Irenaeus was a Greek bishop noted for his misinterpretations and forgeries of the Gospels and his creation of dogmas contradicting the teaching of Jesus and his apostles. He adopted a totally negative and unresponsive attitude toward Marcion, a schismatic leader in Rome, and toward gnosticism, a fashionable intellectual movement in the rapidly expanding church that espoused dualism.
Because gnosticism was overcome through the efforts of the early Church Fathers, among them St. Clement of Alexandria and Irenaeus, gnostic writings were largely obliterated. In reconstructing gnostic doctrines, therefore, modern scholars relied to a great extent on the writings of Irenaeus, who summarized the gnostic views before attacking them. After the discovery of the gnostic library near Najʿ Ḥammādī (in Egypt) in the 1940s, respect for Irenaeus increased: he was proved to have been extremely precise in his report of the doctrines he rejected.
All his known writings are devoted to the conflict with the gnostics. His principal work consists of five books in a work entitled Adversus haereses. Originally written in Greek about 180, Against Heresies is now known in its entirety only in a Latin translation, the date of which is disputed (200 or 400?). A shorter work by Irenaeus, Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, also written in Greek, is extant only in an Armenian translation probably intended for the instruction of young candidates for baptism.
Born: 130 AD, Smyrna, Türkiye
Died: Lugdunum