Peter Kirby

I’ve been sitting on the idea presented in this post for a couple weeks. As an idea, it sets off red flags. It’s comparing a text known only from a few fragments to another text known only from a few fragments, which both reduces the amount of potential evidence and increases the amount of room for speculation. It’s positing an identity between two given names of writers, writers that are widely known in some circles (they are both in presentations of church history aimed at a secondary school level) and conflating them, which seems a bit pat.

Frankly, I didn’t like these red flags, and that’s why I felt it necessary to mull it over a bit before offering it to others for consideration. My own understanding of the evidence has not changed, so I’m giving the idea up for scrutiny that others might help me change it if I have erred.

The idea arises from the background material presented in earlier posts:

Putting Papias in Order

Chasing Hegesippus

The second post, about Hegesippus, concludes that the author’s name was unknown (having been assumed to be Josephus and then corrupted to be Hegesippus), that the author may have been known solely from his fifth book (from which the title was ascribed), and that the author wrote during the reign of Antoninus and specifically between 138 and 148 AD. The conclusions reached when “Chasing Hegesippus” lead to the question of the author’s identity. Continue reading »

It doesn’t receive much direct investigation, but given how little actually survives from the second century of early Christianity, any text with a claim to such antiquity should receive attention, including the Martyrdom of Polycarp.

Godfrey Gets Me Wondering…

Recently Neil Godfrey offered a couple arguments for a third or fourth century context to the famous Martyrdom of Polycarp (also called the Letter of the Smyrnaeans). They are worth considering. One of them:

Quintus [in the text of the Martyrdom of Polycarp] was one who rushed to martyrdom. He believed Christians should actively seek out martyrdom. … It may be significant, too, that Quintus is singled out as a Phyrgian. It was in Phrygia that the anarchic Montanist movement began from around 168 CE. The Montanists were notorious for their wild prophetic utterances and zealous seeking of martyrdom.

The problem of suicidal volunteering for martyrdom was a phenomenon of the late second and third centuries. Polycarp was supposed to have been martyred 155 CE. Continue reading »

When we come to the second book of Irenaeus, where he argues from tradition and the Gospel of John that Christ “did not then wont much of being fifty years old,” the modern reader generally has one of two base reactions. On the one hand, the reader that does not think much of the patristic writers generally will harbor a suspicion regarding Irenaeus that he is a man of small mind, much as Eusebius describes Papias owing to the latter’s chiliast opinion of a 1000-year paradise on earth (an opinion shared by Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Victorinus of Pettau). On the other, the one that exalts the Church Fathers will find a way to harmonize Irenaeus with the dominant post-Nicene church tradition and interpretation of the New Testament, whether that is by misunderstanding or marginalizing the author. One finds a hard time getting through the impasse created by the polemicist who giggles and the apologist who gags Irenaeus. Still it is the only genuine option open to us as critics that we steer clear of the gaping errors on both sides here and press on to reach an understanding of Irenaeus in his historical context.

I’ve used the picture of Einstein simply because the photo is a modern representation of a mature, noble “master” of a man, the very kind of picture of Jesus that Irenaeus held. We can understand the argument of Irenaeus more clearly by looking at similar church tradition and by comparing it with knowledge about the stages of life current in the era. Continue reading »