Jared Secord: Medicine and Sophistry in Hippolytus' Refutatio

Hippolytus’ Refutatio is an underexploited source for the connections that existed between the Christian communities of Rome and the city’s diverse intellectual life. Most of the current work on the subject focuses on philosophy, and has been concerned especially with testing the reliability of Hippolytus’ citations from otherwise lost philosophical texts (e.g. Osborne 1987, Mansfeld 1992), or with demonstrating that the organization of Hippolytus’ community resembled that of a philosophical school (e.g. Brent 1995, 405-6). The paper I offer extends the scope of current research to include the areas of medicine and the sophistic movement.

In the area of medicine, evidence from the Refutatio demonstrates that some Christians had an active and technical interest in the mechanics of human anatomy and physiology (some discussion in Pouderon 2005). One passage (4.51.10-13) even seems to suggest that Christians formed part of the audience for public medical demonstrations and dissections of the type performed by Galen and Rome’s other doctors (see Debru 1995, von Staden 1997).

The Refutatio also contains signs of Hippolytus’ awareness of the public displays associated with the contemporary sophistic movement. He uses the vocabulary commonly applied to extemporizing sophists – particularly the verb schediazein (e.g. 9.12.19) – to describe the speech of his opponents. Their tendency to improvise, Hippolytus suggests, functions not as a demonstration of their verbal acuity, as it would for a Greek sophist, but rather of their hastiness and inconsistency as Christian teachers and theologians.

In sum, the paper demonstrates both that the Christian communities of Rome were well aware of the public displays of Greek doctors and sophists, and that Hippolytus exploits this level of awareness as part of his attack on heretics, depicting them as more like doctors and sophists than Christians.