Scriptural Mormonism: Dominic J. Unger on Irenaeus’s Comment in Against Heresies 2.22.6 Concerning the Age of Jesus’s Death

Irenaeus’s statements here and in the following paragraphs about the length of Christ’s public ministry and of his age are quite confusing. The Gnostics maintained that Christ’s public ministry lasted only one year (cf. 1.3.3; 2.20.1). This Irenaeus refutes emphatically. He calls attention to the four paschs reported in John’s Gospel, supposing at least three years of ministry. He claims, too, that Christ, according to the Scriptures, was about thirty years old when he was baptized (cf. Luke 2:23; A.H. 2.22.4; 3.10.4). One would be inclined to conclude from this that Jesus was, according to Irenaeus, about thirty-three years old when he died. In subsequent paragraphs, however, he argues that Jesus was in his forties when he was preaching. He uses two arguments. First, Christ came to save all men and women, in all age brackets, including the elderly (2.22.5). And so Christ also reached the age of the elderly, and that, in reality, not merely in appearance (2.22.3–4). Second, the Gospel itself (John 8:56–57) confirms this. The Jews who wanted to show the disparity between Abraham’s age and Jesus’ would have guessed his age in the thirties if that is what he was. For these reasons Irenaeus thinks that we must hold that he was in his forties. To make the confusion worse, Irenaeus claims that this is the tradition of the presbyters of Asia who got their information from John (2.22.5). But their tradition was wrong in regard to millenarianism; it could have been wrong on this date also. Did he accept it without questions? Let us note some facts. Irenaeus knows that it was under Tiberius Caesar that Jesus was baptized (3.14.3) and then preached (4.22.2; also 4.6.2, which is not about his birth, but about his public revelation, according to the context). Irenaeus knows, too, that Jesus was crucified under Tiberius Caesar (1.27.2). He notes frequently that Pontius Pilate was then procurator of Judea (1.25.6; 27.2; 2.32.4; 3.4.2; 5.12.5). Must we accept that he knew nothing about the end of Tiberius’s or Pontius Pilate’s regime? Or that if he held Jesus to be in his forties when he preached and died, he did not advert to the fact that it would no longer have been under Tiberius or Pilate, but under Claudius? But he knew that Simon Magus already performed under Claudius Caesar (1.23.1), and so Jesus could hardly have been living under Claudius. True, in Proof (n. 74) he had Pilate procurator under Claudius! Did he contradict himself? Or did a scribe substitute the wrong Caesar? Since Irenaeus has everything in order here (four paschs and three years of ministry, beginning at about thirty years of age, all under Pontius Pilate and Tiberius Caesar), I am inclined to think that he himself stresses his two arguments (Christ’s being among the elderly and John 8:56) as weapons against the Gnostics. They argue literally from Scripture and its numbers. Irenaeus would say, Good, I too can choose that type of weapon and refute you by your own methods. He uses parables in that way, I believe. So why not about this? And yet he seems so sincere in arguing about the reality of what he says. F. Vernet (“Irénée [Saint],” DTC 7.2.2463–64) thinks that the three years of public ministry established by the Passovers preceded the death of Jesus, but there were many years in between the baptism and the beginning of his ministry. But that is not according to Scripture, nor according to Irenaeus. In 2.22.4, his statement about Jesus’ ministry following the baptism is grammatically so presented that it is difficult to admit any long gap between the baptism and the ministry. J. E. Steinmueller (A Companion to Scripture Studies, rev. ed., 3 vols. [New York: Joseph F. Wagner, 1969], 3:184–85) thinks that Irenaeus agrees with the facts, in that Jesus was about forty-one years old when he died and about thirty-seven or thirty-eight when he was baptized, because the Lucan term “about thirty” is to be taken in a broader sense of the liturgical age for public ministry. But he overlooks the fact that Irenaeus himself tells us expressly that Jesus had not completed his thirtieth year when he was baptized (2.22.5). Either Irenaeus misunderstood the presbyters (so J. Hoh, Die Lehre des hl. Irenäus über das Neue Testament, NTAbhand. 7, pts. 4/5 [Münster: Aschendorff, 1919], 160–62), or the presbyters already misunderstood John, and Irenaeus followed them blindly, as he did in the millenarist theory. Cf. U. Holzmeister, Chronologia Vitae Christi, 99–100. J. Chapman (“Papias on the Age of Our Lord,” JThS 9, no. 33 [1908]: 42–61) holds that both Irenaeus and later Victorinus (De fabrica mundi) quote from a common source, which is undoubtedly Papias’s work. Irenaeus thought that, because of Papias’s remark in the prologue, all this rested on apostolic tradition. See also J. Chapman, “On an Apostolic Tradition that Christ Was Baptized in 46 and Crucified under Nero,” JThS 8, no. 32 (1907): 590–606. More recently, H. A. Blair (“The Age of Jesus Christ and the Ephesian Tradition,” Patristic Studies 7, TU 92 [1966]: 427–33) made an attempt to justify Irenaeus’s older age for Jesus for postulating a longer period of discipleship for Jesus under John the Baptist, so that he would have been born between 20 and 12 BC, and yet died about AD 30/33. But even as the author admits, though this solves some problems, it creates others. G. Ogg (“The Age of Jesus When He Taught,” New Testament Studies 5 [1958–59]: 291–98) comes to a similar conclusion, but by a different method, about an earlier date for Christ’s birth, as a justification of Irenaeus’s opinion. (Dominic J. Unger, St. Irenaeus of Lyons: Against the Heresies, Book 2 [Ancient Chrisitan Writers 65; Mahwah, N.J.: The Newman Press, 2012], 75)