Antiheretical Writers of the Late Second Century: Irenaeus and Hegesippus.

The Catholic Church.

        About A.D. 180 Christian leaders, hard pressed by nearly a century of schismatic movements, Gnostic and non-Gnostic alike, launched an intensified literary campaign against these minority groups. It is sometimes supposed that this campaign marks the creation of the “universal” or Catholic Church, but the term as such goes back to the days of Ignatius (Smyrnaeans 8:2) and is used to differentiate the Church as a whole from sectarians in the Martyrdom of Polycarp. To imagine that something new was created toward the end of the second century is to misunderstand the traditional ideals of such a writer as Irenaeus.

        Irenaeus is important because he binds together the Eastern and Western Christianity of his day; he was born in Asia Minor and spent his youth in Smyrna, where he saw Polycarp and heard him speak. He tells of this in a letter that was virtually a treatise On Sovereignty (that of the one God), addressed to his sometime friend Florinus, a Roman ex-presbyter inclined toward the views of Valentinus. Irenaeus' middle and later life was spent at Lyons, in Gaul, where he succeeded the aged Pothinus as bishop and carried on an active mission among the Gauls, preaching to them in their own tongue. While still a presbyter at Lyons, when Montanism was at its height, he was sent to Rome with a letter of introduction to the bishop Eleutherus from the confessors who had survived the persecution of A.D. 177. Irenaeus thus knew Christianity East and West-Asian, Gallic, and Roman; he participated in the controversies over Gnosticism, Montanism, and the Quartodeciman question.