ABSTRACT
In the first book of his five-volume refutation of heresy, Irenaeus of Lyons—a second-century ecclesiastical leader, theologian, and defender of orthodoxy—optimistically claims that a shared commitment to a single ecclesiastical creed unites the variety of Christian communities scattered throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond:
Although the languages of the world are dissimilar, the import of the tradition is one and the same. For the churches which have been planted in Germany do not believe or hand down anything different, nor do those in Spain, nor those in Gaul, nor those in the East, nor those in Egypt, nor those in Libya, nor those which have been established in the central regions of the world. 1
