Adamantius

Adamantius is a name attached to a book rather than a life. The book is a Greek dialogue called On the True Faith in God — in Latin, De recta in Deum fide — and it was probably written around the year 300, or in the decades just after. In it a Christian named Adamantius argues in front of a pagan judge against five opponents in turn: Megethius and Marcus, who follow Marcion; Marinus, a follower of Bardaisan; and Droserius and Valens, who hold Valentinian gnostic teaching. The judge, a neutral philosopher, listens, weighs the arguments, and by the end is converted himself. It is a set piece, staged the way a courtroom is staged, and it was almost certainly written by one hand rather than transcribed from a real debate. The questions on the table are the oldest and deepest ones the early church faced. Is the God of Israel the same God as the Father of Jesus Christ? Marcion said no; the Old Testament God was a lesser, harsher being, and the true God was unknown until Christ revealed him. Is matter evil and the body a prison? The gnostics said yes. Did Christ have a real body, or only the appearance of one? Adamantius argues the church's answer at every point: one God, one Scripture, a real creation, a real incarnation, a real resurrection of the flesh. For a long time the dialogue was published under the name of Origen, whose surname was Adamantius — "man of steel." It is not his. The book quotes Methodius of Olympus, who wrote against Origen, and its theology is not Origen's. But the confusion is old and stuck, and the name has stayed. The work matters for a reason its author never intended. To argue against Marcion, Adamantius has to quote him, and those quotations are among the best evidence we have for what Marcion's mutilated New Testament actually said — which books he kept, which he cut, which words he changed. A book written to refute a heretic became a window back into the heretic's Bible. Rufinus translated the dialogue into Latin around the turn of the fifth century, and it circulated in the West that way. The Greek survives in a number of manuscripts. Who Adamantius was, where he lived, and when he died, no one knows. Sources: Adamantius, De recta in Deum fide (Dialogue on the True Faith in God); Rufinus of Aquileia's Latin translation; Johannes Quasten, Patrology, vol. II.