Irenaeus Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching

Ken McGuire
Ken McGuire Member Posts: 2,074 ✭✭✭
edited November 20 in English Forum

The Ante-Nicene Library that Logos offers is fairly extensive, but it is probably impossible to have a truly complete collection of any era of the Fathers - there are just so many of them. Big Smile  And, of course, it cannot contain documents found since it was originally published.

In 1904 one such document was found - Irenaeus's Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching - in an Armenian translation.  If was mentioned in Eusebius, but had been considered lost.

But now it is found.  It is drastically shorter than Against Heresies, and so does not give anything like the detail of the larger work.  Instead it is more catechetical treatment by Irenaeus of the Faith once delivered to the Saints.  As such, it servers (IMHO) as a fine introduction to how Christians read the Bible c. 200.  If you want more detail, go to Against Heresies and Justin's Dialogue with Trypho.

In 1920 J Armitage Robinson published an English translation of it.  While he admits to not being an expert in Armenian, he was an expert in Irenaeus.  And so his careful edition is quite highly notated, and can serve as a guide for where to go for more information even today.

ABOUT THIS EDITION: The main source for this is from CCEL (http://www.ccel.org/ccel/irenaeus/demonstr).  While I did proof this a bit with the copy on Google books, it is obvious that the person or people behind this have spent a lot of time on it.  The footnote numbering is from them - in SPCK's original they were numbered by page.  In addition, the original had margin notes.  Some were inserted into the text parenthetically by CCEL.  I added a few more that way and also tried to link the biblical quotes.  In addition I tried to link with as many early documents as possible.

Unfortunately since to the best of my knowledge there is no datatype for this work, it does not link to itself very well.  When Robinson references a page in this work, I created a link.  But when he references a paragraph number of Irenaeus's work, I did not.

But I offer this to the community as an introduction to this great early Christian thinker.

SDG

Ken McGuire

The Gospel is not ... a "new law," on the contrary, ... a "new life." - William Julius Mann

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