19 - Irenaeus and Apostolic Tradition

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Well, I imagine we'll still have a few folks coming in. Very often,

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I am asked about resources, books. On Twitter, I'm constantly being asked to be a bibliography generator.

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I just ignore those tweets. With the internet today, if you can't come up with a good list of books,

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I just don't think you've been properly trained in the use of Google yet. But I did want to mention, this is actually just volume three of a four -volume set.

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The fourth volume just came out, and they're in a new, nice, hardback format published.

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Who's publishing this now? Christian Focus Publications just came out with these.

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2 ,000 Years of Christ's Power by Dr. Nick Needham. Dr. Needham, this is volume three.

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This is the Renaissance and Reformation, which I just happened to be looking at. Dr. Needham is the lead elder of the

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Reformed Baptist Church in Inverness, Scotland. He teaches at a university up there.

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Dr. Needham is a really interesting fellow. We met, in fact, ironically, there will be only a few of you that will find this to be interesting, but ironically,

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I had spoken at that church on a Sunday, and we went to one of the members' homes that afternoon and were having some very enjoyable fellowship that afternoon, myself, and Dr.

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Needham, and Pastor Roger Brazier. And it was that afternoon that I got a message, email.

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Somehow, I remember I had to go out to someone's little cottage in the back of their house or something to get internet.

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This was 2005, and it was that day that I got the first message about a guy by the name of Ergon Kanner.

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And it was the same day that we were having a real nice lunch in the afternoon with Dr.

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Needham. So he has just finished that series, the fourth volume brought it up to the modern period,

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I believe, but very, very accessible. It's not like some of the church histories, which are like chewing aluminum foil, or as they say outside of the

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United States, aluminum foil, but very accessible, not overly filled with so many facts that you just get lost in the woods.

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So 2 ,000 years of Christ's power, Dr. Nick Needham. If you want to have a set, maybe you'd like to let the husband or wife know, hey, honey, that would be a great

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Christmas present or something like that, you might go that direction. We were talking in our last study,

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I believe this is the 18th lesson in the church history series, about Irenaeus of Lyon.

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And we had discussed the issue of apostolic succession. This is extremely important.

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We're going to see it over and over again in the course of the study of church history.

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But it is also important to recognize that Irenaeus is a real trouble spot for those who wish to assert the existence of a papacy early in the church.

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By the way, I have been told a couple of times by someone who will remain nameless, but who's normally in the car with me, that it's good for me to write down Irenaeus.

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Because someone who, again, will remain nameless normally gets lost in the class because that nameless person is

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Googling and going off and reading other articles about what I'm talking about and not listening to what

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I'm saying. So maybe if I put the name up, then that will help maybe

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Google faster. I don't know. Something along those lines. But Irenaeus is a trouble spot for those who wish to assert the existence of a papacy early on in the church, or at least an infallible one.

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Irenaeus rebuked Victor, the Bishop of Rome, over the

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Quartodeciman controversy. Now, how many of you remember what the Quartodeciman controversy was?

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Only one person. Everyone else has completely forgotten. OK, we have two. Can we have three?

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Three people, three, three, three, three, going for three. You're going with three. Two people remember the Quartodeciman controversy. Well, you see, what happens?

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We're going to have to start having quizzes and floggings. That's what we need to have.

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Doctor, how do you do this? I mean, you teach history. Have any suggestions? See, you were wandering off, too.

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Your mind was 4 ,000 miles away. You were going, when's he going to start saying something interesting? I have the luxury of feelings.

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You have feelings? Yes. Would that result in church discipline, or just what?

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I'm not sure what would happen here. But yes, the

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Quartodeciman controversy was about when you celebrate

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Easter. When do you celebrate the resurrection of Christ? And there were two different ways of looking at this.

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The East had one way. Basically, they used the Jewish calendar,

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Nisan 14, the day of Passover, calculated it from there. The West had a different way of doing it.

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Obviously, the Western way remains the primary way here in the West.

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And that's why Easter just bounces all over the place and can be as early as March or as late as the end of April.

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But there was a great controversy in the early church concerning this. And Victor, the

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Bishop of Rome, threatened the Eastern churches with excommunication if they did not bow to the

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Western method of determining the date of the celebration of Easter. Now, you might go, why would someone break fellowship?

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Well, when you think about what we break fellowship over today, is it really all that shocking that this would have been an issue back then?

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I mean, it may not be a big issue to you and I. We don't really care one way or the other. But many of the things that you and I care about a lot, or at least people in our day care about a lot, hadn't even been thought of back then.

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So Victor sort of flexes his muscles. Here we find the

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Eastern churches claiming that their method of determining the date of the celebration of Easter was apostolic in origin.

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Now, what do you do now when you have an entire group in the East saying, hey, we're just doing what

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John told us to do? So an apostle told us to do this. So if an apostle told us to do this, who are you to tell us to do it some other way?

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What apostle told you? And of course, since there's no command in scripture on this, you see what happens once you get out of the scriptural realm into realms of alleged tradition.

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They refused to abandon this methodology, even when Victor, the Bishop of Rome, the monarchical episcopate, having finally emerged around.

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What do I mean by that? Well, remember, I've mentioned before, up until about 140 AD, there was no single bishop in Rome.

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There was a plurality of elders. But now by the time we get to Victor toward the end of the second century, we have a monarchical episcopate.

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We have one particular bishop. So he threatened them with excommunication, a fact that in and of itself shows that the

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Eastern churches did not view Victor as the head of the church. They're like, go ahead, buddy.

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We have apostolic tradition. You're just rattling your chains. So you do whatever you want to do.

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But beyond this, we find Irenaeus, the great bishop of Leom, writing to Victor.

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So he even takes the time to write to Victor in the name of the entire region of Gaul, which is on the other side.

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If you think of a map, Gaul is the other side from where the east is. This is about as west as you can get as far as that is concerned.

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And so he writes to Victor in the name of the entire region of Gaul, rebuking the rash actions of the

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Roman bishop and calling him to remembrance of what had been done by his predecessors. So he says, quote, for neither could

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Anicetus persuade Polycarp to forego the observance in his own way. So Anicetus was one of the leaders in Rome.

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Polycarp from the east. So for neither could Anicetus persuade Polycarp to forego the observance in his own way, inasmuch as these things had been always so observed by John, the disciple of our

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Lord, and by other apostles with whom he had been conversant. Nor, on the other hand, could Polycarp succeed in persuading

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Anicetus to keep the observance in his way. For he maintained that he was bound to adhere to the usage of the presbyters who preceded him.

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In this state of affairs, they held fellowship with each other. And Anicetus conceded to Polycarp in the church the celebration of the

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Eucharist by way of showing him respect. So they parted in peace one from another, maintaining peace with the whole church, both those who did observe the custom and those who did not.

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And so here you have Irenaeus saying, look. Look to those who before you held peace in the church, even though they disagreed on this issue.

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This starts to raise the subject of what we're going to struggle with a lot and continue to struggle with to this day.

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And that is the difference between what is definitional of the faith and what is called the adiaphora, the adiaphora, the things that are not definitional, the things that do not change the nature of the faith.

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And what Victor was basically saying is he's going to take the date of the celebration of Easter out of this realm and put it into the definitional realm.

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And we do that with a lot of stuff. I remember years and years and years ago being asked to go speak at a church over in downtown

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Glendale someplace. I couldn't find it again, but it was downtown Glendale. I remember that much. And before I was asked to speak,

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I was speaking on Mormonism. And before I got up, I was leafing through.

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There was something back with the hymnals. I think there was a statement of faith or something about the church, and I was looking through it.

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And lo and behold, as I looked through it, as I got to the end, it became very clear that in this church, if you're going to be a member of this church, there was one particular eschatological viewpoint that you had to hold, and none other would be allowed.

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So it was a very, you're not allowed to be a member of this church unless you hold to this very specific, rather modern perspective on eschatology.

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And there are a lot of things like that. And when you're raised within one particular tradition, and if you don't bump into other people, if you don't read church history, if you don't have exposure, it's real easy to draw extremely sharp lines and to have a real small range of adiaphora and a real big range of dogma, because you're uncomfortable with someone who would disagree with me about almost anything.

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We have to be very, very careful about that. We have our, we're reading through the 1689.

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Does that mean you chuck all the Presbyterians into the lake of fire? For some people, that's what you do.

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And it's just like, where's the line? Where's the line here? And obviously, in this situation,

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Irenaeus was the one showing himself to be mature, recognizing what's important, and that the peace of the church and the unity of the church and what binds us together was more important than the specific date of an extra -biblical celebration.

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And it was Victor that was the one that was showing himself to be immature. Now, one as well point out that the tables had been turned.

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And if it was Irenaeus who had rashly threatened the Eastern church's excommunication, and Victor had written to him rebuking him and counseling to peace, that Victor's letter would surely be touted today as evidence of papal supremacy at this early date.

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And it would have been. No question. What I'm pointing out here is, if you haven't seen it, I'm sure we can find a chair for you somewhere, brother.

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There's one up here, and there's some back there. Don't want you standing the whole time. Make me nervous.

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If you haven't seen it yet, I did a fact. You know when you're getting into your middle 50s when on the dividing line this week,

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I was talking with Rich. And I was going, I'm trying to remember how many debates we've done on the subject of the papacy.

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And I knew I debated Mitchell Pacwa on it. I debated the big, huge debate, the seven and a half hours with Jerry Matitix up in Denver when the pope came to town back in 93.

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But I couldn't remember any others. And then another one was pointed out to me on papal infallibility.

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I wasn't really thinking about infallibility. But then someone pointed out, yeah, remember the big, long, four and a half hour debate at Boston College you and Rob Zins did against Robert St.

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Janis and Scott Butler? And I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, I guess that's right. I just totally, you know, there's around 154 debates now, and I can't remember them all.

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But if you haven't seen that debate, it's a good debate. Well, sort of a good debate.

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It was a good debate on one side. It wasn't such a good debate on the other side. But it is sort of fun to see one of the guys,

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Scott Butler, almost spitting on me. He just so lost it in one of his presentations.

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But one of the things we presented was the Peter syndrome. And the

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Peter syndrome is, once again, if you look at history backwards, if you look at it anachronistically, so you look from the modern period backwards, and you have all these lenses where Rome has told you

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Peter is the prince of the apostles, and Peter is the only one who holds the keys by virtue of who he is, and he's the successor of Christ, and he's the vicar of Christ, and blah, blah, blah.

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Once you've got all those lenses in place, then you look back at church history, and you start seeing these things.

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And as long as Peter is even mentioned, ah, there it is, there's papal infallibility, there's the papacy, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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And it's amazing to observe this. You can just dial up 1310 on your radio sometime, and listen in the afternoon to Catholic Answers Live, you'll hear it.

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You'll hear this very abuse of church history taking place. And anything about Peter, anything about the

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Bishop of Rome, and that's what I'm talking about here. If the roles had been reversed, this would have been taken as evidence of the

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Bishop of Rome's supremacy. But, since it's him being rebuked, then it's just a private thing between Victor and Irenaeus, and it's irrelevant.

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So if it goes one direction, oh, there's your evidence, you're just denying history. If it goes the other direction, no, it's just a personal thing.

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It's sort of like, look at all the debates we've done on papal infallibility, we've done three. All three

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Roman Catholics that we debated defended it in a completely different way, in contradiction to the other two. And the reason for that's simple.

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Papal infallibility is a doctrine that cannot be disproven because it has no meaning. In other words, the

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Pope is infallible unless he makes a mistake. That's basically what they have to say.

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Because the Popes have made mistakes. There have been Popes who've been condemned as heretics, and so on and so forth.

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So the Popes have made mistakes. So what do you do? Well, he's only infallible as long as he's not making a mistake.

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What use is that statement? Because no one could ever know at any point in time whether what the Pope said today was infallible or not.

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You have to wait for decades. You have to wait till he's dead and you're dead. What good is that?

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There is no meaning to it. And so this is the situation that we face.

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Instead, we only find the Bishop of Rome trying to force the Eastern bishops to toe the line on an issue in which, in fact,

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Victor was in the majority. Yet not only do we not find the Eastern bishops complying, but we find the

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Western Bishop Irenaeus and those bishops with him writing to Victor, counseling him to back off of his impetuous course of action.

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I note in passing that Victor failed in his attempt. The Eastern churches continued their means of worship for years to come.

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Now finally, Irenaeus is often cited as one who insists that tradition is necessary for a proper understanding of God's truth.

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Irenaeus is often cited as one who insists that tradition is necessary for a proper understanding of God's truth.

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Now, to a certain extent, that is true if we allow him to define what tradition is.

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He did insist that apostolic tradition was necessary, but what he meant by that is quite different than what is often asserted.

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And this is one of the things that really bothers me. I will, especially if I'm driving back from out in Mesa where Summer and the girls are, there is no way from 2 p .m.

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to 7 p .m. to drive from Mesa to the

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Metro Center area. Without visiting numerous parking lots called freeways on the way. It's just not possible.

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I don't even care what day it is. Yesterday, Saturday, we picked up Clementine and she was over last evening and we got onto the 10 and it's just like, okay, let's break on, break off, break on, break off, break on.

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Just all the way through the inner corridor there and it used to be fun with our kids back in the olden days.

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You can tell how traffic has changed in Phoenix because in the olden days, we had this thing where when you went through the tunnel, you'd see if you could hold your breath.

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You would die 47 times now because you can't go through the tunnel at the speed limit or anywhere near the speed limit.

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It's, oh, it's just, I think maybe at 2 .35 in the morning you might be able to get through there, but it's a phew.

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Actually, 4 .45 works pretty good. 4 .45 works? Okay, all right, well, I'm not so sure about that, but anyway, so I tune in,

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I listen to Catholic Answers Live and so I'm trying to redeem the time in doing some research and some of you who listened to the last dividing line know

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I did an entire thing where I played an entire answer given by one of the apologists,

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Tim Staples, and just walked through it. Here's the problem here, notice what they're doing here, notice what they're doing.

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And all the time, it's just like this. It's just like this. You'll hear people saying, see, Irenaeus said you need apostolic tradition.

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And then they interpret the words of someone speaking in the second century in the categories of the modern

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Roman Catholic Church. And people just, they just, I can't tell you how many folks

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I have had to deal with who once sat with us, who crossed the

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Tiber River and went in the realm. Now, by the way, it wasn't because of the overwhelming power of the argumentation.

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Normally, there was something else going on there in their experience and in their understanding of the gospel but I just can't tell you how many people

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I've talked to who've said, well, I just didn't realize that, you know, all the way back to these days, they talked about apostolic tradition.

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Have you ever looked up what Irenaeus said apostolic tradition was? And they just accepted.

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You know, as long as you say it with enough vim and vigor, it must be true. Well, here is

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Irenaeus's definition of apostolic tradition. You ready? Is this gonna be about Mary and popes and indulgences and the infallibility of the

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Church of Rome and the insufficiency of scripture? Here it is. Here's what apostolic tradition is.

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And it's all of one, well, is it two sentences when you have a semicolon?

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That's a question but it could be three total sentences if we don't use a semicolon.

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Here it is. These have all declared to us that there is one God, creator of heaven and earth, announced by the law and the prophets and one

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Christ, the Son of God. If anyone do not agree to these truths, he despises the companions of the Lord.

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Nay more, he despises Christ himself, the Lord. Yet he despises the Father also and stands self -condemned, resisting and opposing his own salvation as is the case with all heretics.

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There it is. There's his tradition. Well, what's his tradition? His tradition is there's only one

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God and the only way, who created all things, and the only way for the scriptures to make any sense is for them to be read in a monotheistic context.

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Now, is monotheism taught in scripture? Yeah, it's taught very thoroughly and fully in scripture.

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Now, do modern liberals who've bought into the, well, the

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Old Testament really isn't what we think it was and it was put together over time, redacted, blah, blah, blah. Do they deny that?

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Well, of course they do. But from beginning to end, the message of the

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Old Testament scriptures is there is only one true God, Yahweh. I'm not gonna spend the time going through all the texts in Isaiah and Deuteronomy and every place else to prove that.

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This is a fundamental element of biblical teaching.

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So this is not a tradition that was delivered outside of scripture that is not contained in scripture that is necessary to complete scripture.

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This is a sub -biblical teaching. In other words, the Bible already taught it, so it's derived from scripture. But the point is, if you ignore that teaching as who did, the

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Gnostics did, because what's the fundamental assumption of the Gnostic? The Gnostic is that there is not just one

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God and that the God we worship is not the God who created heaven and earth.

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Remember in Gnosticism? We went over Gnosticism, right? We talked about, boy, the way you're all looking at me, you're making me a little bit nervous here.

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We talked about Gnosticism. We talked about Gnosticism. I have an amen from the front row.

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And I drew on the board and we've got the spiritual God up here and you've got the Pleroma and you've got the intermediate beings coming down.

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These are called eons. And eventually you get down to something called what? You run that by one more time, eons.

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A Klingon? No, not a Klingon. That is not. Little long imposter.

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Okay. Okay, you've got, this is important.

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You've got your one, your one

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God, your one, all spirit, all spirit. No connection to flesh.

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All good. Because remember, this is a dualistic system. Anything that's spirit is good, anything that's flesh is evil.

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Coming down from the one God, you have a series of divine beings and these are called eons.

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All right? All together, they're called the Pleroma. And finally, you get far enough down that you can get to a being that still has divine power but it's far enough removed from the one

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God that it can become the creator and it creates the physical world.

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This is how the Gnostics and dualistic systems explain how our creation come from. If God is all spirit and he's all good, then where did this evil creation come from?

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And here is the Demiurge. Okay? So, what happened when

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Gnosticism encountered Christianity is, remember, I described

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Gnosticism like Plato. And if you take

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Plato and you roll it over, if you, the great tragedy of having a new thing of Plato was if you dropped it in the dirt.

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Because what does Plato do as soon as it hits the dirt? It collects it. It collects it.

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And you'll never get it out. It's done. So, Gnosticism was like theological

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Plato and as it was rolling from the east toward the west, as it came out of Persia and places like that, once it encountered

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Christianity, it's like, hmm, what can we do with this? And so, what they did is they put

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Jesus in here someplace. He becomes one of the eons. He's one of the intermediate beings.

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But, if this is the creator, once you encounter Christianity, who's this? That's Yahweh.

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That's Yahweh. So, Yahweh is an evil God. And that's why Marcion and the Gnostics, they get rid of the

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Old Testament, because that's all about Yahweh anyways, and then they purge anything out of the New Testament that has anything to do with Judaism, Old Testament stuff,

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Old Testament citations. They just chop it all out, because Yahweh is an evil God, all right?

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So, this is what the Gnostics are all about. And so, now you know why, if a seminarian ever looks at you and goes, you

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Gnostic, they're trying to insult you. They're failing horribly, but they are trying to insult you very deeply and trying to be very,

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I don't know. Fancy in the process. So, with that in mind, listen again, and remember, one of the earliest, most complete sources that we have from a

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Christian perspective about Gnosticism is Irenaeus' Against Heresies. Four volumes, four stinking volumes, okay?

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I mean, Nick Needham does four volumes about over 2 ,000 years of church history. Irenaeus does four volumes in response to the

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Gnostics, and this was by the end of the second century. So, with this in mind, then, what does

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Irenaeus say? These have all declared to us, all the apostles declared to us, there is one God, creator of heaven and earth, announced by the law and the prophets.

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Remember, they got rid of the law and the prophets. And one Christ, the Son of God, if anyone do not agree with these truths, he despises the companions of the

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Lord. You're rejecting the apostles. Nay more, he despises Christ himself, the Lord. Yet he despises the

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Father also, and stands self -condemned, resisting and opposing his own salvation, as is the case with all heretics.

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So, very clearly, what Irenaeus is saying is, a Gnostic cannot even begin to make heads or tails out of the scriptures, because they don't start where the scriptures demand that you start in accepting their own testimony to the fact there's only one true

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God. Yes, sir? Is there any estimate as to the percentage of professing Christians in the second, third century were

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Gnostic versus Orthodox? One of the, by the way,

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I put on Facebook this week the fact that Dr.,

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well, that Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte posted for free for everyone to access

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Dr. Michael Kruger's class on the canon and text of scripture.

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And so, anybody can now get the syllabus, listen to the lectures.

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Some of them are audio only, and then when they do specific examination of specific manuscripts, they video -recorded those.

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So, they're all available from RTS Charlotte. I would highly recommend to anyone who really wants to get into, and Dr.

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Kruger is just one of the best in this field, especially on canon. This is really, really important stuff.

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Kruger also edited and contributed to a book called The Heresy of Orthodoxy.

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And especially for you, I'm just assigning it to you. Sorry, you're stuck. Okay, you of all people in the room need to read

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The Heresy of Orthodoxy, because you'd appreciate it, especially. And that's meant as a respectful thing.

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I hope you understand that. Those of you who don't know our brother, professor of history. The key issue in The Heresy of Orthodoxy, well, what's interesting, back up here a second.

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Kruger is younger than I am. I remember when I was sitting in his office, he's the president of RTS Charlotte. I was sitting in his office with he and Dr.

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Anderson a couple years ago, when all of a sudden the really sad realization hit me that I was the oldest person in the room.

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And that just really made me realize that, yeah, okay, all right then. So he's a brilliant young scholar, but he's already done a tremendous amount of great stuff.

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And he has had a focus in the areas he had a focus on, because when he did his undergraduate work at Chapel Hill, as a freshman, he took

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Introduction to the New Testament from Bart Ehrman. Wow. So if you don't know who

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Bart Ehrman is, Bart Ehrman is the leading English -speaking critic of New Testament Christianity in the world today.

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Debated him in 2009. And so he was challenged at that point, and all of his work since then has been forged in recognizing the seriousness of the challenge that people like Ehrman are presenting to us.

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And so one of the key elements of Ehrman's theory is that he accepts what's called the

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Bauer Hypothesis. The Bauer Hypothesis published initially during Hitler's years in Germany.

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No one really cared too much, because World War II, but after World War II, it was finally translated into English, and once it hit the

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English -speaking world, it revolutionized everything. And Bauer's hypothesis was there was no orthodoxy in the early church, that the early church was nothing but a mishmash of competing views, none of which have any right to be called apostolic, none of which have any right to be said, the apostles didn't teach one truth, they taught all sorts of different perspectives.

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And sort of like natural selection, history just chose one group, and once they became predominant, then they just wiped everybody else out.

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That's the Bauer Hypothesis. Heresy of orthodoxy, the Bauer Hypothesis has been shredded.

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At every point where he actually tries, where he actually tried, he's gone now obviously, but where he actually tried to prove his point with facts based upon what happened in this period in this city or that kind of stuff, been shredded, but his perspective is still the majority view.

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It's the majority view because it's just simply repeated over and over and over again. And it's fascinating to read the

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Heresy of Orthodoxy because it just takes the Bauer Hypothesis apart, and yet to then go, and yet this is what is being taught over and over and over again in universities and colleges all across the

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English -speaking and German -speaking world, despite the fact that it floats in midair.

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It has no foundation in the actual historical data itself. So all of that, to answer your question by saying, depends on who you talk to.

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Obviously, a person taking the Bauer Hypothesis is going to minimize the number of what they would call proto -Orthodox and maximize the number of Gnostics.

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It's really hard to say because we just, because it was a period of persecution and the Romans didn't care who they were persecuting.

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They didn't care if you were a Gnostic or anybody else, or it's gonna cut your head off one way or the other. So because it was a period of persecution, some of the information that we might have been able to have, it just isn't there.

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So the answer is no, we don't have sufficient data to be able to provide that kind of stuff.

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But clearly, even if we look at things today, there is, if, you know, compare the

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Mormons in 1980 to evangelicals in the United States.

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It would have been about 2 .5 million versus what?

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I don't know, 1980, 100 million, something like that. And yet, the reaction to that small group was still very, very large.

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So if Irenaeus writes a four volume set, does that mean 50 % of the people around him are

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Gnostics? Probably not. But once you see even a small number of people convert, you find that to be a tremendous challenge.

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So it's really difficult to say. And it really depends on where somebody is on that issue. So, but if you're taking notes, look up Dr.

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Michael Kruger, RTS Charlotte, Canon and Text of Scripture, it's now available. Be so useful.

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I know it takes time. It's a full elective class and it's all recorded and it's on seminary level and all the rest of it.

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Still, in comparison to a lot of things you could spend your time on over the next couple of months, great stuff, really.

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It's take advantage of it while we have it. Take advantage of it while we have it. So glad you asked that question because that, so now

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I've given you two things. I've got RTS Charlotte and you've got Nick Needham's four volume set. No one can complain that you don't have plenty of extra reading if you want to do extra reading.

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So there's your Gnosticism. There's your Apostolic Tradition from Irenaeus' perspective.

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Now, very quickly, let me just introduce you to the next topic and then we will run out of time. And that is what's called the

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Alexandrian School. The Alexandrian School. Alexandria, Egypt was a major center of culture and learning from the time of its founding by, guess who founded it?

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Alexander the Great, that's right. Not too difficult to figure that one out.

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Founding by Alexander the Great in 322 BC, 322

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BC, it housed the greatest library of the ancient world. It became the rival of Antioch and Rome as a center of Christian teaching and authority.

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Now, all of that is true. There are many people today who will, who have an automatic prejudice against anything

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Alexandrian or Egyptian. Well, because we know Egypt is the land of slavery and so there's, you know, it's bad, bad, bad down there.

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The funny thing is, oh yes, King James only is very much in that group, yes.

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But not just them, Ecclesiastical text only as well. But anyway, the irony is, as we'll see later on, we get into the time period around the

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Council of Nicaea and then the time period afterwards. Where's the one place where a firm conviction of the deity of Christ remains where everywhere else it becomes compromised?

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It's Alexandria. And the Bishop of Alexandria after the Council of Nicaea, he wasn't Bishop at the time the

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Council of Nicaea, but he becomes Bishop in 328, fell by the name of Athanasius, Athanasius of Alexandria.

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He's the one who stands firm. Antioch, Rome, they all become wishy -washy.

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They all become semi -Aryan. But the one place that stands firm is

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Alexandria. So does that mean everything from Alexandria is good? No, because as we're gonna find out, when you look at the two major people we're gonna look at from Alexandria, are

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Clement of Alexandria and Origen.

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And interesting people, interesting people. We need to know about them, but I can't say, well, what

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I can say is this. What's surprising to me is that the stalwart who defended the deity of Christ so strongly exegetically, so in such the very same kind of manner as I defend the deity of Christ today, as anyone today would defend the deity of Christ, that Athanasius would come from Alexandria is a testimony of the grace of God because Origen, I can't think of almost anything overly positive that comes from Origen.

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I mean, he was undoubtedly one of the most brilliant people in early

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Christian history, there's no question about it. He kept scribes busy day and night. There are 600 volumes of his writings, 600 volumes, the vast majority of which has not been translated into English, it exists only in Latin and Greek.

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He did textual critical stuff. He put together the hexapla, he put together this thing where you have parallel columns of different versions, and I mean, the guy was absolutely clearly genius level smart, but he was pretty much a heretic.

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I mean, in many, in almost every way, especially from late by later standards, but even in his day, there were a lot of people, even in Alexandria, eventually he got kicked out of Alexandria, even though his name was absolutely famous, and the school there was dependent upon his fame, but as you'll see, one of the most negative things to come from Origen is a method of interpretation that ended up crippling, crippling the

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Christian church for 12, 1300 years?

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Seriously? Oh yeah, allegorical interpretation, yeah. And it's, allegorical interpretation finally gets overthrown by something called the

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Reformation, and so you're talking 1500s, and he's flourishing in the early 200s, so yeah, about 1300 years of negative influence, especially a loss of the

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Old Testament as functionally theological scripture, thanks to Origen, but the

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Alexandrian school, and that is what we will start looking at the next time we get together.

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I do not wander off again until January, so we'll actually be able to string a few classes together.

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I'm not sure what next year's gonna look like, because I'm in Europe for, oh wow, nearly a month and a half.

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South Africa, it's gonna be insane. It's 2017, man, it's the 500th anniversary of the

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Reformation, it's gonna be insane, but we'll try to get as far as we can as quickly as we can here.

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Let's close our time with a word of prayer. Our great heavenly Father, once again, we thank you for the freedom we have had to look back and to be reminded that you have been working with your people for a very long time.

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May we rejoice in that, may we rejoice in our place, in that long history of the fulfillment of the promise that Christ made that he would build his church.

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We thank you for that, we ask that you would gather with us in the following hour, that you would be blessed by what is done here, that your name would be honored and glorified.