Athenagoras of Athens

Around AD 177 a Christian in Athens wrote a formal petition to the emperor Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus. He signed it Athenagoras, philosopher of Athens. Beyond the name and the title, the record of his life is nearly empty. The petition survives complete, and it is one of the clearest documents the second-century church produced. It is usually called A Plea for the Christians. Three things the empire believed about Christians, Athenagoras set out to answer. First, that they were atheists — they had no images, no temples, no sacrifices, so plainly they had no god. Second, that at their meetings they ate human flesh, a charge the Greeks called Thyestean banquets. Third, that they committed incest in the dark, called Oedipodean intercourse. The rumors came from garbled reports of the Lord's Supper and of Christians calling each other brother and sister. Athenagoras took them one at a time, in the manner of a man who had been trained to argue. On atheism, he pointed out that the pagan poets and philosophers themselves had reasoned toward one God, and quoted them at length doing it. On cannibalism, he made an argument the emperor could check: Christians refuse to attend the gladiatorial games, refuse to watch a man be killed for sport, and condemn abortion and the exposure of unwanted infants as murder. People who will not look at a death in the arena do not eat their own children. On incest, he described Christian marriage — one wife, for life, with remarriage after a spouse's death regarded as a kind of decent adultery — and let the contrast stand. Running under all of it is the argument he pressed hardest: Christians are the emperor's most loyal subjects, because they are the only people in the empire who cannot lie about what they believe. A second work of his survives, On the Resurrection of the Dead, arguing that God's power and God's justice both require that the body itself be raised. We do not know whether the emperor read the plea. We do not know when or how Athenagoras died. The record of his life is two books and a self-description, and both books are better than most of what surrounds them. Sources: Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians and On the Resurrection of the Dead (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2.