Athenagoras

▪ Greek Christian philosopher and apologist

flourished 2nd century AD

      Greek Christian philosopher and apologist whose Presbeia peri Christianōn (c. 177; Embassy for the Christians) is one of the earliest works to use Neoplatonic concepts to interpret Christian belief and worship for Greek and Roman cultures and to refute early pagan charges that Christians were disloyal and immoral.

      Identified by some early historians as a native of Athens and a Platonist who converted to Christianity, Athenagoras went to Alexandria and established the prototype for its celebrated Christian academy. He addressed the Embassy, an apology in 30 chapters, to the emperor Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus as a response to the threefold indictment, leveled against the Jews in classical times, that by the 2nd century had been transferred to the Christians—namely, atheism (disbelief in pagan deities), cannibalism (eating children at banquets), and incest. Athenagoras appealed to Greek and Roman rationality and claimed for Christians the same rights common to all citizens.

      To the charges of atheism and child murder Athenagoras countered that Christians worship God in an unbloody manner. Unlike the degrading idolatry of the pagan submission to arbitrary and immoral deities, Christians, he asserted, revere one perfect and eternal divinity whose threefold self-expression is not polytheistic. Athenagoras adduced the first rational apologetic for God's simultaneous unity and trinity by suggesting multiple persons in a single nature and potency.

      By his account of the sometimes rigorous Christian moral code banning evil thoughts, second marriages, abortion, and the viewing of gladiator contests, while insisting on the duty of civil obedience and emphasizing an orientation toward the next life, Athenagoras refuted the allegation of sexual depravity.

      A second work, the tract Peri anastaseōs nekrōn (The Resurrection of the Dead), is cautiously attributed to Athenagoras. Rejecting the Platonic tenet that the body is the prison of the soul, and affirming matter–spirit complementarity, he accepts bodily resurrection from the dead on the basis of God's omnipotence and purpose to manifest his image eternally.

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