“But Polycarp also was not only instructed by apostles, and conversed with many who had…”
But Polycarp also was not only instructed by apostles, and conversed with many who had seen Christ, but was also, by apostles in Asia, appointed bishop of the Church in Smyrna, whom I also saw in my early youth, for he tarried [on earth] a very long time, and, when a very old man, gloriously and most nobly suffering martyrdom, departed this life
Irenaeus · Against Heresies · ANF I, Against Heresies, Book III, Chapter III, 4
Irenaeus saying he saw Polycarp himself, as a boy, and that Polycarp had been appointed at Smyrna by apostles. It is the shortest chain anywhere between the apostles and a named man of the late second century who could be questioned about them, and it is the reason Polycarp stands where he does in this dataset.
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 4, in the region of ANF vol. 1 that carries the third book. Irenaeus is the primary witness for his own acquaintance with Polycarp and for Polycarp’s appointment at Smyrna, and this is the passage. 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