To understand Irenaeus and the canonical collection, particularly the revision of Paul’s letters, we need to look into the parallel redaction and revision of the famous collection of letters who pseudonymously were credited to Ignatius of Antioch. With him being backdated to the beginning of the second century by Eusebius of Caesarea, his collection of seven letters of which Eusebius is the first to speak, provides the cornerstone for the ancient anti-heretic, anti-Jewish and monepiscopal church history of the beginnings of Christianity. A critical reading of both, Paul’s letters and those of the spurious Ignatius, however, allows to dismantle the fictional account that served Irenaeus and his apologetic followers through the centuries to cement early Christian orthodoxy.

Irenaeus’ view is condensed in the collection that he brought together, combining the Book of Acts with the so-called Catholic Letters (= the Praxapostolos). Placed after the four Gospels, it endorses a neatless development from Jesus and his early followers through the early days of growth of the church in its emancipation from its Jewish beginnings. With Paul’s letters in a revised version that was made to fit the Gospels and the Praxapostolos this fiction of a continuous, rapid and Spirit-guided growth was linked to the success-story of the Church in contra-distinction to the miseries and decline of the Jewish community and the vain attempts at undermining the Church by the develish heretics.