On the Question of the Authenicity of Irenaeus's Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge falsely so-called

I am not getting paid for this.  That's the bottom line.  I don't have to be right. I don't have any 'reputation' to uphold. I'm just go where the evidence leads me.

If I found a lead which said that Jesus was God I would follow that piece of evidence.  If I found a lead which said that the Jews were wicked people who deserved to have their temple destroyed because they killed 'Christ,' I'd follow that lead.

That doesn't mean that I am forced to accept any of these claims on a personal level. I just want to find the truth knowing that this is an ongoing - even life long - proces which necessarily will necessarily leave me falling short of attaining 'perfect knowledge' of the thing I am studying - i.e. the origins of Christianity.

But I am okay with that. I do it every day on a personal level.

Yet somehow the average 'professor' seems to think that he or she has to present an image of infallibility or - worse yet - stick with tired old 'assumptions' about the early Church.

Let me give you an example.

While I was working on this theory identifying the Carpocratians with the Emperor Commodus' inner circle Marcia Aurelia Ceionia Demetrias as the 'little Marcia' who came to Rome during the reign of Lucius Verus and was identified as a Carpocratian in Irenaeus' First Book of Against the Heresies) I necessarily came back to the question of how much of Irenaeus' work that now survives was actually written by Irenaeus.

The problem as I have mentioned in a previous post is that Hippolytus always cites a shorter version of Irenaeus' work in the Philosophumena. This would suggest - as we see with other Patristic texts (cf. the introduction to Tertullian's Against Marcion Book 1.1) - that later editors were continually adding new material to old texts.

As such Hippolytus' version of Irenaeus was closer to the original than our surviving copies of Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So-Called (the real name of 'Against the Heresies)

Yet does that mean that even Hippolytus' text of Irenaeus was immaculate?

In other words, if you see a process where everyone was coming along and adding bits and pieces to the work (just read Book Five and you can't help but get a sense that this author is quite angry at Rome as we know Hippolytus was) why should we trust Hippolytus' text.

Then I noticed something in Hippolytus's biography I had never noticed before - all the ancient sources identify him as a 'Novatian.' I knew that Hippolytus had been set up as a rival Pope to those of the Catholic Church. When this occurred exactly is anyone's guess but the idea that he might have a hand at adding or reworking the information which appears in chapters 22 to the conclusion of Book One is now a distinct possibility.

In this section we noted the 'Carpocratians' suddenly emerge as an Alexandrian sect which have come to Rome and venerated a portrait of Jesus which - I have noted - must be identified as or related to the portrait that hung in the Imperial palace at the time of Alexander Severus.

There is a clear continuity when you follow Hippolytus' report about Callixtus back to the historical inner circle of Commodus.  In other words, Callixtus represents a certain line from the reign of Victor. Callixtus would have certainly argued that he favored not only by Zephyrinus but also Victor. In my mind this is the Carpocratian tradition of Marcia (remembered as 'little Marcia' owing to the fact she was but a girl in the age of Anicetus when she first came to Rome) which sneaks into books of Irenaeus which were preserved by the circle of Hippolytus.

Now this is what I have been thinking about all day. It is Hippolytus' text of the Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So-Called which is attributed to someone named 'Irenaeus.' But we cannot forget that there must have been another copy of this same work in the hands of his Catholic rivals in Rome (i.e. the line which went from Victor to Zephyrinus to Callixtus to Urban and finally Pontian).

Was this text of the Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So-Called ascribed to Irenaeus - or as I suspect - was it connected to Eclectus or 'Eclecta' as we see in the case of the letter of 2 John in our canon

Hippolytus was already estranged from 'Catholic Church' in the period which - as we have seen - developed directly from Commodus's funneling of large sums of money during his rule. 'Irenaeus' acknowledges that the Church was dependent on Commodus' generosity and that many members of the Catholic Church sat in his court so the idea that the author of Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So-Called COULD HAVE BEEN Eclectus is not out of the question.

The only reason that we believe that the name of the author of Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So-Called was named 'Irenaeus' is because the circle of Hippolytus connects this name with that text.

Yet we can see from the example of Hippolytus' own Refutation of All Heresies that false attributions can and indeed do get made .Of its ten books, Book I was long known and was printed (with the title Philosophumena) among the works of Origen, Books II and III are lost, and Books IV-X were found, without the name of the author, in a monastery of Mount Athos in 1842, and published in 1851 under the title Philosophumena, by E. Miller, who attributed it to Origen of Alexandria. It has since been attributed to Hippolytus.


Why couldn't the same 'mistake' have been made with respect to Commodus' chamberlain Eclectus's original authorship of the Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So-Called

The only difference would be that in this case the name 'Irenaeus' (an otherwise unhistorical figure) was DELIBERATELY misidentified as the name of the author owing to Hippolytus' own animosity toward the Commodian cabal which had authority in Rome.

It would have been impossible for Hippolytus to acknowledge the authority of Eclectus and to attack the Episcopal line that went from Victor through Zephyrinus, Callixtus and the rest because it would have been well recognized that Eclectus, Marcia and the rest not only saved Callixtus from the mines but were part of a community which set him on his path to the Papal See.

This is why I think it is likely that the historical author of Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So-Called - i.e. 'Eclectus' - was renamed by Hippolytus as 'Irenaeus.'