Irenaeus of Lyons · a new plain-English translation from the original language
A demonstration that the Lord and the Apostles delivered their teaching in truth, and not according to the opinion of their hearers. Returning, then, to the tradition which comes from the Apostles, and which is preserved in the Church and abides among us, let us come to that demonstration, drawn from the Scriptures, given by those who wrote the Gospel of the Apostles — from which they set down their teaching concerning God, showing that in our Lord Jesus Christ truth itself resides, and that no falsehood dwells within him. As David also, prophesying both his birth from the Virgin and his resurrection from the dead, says: 'Truth has sprung up from the earth.' And the Apostles too, being disciples of the truth, stand outside all falsehood; for falsehood shares nothing in common with truth, exactly as darkness shares nothing with light — wherever one is present, the other is driven away. The Lord, therefore, being the truth, did not lie; and since he knew the fruit of falsehood to be evil, he — being perfect — would surely not have confessed as God, and as ruler, supreme King, and his own Father, one who was imperfect; nor would the spiritual one have confessed an animal one, nor the one within the Pleroma confessed one outside the Pleroma. Nor would his disciples have named some other god, or called any 'Lord' besides him who truly is God and Lord of all — as those most vain sophists claim, saying that the Apostles taught with hypocrisy, shaping their teaching to the capacity of their hearers and their answers to the suspicions of their questioners, speaking blind things to the blind according to their blindness, sick things to the sick according to their sickness, and mistaken things to the mistaken, matching their own delusion; and that to those who supposed the Demiurge alone to be God, they preached him as God, while to those who could grasp the unnameable Father, they made known the ineffable mystery through parables and riddles — so that, on this view, the Lord and the Apostles delivered their teaching not as the truth itself has it, but hypocritically, and according to what each hearer was able to receive.
But this is not the way of those who heal and give life, but rather of those who burden and increase men's ignorance; and the Law will be found far truer than this teaching, when it pronounces accursed everyone who puts a blind man in the way, so that he wanders from it. For the Apostles, who were sent to seek out those who were wandering, to give sight to those who could not see, and to bring healing to the sick, surely did not speak to them according to their hearers' own present opinion, but according to the manifestation of the truth. For no one would be acting rightly toward blind men if, seeing them already being carried over a precipice, he urged them to keep to that most dangerous road, as though it were truly the right one, and as though they would arrive safely. What physician, wishing to cure a sick man, would act according to the desires of the one who is ill, rather than according to what the art of healing requires? Now that the Lord came as physician to those who are ill, he himself testifies, saying: 'It is not the healthy who have need of a physician, but those who are unwell. I have not come to summon the upright, but sinners, to a change of heart.' In what way, then, will the unwell be restored, and in what way will sinners turn back — by persevering in that same condition? Or rather, by undergoing a great change and turning away from their former way of life, through which their sickness is healed; for ignorance, the mother of all these ills, is done away with through knowledge. It was knowledge, then, that the Lord imparted to his disciples, by which he healed those who were suffering and restrained sinners from sin. He therefore no longer spoke to them according to their former opinion, nor answered according to the suspicion of his questioners, but according to saving doctrine, without hypocrisy and without respect of persons.
This is also shown from the Lord's own words. To those who were of the circumcision he made known the Son of God, manifesting that he himself was the very one who had been proclaimed beforehand by the prophets as the Christ, who would restore freedom to mankind and bestow on them the inheritance of incorruption. The Gentiles, in turn, the Apostles taught to abandon vain wood and stone, which they supposed to be gods, and to worship the true God, who established and made the whole human race, and who through his own work of creation nourishes, increases, and sustains it and grants it its very being; and to await his Son Jesus Christ, who ransomed us from our apostasy through his own blood, so that we too might become a sanctified people — who is to descend from the heavens in the power of the Father, who will also execute judgment upon all, and will grant the good things that come from God to those who have kept his commandments. He, appearing in the last times as the chief cornerstone, gathered into one and joined together those far off and those near at hand — namely, uncircumcision together with circumcision — spreading wide Japheth, and establishing him in the house of Shem [Eph. 2].