Ten years later Irenaeus, perhaps still in his twenties, witnessed mob violence against Christians at first hand in Lyons, where he lived, and in the town of Vienne, some thirty miles away. Public officials had banned Christians, as polluted persons, from entering the baths and markets and, finally, from all public places protected by the city’s gods. Then, when the provincial governor was away from the city, “the mob broke loose. Christians were hounded and attacked openly. They were treated as public enemies, assaulted, beaten, and stoned.”20 Bishop Pothinus, now in his nineties, was arrested and tortured, along with between thirty and fifty of the most outspoken members of his congregation. Many were taken to prison and strangled. Ten Christians changed their minds and recanted but were not released. Those who survived and still confessed to being Christians were sentenced to be tortured in public and torn apart by wild animals. When the governor returned and heard that some of the prisoners were Roman citizens, he wrote to Marcus Aurelius, the so-called philosopher emperor, to ask whether these should die in a public spectacle in the arena like the rest or be granted the citizens’ usual privilege of a quicker, more private death—for example, by beheading.
We do not know what the emperor replied; but meanwhile those terrified Christians who managed to escape arrest marveled at how God’s power energized the confessors. At their trial, for example, the young nobleman Vettius Epagathus dared to defend them before a hostile, shouting crowd. When the magistrate, apparently irritated by his objections, turned to him and asked, “Are you one of them too?” the sympathizer who wrote their story says that the holy spirit inspired him to say yes, and so to die with them.21 God’s spirit filled the least of them as well: some said that it was Christ himself who suffered in the slave girl Blandina, when she astonished everyone by withstanding the most agonizing torture; and others told how Christ triumphed in the suffering of the slave named Sanctus, and inspired Bishop Pothinus’s unwavering courage until he expired. Many testified that they had experienced the power of the holy spirit as they prayed together in the dark, stinking prison of Lyons.
But when the imprisoned confessors heard from their visitors that in Rome other “spirit filled” Christians were being persecuted—and not by Roman magistrates but, worse, by their fellow Christians—they decided to intervene. Claiming the special authority that Christians accorded those who had given up their lives for Christ, they wrote a letter to the bishop of Rome, urging him to deal peaceably with those under attack, who had joined a revival movement called “the new prophecy.” The prisoners asked Irenaeus, who had somehow escaped arrest, to travel to Rome to deliver their letter, and he agreed.
Irenaeus does not tell us his own attitude toward the new prophecy, but he probably knew that this movement of charismatic Christians had arisen about ten years before in rural towns of his native Asia Minor (present-day Turkey), when the prophets Montanus, Maximilla, and Priscilla, popularly called “the three,” began traveling from one rural church to another, claiming to communicate directly with the holy spirit. Wherever they went, the three shared their visions, spoke in ecstasy, and urged others to fast and pray so that they too could receive visions and revelations. From Asia Minor the movement swept through churches all across the empire, to Africa, Rome, and Greece, and even to remote provinces like Gaul, arousing enthusiasm—and opposition.
Apollinarius, who became bishop of the Asian town of Hierapolis in 171 C.E., says that when he went to Ancyra (contemporary Ankara, in Turkey) “and saw that the church in that place was torn in two by this new movement,” he opposed it, declaring that “it is not prophecy, as they call it, but, as I shall show, false prophecy.”22 Such opponents accused Montanus, Maximilla, and Priscilla of being opportunists, or even demon-possessed. In one town a Christian named Zotimus interrupted Maximilla while she was prophesying and tried to exorcise her, ordering her “demons” to leave, until her followers seized him and dragged him outside the church. Maximilla had received outpourings of the spirit and had left her husband to devote herself to prophecy. Speaking in an ecstatic trance, she declared, “Do not listen to me, but to Christ. . . . I am compelled, whether willing or not, to come to know God’s gnosis.”23 Priscilla claimed that Christ had appeared to her in female form. Opponents accused both Maximilla and Priscilla of breaking their marriage vows, wearing expensive clothes, and making money by deceiving gullible people. After a group of bishops in Turkey finally excommunicated her, Maximilla protested: “I am driven away like the wolf from the sheep. I am no wolf; I am word, and spirit, and power!”24
When Irenaeus arrived in Rome, he found on every side groups and factions that challenged his own understanding of the gospel. The letter he brought may have helped persuade Bishop Eleutherus to refrain from censuring the new prophecy, but the movement was dividing Christians throughout Asia Minor as well as Rome. While many attacked its leaders as liars and frauds, others defended it—and those on both sides drew the Gospel of John into the controversy. Some members of the new prophecy claimed that the spirit’s presence among them fulfilled what Jesus promised in John’s gospel: “I will send you the advocate [paraclete], the spirit of truth, . . . [who] will guide you into all truth.”25 Angered by such argument, Gaius, a Christian leader in Rome, charged that the Gospel of John, along with that other controversial book of “spiritual prophecy,” the Revelation, was written not by “John, the disciple of the Lord,” but by his worst enemy, Cerinthus—the man whom Polycarp said John had personally denounced as a heretic.26 Not long afterward, however, Tertullian, already famous as a champion of orthodoxy, himself joined the new prophecy and defended its members as genuinely spirit-filled Christians. Although to this day Tertullian stands among the “fathers of the church,” at the end of his life he turned against what, at this point, he now began to call “the church of a bunch of bishops.”27
When Irenaeus met in Rome a childhood friend from Smyrna named Florinus, who like himself as a young man had studied with Polycarp, he was shocked to learn that his friend now had joined a group headed by Valentinus and Ptolemy—sophisticated theologians who, nevertheless, like the new prophets, often relied on dreams and revelations.28 Although they called themselves spiritual Christians, Irenaeus regarded them as dangerously deviant. Hoping to persuade his friend to reconsider, Irenaeus wrote a letter to warn him that “these views, Florinus, to put it mildly, are not sound; are not consonant with the church, and involve their devotees in the worst impiety, even heresy.”29 Irenaeus was distressed to learn that an increasing number of educated Christians were moving in the same direction.
When he returned from Rome to Gaul, Irenaeus found his own community devastated; some thirty people had been brutally tortured and killed in the public arena on a day set aside to entertain the townspeople with this spectacle. With Bishop Pothinus dead, the remaining members of his group now looked to Irenaeus for leadership. Aware of the danger, he nevertheless agreed, determined to unify the survivors. But he saw that members of his own “flock” were splintered into various, often fractious groups—all of them claiming to be inspired by the holy spirit.
How could he sort out these conflicting claims and impose some kind of order? The task was enormous and perplexing. Irenaeus believed, certainly, that the holy spirit had initiated the Christian movement. From the time it began, a hundred and fifty years earlier, both Jesus and his followers claimed to have experienced outpourings of the holy spirit—dreams, visions, stories, sayings, ecstatic speech—many communicated orally, many others written down—reflecting the vitality and diversity of the movement. The New Testament gospels abound in visions, dreams, and revelations, like the one that Mark says initiated Jesus’ public activity:
In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth, and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the spirit descending like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven: “You are my beloved son; with you I am well pleased.”30
Luke adds to his versi
on of this story an account of Jesus’ birth, in which a vision precedes every event in the drama, from the moments the angel Gabriel appeared to the aging priest Zacharias and later to Mary, to the night when “an angel of the Lord” appeared to shepherds to tell them of Jesus’ birth, terrifying them with a sudden radiance that lighted up the nighttime sky.31
But the visions and dreams that occurred during Jesus’ lifetime were overshadowed by those the gospels say happened after his death, when his grieving followers heard that “the Lord actually has risen and has appeared to Simon [Peter]!”32 Each gospel indicates that Jesus’ disciples received visions after his death, a time that Luke says was especially charged with supernatural power. For Luke, this outpouring of dreams and visions proved that God’s spirit was present to Jesus’ followers. This, he says, is what the prophet Joel had predicted:
In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.33
Decades before Luke wrote, his mentor, Paul of Tarsus, then unknown to Jesus’ disciples—or known to them all too well as an enemy and a spy—suddenly claimed that Jesus had personally appeared to him in a blazing light and chosen him as his special representative. Henceforth Paul, who had never met Jesus during his lifetime, called himself “an apostle of Jesus Christ” (apostolos, in Greek, means “representative”) and claimed to rely on the spirit’s direct guidance throughout his life.34 Paul wrote to Christians in Corinth that he had been “caught up into Paradise,” but said that what he had seen and heard there he could never tell, since these were “things that no mortal is allowed to speak.”35 Luke relates in the Acts of the Apostles, which he wrote as a sequel to the gospel, that even after the risen Jesus appeared personally to his astounded disciples and then ascended into heaven forty days later, the spirit continued to flood his followers with charismata—power to heal, to exorcise, to prophesy, even to raise the dead.
Even a hundred years or so after Luke wrote these things, members of the new prophecy loved to recall what the Gospel of John says Jesus promised to his followers: “The holy spirit will guide you into all truth” and enable you “to do greater works than I do.”36 Then, as now, many Christians believed that the author of that gospel also wrote the Revelation, which describes astonishing visions the author says he received “in the spirit,” that is, in an ecstatic state. The author of Revelation, whose name was John, says that, while imprisoned on the island of Patmos “because of God’s word and the witness to Jesus,” he was “caught up into heaven” and beheld the Lord enthroned in glory above a heavenly sea, glittering like crystal, and heard angels intoning the secrets of “what is to come.”37 Unlike Paul, however, John did write down what he said he saw and heard in heaven, and this is why his book is called Revelation.
Without visions and revelations, then, the Christian movement would not have begun. But who can tell the holy spirit when to stop—or, as Irenaeus’s contemporaries might have said, who can say whether the holy spirit has stopped? And when so many people—some of them rivals or even antagonists—all claim to be divinely inspired, who knows who has the spirit and who does not? These questions concerned Irenaeus—and concern many Christians today. Some ask now, as many did then, whether people living after the time of the apostles still receive direct revelation. A growing number of charismatic Christians today believe that they do, and some, unlike Irenaeus, believe that the spirit may say different things to different people. Those who call themselves Pentecostalists, for example, identify with the apostles Luke describes in the New Testament Acts of the Apostles. Luke tells how the apostles, at the feast of Pentecost, experienced God’s spirit streaming down upon them “like tongues of fire” and filling them with power.38 Those early Christians who joined the new prophecy no doubt agreed. One anonymous member of the movement objected to “those who want to restrict the power of the one Spirit to seasons and times” and declared that, on the contrary, “we recognize and honor not only new prophecies but new visions as well.”39
Yet their opponents, including Gaius in Rome, argued that genuine visions and revelations had ended with the close of the apostolic age. Gaius urged his fellow believers to reject any revelation received after that time—from the visions in the Revelation to those of the new prophets. For, Gaius argued, since “the number of the prophets and apostles is [now] complete,”40 no one who lived after the apostolic age could receive revelation directly from Jesus himself. As for Luke’s story of the day of Pentecost, those who agreed with Gaius could point out that in that same opening scene in Acts, Jesus’ disciples communed directly with the risen Christ for only forty days. Luke says that after forty days, “as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight,”41 forever ending direct communication between the risen Jesus and his disciples.
Irenaeus himself tried to forge a middle ground. Unlike Gaius, he refused to draw a sharp line between the apostolic age and the present. After all, he himself had received revelation—for example, on the day of Polycarp’s death. He had heard, too, that Polycarp, while hiding from the police, had dreamed that his pillow caught fire and prophesied that “I am to be burnt alive.”42 Irenaeus also heard from the martyrs in his own town, as well as from other Christians, that such things still happen:
We hear many brothers and sisters in the church who have prophetic gifts, speaking through the spirit in all kinds of tongues, and bringing things hidden from human beings into clarity, and revealing the mysteries of God.43
So Irenaeus challenged those who suggested that miracle stories in the gospels were not to be taken literally, or that miracles no longer happen:
Those who are truly his disciples actually do drive out demons. . . . Others foresee things that will happen; they see visions and speak prophecies . . . others, still, heal the sick by laying their hands upon them, and they are completely healthy. . . .
Yes, and furthermore, as I have said, even the dead have been raised up, and they have remained alive among us for many years. What more should I say? It is not possible to tell how many gifts which the church throughout the world has received in the name of Jesus Christ, and uses every day to benefit the nations, neither deceiving anyone, nor taking any money.44
These miracles attracted crowds of newcomers to Christian groups, despite the danger. Those who receive healing, Irenaeus added, “often believe and join the church.”45
Although Irenaeus stopped short of defending Maximilla, Montanus, and Priscilla, or even mentioning the new prophets by name—if, indeed, he knew their names—he criticized their opponents for wrongly “disregarding both the gospel [of John] and the spirit of prophecy.” He reminded his contemporaries that Paul, too, not only received visions and spoke prophecies but also “recognized men and women prophesying in the churches.”46
But the immediate problem Irenaeus confronted in Lyons was not a lack of spiritual revelation but an overwhelming surplus. Perhaps he refrained from criticizing the new prophets because he thought the things they said when they spoke “in the spirit” did not deviate that much from the tradition he accepted. But other would-be prophets said and did things he thought were completely wrong, and Irenaeus judged them to be schismatics and frauds. The problem was how to discriminate: “How,” he asked, “can we tell the difference between the word of God and mere human words?”47
What especially troubled Irenaeus was that “even in our own district of the Rhone valley,” a prophet named Marcus was causing a stir among believers; he had attracted from Irenaeus’s congregation a great number of men and quite a few women . . . whom he [had] persuaded to join him, as one who possesses the greatest understanding and maturity, and who has received the highest power from the invisible and ineffable regions above.48
Although his account is hostile, and accuses Marcus of being an agent of Satan, Irenaeus offers a detailed picture of what this prophet did
. Marcus not only received visions and spoke in prophecy himself but also encouraged others to do so. When someone asked Marcus to invoke the power of the spirit, Marcus would place his hands upon the person’s head and offer prayer that echoed Jesus’ words from the Gospel of Matthew (“Do not despise the little ones, for, I tell you, their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven”).49 Marcus prayed for each initiate that “you may receive grace, since the Father of all sees your angel standing before him.” Then he placed his hands upon the person’s head and said, “Behold, grace has descended upon you; open your mouth, and prophesy.” Then, Irenaeus says, the candidate would protest, having been instructed to do so, that “I have not at any time prophesied, nor do I know how to prophesy,” in order to acknowledge that prophecy has nothing to do with natural human capacity but only with the gift of divine grace. Finally Marcus again would encourage the initiate to speak prophecy—often, Irenaeus says, a “foolish woman”—and at that point, he says indignantly, she, then, puffed up with vanity and elated by these words, and enormously excited in soul by expecting that she herself is about to prophesy, her heart beating wildly, reaches the necessary pitch of audacity, and, foolishly as well as brazenly, utters whatever nonsense happens to occur to her, such as one might expect from someone heated up by an empty spirit.50
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