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)
