The present contribution is the first half of a two-part study. It deals with a group of so-called «presbyters» (presbyteroi) to whom Irenaeus of Lyons refers as sources in his exstant works. He introduces them as pupils of John, «the disciple of the Lord», whose teaching they were deemed to transmit orally. This is an ideal image of a generation of believers in Jesus intermediate between Jesus’s direct disciples and the believers of further generations who would have no personal connection (...) to Jesus nor to those who had been with him. For one specific saying, Irenaeus mentions as his sources the presbyters as well as Papias of Hierapolis, who had written a work including sayings of Jesus with their interpretation. Papias also claimed that he had received such sayings through «the presbyters», so we have to determine whether Irenaeus knew the presbyter’s traditions only through Papias’s work or also independently from it. Finally, the article compares Irenaeus’s appeal to the presbyters with some passages where Clement of Alexandria referred to presbyters’ teachings in a similar way ten to twenty years after Irenaeus in a different milieu. The second part of this study will examine how Irenaeus used the notion of presbyters in order to support the process that led to establishing a «monepiscopate» in the Roman Church. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper, published in issue 1 of Augustinianum 63 (2023), 9-45, we examined the question of whether Irenaeus of Lyons depended on the Exposition of Logia about the Lord of Papias of Hierapolis. In this second and final part we focus on the way Irenaeus used information which, since the first decades of the second century, had been attributed to presbyters of Asia and then in particular on the way he identifies the succession of presbyters (...) with that of bishops (primarily in Rome). He links the latter with Christian origins but also profoundly alters the function traditionally attributed to the presbyters themselves, within a system he devised in order to respond to urgent problems, in a context quite different from the era in which the traditions to which he appeals were born. (shrink)

Cet article s�insère dans une recherche en cours sur l�ouvrage perdu de Justin Martyr contre Marcion et toutes les hérésies. Des remarques sur les �uvres conservées de Justin (Apologies, Dialogue avec Tryphon) et des comparaisons avec d�autres auteurs qui ont écrit contre les hérésies peu après lui, en premier lieu Irénée de Lyon et Tertullien, permettent d�identifier des sections de texte qui semblent bien remonter au Syntagma de Justin. En particulier, le présent article dégage une ligne argumentative qui, en réfutant (...) les objections marcionites contre la prescience du Créateur, développait le thème du libre arbitre des humains et des anges, ainsi que celui de la chute des anges rebelles, leur activité dans l�histoire du monde et leur châtiment final. (shrink)