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The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Fathers & the Creeds
Adamantius
died c. 400Patristic
A name attached to a book: the Greek dialogue in which one Christian argues down five heretics in front of a pagan judge.
Pictured: the era he stood in — The First Council of Nicaea — Vasily Surikov (1876), public domain
Summary
- Lived died c. 400.
- Stood in The Fathers & the Creeds (AD 313–600).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Eastern.
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived8 moments · AD 313–600
- 325The Council of NicaeaAbout three hundred bishops met in a lakeside town in what is now Turkey to answer Arius, an Alexandrian pastor who taught that the Son was God's first and greatest creature, glorious, but made, so that "there was when He was not." The council answered with one word: the Son is *homoousios* with the Father, of the very same being, begotten, not made.
- 335Athanasius is exiled for the first timeThe bishop of Alexandria, who had been at Nicaea as a young deacon, was banished to Trier in Germany after a rigged synod. Four more exiles followed; he spent roughly seventeen of his forty-five years as bishop away from his city.
- 367Athanasius's Easter letter lists the twenty-sevenHis thirty-ninth Festal Letter names exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament we use today, the earliest surviving list that matches ours. Councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) confirmed the same list in the West.
- 380Nicene Christianity becomes the empire's official religionThe Edict of Thessalonica, issued by Theodosius I, commanded all his subjects to hold the faith of Nicaea. Legal protection had become legal privilege, and pressure on everyone else.
- 381The Council of ConstantinopleAround a hundred and fifty bishops confirmed Nicaea and expanded its article on the Holy Spirit, who "proceeds from the Father" and "together with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified." This 381 text is the creed most churches actually recite as the Nicene Creed.
- 386Augustine converts in a Milan gardenA thirty-one-year-old professor of rhetoric, weeping under a fig tree, heard a child's voice chanting "take up and read," opened Paul's letter to the Romans, and stopped running. His mother Monica had prayed for him for years; Bishop Ambrose's preaching had already broken his objections.
- c. 397–400Augustine writes the *Confessions*He told his whole story, theft, ambition, a long affair, a slow surrender, as one long prayer addressed to God. Nothing quite like it had been written before, and it invented the spiritual autobiography.
- c. 405Jerome finishes translating the Old Testament from HebrewCommissioned by Bishop Damasus in 382, Jerome worked for decades in Bethlehem, learning Hebrew so he could go behind the Greek to the original. His Latin Bible, later called the Vulgate, was the Bible of the West for a thousand years.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Adamantius at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
The Christian voice in an old staged debate against gnostic and Marcionite teachers.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Fathers & the Creeds · 130 on this stretch of wall
Exiled five separate times for refusing to say the Son was anything less than God, they called it Athanasius against the world.
Made a Roman emperor stand outside the church door until he repented of a massacre.
Heard 'sell what you have' read aloud in church, walked into the Egyptian desert, and started monasticism.
A brilliant, restless sinner whose mother prayed for him thirty years; his Confessions still read like a man talking straight to God.
Built an entire town for the sick and the poor outside his city, and wrote the rule Eastern monks still live by.
Preached five sermons in a tiny borrowed chapel that settled how the whole church speaks about the Trinity.