Who was Christ? (Dominion)

Here was a question, as Irenaeus knew all too well, infinitely more unsettling than any that a Roman governor might think to demand. For some Christians, the teaching within Paul’s letters, and within the four earliest gospels – that Jesus, a man tortured to death on a cross, was also, in some mysterious way, a part of the identity of the One God of Israel – was simply too radical to tolerate. Who, then, might he actually have been?

Rather than commingling the earthly with the heavenly, some Christians argued, was it not likelier that his humanity had been mere illusion? How could the Lord of the Universe possibly have been born of a mortal woman, still less have experienced pain and death? Various Christian teachers attempted solutions to these puzzles.

Irenaeus, while in Rome, encountered various schools with their own opinions and heresies*.*

*Some taught that Christ was pure spirit; others that the mortal Jesus ‘was merely a receptacle of Christ’; others still that Christ and Jesus, although distinct from one another, were both of them supernatural entities, part of a bewilderingly complex cast of divine beings who, far beyond the bounds of the material earth, inhabited what was termed the pleroma, or ‘fullness’.    *

All heresies had one thing in common: the revulsion at the idea that Christ suffered a physical death.

‘The man who believes that is still a slave.’ Such was the opinion of Basilides, a Christian living in Alexandria, who taught that Jesus, when the time came for him to be crucified, had swapped his form with that of an unfortunate passer-by. ‘And Jesus had stood laughing, as the man, through ignorance and error, was crucified in his place.’

Irenaeus was determined to define the true path of belief for Christians, and doctrines such as that of Basilides was a treacherous diversion. They mocked the idea that Christ might be imitated; they mocked the martyrs who would have died in vain.

It is expected that there would be a variety of views on the nature of Christ. Iranaeus knew that he was competing for customers in an open market, so he systematically catalogued these alternative teachings by self-proclaimed Christians.

If he was unfair in deriving them all from a single source – a Samaritan necromancer named Simon, supposedly converted by Peter – then he was not entirely so. Teachers like Basilides had made sure to trace the origin of their doctrines back to the time of the apostles. This, though, was a battlefield on which Irenaeus found it easy to train overwhelming force. When Basilides claimed that he had received his gospel from a single follower of Peter, by means of a secret channel of communication, it inevitably highlighted how plentiful and public were the sources for the authority claimed by bishops such as Irenaeus himself.

‘Although dispersed throughout the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, the church has received from the apostles, and from the disciples of the apostles, one single faith.’

*Irenaeus did not claim any privileged source of wisdom. Just the opposite. The Church that he defended rested on foundations that spanned the entire Roman world. Decades earlier, while travelling through Asia Minor on his way to Rome, Ignatius, a bishop from Syria, had proudly defined it as katholikos: ‘universal’. This – the catholic Church – was the one with which Irenaeus identified.    *

Source: Dominion

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