As the gospel spread across the Roman world, it encountered not only imperial persecution but also intellectual scorn. The apologists of the early Church rose to meet these assaults with eloquence and boldness, offering a defense that was both rational and revelatory. In the collision of Christian truth with the pagan world’s mythology, philosophy, and morality, the Church’s defenders exposed the vanity of idolatry while proclaiming the eternal wisdom of the Logos. Their arguments rang with the conviction that Christianity was not only true, but superior in every respect to the crumbling pantheon of the ancient world.
I. Responding to Pagan Objections
1. The Miraculous and the Resurrection
The pagan attack on the miraculous in the Gospels—especially the resurrection of Christ—was met with a deft appeal to consistency. Christian apologists pointed out that Greco-Roman mythology abounded in tales of divine wonders and supernatural births. This argumentum ad hominem was not an endorsement of those myths, but a rhetorical strategy to deny their critics the right to object to miracles on principle.
Origen grounded the credibility of the resurrection not in myth, but in the character of the witnesses. He appealed to their integrity, to the public nature of Jesus’ death, and to the transformative power of the event itself—evidenced in the birth of the Church and the martyrdom of its leaders.
2. Christianity’s Alleged Novelty
The accusation that Christianity was a new and therefore suspect religion was answered in two ways. First, the apologists pointed to divine providence preparing humanity for Christ—history itself was seen as a training ground for redemption. Second, they argued that Christianity, though newly revealed, was eternally present in the counsel of God and prefigured in the moral intuitions and prophetic voices of antiquity.
By claiming the Hebrew Scriptures as their own, Christian thinkers could assert antiquity far surpassing that of any pagan creed. Justin and Tatian emphasized that Moses predated Homer, Hesiod, and all the Greek sages. Athenagoras mocked the relative youth of the pagan pantheon, observing that even the names of their gods were recent fabrications. Clement of Alexandria accused Greek philosophers of theft—plundering truths from the Hebrew prophets and diluting them with error. Tertullian and Minucius Felix leveled similar charges of plagiarism.
3. The Resurrection of the Body
The resurrection of the body, a stumbling block to both pagans and Gnostics, was vigorously defended. Its possibility was grounded in the omnipotence of God—the Creator of both body and soul. Its appropriateness was shown in the body’s dignity: made in God’s image, a vessel of the Spirit, and a partner in human moral action.
Apologists employed analogies from nature: seasons cycling from death to life, day following night, the moon’s renewal, seeds dying to yield fruit. Theophilus and Tertullian made rich use of such images. The latter marveled that any man who beheld the wonders of nature could doubt the resurrection: “All things,” he wrote, “are preserved by dissolution, renewed by perishing; and shall man… die only to perish forever?”
4. Moral Accusations and the Power of Christian Conduct
Heathen accusations of vice and immorality were met with scorn and sorrow. The New Testament, the apologists rightly claimed, contained the loftiest moral teaching in history, and the lives of Christians were shining counterexamples to the slanders spread against them.
Origen, in his Contra Celsum, noted that Christ had remained silent under false accusation, trusting that his life would speak for itself. Likewise, the lives of his followers, unblemished and radiant with charity, were the most eloquent rebuttal to pagan bigotry. “They are his most cheerful and successful advocates,” Origen wrote, “and their witness drowns the clamors of even the most fanatical enemies.”
II. The Offensive Against Paganism
1. The Gods Discredited
With growing confidence, Christians not only defended their faith but launched a full-scale assault on paganism. The myths of the gods were, to the apologists, morally grotesque and intellectually bankrupt. The deities were not benign personifications of natural forces but corrupt demons, fallen angels who led men into vice.
Drawing from Psalm 96:5 in the Septuagint—“All the gods of the nations are demons”—the early fathers like Justin, Tertullian, and Minucius Felix cataloged the shameful tales of the gods: Vulcan’s limp, Mercury’s wings, Saturn devouring his children, Jupiter’s adultery, Bacchus’s drunkenness, and Venus’s lust. Tertullian mocked the contradiction of Jupiter forging thunderbolts while being born in Crete. Even pagan philosophers and poets ridiculed the myths, with Plato himself banishing Homer from his ideal republic for dishonoring the gods.
Justin suggested that any similarities between pagan myths and biblical events were demonic parodies. Bacchus’s wine was a corruption of Genesis 49:11; Perseus’s virgin birth echoed Isaiah 7:14; Hercules’s wanderings parodied Psalm 19:6; and the healings of Asclepius distorted Isaiah 35. The demonic powers had counterfeited truth in order to deceive.
2. The Limits of Philosophy
Greek philosophy, though more elevated than mythology, was not spared. The apologists respected the pursuit of wisdom but exposed its inconsistencies. Socrates, the wisest, confessed ignorance. Philosophers could not agree: Thales named water as the origin of all things; Anaximander said air; Heraclitus, fire; Pythagoras, number. Even Plato shifted positions—sometimes identifying three causes (God, matter, ideas), other times four (adding the world-soul). He alternated between describing matter as eternal and as created.
In view of such contradictions, Justin asked, who would entrust the salvation of the soul to philosophers?
3. Seeds of Truth in Pagan Thought
Yet Christian apologists did not reject philosophy wholesale. Particularly in the East, thinkers like Justin, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen discerned “seeds of the Word” in Greek thought. Justin’s concept of the Logos spermatikos taught that the pre-incarnate Word had scattered truth among the nations, making even pagans unwitting participants in divine revelation. He counted Socrates and Heraclitus among those who lived according to the Logos and were, in a sense, Christians before Christ.
He further posited that Plato and others may have encountered Hebrew Scriptures during their travels in the East, drawing from them concepts such as monotheism—though distorted in transmission. This view, of Hellenism as preparatio evangelica, was elaborated by the Alexandrian fathers and served as a bridge between classical culture and Christian theology.
The Latin fathers, less conciliatory, tended to dismiss pagan wisdom more sharply. Yet even Augustine acknowledged that the Platonists came remarkably close to Christian truth and could be considered Christian in theory—if only their language were refined and purified.
References
(104) Tertullian, Apologeticus, chapter 43; see also De Resurrectione Carnis, chapter 12.
(105) Psalm 96:5 LXX: “All the gods of the nations are demons”; cf. 1 Corinthians 10:20.
(106) Justin, Apology II, chapters 8 and 13; he includes the Stoics and moral poets.
(107) On the Logos spermatikos, see E. Spiess, Logos Spermatikos, Leipzig, 1871.
(108) Augustine, De Vera Religione IV.7: “The Platonists are nearest to Christian truth and would be true Christians with only slight adjustments”; cf. Retractationes I.13. See also Lactantius, De Falsa Religione I.5; De Vita Beata VII.7; and Minucius Felix, Octavius 20.
