The Apology of Aristides: Texts and Studies 1 (1891) pp. 1-34. Introduction.
INTRODUCTION.
THE present volume contains one of the earliest of the Apologies made to the Roman Emperors on behalf of the Christians, that, namely, which was said to have been presented to the Emperor Hadrian by an Athenian philosopher of the name of Aristides. Our information concerning this Apology has hitherto been of the scantiest kind, depending chiefly upon certain allusions of Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History and in his Chronicon; as Eusebius did not, however, preserve any extracts from the book and presents only a most obscure figure in a philosopher's garb as its author, while subsequent writers have added little or nothing to what they found in Eusebius, it must be admitted that our ideas as to the character and scope of one of the earliest apologetic treatises on Christianity were about as vague as it was possible for them to be. It is true that there was a suspicion abroad which came from Jerome that the lost work. of Aristides had been imitated by Justin in his Apology, and Jerome had also ventured the opinion that the Apology was woven out of materials derived from the philosophers: but it was almost impossible to put any faith in Jerome's statements, which are usually mere editorial expansions and colourings of what he found in the pages of Eusebius. Not that there was any à priori improbability in the opinion that one Christian Apologist had imitated another, for almost all the Apologies that are known to us are painfully alike, and it would not be difficult to maintain of any two of them selected at random that one of them had borrowed from or imitated the other. The difficulty lay in the want of literary faith in statements made by Jerome; but even if |2 this confidence had not been wanting, we should not have been very much the wiser.
In the case of a companion Apology to that of Aristides, we were more happily placed for forming an opinion; since Eusebius not only describes an Apology presented to the Emperor Hadrian by a certain Quadratus, at the time of one of the imperial visits to Athens, but gives us also some striking and powerful sentences, just enough to convince one that the document was marked by argumentative force and spiritual insight, and could not have been a mere conventional tirade against paganism. Until recent times, then, all that could be said on the subject of these lost Apologies was that we had Eusebian tradition for their existence, Eusebian authority for their date, and a Eusebian extract from one of them as a specimen of sub-apostolic defence, a mere brick from a vanished house.
The mist, however, lifted some time ago, when the learned Armenians of the Lazarist monastery at Venice added to the obligations under which they have so often laid the scholarly and Christian world, by publishing an Armenian translation of the opening chapters of the lost Apology of Aristides; and although their document was received in some quarters with incredulity, it will be seen; by what we have presently to bring forward, that the fragment which they printed was rightly entitled, and that they had at least made the way for a satisfactory conception of |3 the dogmatics which underlay the apologetics. This was a great gain. Moreover their published fragment shewed traces of an interesting originality of method in the classification of the religious beliefs of the time.
Our contribution to the subject consists of a Syriac translation of the whole, or substantially the whole, of the missing Apology. We were so happy as to discover this text in a volume of Syriac extracts preserved in the library of the convent of St Catharine, upon Mount Sinai, during a delightful visit which we paid to those majestic solitudes and silences in the spring of 1889. Our copy has suffered somewhat in the course of time from successive transcriptions, and needs occasionally the hand of the critical corrector. The language and thought of the writer are, however, so simple and straightforward that the limits of error are much narrower than they would be in a document where the structure was more highly complicated; the unintelligible sentences which accumulate in a translation so much more rapidly than in the copying of an original document, are almost entirely absent. In fact the writer is more of a child than a philosopher, a child well-trained in creed and well-practised in ethics, rather than either a dogmatist defending a new system or an iconoclast destroying an old one: but this simplicity of treatment, so far from being a weakness, adds often greatly to the natural impressiveness of the subject and gives the work a place by the side of the best Christian writing of his age. But, before going further, it will be best to describe a little more closely the volume from which our text is taken.
Description of the MS.
The MS. from which we have copied is numbered 16 amongst the Syriac MSS. of the Sinaitic convent. The MS. may be |4 referred to the 7th century, and is written in two columns to the page. The book is made up of a number of separate treatises and extracts, almost all of which are ethical in character. Thus on fol. 1 b we have [Syriac] or, the history of the Lives of the Fathers, translated from Greek into Syriac.
On fol. 2b [syriac]
Apparently we have here the Liber Paradisi or Lives of the Holy Fathers of the Desert, of which many copies exist in Greek, though it may be doubted whether there is any critical edition. Some portions of this Syriac version were published at Upsala by Tullberg and his disciples, in 1851, from MSS. in the Vatican and in the British Museum. In our MS. the current heading of the pages is [syriac]
or, History of the Egyptian Hermits.
After fol. 86 b two leaves appear to have been cut away. Fol. 87 b bears the heading [syriac]
Of the holy Nilus the Solitary.
At the foot of fol. 93 a begins the Apology of Aristides.
On fol. 105 a begins [syriac]
or, A discourse of Plutarch on the subject of a man's being assisted by his enemy.
At the foot of fol. 112 a [syriac]
or, A second discourse of the same Plutarch peri\ a)skh&sewj .
Apparently this is the tract published by Lagarde in his Analecta, pp. 177-186, and translated by Gildemeister and Bücheler. |5
On fol. 121 b [syriac]
A discourse of Pythagoras,
probably the same as is published in Lagarde's Analecta, pp. 195 -201.
On fol. 126 a [syriac]
A discourse of Plutarch, on Anger,
for which see Lagarde, Analecta Syriaca, pp. 186-195. On fol. 132 b [syriac]