Losing the Plot: Irenaeus, Biblical Narrative, and the Rule of Truth

[Extract] This essay asks whether Irenaeus’s rule of truth contains within it an anti-Valentinian counter-narrative.[1] For the purposes of this exercise, ‘counter-narrative’ means one story that must be incompatible with another telling of the same story. Of course, not all variant tellings of the same stories are necessarily incompatible. Narratives can be voiced coherently from multiple points of view. Consider, for example, Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. But many variances in narration do arise from more substantial disagreements. The situation described at the end of Matthew’s gospel seems a better analogue for understanding Irenaeus and the Valentinians than Shakespeare and Stoppard on the melancholy Dane. There, as Matthew explains, the Apostles and the Sanhedrin provide competing narrations of Jesus’s last days. Either he rose from the dead, or the disciples stole his body and claimed that he had (GMt 28.11–15).