Aristides of Athens as Ecclesial Apologist: How Many People-Groups Did Aristides Originally Identify?

The second part of chapter two in my doctoral dissertation

Photo by Jennefer Zacarias on Unsplash

I am currently writing the dissertation for my second Ph.D., in Church History and Ecclesiology at Stellenbosch University. The tentative title of my dissertation is “Aristides of Athens as Ecclesial Apologist.” As I complete each portion, I will post the segment for anyone who wants to follow my progress. I will not be including the footnotes in these posts, so each chapter will typically be a couple thousand words longer than what’s posted here.

• Chapter 1a: “Aristides of Athens as Ecclesial Apologist: Introduction”

• Chapter 1b: “Aristides of Athens as Ecclesial Apologist: The Apologia in the Greek Barlaam and Ioasaph”

• Chapter 1c: “Aristides of Athens as Ecclesial Apologist: Syriac Text, Greek Papyri, and Armenian Translations”

• Chapter 2a: “Aristides of Athens as Ecclesial Apologist: Cosmological, Ethnological, and Doxological Apologetics”

2.3.1 The textual dilemma of four people-groups or three plus three

Before examining the apologetics strategies in Aristides’ ethnological argument, a discrepancy in the textual traditions must be carefully considered. The textual dilemma is simply this: In the Greek text embedded in Barlaam and Ioasaph, the families of humanity are organized into three groupings followed by three subgroupings, whereas the Syriac and Armenian translations categorize humanity into four groupings. In this chapter, I will propose a tentative resolution to this dilemma so that it will be possible to analyze the apology’s ethnological argument in chapter 3 of this dissertation.

Despite this textual dilemma, the structure of the argument in the Apologia is similar in each version and translation. After considering each genus of humanity, Christians are identified as the sole people-group marked by a message, morals, and origin that reflects devotion to the deity necessitated by the order and motion of the cosmos. Other people-groups fall short due to defective ethics, devotion to multiple deities, or devotion that descends from mere human beings. Nevertheless, the discrepancy in ethnological taxonomies remains a significant barrier when it comes to careful analysis of the apologetics arguments in the Apologia of Aristides.

The four genuses of humanity are, according to the Armenian translation, “barbarians, Greeks, Jews, and Christians” (“բարբարոսք, Յոյնք, Հրեայք եւ քրիստոնեայք,” Apol. 2 Arm.); the same ethnological quatrain appears in the Syriac text. The Greek metaphrase in Barlaam and Ioasaph, however, classifies humanity in a triad: “worshipers of the so-called gods, and Jews, and Christians” (“οἱ τῶν παρʼ ὑμῖν λεγομένων θεῶν προσκυνηταὶ, καὶ Ἰουδαῖοι, καὶ χριστιανοί”); after this initial triadic classification, the Greek metaphrase then subcategorizes the “worshipers of the so-called gods” into “Chaldeans, Greeks, and Egyptians” (Apol. 2 Gk.). The description of the Chaldeans in the Greek text is virtually identical to the description of the barbarians in the Syriac text (Simpson 2015:123–127; Vinzent 2014:243–244). This similarity suggests that either “Chaldeans” was substituted for “barbarians” at some point in the history of the Greek Barlaam and Ioasaph or “Chaldeans” was switched to “barbarians” in a source that preceded the Syriac and Armenian translations.