Christians, Gnostics and Philosophers in Late Antiquity

Mark Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781409448228
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351219129
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Gnosticism, Christianity and late antique philosophy are often studied separately; when studied together they are too often conflated. These articles set out to show that we misunderstand all three phenomena if we take either approach. We cannot interpret, or even identify, Christian Gnosticism without Platonic evidence; we may even discover that Gnosticism throws unexpected light on the Platonic imagination. At the same time, if we read writers like Origen simply as Christian Platonists, or bring Christians and philosophers together under the porous umbrella of "monotheism", we ignore fundamental features of both traditions. To grasp what made Christianity distinctive, we must look at the questions asked in the studies here, not merely what Christians appropriated but how it was appropriated. What did the pagan gods mean to a Christian poet of the fifth century? What did Paul quote when he thought he was quoting Greek poetry? What did Socrates mean to the Christians, and can we trust their memories when they appeal to lost fragments of the Presocratics? When pagans accuse the Christians of moral turpitude, do they know more or less about them than we do? What divides Augustine, the disenchanted Platonist, from his Neoplatonic contemporaries? And what God or gods await the Neoplatonist when he dies?

I


Quoting Aratus: Acts 17,28

ἐv αὐτῷ γὰρ ζῶμεν καὶ κινούμεθα καί ἐσμέν’ ὡς καί τινες τῶν καθ’ ὐμᾶς ποιητῶν εἰρήκaσιν· τοῠ γὰρ καἰ γένος ἐσμέν.

This verse from Paul’s speech to the Athenians prompts two related questions: (1) who is the poet quoted? (2) what is the source for the author’s knowledge of his words? The second, at least, would seem to admit of a more sustained inquiry than it has hitherto received.

1. Of the two known candidates¹ we may exclude Cleanthes, a Stoic philosopher who exclaims in verse four of his Hymn to Zeus ἐκ σοῦ γὰρ γενόμεσθα. He speaks to Zeus, not of him, and employs a different verb. Dibelius has shown that the plural τινες... ποιητῶν need not imply that the author of Acts had more than one authority², and we know of another poet who supplies the exact quotation, and enjoyed a wide celebrity, among Christians and pagans, to which few other pagan writers, least of all Cleanthes, could aspire. This author is Aratus, who embarked upon his Phaenomena with a eulogy of Zeus:

Ἐκ Διός ἀρχώμεσθα, τόν οὐδέποτ’ άνδρες έώμεν

ἄρρητον· μεσταὶ δέ Διός πᾶσαι μέν ἀγυιαί,

πᾶσαι δ’ ἀνθρώπων ἀγοραί, μεστή δέ θάλασσα

καί λιμένες· πάντη δὲ Διός κεχρήμεθα πάντες.

τοῦ γὰρ καὶ γένος εἰμέν·

(Phaenomena 1–5)

Christians could not fail to know a little of Aratus, since he was famous enough, like Homer, to nourish magic and occasion heresy. He is quoted by Hippolytus from the astrologers in the fourth book of his Elenchus and from a Gnostic group, the Peratae, in the fifth³. Dibelius observes that this most familiar of allusions was also the most felicitous, since the proem to the Phaenomena, like the speech on the Areopagus, declares that the supreme god has ordained the earth, its seasons and the motion of the heavens as a token of his existence and benevolence to man⁴

2. The source of the citation having once been ascertained, it remains to decide whether Paul or his biographer would have known it at first hand. No use by a Gnostic author warrants the inference that a work was known to Christians of the apostolic era; we cannot say with certainty of any Gnostic sect that it was flourishing before the second century, and many addressed the study of pagan books with an assiduity that rendered them suspicious to the most learned of their catholic opponents. We cannot even be certain that the Gnostics read the Phaenomena in its entirety, since a writing of such eminence would be quoted far more often than it was read ⁵.

It might be urged that Paul himself would have made the acquaintance of the poet of Soli. He was born in the same locality, and if it is true, as some maintain⁶, that he writes with a proficiency that could only have been acquired in the schools of rhetoric, it is hardly to be supposed that an education in the Asiatic provinces would have neglected the best of the Asiatic poets. It must be said, however, that if the Apostle was so finely trained he allowed himself surprising infelicities. Even where its grammar is pure, his writing has no taste of Attic, either in vocabulary or in syntax, and the theology of the Greeks is still so strange to him that he credits them with a cult of the physical elements.⁷

The one line from a Greek classic in a letter agreed to be genuine affords no index of great erudition. Φθείρουσιν ήθη χρησθ’ ὁμιλίαι KαKαί (1Cor 15,33) is a trimeter, but the fact that it is ascribed, now to Menander and now to Euripides, implies that it was current as a proverb, and as a proverb it would seem to have come to Paul⁸. Hence it is that he uses it without any intimation that he knew it to have an author, and we cannot even be sure that he was capable of distinguishing a trimeter from the cadences of ordinary speech⁹.

The written speech, in any case, is the work of Luke, not Paul. Of Luke it is often surmised that he received a Greek education, since he writes the most elegant Greek of the four evangelists and does not share Matthew’s interest in the life and thought of Palestinian Jews. But since he is no stranger to the Septuagint, in echoing which he frequently improves on Mark and Matthew¹⁰, it is likely that he sympathised with Judaism even before embracing Christianity; that is, he may have been one of the θεοσεβεῖς or “god-fearers”, among whom the apostles to the Gentiles will have cast their earliest seeds¹¹ Such a man cannot have been wholly ignorant of the copious apologetic literature which the Jews had been addressing to their pagan neighbours over the past three centuries; it may, indeed, have furnished him with an archive for some episodes in the Acts of the Apostles¹², and is certainly the origin of the belief universally held by the first evangelists and martyrs, that the Greeks lived in the darkness of millennial polytheism, courting gods of wood and stone¹³. Luke can therefore hardly have neglected the apologists as a model when his hero was obliged to make a sermon to the Greeks.

Even the sparse remains of the Jewish apologists yield one instance of citation from the Phaenomena which is early enough to have met the eyes of Luke. The author is Aristobulus, a Jew of the second century B. C.¹⁴:

Ἐκ Διός ἀρχώμεσθα, τόν οὐδέποτ· ἄνδρες ἐώσιν

ἄρρητον’ μεσταὶ δέ θεοῦ πᾶσαι μὲν ἀγυιαί,

πᾶσαι δ’ ἀνθρώπων ἀγοραί, μεστή δέ θάλασσα

καὶ λιμένες, πάιrῃ δέ θεοῦ κεχρήμεθα πάντες.

Τoῦ γὰρ καὶ γένος ἐσμέν’ ὁ δ’ ἤπιος ἀνθρώποισι

δεξιὰ σημαίνει, λαοὺς δ’ ἐπὶ ἔργον ἐγείρει

μιμνήσκων βιότοιο· λέγει δ· ὅτε βῶλος ἀρίστη

βουσί τε καὶ μακέλησι, λέγει δ· όὅε δεξιαὶ ὧραι

καὶ φυτὰ γυρῶσαι καὶ σπέρματα πάντα βαλέσθαι.

Σαφῶς οἶμαι δεδεῖχθαι ὅτι διὰ πάντων ἐστὶν ἡ δύναμις τού Θεοῦ. Καθὼς δὲ δεῖ σεσημάγκαμεν περιαιροῦντες τόν διὰ τών ποιημάτων Δία καὶ Ζῆνα· τὸ γάρ τῆς διαναίaς aὐτῶν ἐπὶ Θεὸν ἀναπέμΙετaι· διόπερ οὔτως ἡμῖv εῖρηται. Οὐκ άπεοικότως οὗν τοῖς ἐπιζητουμένοις προενηνέγμεθα ταῦτα. Πᾶσι γὰρ τοῖς φιλοσόφοιςὁμολογεῖται, ὅτι δεῖ περὶ Θεοῦ διaλήψεις ὁσίας ἔχειν, ὃ μάλιστα παρακελεύεται καλώς ἡ καθ· ἡμᾶς αἵρεσις. Ἡ δὲ τοῦ νόμου κατασκευὴ πᾶσα τοῦ καθ· ἡμᾶς περὶ εὐσεβείας τέτακται καὶ δικαιοσύνης καὶ ἐγκρaτείaς καὶ τῶν λοιπῶν ἀγαθῶν τῶν κατ· ἀλήθειαν.

This passage should suffice to explode the case advanced by Dibelius for Luke’s immediate knowledge of Aratus. What Aratus had to say of the earth, of its seasons and of the motion of the heavens is dispatched in his first nine lines, which are here set before us in their entirety. Scholars who have turned to Aristobulus for comparison with Luke have seldom observed one detail which suggests that he was the intermediate source for the evangelist¹⁵: this is the substitution of the word Θεοῦ, where metre permits, for the name of Zeus. Those who hold that Luke had read Aratus should be more surprised by the ease with which he appropriated lines that had been addressed to a pagan deity. Christian apologists sought few converts in the Greek pantheon, not even one so late and so proficient in Greek as Origen¹⁶, and their practice did not coincide with that of Aristeas and other Jews, who could interpret the name of Zeus as one of the thousand masks of God¹⁷

The audacity of Luke would thus be more remarkable than his learning had he pressed on Paul a phrase from the received text of Aratus. He would, however, be guilty of no such equivocation if the name of Zeus had already been displaced by a higher one in the version known to him; and, as we have seen, such a version was to hand in a Jewish writing which his interests would have led him to consult.

_______________

¹ The hypothesis that the opening phrase is a snatch from a poem ascribed to Epimenides was advanced by K. Lake and F. Jackson, The Beginnings of Christianity, Vol. V, London 1933, 246–251. But their theory that the Syrian exegete Ishodad preserves a paraphrase of an ancient poem is now generally rejected, and in any case even Ishodad names Aratus, not Epimenides or the eponymous Minos of his poetry, as the author of the words considered here.

² M. Dibelius, Studies in the Acts of the Apostles, London 1956, 50 n. 76.

³ Elenchus IV,6,3 cites Phaenomena 56f.; V,16,15f. cites 46, 61 and 70. The most copious allusions, only some of which are explicit, occur between IV,46,6–IV,49,4 and include 19–23, 27, 37, 38, 39, 44, 45, 46, 61, 62, 63–67, 70, 75, 179, 261, 269, 273, 332–335.

⁴ Dibelius, Studies (above n. 2) 48–57.

⁵ In fact the lines appear to have been taken from a commentary on Aratus by Euphrates, who is mentioned as an authority for the magicians at IV,2 and for the Peratae at V,13,9. The fact that the latter styles him a Peratic indicates only that he was claimed by the Peratics as a teacher, not that Hippolytus knew anything more concerning the provenance of his works. If this Euphrates is indeed the Stoic admired by Pliny and Epictetus (Epistles I,10; Discourses III,15,8; IV,8,17), but mocked by later authors both as a tool and as a rival of the thaumaturge Apollonius (Ongen, Contra Celsum VI,41; Philostratus, Life of Apollonius V passim), then even the learned Peratae did not know Aratus at first hand. On the Stoic belief in various forms of divination see Cicero, De Divinatione I, De Natura Deorum II, De Fato, and Seneca, Quaestiones Naturales II; for a Stoic as imitator of Aratus see Manlius, Phaenomena.

⁶ H. D. Betz, Galatians, Philadelphia 1979, is a celebrated example of such a thesis.

⁷ On the Galatians as worshippers of the elements see Gal 4,8–10. On the Galatians as Greeks see 3,28. The assumption that all pagans worship the elements is elaborated in the early Apology of Aristides.

⁸ For the use of the line as a proverb see Diodorus Siculus ΧVI,54. The ascription to Euripides is found in Socrates, Ecclesiastical History II1,16, and cf. Clement, Stromateis I,14. For the ascription to Menander see Jerome, Epistles LΧΧ,3. The verse appears as Euripides Fr. 1024 (Nauck), as 808 in the Sententiae Menandreae and as Fr. 187 in Koerte, Menandrea II, Leipzig 1953. The latter opines that Euripides was the original author, and it therefore appears that 1Cor 15,33 adds little weight to the arguments of F. W. Danker, Menander and the New Testament, NTS 10, 1963/64, 364–368.

⁹ Cf. Aristotle, Poetics 1449a25 on the facility with which trimeters were uttered in common speech. The adage μικρὰ ζύμη ὅλoν τὸ φύραμα ζυμοῖ at 1Cor 5,6 is only one heavy syllable short of a trimeter.

¹⁰ See e. g. the Deuteronomic excuses at Luke 14,18–20 (not in Matthew’s parable of the Great Supper) and the substitution of the phrase “finger of God” for “power of God” at Luke 11,20 (cf. Exodus 8,19). M. Wilcox (The Semitisms of Acts, Oxford 1965) concludes that many, though not all, were Septuagintalisms, and that the others reached Luke by sources known to him in Greek. For a summary of the arguments that make Luke a converted Gentile see W. Henriksen, The Acts of the Apostles, Edinburgh 1978, 9f.

¹¹ Cf. Acts 8,2 and Lake/Jackson, Beginnings V (above n. 1) 74–96.

¹² Thus the escape of Moses through sleeping guards and gates that open αὐτομάτη, described in Artapanus Fr. 3 (Jacoby) (Eusebius, Praeparatio Evange...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Christians and Pagans in Dispute
• Gnostic Thought and its Milieu
• Christianity and the Platonic Tradition
• Index