If η γενεα αυτη is understood to
a set specific timeframe for Jesus’s παρουσια and if that παρουσια did not come
within that timeframe, then the verse would be understood as a prophecy that
did not come to pass as predicted. (Ryan E. Meyer, “This Generation” in
Matthew 24:34 and the New Exodus [Studies in Judeo-Christian Thought
Monograph Series 2; El Cajon, Calif.: SCS Press, 2025], 1)
. . . it will be well that you
call to mind what the sacred history relates of good King Hezekiah (2 Chron 32.,)
namely, that after he had abolished the superstitions throughout Judea,
reformed the state of the church according to the law of God . . . (John
Calvin, Letter to Edward Seymour (“The Protector Somerset”), October 22, 1548,
in Letters of John Calvin: Selected from the Bonnet Edition with an
Introductory Biographical Sketch [Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust,
1980], 89)
You are aware, Monseigneur, of
what is written concerning the good King Hezekiah, that after having performed
such memorable actions, well for religion and the worship of God and for the
common weal of his country, his heart was lifted up. (John Calvin, Letter to
Edward Seymour (“The Protector Somerset”), February/March 1550, in Letters
of John Calvin: Selected from the Bonnet Edition with an Introductory
Biographical Sketch [Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1980], 115-16)
On Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.2
Convenire ad
The traditional Catholic apologetic reading takes convenire as “agree”: every church must be in doctrinal accord with Rome. The philological difficulty is that convenire in the sense “agree with” normally construes with cum and the ablative, or with the dative; convenire ad with the accusative is the ordinary construction for physical movement—to resort to, to assemble at.
Studies of the translator’s own habits elsewhere in the Latin Irenaeus reinforce the point: he uses convenire ad for literal gathering, and prefers other verbs—consentire, concurrere in—where his Greek meant agreement. ON this reading, Ireaneus says that the faithful from everywhere come to Rome, which suits the appositive gloss perfectly: “every church, that is, the faithful from everywhere” is a strange description of parties to a doctrinal consensus and a natural description of travelers converging on the capital of the world—officials, merchants, soldiers, teachers, and Christians among them, exactly the traffic that brought Polycarp, Justin, Hegesippus, Marcion, Valentinus, Tatian, and Irenaeus himself to Rome within a few decades. (Laurent Cleenewerck de Kiev, From Auctoritas to Potestas: The Development of Roman Primacy from the Pre-Nicene Era to Vatican I [Washington, D. C.: EUCLID University Press, 2026], 43-44)
The Argument in Context
Irenaeus’s project in Book 3 is anti-Gnostic: against secret traditions, he sets the public successions of bishops in the apostolic churches. He says explicitly enumerating the successions of all the churches would be tedious, and that he will therefore take one conspicuous specimen—Rome—and he lists its twelve bishops from Linus to Eleutherus, “in this order and by this succession the ecclesiastical tradition from the apostles and the preaching of the truth have come down to us.” Two consequences follow.
First, Rome functions in the argument as a representative example of the apostolic principle; in 3.3.4 he immediately adds Smyrna—“and Polycarp too . . . would declare these things”—and Ephesus, “a true witness of the tradition of the apostles,” as further registers: superfluous if Rome’s say-so settled doctrine, natural if Rome is the best of several independent witnesses. HE caps the argument in 3.4.1 with the barbarian churches who “without paper and ink have salvation written in their hearts by the Spirit”—the tradition is everywhere and Rome is its most convenient index, not its source.
Second, the details resist a Petrine-monarchical reading: the foundation is jointly Petrine and Pauline; Peter is not counted as first bishop—the apostles “hand over the episcopate” to Linus and depart the list; and the letter to Corinth is remembered as sent by “the church” under Clement. Whatever principalitas Irenaeus intends, he does not make the Roman bishop Peter’s successor in any exclusive sense—the very construction on which the later edifice would rest. (Laurent Cleenewerck de Kiev, From Auctoritas to Potestas: The Development of Roman Primacy from the Pre-Nicene Era to Vatican I [Washington, D. C.: EUCLID University Press, 2026], 48-49; cf. Decree of the Holy Office, January 24, 1647: Peter and Paul being the Dual Heads of the Church is "heretical")
Reception History and the Weight of the Sentence
The interpretive history is also a form of evidence. No one in antiquity cites “Irenaeus 3.3.2” as a proof of Roman jurisdiction—not Stephen against Cyprian not Julius, not Damasus, not Leo, none of whom would have missed such a proof-text had contemporaries read it as one. The Greek text vanished; the Latin slept in the manuscripts; the sentence entered papal apologetics with the printed editions and the Reformation controversies, was fought over by Massuet, Stieren, and Harvey in their editions, became a set-piece of the nineteenth-century polemics between Döllinger’s circle and the ultramontanes, and reached its apotheosis at Vatican I, where Pastor Aeternus quotes it in the “agree with” sense as its sole patristic proof from the ante-Nicene Church. . . . The scholarly mainstream across confessions has accordingly settled in the middle: Rome, by virtue of preeminent apostolic origin and its position at the world’s crossroads, is for Irenaeus the privileged witness and touchstone of the apostolic tradition—doctrinally weighty in the highest degree, jurisdictionally not in view. (Laurent Cleenewerck de Kiev, From Auctoritas to Potestas: The Development of Roman Primacy from the Pre-Nicene Era to Vatican I [Washington, D. C.: EUCLID University Press, 2026], 51)
On “in qua”:
The whole problem disappears, if one links 'in qua' in the most natural manner with the foregoing, that is to say with the colon immediately preceding. 'In qua', then, takes up 'omnem ecclesiam' of line 2; 'ab his qui sunt undique' far from being a possible dittography of line 3 is in fact put down to prevent any misunderstanding of this point. The meaning of Irenaeus is that every church (i.e. all believers everywhere) in which the apostolic tradition is kept is necessarily in agreement with Rome, by reason of the very high age of the Roman church. (Luise Abramowski, “Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. III 3, 2: Ecclesia Romana and Omnis Ecclesia; and Ibid. 3, 3: Anacletus of Rome,” The Journal of Theological Studies 28, no. 1 [April 1977]: 102)
. . . the tradition preserved in the universal church by the faithful everywhere, with Rome as the convenient point of verification. Either way, the clause is awkward for the maximal reading: if the argument were “Rome is the norm because of her authority,” the tradition should be preserved by Rome for everyone, not in Rome by everyone. The sentence’s own economy runs from the world to Rome, not from Rome to the world. (Laurent Cleenewerck de Kiev, From Auctoritas to Potestas: The Development of Roman Primacy from the Pre-Nicene Era to Vatican I [Washington, D. C.: EUCLID University Press, 2026], 46)
Rome’s faith is reliable because it is perpetually audited by the whole church converging there . . . (Ibid., 46, emphasis removed from original)
And he dealt wisely, and dispersed
all of his children throughout all the countries of Judah and Benjamin, unto
every fenced city: and he gave them victual in abundance. And he desired
many wives. (2 Chron 11:13 |
KJV)
And he wisely spread all his sons through all
the regions of Judah and Benjamin to all the fortified towns, and he married
them off with wives (וַיִּשְׁאַל הֲמוֹן נָשִׁים). (Robert Alter, The
Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 3:943)
and he married them off with
wives. The Hebrew text here looks corrupt. It reads wayishʾal
hamon nashim, literally, “and he asked many wives.” The verb shaʾal
is not ordinarily used for seeking wives, and the word for “many,” hamon,
also looks idiomatically suspect. This translation adopts one proposed
emendation, reading waysiʾa lahem nashim. This involves a
respacing of the consonants (the kind of error a scribe might easily make) and
it assumes that the consonant nun at the end of hamon was introduced
by dittography because the next word begins with nun and that the vowel
before it was then inserted in order to turn h-m-n into a known word. (Robert
Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2019], 3:943)
[101] At the time there
was a severe drought in the metropolis of Pessinus and the fruits of their
produce were withered. When the people of this metropolis learned that Christ’s
servant was being hosted by Bishop Aemilianus at Aligete, they hurried to him.
Their dignitaries together with the clergy and a sizeable crowd came to the
aforesaid monastery of the Theotokos, which was 15 miles distant and, after
begging Bishop Aemilianus, took the servant of Christ and led him off to their
own city to feast him and for their land to receive rain from heaven through his
prayer.
About six miles from their city
there was a garden, and in this garden there was a swarm of locusts that were
destroying the vegetables that had recently sprouted. When the garden’s owner
learned of the presence of the divinely inspired man, he
ran three miles from his garden to meet him, and falling before him, reported the
damage that the locusts had caused in his garden. (“The Life of our holy father
Theodore, archimandrite of Sykeon, written by George his disciple, priest and
leader of the same monastery” (c. AD 613) in Theodore of Sykeon: The Life by
George and the Encomium by Nicephorus [trans. Michael Whitby and Richard
Price; Translated Texts for Historians 87; Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2022], 177)
The Greek of the material in bold can be found in André-Jean
Festugiére, Vide De Théodore De Skyéôn, 2 vols. (Brussels: Société Des Bollandistes, 1970), 1:81:
Γνους δε την παρουσιαν του θεοφορου
ανδρος . . . .
The current
text of Alma 17:3 reads:
But this is not all; they had given themselves
to much prayer, and fasting; therefore they had the spirit of prophecy, and the
spirit of revelation, and when they taught, they taught with the power and
authority of God.
However, the
1830 Book of Mormon reads a bit differently:
But this is not all: they had
given themselves to much prayer, and fasting, therefore they had the spirit of
prophecy, and the spirit of revelation, and when they taught, they taught with
power and authority, even as with the power and authority of God.
As Skousen notes (Analysis of Textual Variants of
the Book of Mormon, p. 1949):
The 1837 edition omitted the
phrase “even as with the power and authority”, probably because the typesetter’s
eye skipped from the first instance of power and authority to the second
one. . . . One possible reason for consciously omitting the phrase “even as with
the power and authority” is the occurrence of the as. In current English,
the as implies a hypothetical aspect, as if the text is saying “even as if
wit the power and authority of God”. Clearly, the sons of Mosiah taught with
the power and authority of God. The purpose of the as is to indicate
that by all appearances their power and authority was from God. Interestingly,
there is an example in the text of as if with that has little, if any, hypothetical
sense:
Alma 56:56
but behold to my great joy
there had not one soul of them fallen to the earth
yea and they had fought as if with the strength of God
yea never was men known to have fought with such miraculously strength.
The meaning of “they had fought as
if with the strength of God” seems to be ‘they fought by all appearances
with the strength of God’. The critical text will therefore restore the
original reading in Alma 17:3 (“even as with power and authority of God”).
Despite the unexpectedness of the as in Ama 17:3, its original use here
appears to be intentional.
Skousen (Ibid., p. 1950) then offers this summary:
Restore in Alma 17:3 the phrase “even
as with the power and authority”, thus maintaining the earliest reading: “and when
they taught / they taught with power and authority even as with the power and
authority of God”; the use of as in the final phrase appears to mean ‘by
all appearances’.
In Teopantli Kalpulli, Isac
participates in different Indigenous rituals and ceremonies around a large
ceiba tree, which is a sacred tree in the Mayan tradition. He shares his
prayers or intentions there, destined for the Great Spirit in a way that is typical
of the Lakota tradition, but it is also a place he regularly attends alone in
the afternoons to meditate. At its altar, known as ‘the aquarium’, Isac
performs medical circle rituals which consist of establishing visions of the
sacred wheel around the four directions, the four elements and their
corresponding totems: the buffalo of the north; the eagle of the east; the
coyote of the south and the bear of the west. Before he has made the peyote
pilgrimage to the sacred centre of Wirikuta, he has deposited his wrapped
jícara [bow] and his arrow at the aquarium, a chapel located at Teopantli
Kalpulli, (because its not an aquarium it is the name of GFU chapel). Isac
considers that the gods are there. Every week, on Saturday nights, he
participates in the Temazcal ritual to connect with the Great Spirit at
Teopantli Kalpulli as well.
. . .
Another element that also travels
with the women is the jefa tambor. It is a community percussion instrument
around which they gather to recover traditional songs in their native
languages. The drum also has different prayers, materialised in pieces of ribbons,
coloured fabrics, bird feathers, snails and so forth that are placed on the
altar in the ceremonies. The jefa tambor is loaded with many intentions. It is
a tradition taken from the Siux-Lakota rites and conveys the motives or
requests to the Great Spirit. (Angela Renée De la Torre Castellanos, "Neo-Mexican
Home Altars: Daily Reconnections with the Spirit of Nature," Journal
of Beliefs & Values [2024]: 8, 13-14)