Today’s scholarship has mostly arrived at a consensus on atonement in the early church—there was no unified theory of the atonement (Pelikan, Kelly, Johnson). While we can grant that there were no clearly articulated theories of atonement, let alone a dominant one, it does not follow that there are no recurrent and leading pieces of atonement theories that are championed or rebuffed by the fathers. To prove this, I enlist two fathers who both wrote extensively on the atonement and span a great distance in terms of geography and chronology: Irenaeus of Lyon (c. 120/140–200/203) and Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296/298–373). Using Adam Johnson’s five categories for mapping theories of atonement, I show that, despite their disagreements, Irenaeus and Athanasius stand shoulder to shoulder in many fundamental aspects of the atonement.