The Second-Century Apologists. Alvyn Pettersen

originated in people’s wrongly thinking that they had found in what little they knew of Christ­ians celebrating the eucharist, with its dominical invitation to eat of the body and drink of the blood of Christ, echoes of the feast in which, according to the myths, Thyestes, entertained by his brother Atreus, unknowingly ate of the flesh of one of his own sons. The third charge was based in the wider public’s misinterpreting the Christ­ians both obeying the dominical injunction to “love one another” and sharing, in the course of the rite of the eucharist, the kiss of peace as evidence of the occurrence in real life of the mythical account of Oedipus’s sexual intercourse with his mother Jocasta.

These several charges had been made against Christ­ians over many years. Dio Cassius, writing about the Domitian persecutions of AD 96, recorded that “Domitian slew, amongst many others, Flavius Clemens . . . and Flavia Domitilla, against both [of whom] was brought a charge of atheism.”2 Pliny the Younger, writing in AD 112 to the emperor Trajan, reported that those who had been accused of being Christ­ians and who then had denied their being Christ­ians confirmed their denials by reciting a prayer to the gods of the empire, by making supplications, accompanied by offerings of incense and wine, to the emperor Trajan’s statue, and by cursing Christ, each and all incontrovertible proof that they had abandoned their monotheistic faith.3 These various practices, once enacted, proved to Greco-Roman minds that a person was not an atheist. For though they denied the Christ, they yet affirmed their readiness both to venerate the gods of the empire and to honor the imperial cult. Meanwhile, by not enacting such practices, which “those who really are Christ­ians [could] not be made to do,”4 people proved that they were indeed atheists, people who would not acknowledge the gods of the imperial cult. In the same letter, Pliny further reported to Trajan that Christ­ians bound themselves with an oath not to commit, inter alia, adultery,5 a particular wrong perhaps mentioned as something to which members of the public believed that Christ­ians were prone. Yet further, again in the self-same letter, Pliny recorded that Christ­ians met in the evening “to take food”, “ordinary and harmless food” Pliny added,6 as though wishing to assure Trajan that Christ­ians did not engage in cannibalistic customs. In Smyrna in 156 the crowds that called on the governor to slaughter some Christ­ians who had been arrested, cried out, “away with these atheists”;7 and the same governor, trying to persuade the arrested Bishop Polycarp to recant his Christian faith, said to Polycarp, “swear by the genius of the emperor, . . . Say, away with the atheists [sc. Christ­ians].”8 Some four to five years later, but this time in Rome, a Christian of the name of Lucius questioned why a certain Urbicus had punished another Christian of the name of Ptolemy, and asked, “why have you punished this man, not as an adulterer, nor fornicator, . . . but simply as one who has only confessed that he is called by the name of Christian?”9 Other crimes, those of murder and theft, were also mentioned by the questioning Lucius. The mention, however, of adultery, indeed, the mention of adultery as the first in the list of possible misdemeanors, may again not be unrelated to the common charge of incest frequently levelled against Christ­ians. Yet another five years later, again in Rome, Justin and his companions were brought before Rusticus, the prefect of Rome. To Rusticus’s demand that they should “sacrifice to the imperial gods,” Justin and those arrested with him asserted that they would offer no sacrifices to “idols.”10 The replacement here of Rusticus’s imperial “gods” with Justin’s “idols” tallies with such thinking as that which lies behind Justin’s earlier statement that non-Christ­ians “called [sc. evil demons] gods,”11 which “gods” the Christ­ians denied and because of which the Christ­ians were called “atheists,” a title that Justin confessed that Christ­ians accepted “so far as gods of this sort [were] concerned, but not with respect to the most true God.”12 In Lyons in 177 there was further anti-Christian activity. There an arrested Christian of the name of Vettius Epagathus unsuccessfully sought to be granted a public hearing where he might put the case that Christ­ians were innocent of the charges of atheism and impiety.13 Another arrested Christian, Attalus, burning as he was fastening to the brazen seat of the amphitheater’s pyre, in effect, roasted as a piece of meat on the grill of a barbecue, cried out to the watching crowds, “Look. What you are doing [sc. to me] is cannibalism. We Christ­ians are not cannibals, nor do we perform any other sinful act.”14 Also arrested were some non-Christ­ians servants of certain Christian households. Terrified lest they themselves might be subjected to the very torture that they saw their Christian owners suffering, and acting at the instigation of some soldiers, they “falsely accused the Christ­ians of Oedipean marriages and of being those who dined in the manner of Thyestes.”15

It would therefore seem that the charges, both of atheism and of being partakers in Thyestean feasts and Oedipean intercourse, were levelled—in the former case, explicitly, and in the latter two cases, at least implicitly—against Christ­ians over much of the second century who lived as far afield as in the provinces of Asia and of Bithynia, and of Pontus in the East, in Rome, and in the province of Gaul in the West. Of these charges that of atheism seems to be the most frequently mentioned. This may be because the references to this charge, the penalty for which was death, appear mainly in Christian literature, for whose readers, to use the later language of Tertullian, the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church.16 It may also be because, in comparison with any punishment inflicted by the empire on those found guilty of acts of cannibalism and adultery, the penalty imposed on those found guilty of denying the gods of the imperial cults was savage and irrevocable. All the charges falsely levelled against Christ­ians, if not fairly and properly addressed, led, Christ­ians noted, to miscarriages of justice. However, of all these charges, the charge of atheism, when not fairly and properly addressed, led to an irreversible miscarriage of injustice. It, of all the charges, therefore especially cried out for an apology.

That said, it is yet understandable why the second-century Apologists did attend to the, in some sense, less serious charges of cannibalism and incest. Not to state that Christ­ians did not engage in cannibalism would have allowed people to think that the violent killing of another person—of which not just cannibalism but also the exposure of unwanted infants and the trading in humans for gladiatorial shows were examples—was of little or no concern; and not to maintain that Christ­ians did not participate in incest would have permitted people to believe that vows of fidelity, in this particular case those between family members, and, by extension, those between a married couple and the one God who had instituted the honorable estate of marriage, were but matters of indifference. Indeed, the issue of indifference was then an important issue. For Christ­ians then were being challenged to define and justify their commitment to the contingent world of time and matter, a challenge that, in relation to such matters as cannibalism and incest, called for a clear understanding of how to behave daily, in a godly way, in relation to one’s neighbor and relative. That challenge, indeed, came from not only wider society but also certain gnostic Christ­ians who were not without teachers who “taught that to taste meat offered to idols and to renounce without reservation the [Christian] faith in times of persecution were matters of indifference.”17 It therefore followed that for the Apologists not to defend Christ­ians against the charges of being cannibals and of participating in incest potentially would not only have allowed for the misrepresenting what was, in fact, the case when it came to Christian behavior, but also have given ground to those who would have been morally lax in their treatment of fellow creatures and casual in their relationship with the Creator of all. What then seems to have been, in the eyes of some gnostic Christ­ians, matters of indifference were, in the eyes of the mid-to-late second-century Apologists, anything but such. A robust apology therefore was not an option; it was demanded, even as a robust definition and justification of a proper and godly commitment to the contingent world of time and matter were.

More often than not the thinking of these second-century Apologists has been examined in terms of tracing the gradual development—or, for some, the evolution—over the early centuries of the doctrine of God. So, for example, J. N. D. Kelly treated the Apologists’s thinking regarding “the Word” and “the Trinity” under the general title of The divine triad;18 and A. Grillmeier explored the Logos doctrine of the Apologists in his book, Christ in Christ­ian Tradition,19 in a section entitled “The Foundation of Christology as Speculative Theology and the Emergence of Hellenism.” More recently, Helen Rhee, in her book Early Christian Literature: Christ and Culture in the Second and Third Centuries,20