Early Libyan Christianity: Uncovering a North African Tradition by Thomas C. Oden (review)

This book is the third volume in an open-ended series on early African Christianity, following How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind (2007) and The African Memory of Mark (2011). Renowned as the editor of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture series, Oden has established himself as a prominent advocate of the importance of ancient Christian studies for resourcing contemporary evangelical and ecumenical theology. The core of the book was delivered as a series of lectures in Tripoli at the Da’wa Islamic University in 2008. While the information that the author presents is interesting and insightful, the book also serves as a blueprint for the grander vision of the Center for Early African Christianity: inspiring a generation of young African scholars to reclaim Africa’s ancient Christian heritage.

Studies in the field of early North African Christianity have been inexcusably scarce, Oden contends: “To enter the arena of early Libyan Christianity is to venture into the least studied theater of patristic scholarship” (27). Oden traces the earliest patristic reference to ancient Libyan Christianity to Irenaeus’s famed rule of faith in Adversus Haereses 1.10.1 (63), but he also explores a wealth of New Testament evidence pointing to the conclusion that Christianity had gained a deep hold in Libya even in the first century. As one of very few western scholars researching this subject, Oden encounters all of the problems that one would anticipate in a truly pioneering study—sparse citations and tenuous conclusions, and Oden is willing to acknowledge that many of his conclusions are probable at best (303). In his quest to reconstruct a lost history, Oden leaves no hypothesis unprobed, positing that Pope Victor I and Tertullian may have been born in Libya, and even suggesting that the marked absence of persecutions under Septimus Severus may have been due to the emperor’s personal relationship with Pope Victor I. “This seems like grist for a fantasy ‘historical novel’ more than as history,” Oden concedes, “but the indicators make it plausible” (115).

Added to the difficulty of the paucity of sources is the inconvenient reality that the theological trajectory of ancient Libyan Christianity did not always tend toward orthodoxy, as the ranks of prominent Libyan-born theologians include Sabellius and Arius. Oden is nevertheless right to point out that the arguments drawn against orthodoxy in Libya contributed to the overall development of Christian doctrine: “The faith that was commonly received from the apostles was in the long run generally held to be the most reliable core of Christian truth. But in these earliest centuries of experimentation it needed meticulous testing to make it stronger. Sabellius and Arius of eastern Libya provided those challenges” (120). In chapter six, Oden reconstructs the story of Synesius of Cyrene—the most brilliant ancient theologian who was certainly known to have come from modern-day

Libya. Oden recounts Synesius’s education under Hypatia and portrays Synesius’s philosophy as in some respects anticipating Augustine’s De Civitate Dei. In chapters seven through nine, Oden takes the reader on a narrative tour of the archeological sites of Libya. Oden describes the baptistery at the church in Cyrene, the exquisite Byzantine mosaics of Qasr Libya, the five Christian basilicas of Apollonia, and the imposing imperial architecture of Sabratha and Leptis Magna. Additional volumes in this groundbreaking series are projected, and the reviewer can only hope that one of the forthcoming volumes will give a history of ancient Ethiopian Christianity.