Tradition can be either oral or written. Never in the early Fathers do we get the sense that the written scriptures are in any way separate from tradition. St. Irenaeus makes it plain that the writing of the gospels grew out of the apostles’ oral preaching, which itself grew out of the personal experience of the living, fleshly Jesus.

“Lay hold of the tradition of the truth.” – St. Irenaeus

The writings of the early Church Fathers capture a moment in Christian history when a living connection to Jesus and his apostles was still present and keenly felt. St. Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130–c. 200), “the first Christian theologian,” marks the transition from the apostolic to the patristic era. He was taught as a very young man by St. Polycarp, who knew St. John the apostle. Both of the latter men lived providentially long lives: John is believed to have died around AD 100, and Polycarp lived c. 69–c.155. Thus, Irenaeus’s thought and teaching extend in a direct line to the Messiah himself.

Sadly, only a fraction of what Irenaeus wrote has survived. For this reason, everything we do have is precious gold, both as historical witness and for its intrinsic theological value. Most of his writing is concerned with exposing authentic Christian faith on the basis of his living connection to the Lord, against heretical (particularly gnostic) teachings.

At this point in church history there was already a strong concern for ecclesial tradition, and for discerning and preserving what Jesus actually taught. Multiple, conflicting voices were already being heard in the Christian world. In the later decades of the first century, the four gospels were written in order to leave a written record of the apostles’ oral preaching, and probably also as a check against errant oral traditions, folktales, and rumors that were circulating about Jesus. Oral tradition was important in the early church, but it had to be corrected and controlled by written records, which were more objective and stable. Recording the memories of eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life in writing was a way of setting the record straight for the future.

Written gospels were also a way for early communities that had received the Christian message through oral preaching to savor and study it in a permanent form. Clement of Alexandria, another of the church fathers, tells us that the crowds who heard St. Peter preach the gospel begged him to leave a permanent written account, so his companion and interpreter Mark (who was not himself an eyewitness to Jesus) wrote down his gospel based on Peter’s preaching.

St. Irenaeus was a key figure in this effort to establish authentic Christian tradition. In addition to his surviving books, Against Heresies and The Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching, we have many fragments of his writing preserved through quotations in other works, such as Eusebius’s Church History from the fourth century.

Irenaeus lets his reminiscences about the early days of the Church flow freely in his Letter to Florinus, from which a valuable fragment survives. Documents like this are priceless in providing a glimpse of that early Christian world. What some historians depict as murky and inaccessible becomes vividly clear, thanks to these first-person memoirs of those who lived in the Church’s early years and in many cases made the ultimate sacrifice for the faith.

In typical fashion, Irenaeus is inveighing against heretical teaching and contrasting it with the sound teaching of the “apostolic men” of old, which he personally experienced. He recalls that while a young boy he saw his correspondent, Florinus (a formerly orthodox priest now turned gnostic), conferring with Polycarp in Asia Minor.

Irenaeus professes to have a clearer memory of those days than more recent events. This is something we have all witnessed with elderly people, who can often recite pivotal stories from their childhood or youth even while retaining a weaker short-term memory. The reason for this, Irenaeus says, is that the experiences of childhood are closely tied to the soul’s growth at this formative stage, and thus become incorporated with the soul. Such memories can be accessed at any time as a permanent point of reference.

Irenaeus is thus able to remember vividly the scene of Polycarp’s preaching:

[…] I can even describe the place where the blessed Polycarp used to sit and discourse—his going out, too, and his coming in—his general mode of life and personal appearance, together with the discourses which he delivered to the people; also how he would speak of his familiar intercourse with John, and with the rest of those who had seen the Lord; and how he would call their words to remembrance. Whatsoever things he had heard from them respecting the Lord, both with regard to His miracles and His teaching, Polycarp having thus received from the eyewitnesses of the Word of life, would recount them all in harmony with the Scriptures.

Institutional or cultural memory (for example in the Christian church) is built up out of the personal memories of individuals who hand on knowledge and experience through time. Irenaeus recalls how he reflectively absorbed his elders’ conversation:

These things, through God’s mercy which was upon me, I then listened to attentively, and treasured them up not on paper, but in my heart; and I am continually, by God’s grace, revolving these things accurately in my mind.

Tradition, for the church fathers, enables one to distinguish truth from falsehood. Something you see time and again in the early patristic writings is the concern for correctness of doctrine. Irenaeus is certain that Polycarp would have fled in horror if he had heard the gnostic teachings being propounded in his own day. Another anecdote, preserved in Against Heresies, confirms this tough-minded early Christian attitude that false teaching and those spreading it should be shunned. The story goes all the way back to St. John and concerns Cerinthus, an early gnostic. It shows that the Beloved Apostle had a humorous streak.

There are even those who heard [Polycarp] tell the story of John, the Lord’s disciple. When John went to bathe in Ephesus and saw Cerinthus inside, he rushed out without washing, shouting, “Let us flee, lest the bathhouse collapse, for Cerinthus, the enemy of truth, is inside!”

An early gnostic, Cerinthus had been going around claiming that Jesus was only human, not divine. Many scholars believe that John’s gospel was written to refute Cerinthus’s errors—hence the strong stress that John places on Jesus’ divinity, or intimate connection with the Father. Christian apologetics starts in the New Testament itself!

This connects to a larger point about the early church. As Bishop Robert Barron has observed, “our modern divisions between the pastoral, spiritual, and theological didn’t exist in the time of the early Church.” For the Church Fathers, all three dimensions of religion were connected. One’s personal knowledge of and relationship with Jesus was closely linked with correct teaching about who Jesus was and what he did. For Irenaeus, tradition in the church is nothing less than an expression of “the preeminent gift of love, which is more precious than knowledge” (Against Heresies, 4.33.8).

And the way this true knowledge was passed along was through ecclesial tradition, in particular the process of apostolic succession. To be sure, oral tradition played in important role in the early church. But it was carried out within an institutional framework. The writings of multiple early Fathers declare the importance of remaining united with one’s local bishop, which in turn connects us with Jesus himself. Truth is thus a unifying force. Apostolic succession is a guarantee of authentic faith and salvation for all.

Irenaeus provides concrete substantiation of his claims about apostolic succession by listing all the bishops of Rome (which he sees as the chief of all the churches) up to his own time:

We point to the tradition and faith announced to humanity by the greatest, most ancient, and universally recognized Church: the one founded and organized in Rome by those two renowned apostles, Peter and Paul. This faith has reached us through the sequence of bishops. Indeed, because of its superior authority and origin, every other church—meaning the faithful everywhere—must align itself with this Church. Once the blessed apostles had founded and built the Church, they entrusted the office of the episcopate to Linus (the same Linus Paul mentioned in his letters to Timothy). Anacletus followed him. The third bishop in line from the apostles was Clement [….]

Evaristus succeeded Clement, followed by Alexander. Sixtus was appointed sixth from the apostles, followed by Telephorus (who suffered a glorious martyrdom), then Hyginus, Pius, and Anicetus. Soter succeeded Anicetus, and now Eleutherius holds the bishopric in the twelfth position from the apostles. Through this strictly ordered sequence, the ecclesiastical tradition and the proclamation of truth have descended from the apostles to us. This serves as complete proof that the single, life-giving faith has been safely preserved in the Church from the apostles’ time until today. (Against Heresies, 3.3.2)

Tradition can be either oral or written. Never in the early Fathers do we get the sense that the written scriptures are in any way separate from tradition. And one of the main pillars of truth in the early Church were the gospels (St. Justin Martyr called them “memoirs of the apostles”) by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Irenaeus provides a thorough account of their origins. He makes it plain that the writing of the gospels grew out of the apostles’ oral preaching, which itself grew out of the personal experience of the living, fleshly Jesus.

In point of fact, we received the knowledge of the economy of our salvation through no others than those through whom the Gospel has come down to us. This Gospel they first preached orally, but later by God’s will they handed it on to us in the Scriptures, so it would be “the foundation and pillar of our faith.” […]

Matthew published a written gospel for the Hebrews in their own tongue, while Peter and Paul were preaching the gospel in Rome and founding the church there. After their passing, Mark also, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, transmitted to us in writing the things preached by Peter. Luke, the follower of Paul, set down in a book the gospel preached by him. Lastly John, the disciple of the Lord, who had leant back on His breast, once more set forth the gospel, while residing at Ephesus in Asia. (Against Heresies, 3.1.1)

Some modern scholars have argued that the gospels lack credibility as accurate portrayals of Jesus’ life, that they were composed a generation later by people who were not eyewitnesses to the events described. Many textbooks—even those used by students in religious colleges—take it for granted that the gospels are “anonymous.” This is in the face of clear and unanimous testimony to the contrary from the early Fathers, men who were in some cases only two generations removed from the apostle John.

In addition to being a unifying force among people, truth creates unity and wholeness in thought itself. Without tradition, truth becomes distorted and fragmented. Gnostic teachers took various individual truths and magnified or distorted them out of proportion. Because they lacked any central authority, their teachings metastasized into dozens of opposing sects. Gnosticism ended up being a matter of each gnostic teacher “preaching himself,” because it ultimately had no objective basis for truth outside of the teacher’s ideas and whims. Or as St. Ignatius of Antioch put it shortly before his martyrdom around the year 107:

These people, while pretending to be trustworthy, mix Jesus Christ with themselves—like those who administer a deadly drug with honeyed wine, which the unsuspecting victim accepts without fear, and so with fatal pleasure drinks down death. (Letter to the Trallians, 6.2)

Starkly contrasting with this is the Church with its authority based in the testimony of the apostles and their successors. Irenaeus declares that the best guide to resolving religious disputes is to consult with the most ancient churches: those founded by the apostles. This is why the church became known as catholic: universal, worldwide, not divisive and sectarian. The term first appears, again, in St. Ignatius of Antioch:

Wherever the bishop appears, there let the congregation be; just as wherever Jesus Christ is there is the Catholic Church. (Letter to the Smyrneans, 8.2)

Tradition for the early church fathers leads to unity, and unity leads to peace. Irenaeus, whose name means peaceful, put this quality into action by mediating in the famous dispute over the date for celebrating Easter. To put it briefly: Eastern Christians celebrated Easter on the Jewish Passover, while Rome celebrated it always on a Sunday. The disagreement threatened to turn into schism. Irenaeus intervened, urging the pope, St. Victor, not to excommunicate Christians who held to the Passover date. Irenaeus insisted that both sides should peaceably keep to their own custom. And once again he brought to bear his long recollections in the interest of asserting a common faith:

And when Blessed Polycarp paid a visit to Rome in Anicetus’s time, though they had minor differences on other matters too, they at once made peace, having no desire to quarrel on this point. Anicetus could not persuade Polycarp not to keep the day, since he had always kept it with John the disciple of our Lord and the other apostles with whom he had been familiar. […] They parted company in peace, and the whole Church was at peace, both those who kept the day and those who did not. (Quoted in Eusebius, Church History)

Stop and consider the tradition that Irenaeus is relaying here. He is telling us, quite nonchalantly, when John and the other apostles celebrated Easter along with their friend Polycarp. Or rather, he was telling the pope this, and we are overhearing it 900 years later. As is often the case with Irenaeus, the mind reels at how deep his roots extended into the church’s history. The more I read him, the more I see him as the central figure of early Christianity. Reading him can be a breathtaking experience.

Reading the church fathers in general leads you to contemplate the mysteries of relative time, a quasi-obsession of mine. The traditions leading back to Christ that Irenaeus so closely guarded were about a century and a half old. Someone of our day attempting to extricate the truth of Abraham Lincoln’s life provides a useful parallel. But this becomes more startling when we realize that in fact only three generations separated Irenaeus from Jesus.

Patristic scholar Mike Aquilina informs us that “antiquity” is a relative term in history, and interest in the church fathers dates from the era of the fathers themselves. For Irenaeus, the church was already “ancient,” even though he was only three generations removed from its founding. Third-generation Christians like Irenaeus are already carefully tracing their lineage back to the apostles. By the third and fourth centuries, writers like Eusebius and Jerome are setting down records of the Church’s history from apostolic times to their day. Their interest in their spiritual ancestry might be compared to our attention to the Founding Fathers of America, studying what they accomplished and divining their message.

Now we can contrast the difference of 150 or 200 years with nearly 2000 years. Do we still feel in our bones, as Irenaeus did, that Christian memory and tradition have been passed along to us intact? How do we know that they have been? What role do the early Christian witnesses outside of the Bible play in our appreciation of our faith? Interest in origins remains strong, as can be seen from the popularity of genealogy and shows like Finding Your Roots. How might we apply these lenses for examining the past to our faith?

Throughout his works, Irenaeus tirelessly reminds us that the Christian faith is based in history and concrete things and events. I am going to let the great bishop of Lyons have the last word on the mystery and power of tradition, and the necessity of handing things on correctly. At the end of one of his lost treatises, Irenaeus includes an important message for the person reading and copying the book. It is a message that reminds us of the role we play as links in the wondrous chain of tradition:

I adjure you, who shall transcribe this book, by our Lord Jesus Christ, and by His glorious appearing, when He comes to judge the living and the dead, that you compare what you have transcribed, and be careful to set it right according to this copy from which you have transcribed; also, that you in like manner copy down this adjuration, and insert it in the transcript.

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The featured image, uploaded by Exanx777, is an image of Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.