“Since therefore we have such proofs, it is not necessary to seek the truth among others…”
Since therefore we have such proofs, it is not necessary to seek the truth among others which it is easy to obtain from the Church; since the apostles, like a rich man [depositing his money] in a bank, lodged in her hands most copiously all things pertaining to the truth: so that every man, whosoever will, can draw from her the water of life.
Irenaeus · Against Heresies · ANF I, Against Heresies, Book III, Chapter IV, 1
The image Irenaeus reaches for when he has finished listing bishops: the apostles did not hide the truth, they banked it, and the church is where anyone may draw on the account. It is the argument of the succession chapters put in one sentence a reader can carry away.
How this is known
These words were matched, word for word, against this project’s own copy of the volume cited.
Book III, chapter iv, section 1 of Against Heresies, the sentence that follows the succession lists, in the region of ANF vol. 1 that carries the third book. The volume's own footnote 2654, printed in its introductory matter to Against Heresies, records that Roberts englished the first two books and that the groundwork of the third and of the part of the fourth carried here was furnished by W. H. Rambaut, which is why this row names them and not Donaldson.
Read in Roberts & Rambaut, ANF vol. 1 (1885) · Alexander Roberts and W. H. Rambaut, revised by A. Cleveland Coxe
Also by
- Irenaeus every saying recorded of this person, and their page