In Defence of Christianity: Early Christian Apologists ed. by Jakob Engberg, Anders-Christian Jacobsen and Jörg Ulrich (review)

There are many ways of handling early Christian apologetic, and it is a merit of the present volume that the contributors have followed no one formula, but have addressed the distinctive questions that each apologist has raised for the last two centuries of scholarship. Thus Nils Arne Pedersen's essay on Aristides of Athens offers a lucid appraisal of the arguments that can be urged on behalf of the Greek, Syriac, and Armenian redactions (not forgetting the fragmentary Greek papyri), concluding justly that none can be identified without qualification as the original text. Jörg Ulrich, candidly granting that Justin Martyr has not always enjoyed the prominence that is accorded to him today, spends less time investigating the provenance of his Logos-doctrine than in illustrating his use of this doctrine to integrate his theology, his epistemology, and the ethical teaching that culminated in his martyrdom. René Falkenberg refutes point by point the charges against the orthodoxy of Tatian which have been in vogue since the time of Irenaeus—a topic of scholarly conversation still, though not so salient in modern Anglophone study as his contestation of pagan norms of ethnic and cultural superiority. Athenagoras, arguably a more systematic philosopher than Justin, also gives a fuller account of the accusations of Christian immorality, and Anders-Christian Jacobsen devotes the greater part of his study to this apologist's vindication of monotheism as on the one hand a guarantee of chaste conduct and on the other a bar to the worship of any other deity. Jakob Engberg, paying tribute to the breadth and originality of the case made by Theophilus in his three books to Autolycus, reminds those who censure his silence regarding Christ that the scope of a book is determined by its aims and the composition of its audience. Theophilus was not the author of only one book; the author of the Epistle to Diognetus, by contrast, may have said all that he had to say in one short tract, which, as Anders Klostergaard Petersen notes, contrives to be at once apologetic, protreptic, and apocalyptic in its tenor.

Jesper Hyldahl commends Clement for having demonstrated, against his Gnostic opponents, that a Christian could adopt principles or tenets first advanced in the pagan schools without compromising either the singularity of Christian preaching or its claims to absolute truth. Where Clement's more dogmatic works are lost, those of Tertullian survive in bulk, and Niels Willert's systematic review of his use of reason and ethical exhortation in the cause of his religion should explode any lingering myths of "Tertullian the irrationalist." The relative dating of Minucius Felix and Tertullian is a problem that cannot be evaded, although it cannot be answered; Svend Erik Mathiassen makes a more original contribution by reminding us that his Octaviusis not so eirenic as its dialogic form and Ciceronian style might lead one to surmise. The political stimulus to the writing of apologetic is examined by Jakob Engberg, with special attention to Pliny the Younger's letter to Trajan; Engberg and others provide a useful collection of pagan sources on this "side of the debate," while Marie Verdoner inspects Eusebius' deployment of the term "apology" and the works to which he gives that appellation. The comprehensive introduction by Engberg, Jacobsen, and Ulrich reminds us that apologetic is a Eusebian construct and that Christians will have enhanced the more ludicrous allegations of their persecutors; in adding Hermias to the list of apologists, it strangely overlooks Kindstrand's arguments for its Cynic provenance and was written too early to notice Whitmarsh's theory that the charge of "atheism" was invented by the apologists themselves.