As It Is Written

A major reinterpretation of early Christian reading culture in the late second and early third century

In As It Is Written, Lewis Ayres offers a new account of the origins and structure of the exegetical culture of early Christianity. Ayres shows that three important early Christian authors—Irenaeus of Lyons, Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian of Carthage—adopted and adapted Hellenistic literary-critical techniques to shape a particular vision of what it meant to have a unified Scripture consisting of “Old” and “New” Testaments and how that text should be read. He argues that previous accounts have overstated the differences among these figures as well as the distinctions between Christianity at the beginning and at the end of this period; Irenaeus, Clement and Tertullian in fact shared a common vision, based on their similar responses to Valentinian and “Gnostic” allegorical exegesis of what would become the New Testament.

Ayres argues further that the common set of literary tools used by these authors was accompanied by a shared set of metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the text, about the cosmos within which Christians read their texts, and about the progressive economy of revelation through which the divine reveals itself in the world. Thus, to explore these phenomena is not only to explore how Scripture was read, it is to explore the foundations of Christian thought and argument itself. In a provocative postscript, Ayres suggests that these modes of reading should remain foundational for the Christian community.