Justified True Belief

(●) He answered the charge that Christians were atheists by arguing, as a philosopher to philosophers, that there cannot be two Gods. + In the late 170s a man in a philosopher’s cloak sat down to write to the most famous philosopher in the world, who happened also to be the emperor of Rome. He did not open with Scripture, because his reader did not accept Scripture. He opened with a survey of what the various peoples of the empire were allowed to worship: Hector at Troy, cats and crocodiles in Egypt, Erechtheus at Athens. Every one of those was legal. Only one name in the empire was a crime all by itself, and he wanted to know why. The man was Athenagoras, and his short book is called the Embassy, or in Latin the Legatio, because he presents himself as an ambassador pleading a case. Its old English translation carries a third title, A Plea for the Christians, which is why its chapters are cited as the Plea; one book, three names. It is one of the most quietly impressive things the second century produced. Inside it sits the first sustained Christian argument that God must be one, reasoned out without quoting a single verse; some of the earliest language anyone used for the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit together; and the sharpest sentence the ancient church ever wrote about children in the womb. The strange part is what happened next. Eusebius of Caesarea wrote the first history of the church, listed its writers era by era, and never mentions Athenagoras once. Only two ancient authors name him at all. His dates cannot be given as a birth and a death because nobody recorded either, so what stands in the title instead is a floruit, Latin for "he flourished": the years a person is known to have been at work. His floruit is about one book long. Both of his works survive today because a single scribe copied them into one volume for a book-collecting archbishop in the year 914, and every later copy descends from that one book.

(●) Before 176 AD: What survives of his early life is a manuscript heading and one confused notice written three centuries later. + The heading over his book in the oldest copy reads: "By Athenagoras the Athenian: Philosopher and Christian." That is very nearly the whole biography. Athenian, so either born in Athens or settled there; philosopher, which in the second century was not an opinion but a costume and a career, the coarse cloak called the tribon and a life of teaching for fees or for love; and Christian, which was the part that could get a man killed. A man in a tribon was recognisable from down the street, the way a uniform is recognisable now, and the heading puts that cloak and that faith on the same line without apology. The one ancient writer who says more is Philip of Side, a church historian working in the fifth century, some two hundred and fifty years after the fact. In the surviving fragment of his twenty-fourth book he reports that Athenagoras was the first head of the Christian school at Alexandria, that he flourished under the emperors Hadrian and Antoninus, that he addressed his Embassy to those two, that he wore the philosopher’s cloak while living as a Christian, and that Clement of Alexandria was his pupil and Pantaenus was Clement’s. Almost none of that can stand, and the trouble is not one slip but most of the paragraph. Hadrian died in 138 and the Embassy names Marcus Aurelius and Commodus in its first line, so the two emperors Philip supplies are the wrong two by a generation. Clement was a child at most, and probably not yet born, when Philip has him sitting in the lecture room. And Philip has the Alexandrian teachers back to front: Eusebius, who is far closer to the events, has Pantaenus teaching Clement rather than the reverse. One detail from the same fragment gets repeated more sympathetically than the others, that Athenagoras came to faith while reading the Christian Scriptures in order to refute them, and it is a good story, the kind a reader wants to be true. It rests on the same late and careless page as the rest. Where he was born, when, to whom, and how he came to believe are simply not known.

(●) 176 AD: Marcus Aurelius came to Athens, endowed four chairs of philosophy and was initiated into the mysteries at Eleusis, and for a season an Athenian philosopher could think the throne might listen. + Marcus Aurelius is the emperor who kept a private notebook of Stoic self-examination, the book we call the Meditations. Stoicism was the school that taught a man to live according to reason and nature and to accept what he cannot change. On his way back from the eastern provinces in the autumn of 176 the emperor stopped at Athens, was initiated into the ancient mystery rites at nearby Eleusis, and endowed four salaried chairs of philosophy in the city. The rites were the most respectable religion in Greece and the best kept secret in it: everyone had heard of them, and an initiate was forbidden to say what went on in the hall, which is why nobody can now say either. The four chairs went one each to the schools a young Athenian might still enrol in: the Platonists, the Aristotelians (Aristotle had been Plato’s pupil), the Stoics, and the Epicureans, who taught that the world is made of atoms and that the gods exist but take no interest in it. For a season, the most powerful man alive was paying the rent of the Athenian schools. That is the moment an Athenian philosopher could think a philosophical argument might actually be heard at the top. Whether Athenagoras ever stood in front of the emperor and read his Embassy aloud, nobody knows, and the book itself does not say. What the book does fix is a date. On 27 November 176 the emperor’s young son Commodus was hailed as imperator, a victorious commander, and from then until Marcus’ death in 180 there were two rulers to address. Athenagoras addresses two, greeting them as "conquerors of Armenia and Sarmatia, and more than all, philosophers." By itself that opening fixes nothing tighter than those four years, but most scholars narrow it to 176 or 177, because the Embassy describes an empire at profound peace and shows no sign of knowing what happened in Gaul in the summer of 177.

(●) c. 177 AD: He wrote the Embassy, and answered by name the three things Christians were accused of. + He does not hedge, and he does not start with the easy charges. "Three things are alleged against us: atheism, Thyestean feasts, OEdipodean intercourse" (Plea 3). Both of the ugly names come out of Greek tragedy, which is exactly why they stuck: a Roman who had never met a Christian still knew these stories the way people now know the plot of a famous film. Thyestes was the king tricked into eating his own children at a banquet, so a Thyestean feast is cannibalism. Oedipus married his mother without knowing it, so Oedipodean intercourse is incest. Both charges had a plausible shape if you only heard about Christians from the street, and for most people in the empire the street was the only place to hear about them. They met before dawn behind closed doors. They called each other brother and sister and then married each other. They spoke of eating a body and drinking blood. Rumour did the rest. His answer is not a denial, it is an audit. Take each charge in order, he says, so that we may not be ridiculed for having no answer. Atheism gets more than twenty chapters of philosophy and argument from the poets. The other two get his opponents’ own household evidence: Christians keep slaves, slaves see everything that happens in a house, and no slave anywhere has been produced who will testify to a single one of these feasts. Behind all three runs the request the whole book is built to make, which is not for favour but for ordinary legal process (T3).

(●) 177 AD: In the same year the Christians of Lyons and Vienne were hunted down on exactly the two uglier charges he was answering, cannibalism and incest. + It would be easy to read the Embassy as a polite exercise. The year it was written says otherwise. The churches of Vienne and Lyons in Gaul sent a letter to the churches of Asia describing what had just happened to them, and Eusebius copied a long stretch of it into his history. He dates it to the seventeenth year of Marcus Aurelius, which is 177. Christians were first shut out of the baths and the markets, then out of the streets. Then the arrests began. Household slaves were seized, and, the letter says, "fearing for themselves the tortures which they beheld the saints endure," they accused their masters of Thyestean banquets and Oedipodean intercourse (Eusebius, Church History 5.1, in McGiffert’s translation). The same two words. The charge Athenagoras was answering on paper in Greek was being extracted by torture that same year in Gaul, and the confessions were then read back to the crowd as proof. What followed is one of the plainest accounts of martyrdom the ancient world left us. Pothinus, the bishop of Lyons, more than ninety years old and barely able to breathe, was dragged before the governor, beaten by the crowd, and died in prison two days later. A slave woman named Blandina, whose mistress had feared she was too frail to hold out, outlasted every torturer they sent at her. It is worth holding the two documents side by side. In one, a philosopher asks two educated rulers for nothing more than a fair trial. In the other, the answer arrives in an amphitheatre.

(●) After 177 AD: A second book came down under his name, defending the resurrection of the body without quoting Scripture at all, and then the record of him stops: no year, no place, no grave. + The Embassy ends by raising the resurrection and then stepping around it: "But let us defer the discourse concerning the resurrection" (Plea 36). The treatise On the Resurrection of the Dead, which sits directly after the Embassy in the manuscript, reads like the deferred discourse finally delivered. It is a sustained argument that the God who made bodies can reassemble them, that a man is a soul and a body together rather than a soul wearing one, and that since God judges the whole man, the whole man has to be there to be judged (T5). Whether Athenagoras wrote it is genuinely disputed, and has been for seventy years. For most of the book’s life nobody thought to ask the question at all: in 1936 Henry Lucks could still write that it was rather singular how nobody had questioned the authorship. Then in 1954 Robert M. Grant argued in the Harvard Theological Review that the two books do not think alike and that the treatise is later, and the matter has gone back and forth ever since. L. W. Barnard and Bernard Pouderon have defended it as authentic. Nikolai Kiel has argued more recently that it is pseudonymous, which means written by someone else and sent out under a borrowed name, and that it belongs to the first half of the third century. The question is still open. The honest thing is to say so and to let the Embassy carry the weight. Of his death there is no record at all: no year, no place, no notice of martyrdom, no grave. The man simply stops.

(●) 914 AD: Both of his books survive because one bishop in Cappadocia had them copied into a single volume. + Arethas was archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, a book collector of the kind every century needs and few centuries get. In 913 and 914 he paid a scribe named Baanes to copy out a collection of the early Christian apologists, the writers who had defended the faith to outsiders seven centuries earlier. That volume still exists. It is catalogued today as Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, gr. 451, and it holds the Embassy and the treatise on the resurrection one after the other. Every later manuscript of Athenagoras descends from it. Think about what that means. One commission, by one wealthy reader, paid out to one scribe, is the reason anyone can read Athenagoras now. Had Baanes fallen ill, or had the volume burned in any of the fires that took so much else, the man would be a name in a fifth-century fragment and nothing more. The books came back into circulation slowly. The Greek text was printed for the first time in Geneva in 1557 by Henri Estienne, with a Latin translation of the Plea made for him by the Swiss scholar Conrad Gessner, and Athenagoras has been read continuously ever since. Meanwhile the confusion went on: in 1599 a French writer named Martin Fumée published a love story he claimed to have translated from a lost Greek novel by Athenagoras. It was his own invention.

What He Taught

(T1) If one God made the world, there is nowhere left for a second God to be. + Imagine a man who tells you his house has two owners, and that neither of them shares it with the other. You would start asking practical questions. Does the second one live in it? No, it belongs to the first. Does he live next door, then, looking after the garden? No, that is the first one’s too. Is there some other property? There is no other property. At some point you would say, gently, that the second owner sounds like a man with no address, and a man with no address is not an owner of anything. That is the shape of Athenagoras’ argument, and among the Christian writings that survive it is the earliest to lay the point out as an argument rather than as a confession. Notice what he does not do. He does not begin with Isaiah, though he can quote Isaiah and does so a chapter later. He begins with reasoning his readers already accept, because his readers do not accept his book. The pivot is the word uncreated, in his Greek agenetos: something that never came into being and depends on nothing else for existing. Everything else a person might count is the other kind of thing, made, and made things fall into matching pairs easily enough. Two coins are alike because one die struck them both; two chairs are alike because one design lies behind them. Likeness, on the reasoning Athenagoras and his readers shared, is always that: copies, and a pattern they have in common. An uncreated being, though, is copied from nothing whatever, he says, so there is no pattern for a second one to share and no sense in which the two could be a matching pair. Nor could they be melted together into one, since merging is something that happens to things with parts, a hand here and an eye there, and being divided into parts is what happens to made things like Socrates rather than to the God who made Socrates. So the two cannot be alike and cannot be run into one. Put them apart, then, and the question becomes geography. The maker of the world stands over what he made and fills everything around it. Where is the second one? Not inside the world, which is the first one’s. Not around it, for the same reason. Not in some further place, because the first fills that too. He does nothing, governs nothing and occupies nothing, and a god like that, Athenagoras says, "clearly does not exist at all, for there is no place in which he can be."

(Q) "If, then, he neither does anything nor exercises providential care, and if there is not another place in which he is, then this Being of whom we speak is the one God from the beginning, and the sole Maker of the world." + Source: Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians 8 (Pratten translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). The Ante-Nicene Fathers is the Victorian collection of English translations of the Christian writers who worked before the Council of Nicaea in 325, and B. P. Pratten made its Athenagoras. The closing sentence of the chapter, after he has walked the imagined second god out of every place it could occupy. The argument runs entirely on premises a Greek philosopher would grant, which is the point of putting it first (T1).

(T2) The God Christians worship is Father, Son and Spirit, united in power and distinguished in order. + Having argued that God is one, he has a harder job: to say what Christians actually do when they worship, without letting a Greek reader hear it as three gods smuggled back in. So he reaches for a word that reader already knows. The word is Logos. In ordinary Greek it means a word spoken and also the reasoning behind the word, the thought and its expression at once, which is why a schoolteacher could use it for an argument and a Stoic for the rational order running through the universe. English still carries a trace of both halves: the logic of a plan and the ending of biology and geology come down from the same Greek noun. John’s Gospel had already taken it up: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). Athenagoras uses it the same way. The Son is the Logos of the Father "in idea and in operation," the Father’s own mind and reason: the thought, and the thought at work. He is not a second deity but the one God’s thought going out to make a world. He is careful to say the Son did not start existing at some point, "for from the beginning, God, who is the eternal mind, had the Logos in Himself." For the Spirit he uses a picture: an effluence flowing out from God "and returning back again like a beam of the sun." Two things are worth saying plainly about this. The first is how early it is. Athenagoras is writing roughly a century and a half before the Council of Nicaea, and he already names three, worships three, and insists in the same breath that there is one God. The second is that his vocabulary is not yet the church’s settled vocabulary, and does not pretend to be. He explains the Son’s coming forth partly in terms of ordering matter, which later teachers would find too close to making the Son a step on the way to creation, and his sunbeam for the Spirit does what all such pictures do, which is help and then run out. The substance is there long before the precision is.

(Q) "Who, then, would not be astonished to hear men who speak of God the Father, and of God the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and who declare both their power in union and their distinction in order, called atheists?" + Source: Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians 10 (Pratten translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). The sentence turns the accusation inside out. The charge was that Christians believed in no god; his reply is that they have been thinking harder about the one God than their accusers have, and that "power in union and distinction in order" is the result (T2).

(T3) A man should be tried for what he has done and never for what he is called. + Around the year 112 a Roman governor in northern Asia Minor wrote to his emperor because he was genuinely unsure how to proceed. Pliny the Younger had Christians in front of him, and he did not know whether what deserved punishment was "the name of being a Christian, even though otherwise innocent of crime" or "only the crimes that gather around it" (Letters 10.96, in William Stearns Davis’ translation). Trajan wrote back that they were not to be hunted out, but that if properly accused and convicted they must be punished. The question Pliny asked was never actually answered, and sixty-five years later Athenagoras picks it up. His case is built out of Roman practice rather than Christian doctrine, which makes it hard to dismiss. Everyone else in the empire worships as their ancestors did, however odd the custom looks. Everyone else accused of a crime is tried for the crime. Philosophers are judged this way, he points out: a philosopher convicted of wickedness is punished as a wicked man, and nobody suggests that philosophy itself should be outlawed as a result. Do that for us, he asks. Investigate the lives; let the name alone. He is asking for less than toleration and more than mercy. He wants the ordinary machinery of Roman justice applied to Christians in the ordinary way, and he is confident enough about what the investigation would turn up to invite it: if any Christian is found living like the brutes, he writes, destroy us root and branch. It took another hundred and thirty-five years and a great deal of blood before an emperor granted anything like the request.

(Q) "Let the life of the accused persons be investigated, but let the name stand free from all imputation." + Source: Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians 2 (Pratten translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). An imputation is a charge laid against someone, an accusation attached to their record. He is asking the emperors to separate two things their courts had let run together: the conduct of a defendant, which a trial can examine, and the label he wears, which it cannot (T3).

(T4) The child in the womb is a creature God has made, and to destroy it is murder. + A labourer named Hilarion, away working in Alexandria, wrote home to his wife Alis in the summer of 1 BC. The letter survives on a scrap of papyrus from Oxyrhynchus, a town in Egypt whose ancient rubbish mounds gave up thousands upon thousands of everyday documents when excavators dug into them at the end of the nineteenth century. It is affectionate; he asks after the little one, promises to send wages, and tells her not to worry. Then: "if it is a boy, let it be, if it is a girl, cast it out" (P.Oxy. 744, in Hunt and Edgar’s translation). To expose a newborn was to carry it out and leave it, at a rubbish heap or a temple step or a roadside, for whoever might take it or for nobody. It was legal, it was ordinary, and a father decided. That is the world Athenagoras is writing into, and it is why the argument he makes is not about a hard case but about consistency. His accusers have called Christians murderers. Very well, look at who actually kills. We have abjured the arena, he says, "deeming that to see a man put to death is much the same as killing him." And a people cannot regard the unborn child as God’s creature and then kill it once it is born, or refuse to expose a newborn and then destroy it after rearing it. The same care runs the whole length, or it was never care at all. Two details give the passage its weight. He calls the woman who takes a drug to end a pregnancy a murderer who "will have to give an account to God," which is a moral verdict and not a piece of rhetoric. And he grounds it not on a rule but on a status: the child in the womb is a created being and therefore an object of God’s care, which is the same ground the Psalms stand on when they say God knitted a man together in his mother’s womb and saw his unformed substance (Psalm 139:13–16). He was not saying anything new to Christians. The Didache, the little church manual from around the turn of the century, had already put "you shall not murder a child by abortion" in its list of the way of life. What Athenagoras added was the argument.

(Q) "For it does not belong to the same person to regard the very foetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God’s care, and when it has passed into life, to kill it; and not to expose an infant, because those who expose them are chargeable with child-murder, and on the other hand, when it has been reared to destroy it." + Source: Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians 35 (Pratten translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). The chapter is headed "The Christians Condemn and Detest All Cruelty," and the sentence is offered as evidence in a murder trial: people who will not watch a man die in the arena, and will not let a newborn be left out to die, are not the people holding cannibal feasts (T4).

(T5) God judges the whole man, body and soul together, so the body has to rise. + The objection came first, and the treatise that comes down under his name states it fairly before answering it. Men drown in shipwrecks and are eaten by fish. Men fall in battle and lie unburied, and the animals come. The matter that was one man’s body ends up inside other creatures and eventually inside other people. So whose is it, when the dead are raised, and which of the two men gets it back? Sort that out, if you can. His reply turns on where the burden lies. The same power that gave shape to formless matter, divided one simple seed into the many parts that grow out of it, and gave life to what had none, is not going to be defeated by a bookkeeping problem. Whoever could make a body from nothing can gather one that has been scattered. Then comes the argument that is really the book’s own, and it is a moral one. A human being is not a soul that happens to be carrying a body. The soul by itself cannot commit the sins that need a body, and the body by itself cannot tell right from wrong; it is the man, made of both, who lives the life and answers for it. But look around and you will see that the answering does not happen here, because the wicked prosper and the good die in the amphitheatre. If judgment is real and just, it has to fall on the same creature that did the deeds, and that creature is body and soul together. Take away the resurrection of the body and you have not simplified the afterlife; you have made justice impossible. When Paul preached in Athens, this is precisely the point at which his hearers walked out: "Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked" (Acts 17:32). A century and a quarter later an Athenian was making the case for it in their own idiom.

(Q) "Who, then, that believes in a resurrection, would make himself into a tomb for bodies that will rise again?" + Source: Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians 36 (Pratten translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). Still answering the cannibalism charge, and doing it by showing that the accusation and the belief cannot both be held by the same people. The fuller defence of the resurrection is in the treatise that comes down under his name, whose authorship is disputed (T5).

(Q) "But among us you will find uneducated persons, and artisans, and old women, who, if they are unable in words to prove the benefit of our doctrine, yet by their deeds exhibit the benefit arising from their persuasion of its truth: they do not rehearse speeches, but exhibit good works; when struck, they do not strike again; when robbed, they do not go to law; they give to those that ask of them, and love their neighbours as themselves." + Source: Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians 11 (Pratten translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). He has just quoted the Lord’s command to love enemies and pray for persecutors, and then asks which of the professional philosophers, the men who parse syllogisms and explain etymologies for a living, has ever managed to do it. His answer is that the people who manage it are not philosophers at all. For a trained Athenian arguing before two rulers who prized education above everything, handing the verdict to artisans and old women is a remarkable thing to do.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The church kept the arguments and lost the man. + Most early Christian writers can be traced by their footprints: someone quotes them, someone answers them, someone puts them on a reading list. Athenagoras leaves almost none. Eusebius, writing around 325, went through the second century author by author and never names him. Jerome, who compiled a catalogue of Christian writers at the end of the fourth century, does not have him either. There are two exceptions. Around the year 300 Methodius of Olympus, arguing about the resurrection, cites him by name on the devil and matter: "as was said also by Athenagoras, that the devil is a spirit, made by God, in the neighbourhood of matter, as of course the rest of the angels are, and that he was entrusted with the oversight of matter, and the forms of matter" (On the Resurrection, in the extract Photius preserved; Ante-Nicene Fathers translation). Photius, who preserved that extract, was a ninth-century patriarch of Constantinople with a reader’s appetite and a habit of taking notes; his summaries of the books that passed through his hands are the only trace a fair number of them have left. What he preserved here is a direct reference to the Embassy, chapter 24, and it proves the book was still being read in the east a generation before Nicaea. The other is Philip of Side’s muddled fifth-century paragraph. So the influence is small, and nothing is gained by inflating it. Athenagoras did not shape the fourth-century debates, because the men in those debates had not read him. His value is of a different kind, and in some ways a better one: he is an undisturbed witness. Here is a Christian arguing in 177, untouched by the later controversies, telling two pagan emperors that God is one, that Father, Son and Spirit are worshipped together, that the body will rise, and that killing the unborn is murder. Nobody was polishing that statement for a council. It is simply what a well-read Christian believed, written down before the arguments started.

(†) He showed that the faith could be defended in the language of the schools. + Justin Martyr had already argued that whatever the philosophers said truly belonged to Christ. Athenagoras does something more specific and, for a reader of arguments, more interesting: he builds a case for a Christian doctrine out of premises that contain nothing Christian at all, and only then brings in the prophets to confirm what the reasoning has reached. Chapter 8 argues God’s oneness from what an uncreated being would have to be. Chapter 9 opens, in effect, by admitting that a reader might dismiss all of that as merely human, and adds Isaiah and Jeremiah on top. That two-step is the method Alexandria would make its own within a generation, and it is still the method of Christian philosophy. Clement of Alexandria argued that philosophy had been given to the Greeks as a tutor to bring them to Christ. Origen answered the pagan critic Celsus point by point on Celsus’ own ground. A thousand years later Thomas Aquinas would open his case for God with arguments meant to work for a reader who granted him no Scripture whatever. There is no evidence that any of them had read Athenagoras. That is rather the point: what he did in 177 was not a private trick but the natural shape of the job, and he got there first among the writings we still have. The style is worth a word too. Where Tatian is scathing and Tertullian is a prosecutor, Athenagoras is courteous almost to a fault, and his Greek is the best of the apologists. He flatters the emperors, grants their intelligence, and then puts the knife in gently. Reading him after his contemporaries is like listening to a barrister after a street preacher.

(†) His sentence on the unborn is the clearest the second century produced, and the church has quoted it ever since. + Early Christian teaching on abortion and exposure is not in doubt, and it does not come from one writer. The Didache, a short manual of Christian practice from around the end of the first century, forbids it in a list of basic commands. The Epistle of Barnabas, written not long after, repeats the prohibition almost word for word. Tertullian, writing in Carthage about twenty years after the Embassy, argued that preventing a birth is an early murder and that it makes no difference whether you take a life already born or destroy one on the way. What Athenagoras contributes is the reason, stated in a single clause: the unborn child is "a created being, and therefore an object of God’s care." Everything else follows from that. It is not a rule imposed on the womb from outside; it is a claim about what is already there. That is why the sentence has outlived its author’s obscurity. It is quoted in histories of medicine, in studies of the ancient family, and in modern Christian ethical writing across every branch of the church, often by readers who could not say another thing about the man. A book can go unread for fourteen centuries and still hold the clearest thing anyone wrote on its subject.

(†) Where he went past his own Scriptures: he called a second marriage "a specious adultery." + The chapter on Christian chastity is the one place in the Embassy where Athenagoras claims more than the New Testament gives him, and he does it in an aside that a reader can easily slide past. He is describing how strictly Christians live, and he says that a person should either remain as he was born or be content with one marriage, "for a second marriage is only a specious adultery." Specious means fair-seeming: something that looks respectable and is not. He then says it of widowers explicitly. A man who takes another wife after the first has died is "a cloaked adulterer, resisting the hand of God." That is a hard saying, and it is not Paul’s. "A wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord" (1 Corinthians 7:39). Romans says the same thing twice over: the widow is released, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress (Romans 7:2–3). Athenagoras reaches his conclusion by pressing the Lord’s words on divorce, "whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery" (Matthew 19:9), onto a case they do not cover, since the whole point of Paul’s exception is that death has ended the marriage. The apologist arguing for fair process has here refused a widow the freedom his own Scriptures give her. Two smaller things in the same book are worth the same honesty. He limits marriage itself to the getting of children, using the picture of a farmer who does not keep sowing a field he has already sown, which is stricter than Paul’s counsel to husbands and wives in 1 Corinthians 7:3–5. And when he explains where demons came from, he takes the sons of God in Genesis 6 as angels who fell into "impure love of virgins" and fathered the giants, a reading that comes out of the Book of Enoch and the Jewish tradition around it, and he presents it as settled. Christians have read that passage in more than one way since, and the editors of the Paris edition of his works added a note warning readers not to follow him there. None of this touches what the church has held in common about God, Christ or the resurrection. It is the ordinary business of reading a good man in a hurry, and taking his argument while checking his conclusions against the text he is arguing from.