“It is within the power of all, therefore, in every Church, who may wish to see the…”
It is within the power of all, therefore, in every Church, who may wish to see the truth, to contemplate clearly the tradition of the apostles manifested throughout the whole world; and we are in a position to reckon up those who were by the apostles instituted bishops in the Churches, and [to demonstrate] the succession of these men to our own times
Irenaeus · Against Heresies · ANF I, Against Heresies, Book III, Chapter III, 1
The sentence this entire dataset is an attempt to make good on. Irenaeus is answering teachers who claimed the apostles had passed a secret doctrine to a chosen few, and his answer is that anyone may check: the men the apostles installed can be named church by church, and the line from them to the present can be counted. He then does it, for Rome, and points at Smyrna and Ephesus for the rest.
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 1 of Against Heresies, in the region of ANF vol. 1 that carries the third book, under the chapter heading the locator names, and outside the quotation marks the translators use for Scripture. 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