Egypt, 'The True Exodus' (AH iv.30.1) and Irenaeus' Anti-Alexandrian Polemic Throughout Book Four of his Refutation

Regular readers of my blog already know the score. I think Christianity started in Alexandria. I ignore the Acts of the Apostles because the Marcionites thought it was garbage. I believe the Alexandrians like Clement only tolerated the text because it was imposed on them from without (like the rest of the Roman canon).

I know it won't make sense to many of you but I really feel there is no history of the second century Church. What we have instead is an inherited 'idea' of what the history of Christianity SHOULD be like - i.e. a straight line from the Acts of the Apostles to the middle of the third century (the first time in the history of the religion that we actually have REAL HISTORY to work with).

I am very hopeful that Harry Tzalas and I are going to find something off the coast of Chatby Beach in Alexandria. The way scholars exclusively study 'texts' to determine the truth about the Christian tradition is downright idiotic. It's like running a business without keeping track of expenses. You have to 'keep things real' is you want to be successful at anything. You can't hope to reconstruct history without 'real things' like knowing where people lived, where the worshiped, how they lived.

Tzalas has already located a Church of St. Mark in the Boucolia. He says the evidence suggests that there are archaeological remains that are as old as the late fourth or fifth centuries. The difference here is that we can READ about St. Mark and his church which was in the Jewish quarter of Alexandria, but when you can see that this was a real place, it is more difficult to ignore.

Indeed doesn't anyone find it strange that we don't have a clue where the Roman Church at the time of Irenaeus was actually located?

Of course, the biggest breakthrough will come if we manage to identify that large rectangular object at the bottom of the sea just to the north of that fourth or fifth century Church of St. Mark as the Jewish temple of Alexandria. Maybe it's just a synagogue. Maybe it's something else. Or maybe it's nothing at all.

The point is that there are all these IDEAS and historical references in the literature which just get ignored by most scholars simply because they don't 'fit' within our inherited models for Christianity.

I actually think that as a result of this practice we end up READING the surviving literature from the period BADLY. Take the example of Book Four of Irenaeus' Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So Called.

It is so very difficult to read Irenaeus. His style is utterly grating it is difficult to fight your way through the material and interpret it critically. It's almost meant to be accepted on blind faith. Irenaeus is going to bore you to death if you don't surrender to his arguments.

Yet I really think that most scholars don't know Irenaeus or misunderstand his writings. They get so overwhelmed with the dreariness of Irenaeus' style that they end up treating the work 'pastorally' (that is read 'bits and pieces of it' out of context and in an entirely self-serving way).

The first point that I always make when tackling the writings of this Church Father is that this book - the Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So Called - developed slowly over the reign of Commodus. Book Four was written very close to 189 CE and should be viewed as a separate work from the rest (the only reason that we think that it belongs in the series is because of the lengthy introduction which might have been written by Hippolytus who effectively 'edited' Irenaeus' work and potentially gave him the name we now call him by - viz. 'Irenaeus').

Book Four has very little to do with identifying teachings as belonging to Valentinus or Marcion or the rest of the 'known heretics.' If we discount the introduction the only references to Valentinus appear in vi.4 [twice] -a passage where Irenaeus identifies the various interpretations of ' "No man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whom the Son has willed to reveal [Him]' a saying which Irenaeus interestingly identifies as being found in the Gospel of Mark (AH vi.4.1), xxxiii.3 where the Valentinians are condemned for the incorrect beliefs about the Father and xxxv.1 where they are lumped together with other 'gnostics' for the same reason.

As I noted this is a very different kind of work than Books One to Three. The attack here is quite clear - the characterization of the Egyptian Church as 'Jewish' (owing to their 'error' in maintaining circumcision, sacrifice and the calculation of holidays using the Jewish lunar calendar (all beliefs discernible from Egyptian and Ethiopian Coptic Christianity). In our next post we will demonstrate that Irenaeus' argument builds until he announces that the Roman Church emerged in the late second century as nothing short of the awaited 'Promised Land' for those who were 'mired' in the heretical 'errors' of Egypt. In Irenaeus' words 'now is the true Exodus.' (AH iv.xxx.2)

I will argue that when read with a critical eye the arguments of this book reflect the contemporary imposition of Roman orthodoxy on Alexandria (i.e. when according to the Liber Pontificalis and Eusebius, the Alexandrian bishop abandon the tradition Passover calculation in favor of fixing Easter on the Sunday after Passover). Yet when read in another way, it PROVES that the Roman Church developed against and out of 'errors' associated with a pre-existent Alexandrian orthodoxy very closely tied to Judaism.

I hope it is interesting for my readers. Above all else I want to disprove that straight line from Acts to the Roman Church. Acts after all is all about Antioch as the See which began with the reconciliation of Peter and Paul. It's ridiculous that scholars just turn their heads as Irenaeus switches 'Rome' for Antioch as this See.

How did the contemporary world get so distracted by his anti-Alexandrian polemic? Maybe they were just scared ...