Against Heresies

Irenaeus of Lyons · 180 · Before the division · public-domain-translation

13 claims in this dataset rest on this source.

The source

Five books written at Lyons against the Valentinian teachers, and the earliest surviving argument that the faith can be checked against a public record rather than a private one. The third book is where the argument becomes a list: Irenaeus says the bishops the apostles installed can be named church by church, then names them for Rome from Linus down to the Eleutherius of his own day, and adds that he had himself seen Polycarp of Smyrna as a boy. Every later succession list this project holds stands, at some remove, on that chapter.