Christ. Finally, he demonstrates that what the apostles proclaimed as fulfilled in Christ, shaped as it is by Scripture, was indeed foretold in Scripture.

Irenaeus stresses the way the apostles themselves used Scripture: following Paul's proclamation that Christ died and rose according to the Scriptures (1 Cor. 15:3-5), the four canonical Gospels focus their accounts of Jesus on the Passion, and they always tell the story with references to Hebrew Scripture. Neither Marcion nor Gnostic writings like the Gospel of Thomas use Scripture like this in proclaiming Christ.