Athenagoras of Athens

← Encyclopedia

Athenagoras of Athens was a Christian apologist of the later second century, known almost entirely from two surviving works and almost not at all as a person. He calls himself, in the heading of his chief text, “Athenagoras the Athenian, a philosopher and a Christian” — and the two words sit together deliberately. He was a man trained in Greek philosophy who set out to argue for Christianity not by appeal to scripture, which would have meant nothing to his intended audience, but in the terms a cultivated pagan would respect.

That chief text is the Legatio, the Plea or Embassy for the Christians, addressed to the emperors Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus and so datable to around 176–177. It is a defense against the rumors that fed the persecutions: that Christians were atheists because they kept no images and no sacrifices, that they ate human flesh in their gatherings, that they practiced incest. Athenagoras answers each in turn, and the answer to the charge of atheism becomes the heart of the work — a sustained philosophical argument that there can be only one uncreated God, drawing on Plato and the Stoics as readily as on the prophets. In the course of it he gives one of the earliest reasoned statements of the relation between Father, Son, and Spirit, though framed in the vocabulary of his own moment rather than the settled creeds that came later. A second treatise, On the Resurrection of the Dead, argues that bodily resurrection is neither impossible nor unworthy of God; some scholars doubt it is genuinely his, and the question remains open.

Almost everything else said of him is late and unreliable. A fifth-century source claims he headed the catechetical school at Alexandria and that Clement was his pupil; the chronology makes this difficult, and historians generally set it aside. The birth and death dates sometimes attached to him rest on no firm evidence — what can be dated is the Plea, by its address to the emperors, not the man.

What gives Athenagoras his interest is the posture itself. He belongs to the generation of apologists who refused to let Christianity be only a sect with its own scriptures, and insisted instead that it could be argued for on the common ground of reason — that the God of the philosophers and the God they worshipped were one. The argument was a wager: that the new faith had nothing to fear from the old learning, and something to gain by meeting it on its own terms. He made the case calmly, to the most powerful reader he could reach, and then passed almost entirely out of the record.

→ Related: Logos · Nicodemus · Divine Providence