“Soter having succeeded Anicetus, Eleutherius does now, in the twelfth place from the…”
Soter having succeeded Anicetus, Eleutherius does now, in the twelfth place from the apostles, hold the inheritance of the episcopate. In this order, and by this succession, the ecclesiastical tradition from the apostles, and the preaching of the truth, have come down to us.
Irenaeus · Against Heresies · ANF I, Against Heresies, Book III, Chapter III, 3
The end of the same list, and the reason it can be dated: Irenaeus writes while Eleutherius is alive and counts him twelfth. It is the earliest surviving statement that a succession of bishops is itself the thing that carries the teaching, rather than merely the men who happen to have held the office.
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 3, the closing sentences of the Roman list, 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