Recent research on the Apology of Aristides of Athens has highlighted “ethnic reasoning” in the text. Advocates of this approach note the description of Christians, Jews, Greeks, and barbarians as genê. They observe how Apology indexes these genê in a strategy designed to demonstrate that the Christian genos is superior. They further point to the construction of fictive ancestries in this taxonomy. Consequently, ethnoracial discourse is now popularly regarded as the primary mode of discursive reasoning in Apology’s formulation of Christian identity.
This presentation offers a challenge to the emerging consensus. Focusing on the Syriac text of Apology, an important witness to Aristides’ primitive text, the presenter argues that Apology articulates Christian identity in primarily civic and cultural terms. The text develops a logic that identifies Christians as a superior culture-group founded by a culture hero, Jesus. The Christian mode of ritual life and collective ethic is most consistent with the divine nature (ch. 1). As such, Christians make the best “world-citizens” because their society imitates God most accurately.
This approach of Apology is consistent with second-century patterns of civic discourse in the Second Sophistic. The role of law and the symbolism of Athens (perhaps a purely literary construction) frame the argument in ways that reflect second-century orations in celebration of Athens as a symbol of cultural and philosophical ideals (Ael. Arist. Panath. Or.). And Apology’s integration of rationality, divine nature, and human ethics further resonates with the theory of the Stoic cosmic city. The Stoics regarded the universe as a vibrant urban center where (rational) men and gods cohabit under common laws and participate in shared citizenship (Dio Chrys. Or. 36.38). This is not to suggest a relationship of dependence between Apology and any particular text. Rather, Apology shares discursive space with these arguments of the Second Sophistic.
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