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Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching
St Irenaeus of Lyons, tr. Robinson, 1920
Chapter 38
But God the Father was very merciful: He sent His creative1 Word, who in coming to deliver us came to the very place and spot in which we had lost life, and brake the bonds of our fetters. And His light appeared and made the darkness of the prison disappear, and hallowed our birth and destroyed death, loosing those same fetters in which we were enchained. And He manifested the resurrection,2 Himself becoming the first-begotten3 of the dead, and in Himself raising up man that was fallen, lifting him up far above the heaven to the right hand of the glory of the Father: even as God promised by the prophet, saying: And4 I will raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen; that is, the flesh5 that was from David. And this our Lord Jesus Christ truly fulfilled, when He gloriously achieved our redemption, that He might truly raise us up, setting us free unto the Father. And if any man will not receive His birth from a virgin, how shall he receive His resurrection from the dead? For it is nothing wonderful and astonishing and extraordinary, if one who was not born rose from the dead: nay indeed we cannot speak of a resurrection of him who came unto being without birth. For one who is unborn and immortal, and has not undergone birth, will also not undergo death. For he who took not the beginning of man, how could he receive his end?
Notes
- The same word corresponds to “artifex” in the Arm. version of V, xv. 2, xxiv. 4: cf. III, xi. 11: ὁ τῶν ἁπάντων τεχνίτης Λόγος.
- Cf. c. 39: Barn. V. 6: ἵνα καταργήσῃ τὸν θάνατον καὶ τὴν ἐκ νεκρῶν ἀνάστασιν δείξῃ: and Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition, in the Eucharistic Prayer: “ut resurrectionem manifestet”; and Philos. x. 33 (Connolly, Texts and Studies, VIII, 4. 166).
- Rev. i. 5.
- Amos ix. 11.
- Or “body”: cf. c. 62.