You'd think that I were stating the obvious. Irenaeus is the first Church Father who speaks to us directly (I still suspect that our present Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So Called was redacted by Hippolytus but I will let that one go for now).
You can't say that about Polycarp, Papias, Justin and the rest. Anyone can see by now that their surviving material has been heavily redacted, mostly by Irenaeus I suspect.
So it is that when conservative scholars say that we 'know the true beliefs of Christianity' they are being intentionally stupid. They know better than this. All that we really know is what Irenaeus TELLS US are the beliefs of the apostolic Church.
I have went through some of this already this month so I don't want to be a bore. Yet I think it is important sometimes to put things in their proper perspective.
I poke fun at Stephen Carlson, Andrew Criddle and Peter Jeffrey at this blog. However I want to restate that in many ways I feel closer to these souls than I do many people who share my belief that To Theodore is authentic.
What I share in common with many of the hoaxers is a love of the writings of the Church Fathers. I can honestly say that I have been almost exclusively spent most of the last thirty years of my life reading Patristic texts.
In a strange way they remind me of my wife (who happens to be Catholic). On the surface there is a lot about the Church Fathers that seems boring, repetitive and down right obtuse. Yet underneath the surface there is something absolutely wonderful.
This is because the early Fathers know what the greatest mystery in the history of mankind is. Or, let me restate that. Irenaeus is the ultimate source of most of the interesting works of Hippolytus and Tertullian AND Irenaeus KNOWS WHAT THE TRUTH IS.
You see in this regard I am actually in agreement with many of the most conservative scholars in the field.
Where I part ways with them of course is that I think Irenaeus is DELIBERATELY trying to obscure the truth from us. It's sort of like when a child grows up and asks his widowed mother what the father who died when he was six years old was 'really like' and that father had a lot of secrets.
I don't think Irenaeus is an honest broker. Irenaeus spends too much time attacking other people, other traditions and other beliefs. He's not the kind of guy you want to trust to get a fair and balanced view of something.
I know that all the pious out there will be saying that 'he had to attack the heresies because they were falsifying the true message of Christ' but I don't buy it. In fact I have always seen things in the exact opposite manner.
The truth will always triumph regardless of what men do against it. I always thought this was the whole point of the opening line of the gospel. Indeed this is how the Christians BEFORE Irenaeus, those whom he attacks interpreted the line:
For, in discoursing of the Saviour and declaring that all things beyond the fullness received form from Him, he says that He is the fruit of the entire fullness. For he styles Him a "light which shineth in darkness, and which was not overcome." [Irenaeus AH i.8.5]
You see to any Jew the whole mystery about 'the light' is immediately obvious. 'Light' or nehora was always identified to be the name of the messiah.
Rabbi Aba Serongia (4th century CE) interprets the phrase, "and light dwells with him", as referring to royal messiah (Genesis Raba 1:6). This interpretation appears in the context of a discussion on the meaning of, "Let there be light" (Genesis 1:3), which always intrigued Jewish commentators. Rabbi Aba sees an extraordinary light, unlike the light of the sun and the moon.
To understand the nature of this light, Rabbi Aba brings to mind the personified light found in Isaiah – "Arise, shine; for your light has come" (Isaiah 60:1). The light that will come to comfort Israel in the end of days is the same light mentioned in Genesis, which in his mind is none other than the Messiah.
That the Messiah is light can further be seen in the enigmatic words "In your light we see light" (Psalm 36:10). This verse was also interpreted as being linked to the light in Genesis 1:3. "What is the light that the assembly of Israel is waiting for ["we see light"]? This is the light of the Messiah, as it is said: "And God saw the light" (Pesikta Rabati 36).
Light as an attribute of the Messiah can be found in another name that Jewish commentators saw as referring to the Messiah. From the verse, "I have prepared a lamp for my anointed one" (Psalm 132:17), it was understood that the Messiah is also called Lamp (Hebrew Ner). Lamp was one of the ornaments in the tabernacle. Outside the tabernacle there was the Ner Tamid, the Lampstand that gave light continuously (Leviticus 24:3-4).
That Ner was not a mere decoration. Trying to understand why the Lampstand was placed outside the tabernacle rather than inside, the Jews concluded that men are the ones who need light, not God who dwelled inside the tent. The lamp, therefore, was to serve as a reminder of the light of the Messiah. "God said to Israel: `As sons of this world you need the light of the temple, and you light lamps there; but in the future... I will redeem you through the Messiah, who was likened to a lamp"' (Midrash Agada on Exodus 27).
This understanding of Judaism is well established. Any reference to 'the light' is a messianic reference. But the opening words of the Christian gospel goes beyond this. It says that the light cannot be apprehended or overcome by darkness. This is a much bolder or more mystical statement which develops clearly from the central mystery in Christianity - the Passion of Christ.
In that story as we all know, the Jews think that they are triumphing over Jesus but in reality they are handing a victory over to the side that will eventually destroy them and their temple. Why? Here is the great mystery which I don't believe most people have come to terms with.
The mystical understanding of the opening words of the gospel necessarily implies some inherent belief in the transmigration of souls - or if you will - the transmigration of the World Soul. Steven J Davis does an amazing job in his works of demonstrating that this 'Origenist' concept continues to be the beating heart of Coptic Christianity. We can trace the idea all the way back to Clement of Alexandria.
While the idea is expressed in many slightly different ways the core Alexandrian concept is that Jesus brought into the world a divine soul that passed to members of the Church through participation in the Eucharist. What is being consumed in that communal meal is nothing short of the soul of the Son of Man.
I think we all know the symbolism of the Church as the body of Christ so I won't bore my readership. However, it is important to note that none of the individual members of the Church is actually understood to be a 'Christ' - save of course 'the head.'
What two hundred years of Protestant scholarship has failed to grasp of course is that the most ancient forms of Christianity - and I am thinking specifically here of the Alexandrian Church of St. Mark - all understand that Christ didn't just end when Jesus died on the Cross. His soul was clearly passed on to another individual who the other disciples knew but only recognized as Jesus resurrected when he displayed the stigmata.
The point I want to make is that if we are going to be 'truly conservative' we have to finally recognize that the papacy is an absolutely necessary part of Christianity. It represents the very divine mystery central to Christianity.
What most people don't realize is that early Alexandrian texts like the Passio Petri Sancti make clear that Jesus' soul went through Mark to a line of Popes who sat in a replica throne which resembled the divine chariot. This was deliberate. It reveals the central mystery of the gospel - i.e. the enthronement of the Son of Man.
This was the whole purpose of Christianity. I some times don't understand the attacks of atheists who say that none of the things described in the gospel are real and the like. I am not sure that intelligent men like Clement and Origen really cared less whether any of these were factual. In that way we see an exact parallel in Judaism where the truth of the Torah is not dependent on the literal words which stand on the page.
The real story in the Torah is the emergence of the Messiah. I have tried to explain this to my Gentile friends for centuries and they just don't get it. It's not really about Moses and the Israelites. All these things were always understood to be signs of what WOULD come in the future.
This is the mystery of the letter vav, the sixth letter of the alphabet. I will not try and explain these matters to the uninitiated (because it would take too long). Yet I was amazed early on in my studies of the Church Fathers that the Alexandrians - and especially Clement of Alexandria - referenced the mystery of the sixth letter.
This is because the Alexandrian tradition develops from authentic Judaism and explains why Origen was branded a heretic.
The Jews believed and believe in metempsychosis. It is called gilgul in Hebrew and forms an important part of every aspect of Jewish mysticism.
The point is that it is only because modern Christians cleave to Irenaeus that they fail to see that he is actually preventing them from seeing the truth. The original truth of Christianity was in Alexandrian and it developed from a single, long gospel which was 'according to Mark,' the first in a line of 'Christs' which ruled over the Alexandrian Church.
And what was this mystery in Alexandria? Clement lays it out for us in the most mystical language possible:
But he who has the light watches, "and darkness seizes not on him," nor sleep, since darkness does not. He that is illuminated is therefore awake towards God; and such an one lives. "For what was made in Him was life." [Instructor ii.9]
Clement also frequent alludes to the idea that this 'light' was received by members of the community:
Let us by no means, then, veil our selves with the darkness; for the light dwells in us. "For the darkness," it is said, "comprehendeth it not." And the very night itself is illuminated by temperate reason. The thoughts of good men Scripture has named "sleepless lamps;" although for one to attempt even to practise concealment, with reference to what he does, is confessedly to sin. [ibid ii.10]
Of course 'we all know' that Jesus is 'the light.' Yet how many of us are prepared for the original Alexandrian truth that Jesus was the light BECAUSE he was the column or pillar of light which guided the ancient Israelites through the desert?
The Alexandrians never believed in the humanity of Jesus. This was something that was forced onto them by the orthdooxy beyond the shores of Alexandria. As Clement notes:
that fire like a pillar, and the fire in the desert, is the symbol of the holy light which passed through from earth and returned again to heaven, by the wood [of the cross], by which also the gift of intellectual vision was bestowed on us. [Stromata i.24]
The point is that Irenaeus' faith has nothing to do with Judaism. It is an artificial contrivance which acknowledges 'the rule of the world' - i.e. the Cosmocrator - in order to make Christianity more palatable to the Imperial authorities.
It is only when we get beyond Irenaeus and delve into the mysteries of Alexandria that we see that Jesus was ONLY the light of the pillar that guided Israel in the desert (i.e. the angel of the presence called Chrestos). It was the first disciple who took that light within his soul by means of the secret initiation referenced in the Alexandrian gospel who was the awaited Christ and it was his gospel which outlined the continuation of that light in the present darkness, an allusion to the Alexandrian Papacy he was to establish for all ages to come.
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."