As we continue to explore Patristic literature on this blog, I want to note the helpful annotated bibliographies that have been compiled by Kyle R. Hughes on the Patristic writers Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyons, and Tertullian. If you are researching these figures as I have been in my work on the Patristic reception of the Gospels, these bibliographies will introduce you to the critical editions of their writings and some key English scholarly monographs on them. Finally, Don W. Springer has provided an extensive bibliography of Irenaeus on his academia.edu page.

Over the last few posts, I have looked at the more “controversial” use of the Gospel of John in support of Montanism, Quartodecimanism, and Valentinianism. At least, it was controversial for certain Christian heresiologists who rejected these constructed viewpoints as heretical. I do not mean to reinstate what Charles E. Hill has dubbed the “orthodox Johannophobia paradigm” in his monograph The Johannine Corpus in the Early Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). According to this older paradigm, “orthodox” Christians were hesitant to embrace the Gospel of John due to its perceived “heretical” use until Irenaeus rehabilitated it as a useful text in refuting his theological opponents, but there was still conservative theological opposition to the Gospel of John that was spearheaded by figures such as Gaius of Rome. Hill has sufficiently demonstrated that John’s Gospel was widely accepted as authoritative in Irenaeus’s day based on the writings of his contemporaries and later Christian artistic depictions of select scenes in the Gospel, plus that there is much earlier evidence of the positive use of it among “orthodox” Christians prior to Irenaeus. I am not completely persuaded by Hill’s efforts to swing the pendulum in the total opposite direction. I do not accept all of the references to the Gospel of John that he finds in Christian sources in the first half of the second century CE, his very early dating of the emergence of an authoritative four-Gospel collection (e.g. based partly on his case that Eusebius’s source for Ecclesiastical History 3.24.5-13 goes back to Papias), his reconstruction of the contemporaries of Irenaeus who rejected John’s Gospel as heterodox Christians, or his underestimation of the positive use of John’s Gospel among certain “Gnostic” writers. I suspect that the Gospel of John was probably initially more popular among Christians in certain locales (e.g., Asia Minor, Alexandria) than in others (e.g., Rome) and that there were conflicting interpretations of it, but the “fourfold Gospel canon” was widely though not universally held in high regard before Irenaeus attempted to defend it.

In this post, I will make no effort to distinguish between what the historical Valentinus taught in Alexandria or in Rome in the second century CE, what his disciples taught, and to what extent have the Patristic writers represented the Valentinians’ beliefs and practices accurately or not. There is also a question about how much some of the more esoteric teachings of the school of Valentinus were common knowledge among Christians in Rome outside of these circles. Valentinus must have commanded some respect among some of his peers as he had hoped, according to Tertullian (Against the Valentinians 4), to become a bishop in Rome and Irenaeus wrote a letter to a presbyter named Florinus reprimanding him for embracing Valentinian ideas (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.20.1, 4-8). If you are interested in researching Valentinianism further, there are publications that are accessible online from experts such as David Brakke (see also this video lecture), April DeConick, and Philip Tite and I have provided a bibliography below.

In this post, I will just focus on Irenaeus. In Against Heresies 3.11.7, he offers the following generalization about how the Ebionites preferred Matthew’s Gospel, those who divided the human Jesus from the divine Christ (i.e. Cerinthus or Carpocrates) preferred Mark’s Gospel, Marcion preferred Luke’s Gospel, and the Valentinians preferred John’s Gospel. Two of Valentinus’s pupils, Ptolemy and Heracleon, wrote commentaries on John’s Gospel. It may be difficult for the uninitiated to follow Ptolemy’s conception of the various emanations from the Father (i.e. 30 paired aeons in total that make up the spiritual pleroma or “fullness”), but it may have ultimately been an attempt to explain how all of reality in all of its complexity originated with a single transcendent divinity. In the preceding chapters Irenaeus recounted what he assumed was a widely-held “Valentinian” fall narrative, in which the youngest aeon Sophia (“Wisdom”) generated Sophia Achamoth (“Lower Wisdom”) who was separated from the pleroma and gave birth to the ignorant “demiurge” or “craftsman” who created the inferior material cosmos. Irenaeus documented how Ptolemy attempted to align his pleromatic myth to the wording of John’s prologue, because he believed that part of the work of refuting it was simply to expose it. He likened the “Valentinian” exegetical method to someone who took an artistic depiction of a king, and remade it into a poor portrait of a dog or a fox while still maintaining that it was a king, or someone who randomly took lines from the Homeric epics out of context and re-arranged them in such a way to present a totally new meaning to them (Against Heresies 1.8.1; 1.9.4).

Bibliography

• Bentley, Layton and Brakke, David. Editors. The Gnostic Scriptures Translated with Annotations and Introductions. Second Edition. Anchor. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.
• Brakke, David. The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.
• Dunderberg, Ismo. Beyond Gnosticism: Myth, Lifestyle, and Society in the School of Valentinus. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
• Ehrman, Bart D. Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. Oxford: OUP, 2003.
• King, Karen L. What is Gnosticism? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
• Lampe, Peter. From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003.
• Lewis, Nicola Denzey. Introduction to “Gnosticism”: Ancient Voices, Christian Worlds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Litwa, M. David. Found Christianities: Remaking the World of the Second Century CE. London: Bloomsbury, 2022.
• Marjanen, Antti and Luomanen, Petri. Editors. A Companion to Second Century Christian “Heretics”. SVC 76. Leiden: Brill, 2005.
• Markschies, Christoph. “New Research on Ptolemaeus Gnosticus.” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 4 (2000): 225–254.
• Pagels, Elaine. The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis: Heracleon’s commentary on John. SBLMS 17; Nashville: Abingdon, 1973.
• Rasimus, Tuomas. “Ptolemaeus and the Valentinian Exegesis of John’s Prologue.” Pages 145-171 in The Legacy of John: The Second Century Reception of the Fourth Gospel. Edited by Tuomas Rasimus. SuppNT 132. Leiden: Brill,
• Skarsaune, Oskar and Hvalvik, Reider. Editors. Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries. Peabody: Hendrickson, 2007.
• Smith, Geoffrey S. Valentinian Christianity: Texts and Traditions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020.
• Thomassen, Einar. The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the “Valentinians”. Leiden: Brill, 2006.
• Williams, Michael Allen. Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
• See also the bibliography on the Valentinians compiled by Rob Bradshaw and the bibliography on Heracleon’s commentary on John’s Gospel compiled by Peter Head.

In the fourth century, the Christian historian Eusebius reports how the Christian world was almost torn apart over whether the date for celebrating Jesus’s death and resurrection should be connected to the Jewish celebration of Passover (see Ecclesiastical History 7.23—25). The translations below are taken from Jeremy Schott’s The History of the Church: A New Translation: Eusebius of Caesarea (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019). Eusebius introduces the conflict as follows:

“The communities of all Asia considered it necessary, as though it was ancient tradition, to observe the feast of the Savior’s Pascha on the fourteenth of the month in which the public notice was given by the Jews to sacrifice the [paschal] lamb, so that the fasts must end on that day, whatever day of the week that it happened to be. But it was not the custom to celebrate it this way for the churches throughout all the rest of the inhabited world, which observed the custom that still holds sway in the present, that no other day is proper for ending the fasts besides the day of the Saviour’s resurrection.” (7.23.1; p. 264)

Allegedly, the Roman bishop Victor (189-199 CE) organized a number of synods in different locales to support the Roman dating of Good Friday (i.e. the date of Jesus’s death) and Easter Sunday (i.e. the date of Jesus’s resurrection). This contrasted with the practice of the Christians in Asia Minor to always honour the memory of Jesus’s death on the fourteenth of Nisan, the day in which the Passover lambs were sacrificed, and this is why they were referred to as Quartodecimans or “fourteeners.” The Ephesian bishop Polycrates was not swayed by Victor’s efforts. He wrote to him claiming that the Quartodeciman practice went all the way back to John, the one who “reclined on the Lord’s chest” and who “became a priest wearing the petalon” before he was laid to “rest in Ephesus” (7.24.3-4; p. 265). In response, “Victor immediately tried to cut off the communities of all of Asia together with the neighboring churches from the common unity, for acting in a heterodox way, and made a public proclamation through letters announcing that all the brothers [and sisters] there were utterly without fellowship” (7.24.9; p. 266). Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons, intervened and reminded Victor that his predecessor, the Roman bishop Eleutherus, agreed to disagree amicably with Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, on the Quartodeciman practice (7.24.16-17).

A helpful article for understanding how the Quartodeciman practice was rooted in the dating of Jesus’s death on the Day of Preparation when the Passover lambs were sacrificed in preparation for the Passover meal in John 19:14 and 31 is Brian Schmisek’s “The Quartodeciman Question: Johannine Roots of a Christian Controversy” Biblical Theology Bulletin 52.4 (2022): 253-261. Schmisek notes that, according to John, Jesus’s death was paradoxically the moment of his exaltation when he was “lifted up” (see John 3:14; 8:28; 12:32, 34). The article is behind a paywall for those who do not have institutional access through an academic institution, but a short bibliography for further research on Quartodecimanism can be seen by clicking on the link.

I have been reading more about the charismatic movement that is commonly referred to as Montanism since I concluded my series on the Alogi. The “New Prophecy” was launched by a trio of prophets and prophetesses named Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla in a village in Phrygia, a region in west-central Asia Minor. There are various named figures associated with the movement in Asia Minor and Rome. It even found a champion in the “orthodox” defender of the faith in North Africa named Tertullian. Other Christians were either drawn to, or repulsed by, the mode of delivering prophecies in a trance-like state in which the “Spirit” spoke through the prophetic spokesperson, the content of the prophecies such as the belief that the new heavenly Jerusalem would appear in Phrygia, or the asceticism and morality of the adherents of the “New Prophecy.” Important monographs on the Montanists include Ronald E. Heine’s The Montanist Oracles and Testimony (NAPSPMS 14; Macon: Mercer University Press, 1989), Christine Trevette’s Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophesy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and William Tabbernee’s Fake Prophecy and Polluted Oracles: Ecclesial and Imperial Reactions to Montanism (Leiden: Brill, 2007). There are a number of articles on Montanism available at Tabbernee’s academia.edu site. Philip Harland has posted Heine’s collection of the “oracles” assigned to the Montanists, while Tabbernee offers “a totally new classification and numbering of Montanist logia” (pp. 318-19) at the end of a chapter for a festschrift.

One thing that you will notice about the oracles is that the prediction about the new Jerusalem seems to draw on the book of Revelation (e.g., Rev 21:2), while the claim that the prophecies are inspired by the “Paraclete” (“called + alongside”) allude to the description of the “Spirit of Truth” in the Gospel of John (e.g., John 14:16, 26; 15:26; 16:7). This may be the reason why certain unnamed “others,” according to Irenaeus of Lyon, rejected the Gospel of John or why Gaius of Rome denied the apostolic authorship of Revelation in his written dialogue with the Roman Montanist leader Proclus. There is a debate between Heine (see “The Role of the Gospel of John in the Montanist Controversy” The Second Century 6 [1987]: 1-19) and Trevett over whether the original prophets and prophetesses were already appealing to the Paraclete in the Gospel of John or whether this was a later development among the adherents of the “New Prophecy” in Rome that subsequently influenced Tertullian. If the latter is the case, then the critics of the Gospel of John known to Irenaeus could have been located in Rome. On the contrary, Trevett detects Montanist influences in the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons to the Churches of Asia Minor and Phrygia that documents the sufferings of the martyrs in Vienne and Lyons in Gaul around 177 CE, including in its allusions to the Paraclete passages in the Gospel of John. Opponents of the Montanists may have had serious concerns with how they were interpreting the Gospel of John and claiming that the Paraclete was inspiring a new prophetic revival.

In my series on the Alogi, I examined the evidence over whether there were “orthodox” Christians, either in Asia Minor or in Rome in the late second century CE, who rejected the Gospel of John and the book of Revelation. At a minimum, it seemed likely to me that Irenaeus of Lyon knew some Christians in the late second century CE who rejected the Gospel of John because they were concerned about the role that it assigns to the “Advocate” or the “Spirit of truth” in guiding and empowering believers, while Gaius of Rome and possibly some namely individuals in Alexandria attributed the book of Revelation to a “heretic” named Cerinthus. The best evidence that Gaius was the source of the objections against both Revelation and the Gospel of John, however, comes from relatively late Medieval Syriac sources.

The series makes clear that many Patristic writers recognized that the seeming discrepancies between the Gospel of John and the “Synoptic” Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke could be a cause for concern. They did not highlight every major or minor discrepancy between the Gospels, but they especially concentrated on how John diverged from the other Gospels right at the outset by narrating Jesus’s miracle of turning water into wine at the wedding of Cana after narrating John the Baptizer’s activity at the Jordan River rather than Jesus’s 40-day temptation in the wilderness. Some commentators observed that it is possible to include all of the events in the Synoptic Gospels between Jesus’s baptism and his triumphal entry into Jerusalem for the Passover in the span of one year, while John’s Gospel demands that Jesus’s ministry lasted for three years since it references three Passovers. Origen of Alexandria also did not bother harmonizing the placement of the temple incident near the start of Jesus’s ministry in John’s Gospel with its placement near the end of Jesus’s ministry in the Synoptic Gospels.

I could have looked at other Patristic sources. Some modern scholars believe that Papias of Hierapolis was contrasting the lack of “order” (taxis) in the Gospel of Mark with the chronological arrangement of the material in the Gospel of John, but I remain convinced that he was contrasting Mark rough account with Matthew’s more refined literary and rhetorical arrangement of the material. Clement of Alexandria famously concluded that John did not intend to cover the “bodily facts” that had been recounted in the Synoptic Gospels, but to supplement them with a more “spiritual Gospel.” The author of the Muratorian Canon was not too concerned with the differences between the Gospels so long as they agreed on the essential points about Jesus’s nativity, ministry with the disciples, passion, resurrection, and second coming. In the next few posts, I want to look at the conflicting theological interpretations of the Gospel of John. The reception of John’s Gospel among the “Montanists,” the “Quartodecimans,” and the “Valentinians” became particularly controversial.