in the schools of paganism and tutored by Greek philosophers,
2nd century Christian "Apologists" produced
texts superior to those which had gone before. To retain their
credence in the enlightened, prosperous age of the Antonine emperors,
remained "philosophers" and
used Greek logic and the style of the sophists to defend Christianity.
their attempts to underpin Christian theology with "science" had little to say about a human
Jesus, for whom they produced no fresh evidence. Rather, their
appeal was that their hero was "just like" the ethereal
superstars of the pagan pantheon and was therefore "respectable".
apologies were nominally addressed to the emperors. The earliest
we know of were written during Hadrian's reign (Aristides and
Quadratus, around 125-130). But in reality their tracts were
the brethren, stiffening Christian belief in the face of rational
criticism – just
like modern Apologetics!
Justin (100-167?) was the first to turn Mary into a
virgin. He also speaks of a nativity star and the 'Magi
Justin regarded Plato as a "teacher
of the Christians."
In his Apology Justin
does not cite any New Testament writings, though he appears
to quote from the evangelical gospels. So we might reasonably
conclude unnamed versions were circulating by the mid-2nd
He is also notable for his Dialogue
with Trypho, a debate with a rabbi.
to fable, Justin Priscos won his "martyr's crown" in
Rome in 165 during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the
most enlightened of emperors.
A student of
Justin, Tatian the Assyrian famously made an attempt
to iron out the contradictions and discrepancies of the "famous
four" memoirs by producing a single gospel, the Diatessaron ("From
wrote an apologetic "Address to the Greeks" arguing
for the superiority of Christian philosophy.
then Tatian went bad and became a heretic.
He led an ascetic
Gnostic sect known as the Encratites (the “self-controlled”)
which came into existence around 166, a time of plague
to Antioch where he died in 172.
An early Christian
apologist, in his work Theophilus to Autolycus – Theo'
wrote 29,000 words about Christianity without once mentioning
III, chapters 24-29, Thephilus presents a "Chronology
of the World" from Adam to Emperor Marcus Aurelius
and does not mention the birth, death
or resurrection of Jesus Christ at all!
This Alexandrian presbyter, who also taught in
Jerusalem and Antioch, at one point identified himself
as a Gnostic.
But in his longest work, "Stromata" ("Miscellanies"),
he attacked Gnosticism. He
does not identify any gospels, but only "The Gospel."
His other notable work, a poem from the late 2nd
century, "Who Is The Rich Man That Shall Be Saved" both
cites and quotes Mark.
said Clement, was worse than sin.
was condemned as a Gnostic in the more degenerate 9th
century by eastern soldier/patriarch Photius and lost
his sainthood in the 17th century.
Theophilus – "Christians
because we're anointed with oil."
Bizarre! 2nd century
Christian bishop did
not know of Jesus!
This is how
the bishop of Antioch – not exactly a Christian backwater! – explains
the origin of the word "Christian":
"Theophilus to Autolycus – Book
1, Chapter 12 - Meaning of the Name Christian.
because that which is anointed is sweet and serviceable,
and far from contemptible ... And what man, when he enters
into this life or into the gymnasium, is not anointed with
oil? ... Wherefore we are called Christians on this
account, because we are anointed with the oil of God."
refers extensively to Jewish scripture and even to the prophecies
of the Greek Sibyl but makes only passing reference
to recent and unnamed gospels.
For Theophilus the 'holy word' is nothing other than Jewish
2nd-early 3rd century Greek Titus Flavius Clemens (he
died about 215) was an educated and widely travelled pagan
who converted to Christianity. Born in Athens,
he studied and taught at the catechetical school in Alexandria,
where Origen was his
pupil. He probably
died in Cappadocia.
struggled to synthesise his new found faith with the platonic
rationalism he had grown up with. All
rational creatures, he reasoned, possessed 'the seeds
of Truth' from God and this certainly included the philosophers
of Greece. None the less, in his 'Protrepticus' ('Address
to the Greeks') Clement sought to prove Greek thought
inferior to Christianity.
Clement flirted with Gnosticism he was unwilling to accept
that 'a secret knowledge' had
been passed down from initiate to initiate It didn't save
him from being condemned as a Gnostic and
losing his sainthood in
the 17th century. Perhaps one original idea that counted
against him was the notion that
had reigned as King of Jerusalem"!
of the Jesus story got edited out early on in the creative
process. It is from Clement's Stromata 1.21:
the temple accordingly was built in seven weeks, is evident;
for it is written in Esdras.
And thus Christ
became King of the Jews, reigning in Jerusalem in the
fulfilment of the seven weeks.
in the sixty and two weeks the whole of Judaea was quiet,
without wars. And Christ our Lord, "the Holy of
Holies," having come and fulfilled the vision and
the prophecy, was anointed in His flesh by the Holy Spirit
of His Father."
bishop of Carthage, contributed much to the western
church – and the New Testament!
the first, about 210, to detail the supposed executions
of Peter and Paul and place them in the
reign of Nero, He also Christianized Pontius Pilate
and turned Tiberius into a closet Christian!
to make compromises himself to achieve political
power, Tertullian defected from the Catholics to
the Montanist heretics.
Origen wrote hundreds of books in an attempt to harmonize
Christian thought with Greek philosophy.
interpretation of scripture and parallels drawn from
Greek mythology was his method.
the resurrection came from pagan antecedents, other
from their graves." He said
Jesus had been invisible, except to the
few with "powers."
his troubles he was excommunicated and condemned
as a heretic.
of Carthage, the first Christian scholar to write in Latin, was
an aggressive, sarcastic writer who actually opposed the use
in defending Christianity. He gave the Church in the west much
of its language, including the word Trinity,
and began its disposition towards blind faith and intolerance ("Prescription
Against the Heretics"). He was also an active forger,
writing many of the epistles so useful to Roman Catholicism.
After the chaos which followed the murder of
Commodus, a fellow north African, the career soldier Septimius
came to the throne.
During his 18 year reign the African provinces became
the recipients of considerable imperial patronage.
Opportunities for Tertullian's own advancement
were mixed with fear. In 195 Severus had become embroiled in an
expensive eastern campaign. After annexations in Parthia, Severus's
Bassianus (aka Caracalla)
was accorded a triumph "over the Jews" (Historia
Augusta: Life of Septimius Severus).
"Jewish manners" were not
popular in official circles and when the emperor visited Alexandria
in 202 he issued an edict forbidding Jewish proselytising
and conversions to Judaism. Tertullian, anxious to demonstrate that
his Christian religion was not a Jewish sect nor tainted
by Judaism, edited the sacred texts and forged others (Clementines,
Ignatians) to make the distinction clearer. For all his hysterics
about "persecution" Tertullian continued in the sanctity business.
his later years
he became increasingly critical of Catholic compromisers and
defected to the Montanists (a chiliastic cult which
anticipated an imminent End Time) and thus ranks as a
the year 157, Montanus himself had run off with two other men's
wives – Prisca and Maximilla – and taken up residence
in Phrygia, in Asia Minor. There, he had groomed his priestesses
as mouthpieces of the Holy Spirit. Induced into a trance-like
states, the women shook violently and rambled incoherently.
Disagreement with their ecstatic utterances was, it seems,
blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.
what the Christian witches prophesied was an imminent
new Jerusalem, descending from the clouds with Christ
extremist cult spread to north Africa where Tertullian was drawn
to its strict asceticism and intolerance of those who had 'fallen
into sin.' Oddly enough
for an End Time movement, Montanism lasted several centuries.
Then again, apocalyptic movements are like that.
Origen was a prolific writer
who sought a synthesis of Christianity and Platonism.
one of the very few early Christian scholars capable of working
with the Hebrew script. When Origen examined the Jewish
scriptures he recognized that there were significant differences
the Septuagint Greek
translation, familiar to Christians,
and the original
Hebrew texts used by Jews. In consequence he created the Hexapla.
This massive "parallel
columns" document, comparing the Septuagint to other Greek
translations and to the original Hebrew version, proved useful
in arguments with the rabbis.
Better informed on scripture than
most of the brethren, Origen was compelled to adopt an
of the blood-soaked Jewish fables. In fact, he argued all scripture
had both physical and allegorical meaning.
Origen was something of a loose cannon.
Sin, he said, was ultimately only a lack of pure
knowledge. Christ was a teacher rather than a redeemer and
was certainly not equal to the Father. Satan himself might
eventually be redeemed.
In both De
principiis and in his
insisted that the philosophic mind had a right to speculate within
the Christian framework – a freedom of expression that would
lead to his condemnation as a heretic.
with the Philosophers & the Soothsayers
it all end if every philosopher was at liberty to tease out fine
nuances of scripture or find his own compromise with paganism?
it all end if every self-styled prophet received his own message
and set of imperatives? The threat of "fresh truth" – implicitly
of higher authority than that of dead Apostles – was all
Orthodoxy developed in response to its rivals. The challenge,
on the one hand, of independent-minded thinkers and on the
other hand, of an apocalyptic movement, led by wild men of
faith and fire, compelled the placemen of the Church to respond.
They federated themselves into a common organisation, established
an obligatory "apostolic" Catholic faith, and enforced
that faith with an insistence upon episcopal supremacy, based
on the fiction of "apostolic succession."
many Christians WERE there?
histories propagate that, surely and steadily, Christianity
won the hearts and minds of the Greco-Roman world. Many
feature a map showing churches dotted across the Middle
East and Europe, as if the most important feature of
a city like Alexandria or Ephesus in late antiquity was
its Christian meeting place!
all helps to conjure up an image of a substantially Christianized
one poised to topple the nasty pagan rulers and inaugurate
a Christian Europe. But there is no truth in this fanciful
estimate for the number of Christians at the beginning
of the 2nd century – and this number is spread
across numerous conflicting factions – is rather
total number of Christians within the empire was
probably less than fifty thousand, an infinitesimal
number in a society comprising sixty million.’
– Wilken (The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, p31)
50,000 compares to, say, four to five million Jews. Gibbon, using the church luminary Chrysostom as his source, observed the following for the situation two centuries later:
"Under the reign of Theodosius, after Christianity had enjoyed, during more than sixty years, the sunshine of Imperial favour, the ancient and illustrious church of Antioch consisted of one hundred thousand persons ... The whole number of its inhabitants was not less than half a million, and that the Christians, however multiplied by zeal and power, did not exceed a fifth part of that great city."
– Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 16.
Before the assumption of power and the imposition of "orthodoxy", the Christians
were loosely organised in groups ranging from perhaps
a few dozen to a several hundred, in perhaps forty to
fifty cities, mainly in the eastern empire.
estimate for the city of Rome is quite illuminating:
are about 25,000 known burial places in the Catacombs
of Rome. As these sites were used for nearly 300
years, that would mean on average about eighty burials
assumes a lifespan of forty years, the average Christian
population in Rome over this period would not have
been more than four thousand people at any one
was out of a total Roman population of well over
– Roberts (In Search of Early Christian Unity, p19)
estimate for Jews in 1st century Rome (Lambert, Beloved
and God) is 60-90,000. Thus, less than a tenth of
Rome’s population were Jews, and less than a tenth
of Jews were Christians!
In so far as
officialdom noticed the Christians at all, it was as
unlicensed hetaeria (associations), which might
be harmless burial societies but might also be ‘political
clubs’ agitating social discord.
at the onset of the second century, most citizens of
the empire had never even heard of Christianity!
Maxwell Staniforth, Early Christian Writings (Penguin, 1978)
L. Boyle, St. Clements, Rome (Collegio San Clemente, 1989)
Jean Ritchie, The Secret World of Cults (Harper Collins, 1991)
A. M. Renwick, The Story of the Chuch (Inter-varsity Press, 1958)
John Riches, The World of Jesus (Cambridge University Press, 1990)
Nicholas Carter, The Christ Myth (HRP, 1993)
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Copyright © 2005
by Kenneth Humphreys.
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