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Earliest Interpretations of Revelation 12 and the Woman of Revelation 12
The four earliest (that I could find so far) interpretations of Revelation 12 either state or imply that the woman of Revelation 12 is not Mary. Irenaeus, for example, treats the dragon’s attack as a still-future event, implying that the woman is not Mary. Hippolytus, Methodius, and Victorinus are more explicit in identifying the woman…
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Irenaeus and the Manichaeans?
Dr. Kenneth Wilson is a contributor to the critique of Calvinism that I’m currently reviewing. I’m not up to Wilson’s chapter yet in my review, but Thuyen Tran called my attention to a rather glaring error in his chapter/article of the book, and an indication that this was not the first time this error had…
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Formal Sufficiency of Scripture: Early Christian Writers (Guest Series)
Formal Sufficiency of ScriptureStated and Examined from Scripture and the Fathers, with scholarly confirmation regarding the Fathers’ views. In an introduction section (link), we discussed the nature of formal sufficiency that we, the Reformed, affirm. In the next section (link), we saw Scripture’s own testimony to its own sufficiency. If we were simply establishing the…
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Irenaeus and the Reliability of "Early" Oral Tradition
People sometimes like to think that if you go back to the earliest fathers you’ll get very good accounts of extra-scriptural tradition. There is a certain amount of intuition to back this up. After all, the earliest fathers were closer in time to the gospel accounts than we are. Intuition is wrong – at least…