The early apologists

Called atheists

To their Roman neighbours the second-century Christians were a strange people. They would not sacrifice to the gods who were thought to keep the city safe, nor burn incense before the emperor's image. Since many believed that neglected gods brought disaster, Christians were called atheists and suspected of disloyalty to Rome. Rumours went round about their meetings before dawn or after dark, where brothers and sisters were said to eat flesh and drink blood; many scholars think the stories grew from garbled reports of the Lord's Supper and of the love Christians showed one another. Around 177 Athenagoras summed up the charges as three: atheism, Thyestean feasts and Oedipodean intercourse, after Thyestes of Greek myth, who was tricked into eating his own sons, and Oedipus, who unknowingly married his mother Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians.

The rumours were false. Around 112 Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia, reported to the emperor Trajan what he had learned by questioning Christians: they met before dawn on a fixed day, sang a hymn to Christ as to a god, bound themselves by oath not to steal, commit adultery or break their word, and met again later to eat ordinary, harmless food Pliny the Younger, Letters 10.96. Even so, he executed those who would not give up the name, and Trajan replied that Christians were not to be hunted out, but that if they were accused and would not sacrifice to the gods, they were to be punished. Persecution in the second century was mostly local and sporadic; the first empire-wide persecution came under Decius in 250. Peter had seen such days coming:

Conduct yourselves with such honor among the Gentiles that, though they slander you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day He visits us.

1 Peter 2:12

The apologists answered along two lines: showing how Christians actually lived, and showing that what they believed was true.

Answered by a life

Athenagoras, a philosopher of Athens, addressed his Plea to the emperor Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus. Christians are not atheists, he explained: they worship the one God who made the world, with his Word and his Spirit, and the poets and philosophers themselves had reached towards the oneness of God. To the charges of cannibalism and incest he answered with Christian conduct. These are people taught to "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44). They will not even watch the gladiators, since to look on at killing is little different from killing, and they count it murder to harm an unborn child.

The Epistle to Diognetus, by an unknown writer of the second or third century, says that Christians are not marked off from others by country, language or customs. They live in their own lands, but as sojourners; they have children, but do not cast them away; they pass their days on earth, but are citizens of heaven. "They love all men, and are persecuted by all." And, to sum it up: "what the soul is in the body, that are Christians in the world" The Epistle to Diognetus 5–6.

Around 197 Tertullian of Carthage, in North Africa, addressed his Apology to Rome's governors. He began with Trajan's ruling: if Christians are innocent, why punish them, and if they are guilty, why not seek them out? They are punished, he said, for a name, not for any deed. If the Tiber floods or the rain fails or plague comes, the cry goes up at once to throw the Christians to the lion. Yet Christians pray for the emperor, as Paul told them to pray "for kings and all those in authority" (1 Timothy 2:2). He ended with a word to his persecutors: the more often you cut us down, the more we grow; "the blood of Christians is seed" Tertullian, Apology 50.

Showing the faith true

The apologists did not stop at clearing Christians' names. In his First Apology, addressed to the emperor around 150–155, Justin Martyr asked that Christians be judged by their deeds rather than their name, and then gave many chapters to the prophecies fulfilled in Jesus: words written long before the events, he argued, were the strongest evidence Justin, First Apology. Jesus himself had said, "Everything must be fulfilled that is written about Me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms" (Luke 24:44). In his Dialogue with Trypho, from around 160, Justin reasoned at length from those same Scriptures with Trypho, a Jew who read them too Justin, Dialogue with Trypho.

To Greeks, Justin spoke of the Word, the Logos, of John's Gospel:

The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John 1:14

Whatever the philosophers said rightly, he held, came from seeds of the Word sown in all people, and the Word himself came whole in Christ Justin, Second Apology 13. His life and martyrdom, and the worship he described, are told in the Theology course's After the apostles: the apologists and Irenaeus.

The fiercest attack came from the philosopher Celsus. In his True Word, written late in the second century, he mocked the faith for gathering the uneducated and called Jesus' miracles sorcery. His most serious objection was a philosopher's: a God who is good and changeless cannot come down into a human body without changing for the worse, so the incarnation is unworthy of God. Some seventy years later Origen of Alexandria answered him point by point in the eight books of Against Celsus, quoting him so fully that Celsus' book survives only in those quotations Origen, Against Celsus. Origen began by recalling that Jesus kept silent before his false witnesses (Matthew 26:63) and that his best defence is the life of his true disciples; yet he wrote, he said, for those weak in faith. To Celsus' objection to the incarnation he replied that the Word, in taking a body, did not cease to be the Word and so did not change for the worse, but came down to those who could not look on the brightness of God.

When the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410, pagans blamed the Christians for abandoning the old gods. At the start of The City of God, Augustine says of God's city: "I have undertaken its defence against those who prefer their own gods to the Founder of this city" Augustine, The City of God 1, preface. He showed that Rome had suffered disasters long before Christ, and that no earthly kingdom is the city of God (see Augustine, doctor of grace).

In conversation

The apologists' two lines of answer still go together. When neighbours misjudge the church, our lives answer first. But a life alone cannot say who Christ is, so the apologists also answered questions of Scripture, history and philosophy. As Origen set down Celsus' words before replying, it is fair to hear an objection accurately, in its strongest form, before answering it; and as Justin and Trypho did, people who disagree can still talk with courtesy.

Several of these apologists were Asian or African: Justin, born in Samaria; Tertullian of Carthage; Origen of Alexandria; Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa. Christianity was never only a Western faith (Is Christianity a Western religion?). The next lesson, The Middle Ages and the Reformation, follows how the church went on joining faith and reason.

Practice