The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  It is rarely recognized that this sort of quotational drive was not unique to Jewish-Christian debate and was not limited to quotation of scriptural texts. Josephus’s Contra Apionem, in the first century, was an important exemplar (Hardwick 1989). But, citation and quotation of documents had already become a staple of judicial speeches in the classical period. Most notably, Isocrates’s Antidosis quoted the author’s own earlier writings as part of his apologia against accusations that he had corrupted the youth.7 Quoted material could amount to as much as roughly five pages of Isocrates’s text. In the amount of introductory remarks and subsequent commentary on the quotation, and in the clearer structure of the whole, it differs from the testimonia collection embedded in Justin’s Dialogue, which possesses less authorial exposition and a less closely structured plan. The basic impulse, however, is the same in each. Literary texts, not merely legal documents, were considered apt witnesses to be brought forth in a defense. Quotation confirmed the misplaced nature of the accusations of one’s opponents and affirmed the innocence of the defendant.

  The importance of Justin’s adoption and extension of a quotational method in imperial Christian apologetics, especially in the generation that saw the Jewish hopes of territorial integrity crushed by Hadrian in response to the Bar Kochba revolt, cannot be ignored. The decision to quote Scripture in polemic against the Jews was not a necessary one (Christians could, and did, adopt other strategies including the development of arguments about the geographical limitations of Jewish cult, the destruction of the Jewish temple and scattering of the Jews, or their ignorance and guilt in rejecting Christ). Alongside the quotation of classical authors, the quotation of biblical texts opened up a space for the exercise of interpretive skills and the consequent reflection and fertilization of the Christian imagination by the narratives and oracular utterances of the Jews’ own Scriptures. In contrast to the rejection of the Hebrew Scriptures by Marcionites or Gnostics, who saw the Hebrew writings and their God as part of the problem rather than the solution to discovering the path of salvation, Justin’s appropriation of the Scriptures fostered an ongoing concern with things Jewish among Christians. The testimonia tradition and its apologetic expression in numerous literary works from Justin’s time into the Byzantine period were legitimizing and determinative of continued immersion in the Jewish texts (in spite of the frequent anti-Jewish sentiment) and the construction of a Christian identity that required the existence and formulation of a Jewish identity (as mother, sister, or rival).

  40.3 HELLENES AND HISTORY

  Justin’s quotation of barbarian literature stands in stark contrast to the Hellenocentric dismissal of barbarian identity as uncultured, immoral, or irrational and, in particular, of the disavowal of direct quotation in favor of a Hellenizing technique of paraphrasing the stories or ideas of barbarian cultures as exemplified by Plutarch (Johnson 2013a, 226–230; Richter 2011, 207–235). In the treatise On Isis and Osiris, Plutarch declared that the Egyptians did not know how to tell rightly their own myths, having confused them as history in a euhemeristic framework; what was needed was a Greek paraphrase of those myths in order to elucidate the philosophical truths hidden deep within them (de Iside 20). This was an interpretive technique that allowed a Greek to speak out of both sides of his mouth: on the one hand, barbarians were allowed consideration as possessors of an ancient wisdom, but on the other hand, they were judged as incapable of understanding that wisdom and thus in need of Greek rationality. The Greeks bore the civilizing burden of helping those who could not help themselves.

  It was precisely this sort of Hellenocentric presumption that many Christian intellectuals diligently sought to oppose. Like at least some of their non-Christian contemporary pepaideumenoi, such as Philo of Byblos or Lucian of Samosata, Christians engaged in ethnic polemics against the Greeks. In spite of being the products of imperial Hellenism, in the sense that they were well educated in the Greek language and its literature, they used the tools of Hellenism to criticize the Greeks (Johnson 2012). The criticisms formulated did not remain within the sphere of Greek religion, though Greek religious practices and the myths about the Greek gods came under heavy fire in nearly all of the extant apologies. Born “in the land of the Assyrians” (Ad Gr. 42, p. 43.10–11) and educated in Athens, Tatian criticized the diversity of Greek dialects (Ad Gr. 1, p. 2.2–4) and the privileged place of Atticism (Ad Gr. 27, p. 29.13) albeit in his own moderately Atticizing Greek. Though rhetorically trained, he attacked grammarians and sophists, citing Aristophanes in his castigation of their “left-over grapes and babbling” in which they cawed like crows (Ad Gr. 1, p. 2.11, quoting Ar. Ran. 92–93). The starting point of Greek nonsense was, for Tatian, the grammarians who appropriated words but “dialogued like a blind person with a deaf one” (Ad Gr. 26, p. 28.3, 7–8). Though his tone is less hostile, Athenagoras would contrast the simple and authentic goodness of illiterate Christians to the clever sophistries of those who “reduce syllogisms, and clear up ambiguities, and explain etymologies . . . who teach homonyms and synonyms, and predicaments and axioms, and what is the subject and the predicate” (Legatio 11.20–23 Geffcken; trans. Pratten). Whereas Lucian would attack fellow-Syrians who acquired books in order to appear learned without actually being so (in his Adversus Indoctum), Tatian attacked the Greeks for collecting books while remaining empty-headed readers “like the [leaky] jar of the Danaids” (Ad Gr. 26, p. 27.21–22).

  Beyond criticisms of the cultural privilege that was deemed to accrue from the mastery of the Greek language, a more substantial contribution of these Christians to Hellenism’s culture wars was the historiographic concern to elaborate the precise chronological relations of the nations of their world (Droge 1989, 91–96). Justin had already made asseverations to the greater antiquity of Moses in comparison to the Greeks: the Greek poets had borrowed from the Hebrew prophets (1 Apol. 44.9), and Plato had borrowed from Moses, though he had understood the latter’s teaching only imperfectly (1 Apol. 59–60). The more peppery Tatian was sweeping in his indictment: Greeks had stolen words (Ad Gr. 26, p. 27.15–16), stories, and ideas from various barbarian peoples. Importantly, both Tatian and his near contemporary Theophilus of Antioch were not content with merely making the claim of Greek lateness in comparison to the Hebrews as Justin had done (or likewise, as Philo of Byblos had done with respect to the Phoenicians, if his fragments are indicative of the range of his argument). They confirmed their claims with detailed chronological arguments.

  Taking Homer and Moses as the two starting points for each of the peoples, since the one was the oldest of Greek authors and the other was the “founder of all barbarian wisdom” (Ad Gr. 31, p.31.8), Tatian provided a summary of the various dates that had been assigned to Homer—not by the Christians but by the Greeks themselves, so that he would not be suspected of depending upon biased sources. Rather, he would use the Greek sources (such as Theagenes, Stesimbrotus, Antimachus, Herodotus, and so on) as weapons against them (Ad Gr. 31, p.31.11–16). The earliest that any of these sources placed Homer was eighty years after the Trojan War, though there was a good deal of divergence that gave dates as late as 400 years after the fall of Troy. Yet, even if Homer lived at the very time of the Trojan War he could scarcely approach the times of Moses, whose lifetime could be determined to synchronize with Amosis the Egyptian king and Inachus the Argive king, and was thereby proven to have lived not only before the war but before Troy was even founded (Ad Gr. 36, p.37.24–25). His argument for the priority of Moses is hardly scientific—it is interrupted by lengthy tirades against Greek immorality, and, of the non-Hebrew and hence purportedly unbiased sources he cites for the date of Moses, only one seems to have mentioned Moses—yet, it was to have immense impact on the development of world chronology. For, without the adoption of chronology as an apologetic technique it is doubtful that Julius Africanus would have drafted his chronography in the third century or even more that Eusebius would have taken up the task of compiling his massive and painstaking Chronicon in the
first decade or so of the fourth century.

  Theophilus’s chronological argument was no less important and represented a less polemical and more coherent argument. It began with the Amosis-Moses synchronism, then drew upon Manetho for a chronology of Egyptian kings until Sethos, whose brother was Danaus who migrated to Greece (Ad Autol. 3.20). This allowed for Theophilus to connect the chronology of the Hebrews to that of the Greeks by means of the Egyptian regnal chronology. For Theophilus, the Hebrews were “our ancestors” and hence the otherwise new religious movement of Christianity was able to acquire ancient roots that antedated the Greeks by several hundred years. In distinction from Tatian, Theophilus used the polemical motivation for constructing a chronology that could “prove” the lateness of the Greeks as an opportunity to take a further step and offer his own chronology of world history beginning with Adam and continuing up to the reign of Marcus Aurelius (Ad Autol. 3.24–28).

  Significantly, in their chronological contrasts between Greeks and other eastern nations, Tatian and Theophilus were affirming a rich fund of historical narratives that could become an integral part of their own identity. The persistent identification of the ancient Hebrews as the forefathers of the Christians, or of Christians as the “true Israel” as Justin had argued, marked an important step by these intellectuals beyond the schematic formulation of Aristides the Athenian in the earliest extant apology. Aristides stands most apart in his apologetic speech purportedly delivered before the emperor Hadrian himself, for his work answered no criticisms and quoted from no earlier texts. Furthermore, while it certainly made a powerful and incisive contribution to the development of Christian identity in terms of a race (genos) that “traced its genealogy from Christ,” in marked difference from the polytheistic nations (Chaldeans, Greeks and Egyptians) and the Jews (Apol. 2.2), it lacked the articulation of a properly historical vision. In apologists of the later second century, who emphasized that they were answering anti-Christian accusations, strategies more advanced than the simplicity of Aristides’s approach were developed to draw out the contours of a Christian identity as superior to its rivals (especially Greeks and Jews). Christians were a nation of pious, wise, and truly philosophic people who were the heirs of the ancient wisdom of the Hebrews, a race that preceded the others in its antiquity and surpassed the others in knowledge of the one true God and the true worship due Him. It was the ethnic nature of such claims, which the later apologists picked up from Aristides, that forced them to begin to grapple so seriously with the historical origins of nations and their relative chronologies.

  It was in the construction of such an historically rooted and theologically defined identity that Christian intellectuals like Theophilus formulated universalizing claims. At once particularist and universalist, therefore—in their adoption of ancient Hebrew holy men as their own ancestors and exclusivist cultic assertions, on the one hand, and their rationalizing Logos theology, discussed earlier, on the other—these Christians pursued the same sort of universalizing project that Plutarch, for instance, had developed. Indeed, it was in order to topple the Hellenocentric universalism of the likes of Plutarch or Aelius Aristides that Tatian and Theophilus made their painstaking chronological labors. Part of what made the sophistic culture of the second century a time of such intellectual exhilaration and literary foment is strikingly, therefore, the chronological investigations, as well as the amassing of biblical proof-texts and castigations of Greek and Roman impiety, injustice, or irrationality, by these Christian litterateurs. If the age of the Second Sophistic can be identified as a field on which complex ad hoc maneuvers and struggles over ethnic identity, historiographic vision, and theological framework were performed, whether playfully or polemically, by cultured actors promoting rival claims to cultural superiority, intellectual or literary precision, and universal truth, then these Christians must receive an integral position in any appreciation of that field. The foregoing observations only gesture at a limited set of notable engagements that exhibit the simultaneous industry of creative freedom (and incessant manipulation) on the part of Christian intellectuals, while at the same time evincing the embeddedness of their literary projects within classical traditions that were shared and contested by their second-century contemporaries.

  FURTHER READING

  Valuable studies of individual Christian intellectuals are contained in Edwards et al. 1999; Grant 1988b remains useful. Significant examinations of early Christian literature’s participation in the philosophical culture of the first centuries of our era and, in particular the development of apologetic historiographical frameworks, have been offered by Boys-Stones 2001; Droge 1989; and Pilhofer 1990; cf. Van Nuffelen 2011. Ongoing scholarship continues to trace the varied articulations and contexts of Christian identity as both a cosmopolitan identity (Perkins 2008) and a race or nation (Johnson 2013b; Kimber Buell 2005; Lieu 2002, 2004). Brent 2006 and Nasrallah 2010 have made illuminating investigations into the performative sophistic contexts of early Christian intellectuals.

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