A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Accordingly Irenaeus followed Justin in seeing God’s purpose unfold through all human history. The Old Testament was the central text on that history – so much for Marcion’s dismissal of it – and Irenaeus delighted in stressing the symmetries or ‘recapitulations’ which its text revealed: thus the fall of the first man, Adam, was remedied by the second Adam, Christ, rising from the dead; the disobedience of the woman Eve remedied by the obedience of the woman Mary; the fateful role of the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden was remedied by the Tree of Life which was Christ’s cross.75 Such symmetries appealed to a culture fascinated by the poetry of numbers and geometry, and they make sense of the lively confidence with which both Justin and Irenaeus looked, on the basis of Revelation 20, to a coming earthly thousand-year rule of God’s chosen (a millennium, hence the belief in such an event being known as millenarianism).