Tertullian often picks up on these arguments (Hippolytus often doesn't because he eventually represented a break from the Episcopal order!). Yet it was Irenaeus who started this idiotic way of arguing that became the hallmark of later Fathers. Yet the later fathers just pointed in the general direction of Irenaeus and the texts he edited (the Ignatian corpus etc) to prove these unproven suggestions.
The bottom line is that Irenaeus never proves that there was an unbroken succession of Patriarchs in ANY city let alone Rome. The only city that he goes into any detail about its illustrious 'apostolic past' is Rome and even then his 'argument' is little more than a list of names with an occasional 'here is a text that he wrote.'
Yet as historians of course we tend to think backwards. Irenaeus goes through two whole books of his Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So-Called before he bothers to draw what amounts to being the barest of sketches of the history of the Roman Church.
Of course, the real problem with the writings of Irenaeus is that this stupid list that appears in Refutation Book III Chapter 3 is the most extensive 'argument' that Irenaeus ever bothers to establish. Most of the time, the ideas just come out of his head and by the time they hit the page they are 'official orthodoxy.'
The example of the establishment of the fourfold canon is the most obvious. He can't marshal a list of authorities who used the quaternion because they don't exist.
Yet even if we accept the idea that Book III is full of some of the worst, most inconclusive arguments in the history of ideas, it becomes all the more amazing again that the two books which precede the establishment of this 'show and tell' book don't even have anything resembling a historical framework.
Just think about how the first book of the Refutation begins (the one with the list of stupid heretics). Irenaeus writes a book to 'refute' and 'overthrow' these traditions which - by their very nature - must have been older than the composition of the book. However Irenaeus DOESN'T EVEN FEEL COMPELLED TO DEMONSTRATE THAT HIS TRADITION IS OLDER THAN THE 'FALSE GNOSTICS' until five or ten years later.
Why the hesitation? Maybe it is because it would have seemed downright laughable to suggest that what he calls 'orthodoxy' is any older than what he sets forth on the page.
And that's another problem. Irenaeus again doesn't set out what 'truth' is until later in the five books in the series. Again we NOW read Book One as if it ALWAYS stood together with the other four books that were written later in Irenaeus' life. Yet the reality is that there was a time when the Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So-Called was JUST Book One (or a portion of what is now in the surviving book).
It is simply amazing that 'orthodoxy' begins 'on the attack' against pre-existent traditions without having to offer up any proof as to what 'the truth' really is.
The opening words of the book begin with a statement that because "certain men have set the truth aside" he must rescue that truth. Yet he never actually defines 'the truth' anywhere in the book.
It is simply amazing to me how the text of Irenaeus begins with a 'problem' (i.e. the things that the heretics 'did' to the truth) without actually defining what it looked like before the alleged 'corruption.' The work simply begins:
Certain persons reject the truth and introduce novel falsehoods, and 'endless genealogies' which says the apostle 'minister questions rather than godly edifying which is in faith.' [1 Tim 1:4]
Isn't that the strangest opening words possible? For one, the letter which purports to come from the apostle certainly was never written by him but is a Catholic forgery undoubtedly written by either Polycarp or - more than likely - Irenaeus himself. His opponents did not recognize these 'Pastoral letters.' They couldn't have had much of a prior existence to Irenaeus' tampering with the writings of previous authorities. And yet AMAZINGLY Irenaeus' whole argument about what the truth ISN'T is based on a lie!
Of course Irenaeus doesn't see it that way. According to him it's the 'false gnostics' who have done all the falsifying and counterfeiting. He immediately goes on to say:
With the specious arguments that they have villainously hammered together, they mislead the minds of the simple and take them captive, by tampering with the oracles of the Lord and becoming bad expositors of things that have been said well.
Clearly Irenaeus is specifically referencing differences in the scriptures that the 'false gnostics' and the Catholics shared in common. I also get the sense that Irenaeus is emphasizing that the Catholic texts lack the 'ambiguity' (or are 'less mysterious') than those employed by their enemies. Yet we already know from Clement's Letter to Theodore that the heretics argued that the Evangelist added "hierophantic teaching of the Lord ... to the stories already written ... [and] certain sayings of which he knew the interpretation would, as a mystagogue, lead the hearers into the innermost sanctuary of that truth hidden by seven veils."
The reader already knows that it is my understanding that these 'added sayings' lead to the inner sanctum of the Church of St. Mark (i.e. the room which the rest of the members of the church could not see directly save for shadows which flickered on the same curtain until they received baptism and other 'preparatory rituals').
Of course Irenaeus frames these mysteries as things which 'corrupted' the truth of the original documents and so frames the ideas of To Theodore in an entirely negative light. He immediately goes on to say:
And they destroy many by leading them away, with pretended knowledge, from him who framed and ordered this whole creation, as though they had something higher and greater to display than the God who has made heaven, earth and everything in them. In a plausible fashion they win the innocent, with rhetoric, to the habit of inquiry. But they destroy them without plausibility by making their attitude blasphemous and impious toward the Demiurge, when they have no ability to distinguish truth from falsehood.
Or as the same passage is preserved in the surviving Latin text:
They also overthrow the faith of many, by drawing them away, under a pretence of knowledge, from Him who rounded and adorned the universe; as if, forsooth, they had something more excellent and sublime to reveal, than that God who created the heaven and the earth, and all things that are therein. By means of specious and plausible words, they cunningly allure the simple-minded to inquire into their system; but they nevertheless clumsily destroy them, while they initiate them into their blasphemous and impious opinions respecting the Demiurge; and these simple ones are unable, even in such a matter, to distinguish falsehood from truth.
Clearly Irenaeus is attacking the Alexandrian mystery religion which existed long before anything approaching his mythical Roman episcopal tradition ever got off the ground in Italy.
And we should see quite clearly that Irenaeus is not talking about a random collection of 'gnostic heretics' as we like to imagine them - i.e. hippies smoking weed and dreaming up silly nonsense. This is an organized system of religion with a veil separating the masses from those of the inner sanctum for he immediately goes on to say that:
Error, indeed, is never set forth in its naked deformity, lest, being thus exposed, it should at once be detected. But it is craftily decked out in an attractive dress, so as, by its outward form, to make it appear to the inexperienced (ridiculous as the expression may seem) truer than the truth itself.
This last phrase - 'truer than the truth' - has an eerie resemblance to Clement's attack against the rival Gospel according to Mark which existed in communities outside Alexandria. Namely that:
even if they should say something true, one who loves the truth should not, even so, agree with them. For not all true things are the truth, nor should that truth which merely seems true according to human opinions be preferred to the true truth, that according to the faith.
Of course Irenaeus goes on to attack the Valentinians (who ultimately come from Alexandria) because he references that he "met some and understood what they think." He is clearly referencing his rival, Florinus, who witnessed Polycarp's REAL teachings and undoubtedly claimed that Polycarp was 'Valentinian' (or perhaps 'Valentinus' himself).
Our entire understanding of the origins of Christianity are founded on the arguments of Irenaeus and the truth is again, there is little 'rational argument' on any of the pages of Irenaeus' work. If anything the material proceeds in away that is utterly illogical and counter-intuitive.
Of course you don't have to make sense when you have the Emperor backing your reforms ...
dating back to conversations with his grandfather, Gaston Frank. "He said we represent one of the last descendants of the Frankist Jewish faith in the world," he muses. "I grew up thinking that our family was something like the Last of the Mohicans."