Irenaeus argues, the root of the problem lay in how the Gnostics read Scripture. He suggests that they treated Scripture like a mosaic, taking whichever tiles they liked and rearranging them to come up with whatever image they fancied, so transforming the original picture of, say, a king, into something entirely different, perhaps that of a dog or fox. They are thus, he says, perverters, abusers, and evil interpreters of the Scriptures. Yet how exactly they are so is vital for Irenaeus. The reason they warp Scripture is that they read it based on non-scriptural principles, forcing it to fit
...more
