ABSTRACT
Reading the New Testament as a book, or rather as a collection of books, is rather unusual, and it rarely happens in scholarship. The New Testament therefore only appears as a collection when found as reading material on hotel bedside tables or purchased via Kindle or in bookshops, either as a gift for confirmation and communion ceremonies or for personal reading. Scholarly commentaries deal almost exclusively with individual books of the twenty-seven writings that form the New Testament. The difference between Justin and the somewhat younger Irenaeus is immediately evident when the latter opens his extensive, five-volume work Adversus Haereses, which he himself calls the “Refutation and Overcoming of the Falsely Called Gnosis,” with a quotation from 1 Timothy 1:4. The phenomenon of an author adopting the language of their opponent, as pointed out by Wolfram Kinzig, is also encountered in the work of Tertullian, who wrote twenty years after Irenaeus in the North-African city of Carthage.
