Orthodoxy did not save his Greek

Claim (verbatim)

Irenaeus of Lyon is the control case that proves condemnation unnecessary for exile-survival: the most orthodox author of his century, and his Greek is gone anyway. The five books Against Heresies survive complete only in the ancient Latin version, so literal it is practically a crib; books IV and V also in Armenian; the Greek persists only where later Greeks quarried him - Epiphanius' Panarion swallowed most of book I's Gnostic catalogues, Eusebius and Hippolytus took their shares - plus early papyrus scraps, including P.Oxy. 405, a copy of book III written within about a generation of composition. His other surviving work, the Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, was lost in every classical language until 1904, when it turned up in Armenian in a single thirteenth-century codex in Erevan - the same manuscript that carries Against Heresies IV-V - published by Ter-Mkrtchean (1907). The mechanism is language-frontier mortality, not anathema: Irenaeus wrote Greek in the Latin West; within a century his home constituency read Latin, and the version displaced the original where demand lived; the Greek East, which had the language, wanted him only as a heresiological quarry and kept the usable catalogues inside newer books, letting the frame rot. Exile survival therefore has two distinct shapes: the condemned lose Greek by jurisdiction, the orthodox by demand geography - and Irenaeus' per-book Greek coverage, thick where the quarries dug and thin where they did not, is the fingerprint of the second shape.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: measured over the Sources Chrétiennes edition of Against Heresies (SC 100, 152-153, 210-211, 263-264, 293-294) with its registers of Greek witnesses, the fraction of the work carrying any ancient Greek witness (quotation or papyrus) will be below one half overall, with book I the best-covered of the five (above one half via Epiphanius) and book V the worst-covered (below one fifth) (primary clause: the overall <0.5 Greek coverage with the I-maximum/V-minimum ordering; the verdict follows it); secondarily, the Demonstration's pre-modern witness list will be exactly one manuscript in one language; retroversions do not count as Greek, coverage is computed from the SC apparatus and fontes, and if percentage coverage cannot be supported the test falls back to the per-book binary form (book I majority-covered, books IV-V majority-uncovered), voiding only if that too is indeterminate.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Sources Chrétiennes Adversus Haereses volumes' Greek-witness registers with P.Oxy. 405 and the 1907 Ter-Mkrtchean edition of the Epideixis - a per-book Greek-coverage measurement plus a witness census.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The SC volumes' introductions register the Greek witnesses book by book - Epiphanius' wholesale carriage of Book I, the papyri including P.Oxy. 405 for Book III, thinning fragments beyond - and the standard statements (Book I recoverable in Greek nearly entire; the whole work surviving only in the literal Latin with Armenian for IV-V) fix the primary clause's answer in print; the Demonstration's single Erevan manuscript is stated in the 1907 editio princeps and the SC 406 introduction. Coverage percentages are reading-off from the printed registers. One pinned detail is doubtful: the V-minimum ordering - Book II's Greek coverage is conventionally the thinnest - so the I-max/V-min clause may already be contradicted by the same registers that decide it.

• A. Rousseau, L. Doutreleau et al. (eds.), Irenee de Lyon: Contre les heresies, SC 100, 152-153, 210-211, 263-264, 293-294 (Paris, 1965-1982), introductions' witness registers
• B.P. Grenfell & A.S. Hunt, The Oxyrhynchus Papyri III (London, 1903), no. 405
• K. Ter-Mekerttschian & E. Ter-Minassiantz, Des heiligen Irenaeus Schrift zum Erweise der apostolischen Verkuendigung (TU 31.1, Leipzig, 1907)
• A. Rousseau, Irenee de Lyon: Demonstration de la predication apostolique (SC 406, Paris, 1995), introduction

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.