After the apostles: the apologists and Irenaeus

The generation after the apostles

By the end of the first century the apostles had died, and the church faced a new question: who would keep the faith they had handed on, and how? The writers of these years are often called the Apostolic Fathers, men who had known the apostles or belonged to the generation just after them.

One of the earliest is a letter from the church at Rome to the church at Corinth, traditionally ascribed to Clement of Rome and usually dated around 96. The Corinthians had pushed out their presbyters, and the letter calls them back to humility and good order. Probably from about the same time, though scholars date it variously, comes the Didache, the ‘Teaching of the Twelve Apostles’, a short church manual. It sets out the way of life and the way of death, tells the church to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and gives thanksgiving prayers for the Lord's Supper The Didache.

Around 110 Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, was taken under guard across Asia Minor to die in Rome, and on the way he wrote seven letters. He begged the Roman Christians not to try to save him: he was God's wheat, he said, to be ground by the teeth of the beasts into the pure bread of Christ. Again and again his letters urge three things: keep together around the bishop, the presbyters and the deacons; share the one Eucharist; and hold fast that Christ truly took flesh and truly suffered.

The last was aimed at teachers later called Docetists, from the Greek for ‘to seem’, who said that Christ only seemed to be human and only seemed to suffer. If that were so, Ignatius wrote to the church at Smyrna, then his own chains were only a seeming too. In the same letter he wrote that wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic church, the earliest surviving use of that phrase Ignatius, Letter to the Smyrnaeans. John had already given the test:

By this you will know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.

1 John 4:2-3

Christians read Ignatius differently on the bishop. Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican Christians see in him an early witness to an episcopate handed down from the apostles; many Protestants note that in the New Testament ‘overseer’ and ‘elder’ name the same office, and read Ignatius as a pastor pleading for unity against heresy and division. The bishop of Smyrna to whom Ignatius wrote, Polycarp, was himself martyred around 155. According to the account of his death, when the proconsul told him to revile Christ, he answered that he had served him eighty-six years and had never been wronged by him, so how could he blaspheme the King who saved him? Whether the eighty-six years were his age or his years as a Christian, we cannot tell.

Before the emperor: Justin

Second-century Christians had no legal protection. Neighbours called them atheists because they would not honour the gods, and wondered what went on at their meetings. Those who answered such charges in writing are called the apologists, from the Greek for a defence; the best known is Justin.

Born at Flavia Neapolis in Samaria (modern Nablus), Justin went from one school of philosophy to another in search of truth. As he tells the story, an old man he met by the sea pointed him to the prophets and to Christ, and he believed. He taught in Rome as a Christian philosopher, and around 155 addressed his First Apology to the emperor Antoninus Pius.

Justin presented Christ as the Logos of John's Gospel, the Word and Reason of God. The whole Logos came in Christ, but seeds of the Logos are sown in every human being, so whatever Socrates or any other philosopher said rightly belongs to Christians Justin, Second Apology. He did not throw philosophy away; he claimed every truth in it for Christ.

He also described Christian worship plainly. On the day called Sunday, believers from town and country gathered, and "the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits". The president exhorted them, all stood to pray, and bread and wine mixed with water were brought and shared after he had given thanks over them. A collection helped orphans and widows, the sick and prisoners. They met on that day, Justin explains, because on the first day God made the world, and on it Jesus Christ rose from the dead Justin, First Apology. Justin was beheaded in Rome with several companions around 165, and the church remembers him as Justin Martyr.

Secret knowledge and a shorter Bible

The deepest challenge of the century came not from persecution but from teachers inside the churches. The movements we now group as Gnosticism began from a real question: if God is good, why is the world so full of pain and evil? Many answered like this. This material world was made not by the highest God but by a lower, ignorant maker. Sparks of the divine are trapped in some human bodies. Salvation comes through a secret knowledge, gnōsis (γνῶσις), of where we truly came from, and Christ descended from above to bring it. Since flesh could not be saved, many said that Christ only seemed to have a body.

They claimed that Jesus had taught this knowledge privately to a few, and they produced gospels of their own; some of them, found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, can be read today (see What about the 'other gospels'?). In the next century Origen of Alexandria, commenting on John 1:3, answered the followers of the Gnostic teacher Valentinus. Their error, as the Catena gives Origen's words, lay in "saying, that the Word supplied to the Creator the cause of the creation of the world" Origen. They made the Creator, that is, a lesser agent beneath the Word.

In Rome, Marcion took another road. A wealthy shipowner from Sinope on the Black Sea, he was gripped by Paul's gospel of free grace. He concluded that the Creator of the Old Testament, who gave the law and judged, was a different god from the loving Father whom Jesus revealed. Around 144 he parted from the church at Rome. He set aside the Old Testament and, as his opponents report, took as Scripture a single Gospel cut down from Luke and ten letters of Paul, removing even from these what seemed to him Jewish.

The church judged that both roads fell short of the apostles' faith. Jesus prayed, "I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth" (Matthew 11:25); and God looked on all he had made and saw that "it was very good" (Genesis 1:31). And Paul had told Timothy to turn away from a ‘knowledge’ falsely so called, and to "guard what has been entrusted to you" (1 Timothy 6:20).

Irenaeus: the faith in the open

The fullest answer came from Irenaeus of Lyons. Raised in Asia Minor, he remembered hearing Polycarp teach at Smyrna when he was young. After the church at Lyons suffered a fierce persecution in 177, he became its bishop, and around 180 he wrote five books usually called Against Heresies. Their full title, the Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So Called, takes its words from 1 Timothy 6:20 Irenaeus, Against Heresies.

Irenaeus defended, first, the one God who is Creator. God did not leave the making of the world to lesser powers or angels; he made it himself with his ‘two hands’, the Son and the Spirit, and so the material world is his, and good. Second, the apostles' faith was never secret. Had they kept hidden mysteries, they would have entrusted them to the men to whom they entrusted the churches; yet what the bishops of those churches had taught, one after another, was one faith, confessed by churches across the world. He called its summary the rule of truth: one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth; one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, made flesh for our salvation; and the Holy Spirit, who spoke through the prophets. It sounds much like the later Apostles' Creed. Catholics and Orthodox find here an early witness to apostolic succession; Protestants stress that the tradition Irenaeus appealed to was public and taught the same faith as the Scriptures.

Third, he held that the church has four Gospels and only four, because these four came from the apostles and were read in the churches. The Muratorian Fragment, a list of the New Testament books usually dated to the late second century, shows the same sifting under way The Muratorian Fragment. The story of the canon is told in the doctrine course's lesson The canon and in How did we get the Bible?.

His deepest answer he drew from Paul. God's purpose, Paul writes, is:

to bring all things in heaven and on earth together in Christ.

Ephesians 1:10

The verb, anakephalaioomai (ἀνακεφαλαιόομαι), means to gather up or sum up. From it Irenaeus drew his teaching of recapitulation. Christ, the second Adam, gathered humanity up in himself: where Adam's disobedience brought death, his obedience brought life. He "became what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself" Irenaeus, Against Heresies. So the whole person, body as well as soul, is saved, and the resurrection of the flesh is salvation's last chapter.

The church remembered this battle. In the fourth century John Chrysostom, explaining "The Word became flesh" (John 1:14), noted that "there are some who say, that the whole of the incarnation was only in appearance, to refute such a blasphemy, he used the expression, was made, meaning to represent not a conversion of substance, but an assumption of real flesh" Chrysostom.

These writers are witnesses, not Scripture, and we weigh them by Scripture; some, for instance, think Justin too generous to the philosophers. But the main lines they drew from the Bible are the common faith of every church: the world God made is good; Christ came in real flesh and saves us, bodies and all; and the apostles' faith is no secret for an elite but open to every believer. Whenever we confess "God the Father Almighty; Maker of heaven and earth" The Apostles' Creed, we stand where they stood.

Practice