ot distinguished from the teachings of contemporaneous
and subsequent Greek philosophers,[547] but merely differs in its aim.
In itself absolutely unfitted to preserve the primitive Christian belief
in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, its importance consists in
its identification of the historical Jesus with this Logos. By its aid
Tertullian united the scientific, idealistic cosmology with the
utterances of early Christian tradition about Jesus in such a way as to
make the two, as it were, appear the totally dissimilar wings of one and
the same building,[548] With peculiar versatility he contrived to make
himself at home in both wings.

It is essentially otherwise with the Logos doctrine of Irenaeus.[549]
Whereas Tertullian and Hippolytus developed their Logos doctrine without
reference to the historical Jesus, the truth rather being that they
simply add the incarnation to the already existing theory of the
subject, there is no doubt that Irenaeus, as a rule, made Jesus Christ,
whom he views as God and man, the _starting-point_ of his speculation.
Here he followed the Fourth Gospel and Ignatius. It is of Jesus that
Irenaeus almost always thinks when he speaks of the Logos or of the Son
of God; and therefore he does not identify the divine element in Christ
or Christ himself with the world idea or the creating Word or the Reason
of God.[550] That he nevertheless makes Logos ([Greek: monogenes,
prototokos], "only begotten," "first born") the regular designation of
Christ as the preexistent One can only be explained from the apologetic
tradition which in his time was already recognised as authoritative by
Christian scholars, and moreover appeared justified and required by John
I. 1. Since both Irenaeus and Valentinus consider redemption to be the
special work of Christ, the cosmological interest in the doctrine of the
second God becomes subordinate to the soteriological. As, however, in
Irenaeus' system (in opposition to Valentinus) this real redemption is to
be imagined as _recapitulatio_ of the creation, redemption and creation
are not opposed to each other as antitheses; and therefore the Redeemer
has also his place in the history of creation. In a certain sense then
the Christology of Irenaeus occupies a middle position between the
Christology of the Valentinians and Marcion on the one hand and the
Logos doctrine of the Apologists on the other. The Apologists have a
cosmological interest, Marcion only a soterio