A colorful but somewhat improbable martyr tale survives about this Apostolic Father being arrested and then carted overland through Anatolia to his execution at Rome, being allowed to draft epistles along the way.

Do epistles (whether legitimate or not) survive from all three of the Apostolic Fathers?

While Irenaeus of Lyon laid out many arguments against Gnostics in his 180 CE treatise Against Heresies, including that they were profligates and that they descended from Simon Magus, we noted in the episode that his most effective argument was simply that:

In the Koine Greek of the New Testament, the word epískopos, though today commonly translated as “bishop,” simply meant:

As we learned toward the end of this episode, later theologians primarily objected to the work of the early church fathers Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Origen on the basis of their:

Due to their important place in the ideological and institutional history of Catholicism, Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, and Polyarp of Smyrna are broadly known as:

This theologian, working at the cusp between the first and second centuries CE, was the first person we have on record to champion the monarchical episcopate, or office of bishop.

This church father produced a short anthropological history of pagan religion, and went on to suggest that great figures in Greek philosophy had taken their ideas from Hebrew prophets and sages – especially in Egypt.

This theologian, around the year 160 CE, argued that the logos written of at the beginning of the Gospel of John was the timeless historical essence of Christ, and that it had long ago animated great philosophers like Plato to write works nearly Christian in nature, though not in doctrine.

Irenaeus of Lyon, around 180 CE, produced a book called Against Heresies. One of Irenaeus’ teachers was the Apostolic Father

Catholicism’s fourth Pope, and author of an important papal letter to the Christian church in Corinth in roughly 90 CE, was:

In the episode, we learned that this very early Christian text has an egalitarian, rather than hierarchical, view of Christians and church leaders.

According to tradition, the teacher of the Apostolic Fathers Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp of Smyrna was:

Clement of Alexandria quotes this Presocratic philosopher, who believed that anthropomorphic gods were clearly a human invention:

In Catholicism, Apostolic Succession is the notion that: