The Fourfold Gospel and the Scriptures

St. Irenaeus is the first writer to defend the four-Gospel canon as a closed and divinely ordained set, famously arguing from the four winds and the four living creatures that the Gospel “cannot be either more or fewer in number than they are.” He read most of the books that would become the New Testament as apostolic Scripture, received the Pauline corpus as a unity, and — against Marcion — defended the Old Testament as the Christian Scripture of the one God who is author of both Testaments.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The First Witness to a Closed Four-Gospel Canon

Writing around 180 in Lyons, St. Irenaeus gives us the earliest surviving argument that the Church possesses exactly four Gospels — neither more nor fewer — and that this number is not a matter of historical accident but of providence. The passage in Against Heresies 3.11.8 is the locus classicus for the fourfold Gospel:

“It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since there are four zones of the world in which we live, and four principal winds, while the Church is scattered throughout all the world, and the pillar and ground of the Church is the Gospel and the spirit of life; it is fitting that she should have four pillars, breathing out immortality on every side, and vivifying men afresh” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.11.8 [PG 7:885]; trans. ANF 1).

He binds the number four to the four faces of the cherubim of Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 4 — the lion (royal power), the calf (sacrificial priesthood), the man (the incarnation), and the eagle (the Spirit hovering over the Church) — and concludes that “the Word, the Artificer of all, He that sitteth upon the cherubim, and contains all things, He who was manifested to men, has given us the Gospel under four aspects, but bound together by one Spirit” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.11.8 [PG 7:885–888]; trans. ANF 1). The four are diverse in face but one in breath: a single Gospel under four forms, not four competing gospels.

The argument is occasioned by polemic. Irenaeus is answering heretics who multiply or truncate the gospels — the Ebionites using only Matthew, Marcion mutilating Luke, the Valentinians adding the Gospel of Truth, others clinging to Mark or John alone (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.11.7, 3.11.9; trans. ANF 1). His four-zones argument is therefore best read not as the reasoning by which the Church arrived at four Gospels but as a theological vindication, after the fact, of a number already received: the cosmic symbolism confirms what tradition had already delivered.

Reflecting or Creating the Consensus? — A Scholarly Debate

How much weight Irenaeus’s testimony bears is contested. The question is whether he records a four-Gospel canon already firmly established in the Church or whether he is among those forging that consensus through the very act of defending it. The fact that he must argue for the number at all — and argue so strenuously — has been read both ways.

Some scholars hold that the fourfold Gospel was already settled well before Irenaeus and that he simply gives it learned expression: T. C. Skeat and others point to manuscript and second-century evidence (and to texts such as the Epistula Apostolorum, dated by some to the 140s) for a four-Gospel collection decades before him (attributed; see Skeat, “The Oldest Manuscript of the Four Gospels?”). Others, notably Geoffrey Hahneman in his work on the Muratorian Fragment, argue that the fourfold Gospel was not yet “firmly established” in the last quarter of the second century and that its full canonical fixity belongs to a later period; on this reading Irenaeus stands nearer the beginning of the process than its end (attributed; Hahneman, The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon). Hans von Campenhausen’s classic account stresses that the catalyst was negative — Marcion’s truncated canon forced the great Church to define its own — so that Irenaeus’s polemic is part of the formative pressure, not merely a notarized record of a finished list (attributed; von Campenhausen, The Formation of the Christian Bible).

The most balanced position, and the one most congenial to the Orthodox reading, is that Irenaeus is a witness to a tradition older than himself which he both receives and consolidates: the four-Gospel canon “must lie prior to Irenaeus” in origin, even as his defense of it marks the moment it becomes articulate and irreversible. He is neither pure reporter nor pure innovator but the hinge on which an inherited usage becomes a stated rule.

Apostolic Authorship and the Origin of the Four

The four-zones argument of 3.11.8 does not stand alone; it rests on an earlier and more historical claim about where the Gospels come from. In Against Heresies 3.1.1 Irenaeus gives the earliest connected account of the composition of the four Gospels, anchoring each to apostolic authority. Matthew “issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect” while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome; “Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter”; “Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him”; and “John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.1.1; trans. ANF 1).

This is the structural foundation of his canonical argument. The Gospels are authoritative because they transmit the preaching of the apostles, who received the Gospel from Christ and the Spirit; the four are not anonymous texts that the Church later promoted but the written deposit of named apostolic witnesses. The number four is then vindicated symbolically in 3.11.8, but the ground of authority is apostolicity, and the cosmic symbolism is its confirmation. This twofold move — historical attribution plus theological vindication — is why Irenaeus’s testimony has been so weighty in later canon debates: he does not merely assert four Gospels but explains why these four and no others belong to the apostolic age, and why the proliferating “gospels” of the gnostics, lacking such a pedigree, are excluded (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.11.9; trans. ANF 1).

The Pauline Canon and the Wider New Testament

Irenaeus receives the letters of Paul as a unified apostolic witness and quotes them constantly throughout Against Heresies and the Demonstration. Where Marcion had reduced Paul to a mutilated set of ten letters and read him against the Old Testament, Irenaeus reclaims Paul for the catholic Church — the same Paul who preaches the one God of Law and Gospel (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.7.1–2, 4.41.4; trans. ANF 1). He also holds firmly to Acts as the apostolic record that anchors Paul to the Twelve, devoting much of Against Heresies Book 3, chapters 12–15, to its testimony against those who would set Paul over against Peter.

On the scope of his usage, the standard scholarly tally (Bruce Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament, 153–156) is that Irenaeus draws on most of the books that would become the twenty-seven-book New Testament — twenty-three of them — citing the four Gospels, Acts, the thirteen Pauline epistles, 1 Peter, 1 John (and 2 John), James, and the Apocalypse. The books for which scholars find no clear use in his surviving works are Philemon, 2 Peter, 3 John, and Jude (Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament, 153–156). The Apocalypse he attributes confidently to John and uses for its number symbolism, including the famous reading of the number of the beast (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.30; trans. ANF 1).

Edge Cases: Hermas, 1 Clement, and the Boundaries

Irenaeus’s canon is not yet a sealed list, and its edges are instructive. He cites the Shepherd of Hermas with the introductory formula reserved for Scripture — “well did the Scripture (graphe) say, ‘First of all believe that there is one God…’” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.20.2; trans. ANF 1). Whether this means he held Hermas to be canonical Scripture in the strict sense, or used graphe in a looser sense of an authoritative “writing,” is debated (attributed). The episode shows that the boundary between Scripture and edifying church literature was still permeable for him, even as the Gospel core was firm. He likewise prizes the Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians as a witness to the Roman succession (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.3; trans. ANF 1) without thereby ranking it with the Gospels. The pattern is consistent with the broader Orthodox account of canon formation: a stable christological and apostolic center received early, with the precise boundary of the catholic epistles and a few smaller books settled later (see Holy Scripture).

The Old Testament as Christian Scripture — Against Marcion

The most consequential of Irenaeus’s canonical battles concerns the Old Testament. Marcion had severed the God of the Hebrew Scriptures from the Father of Jesus Christ, casting the former as a lesser, “just” creator-deity and rejecting the Old Testament wholesale. Against this, Irenaeus insists that there is one God, who is at once Creator and Redeemer, and that the Law and the Prophets are Christian Scripture testifying throughout to Christ.

His argument is that the Scriptures are a single coherent narrative — the one oikonomia of the one God unfolding from creation to incarnation — and that Christ himself is their treasure: “If anyone, therefore, reads the Scriptures with attention, he will find in them an account of Christ, and a foreshadowing of the new calling. For Christ is the treasure which was hid in the field, that is, in this world… but the treasure hid in the Scriptures is Christ” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.26.1; trans. ANF 1). The patriarchs and prophets did not write of another God; “one and the same householder produced both covenants,” the elder and the newer, “for one and the same God” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.9.1; trans. ANF 1). Moses wrote of Christ (John 5:46), and the prophets, moved by one and the same Spirit, announced the economy that the Gospels record (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.10.1, 4.34.1; trans. ANF 1).

This refusal to discard the Old Testament is not antiquarianism but the very logic of salvation: a Redeemer who is not also the Creator would redeem us from someone else’s world, leaving the flesh and the cosmos outside salvation. By holding the two Testaments together under one God, Irenaeus secures the goodness of creation, the reality of the incarnation, and the unity of the divine plan — the same convictions that ground his anthropology of growth (see The Glory of God Is a Living Man). For the Orthodox tradition, his defense of the Old Testament as Christian Scripture, read through the Septuagint and according to the Rule of Faith, is foundational (see Holy Scripture).

See Also

References

  • Irenaeus of Lyon. Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses). c. 180. Trans. in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (ANF 1); Greek/Latin in PG 7.
  • Behr, John. Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
  • Behr, John, trans. St. Irenaeus of Lyons: On the Apostolic Preaching. Popular Patristics Series 17. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997.
  • Hahneman, Geoffrey Mark. The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
  • Metzger, Bruce M. The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. (Irenaeus: 153–156.)
  • Osborn, Eric. Irenaeus of Lyons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
  • Presley, Stephen O. The Intertextual Reception of Genesis 1–3 in Irenaeus of Lyons. Leiden: Brill, 2015.
  • Skeat, T. C. “The Oldest Manuscript of the Four Gospels?” New Testament Studies 43 (1997): 1–34.
  • von Campenhausen, Hans. The Formation of the Christian Bible. Trans. J. A. Baker. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972.