“For it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on…”
For it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on account of its pre-eminent authority, that is, the faithful everywhere, inasmuch as the apostolical tradition has been preserved continuously by those [faithful men] who exist everywhere.
Irenaeus · Against Heresies · ANF I, Against Heresies, Book III, Chapter III, 2
The most argued-over sentence of the second century, and it has been read two ways for four hundred years: that every church must resort to Rome, or that Rome holds the faith precisely because the faithful of every church bring it there and it can be checked against them all. The Greek Irenaeus wrote is lost. What survives is an old Latin translation, and the argument is about what its words meant before they were Latin.
How this is known
These words were matched, word for word, against this project’s own copy of the volume cited.
Book III, chapter iii, section 2, in the region of ANF vol. 1 that carries the third book. The volume prints the Latin behind it in the same place — Ad hanc enim ecclesiam propter potiorem principalitatem necesse est omnem convenire ecclesiam — with its translators’ own note that they are far from sure the rendering above is correct and have been unable to think of anything better. 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