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

Book chapter


White, Devin. (2020). Losing the Plot: Irenaeus, Biblical Narrative, and the Rule of Truth. In In Francis Watson and Sarah Parkhouse (Ed.). Telling the Christian Story Differently: Counter-Narratives from Nag Hammadi and Beyond pp. 153-168 Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9780567679543.ch-009
AuthorsWhite, Devin
EditorsFrancis Watson and Sarah Parkhouse
Abstract

[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).

Page range153-168
Year2020
Book titleTelling the Christian Story Differently: Counter-Narratives from Nag Hammadi and Beyond
PublisherBloomsbury Academic
Place of publicationUnited Kingdom
ISBN9780567679529
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.5040/9780567679543.ch-009
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Controlled
Publication process dates
Deposited19 May 2021
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Evagrius of Pontus on exodus and the virtues
White, Devin L.. (2019). Evagrius of Pontus on exodus and the virtues. Vigiliae Christianae: a review of early Christian life and languages. 73(5), pp. 516-530. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700720-12341416