The Second-Century Apologists

Alvyn Pettersen

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781725265271
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

"They bring three charges against us: atheism, Thyestean banquets, and Oedipean unions." So a late second-century Christian Apologist wrote with reference to his critics. Against these and other charges the Apologists rallied. Not so, they maintained. It was not the Christians but their critics who were the atheists and the Christians were the true theists. They were atheists only insofar as they denied the fabricated gods of the cults and the immoral deities of theaters. That, they explained, was why Christians absented themselves, whatever the cost, from the imperial cult, theaters, and amphitheaters. They were not cannibals, as Thyestes was when he ate the flesh of his children. To suggest otherwise was to misunderstand Christians consuming Christ's flesh and blood at the Eucharist. Nor were they imitators of Oedipus, who entered into sexual relations with Jocasta, his Queen and, though he knew it not, also his mother. Christians did exchange the kiss of peace. They did love one another. They were not, however, incestuous. Any promiscuous love on their part extended only to a very practical love of every needy soul.This book explores these arguments, especially noting the Apologists' commitment to God's oneness, to Christians not worshipping anything made, and to humans properly caring for fellow creatures.

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Christ­ianity—Not New, and It Is True

The mid-to-late second-century Apologists were adamant that Christ­ianity was not new and was true. Theophilos, for example, stressed that Christ­ian teaching was “neither modern nor mere fables”;84 Tatian robustly countered charges that his Christ­ian beliefs were “new-fangled barbarian doctrines”;85 and Justin, though not listing novelty as one of the charges brought against Christ­ianity, denied that what he and other Christ­ians confessed with regards to Christ were “mere marvelous tales.”86 Indeed, employing themes common to the Apologists’s general defense of Christ­ianity’s antiquity, he asked,

Why should we believe . . . that [a crucified man] is the firstborn of the unbegotten God and will pass judgement on the entire human race unless we have found testimony concerning him made public before he came and was born as man.87

Severally, and together, the Apologists either asserted or assumed that Christ­ianity both was not new and was true; and this they asserted within a Greco-Roman world where, generally speaking, a belief’s antiquity sustained its claim to be true, even as a belief’s novelty undermined its truth claim.88

The arguments of the Apologists that Christ­ianity was not novel but antique are several and widely shared: the Hebrew prophets, amongst whom Moses was placed, were, in the words of Justin, “our teachers,”89 teachers from whom Christ­ians had received instruction concerning creation itself,90 Christ and the gentile mission,91 and the final judgement.92 Indeed, Christ­ianity’s antiquity, the Apologists argued, was underlined by the extraordinary antiquity of Moses, the first prophet: Moses, they maintained, antedated Homer, the “oldest of poets and historians.”93 He antedated the Trojan war, of which Homer wrote, by either four hundred94 or one thousand years.95 Indeed, they asserted, he antedated the ancient cities of Egypt.96 It is not surprising then that both Justin and Theophilos claimed that Moses was more ancient than all the Greek writers and poets.97 Comparatively speaking, they then implied, it was Greco-Roman thinking, rather than Christ­ianity, which was novel, and whose truths claims were suspect.

Within this context, Athenagoras’s silence concerning Moses’s remote antiquity may therefore seem a strange silence. Perhaps, however, his silence, though noticeable, is not total. Certainly, in mentioning the charges levelled against Christ­ians, Athenagoras recorded those of atheism, Thyestean feasts, and Oedipean unions,98 but not that of Christ­ianity’s novelty. Elsewhere, however, he did state the grounds for Christ­ian believing:

we [sc. Christ­ians] have prophets as witnesses to what we think and believe, witnesses driven by a divinely inspired Spirit to speak about God and the things of God. . . . It would therefore be irrational, he continued, to abandon belief in the Spirit from God who has moved the prophets’s mouths like musical instruments and to attend to human opinions.99

These “prophets” were not named here by Athenagoras. Yet, it would be strange not to identify amongst them Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, prophets to whom Athenagoras more generally referred in his writings, and to whom other Apologists referred when seeking to refute the charge of Christ­ianity being novel. Further, Athenagoras’s reference here to the godly inspiration of these prophets’s utterances echoes the thinking of other Apologists when they treated the charge that Christ­ianity was but a recent human invention. Athenagoras’s thinking in these matters may therefore be not so dissimilar from that of other contemporary and near contemporary Apologists.

The Apologists indeed reinforced their argument that the Hebrew prophets—who, they claimed, foretold the truths later held by Christ­ians—were more ancient than the Greek poets and philosophers by maintaining that these latter were dependent for some of their ideas upon the beliefs of these former. Plato, they asserted, “borrowed” from Moses:100 he depended upon Moses for his views on God’s creation of the world,101 the soul’s immortality, post-mortem punishment, and the contemplation of things heavenly.102 They even maintained that the Greek poets ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• The Second-Century Greco-Roman World
• Six Greek Christ­ian Apologists
• Christ­ianity—Not New, and It Is True
• Atheists? Guilty as Charged
• Atheists?—Not Guilty as Charged
• Thyestean Banquets and Oedipean Intercourse
• Postscript
• General History Outline
• Bibliography