St. Irenaeus - New Testament Canon

I have an app called Universalis. It’s a great resource. Today there was a reading about St. Irenaeus who lived in the 2nd Century AD. 

He was a disciple of St. Polycarp who was a disciple of the St. John the Evangelist. 

His greatest contribution to the Church was his apologetic work against gnostic heresies.  He was recently declared to be a Doctor of the Church. You can read more about that at the Simply Catholic website. 

He also helped in settling the arguments about what writings belonged in the New Testament canon. 

He is venerated in the following Christian Churches. Note that there are Protestant groups that venerate saints. Say what? 

Roman Catholic Church and Eastern Catholicism

Assyrian Church of the East

Eastern Orthodox Church
Lutheran Church
Oriental Orthodox Church
Anglican Communion

Second Reading: St Irenaeus (130 - 202)

Irenaeus was born in Smyrna, in Asia Minor (now Izmir in Turkey) and emigrated to Lyons, in France, where he eventually became the bishop. It is not known for certain whether he was martyred or died a natural death.

Whenever we take up a Bible we touch Irenaeus’s work, for he played a decisive role in fixing the canon of the New Testament. It is easy for people nowadays to think of Scripture – and the New Testament in particular – as the basis of the Church, but harder to remember that it was the Church itself that had to agree, early on, about what was scriptural and what was not. Before Irenaeus, there was vague general agreement on what scripture was, but a system based on this kind of common consent was too weak. As dissensions and heresies arose, reference to scripture was the obvious way of trying to settle what the truth really was, but in the absence of an agreed canon of scripture it was all too easy to attack one’s opponent’s arguments by saying that his texts were corrupt or unscriptural; and easy, too, to do a little fine-tuning of texts on one’s own behalf. Irenaeus not only established a canon which is almost identical to our present one, but also gave reasoned arguments for each inclusion and exclusion.

Irenaeus also wrote a major work, Against the Heresies, which in the course of denying what the Christian faith is not, effectively asserts what it is. The majority of this work was lost for many centuries and only rediscovered in a monastery on Mount Athos in 1842. Many passages from it are used in the Office of Readings.