Lewis Ayres: Irenaeus and the ‘Institution’ of the Christian Intellectual

One of the central themes of Irenaeus’s polemic against the Valentinians is the charge that they fail as readers of Scripture. Against them Irenaeus deploys a panoply of techniques and assumptions that had been developed within Hellenistic and then early imperial grammatical traditions, and which were diffused through contemporary Greek and Latin literary culture. I have elsewhere explored ways in which Irenaeus claims the cultural capital of these traditions for “orthodox” Christian use, and hence how they come to determine emergent Christian understanding of what it is to have a unified scripture of ‘old’ and ‘new’ testaments. Irenaeus’s claims in this regard concern, however, not only methodological questions about how Scripture should be read, they reveal an emergent conception of Christian intellectual expertise within the Christian community. Irenaeus is reticent to talk openly of the value of intellectual expertise, but at times he lets slip significant remarks, and much is revealed implicitly. Using some themes from ‘Neo-institutionalist’ writing of the last three decades I will explore how far it is helpful to consider the elite Christian exegete as conceived by Irenaeus, as an ‘institution.’ Doing so will suggest some ways in which we might compare Irenaeus to Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian in ways that undermine some common stereotypes.