Christus Nesciens? Was Christ Ignorant of the Day of Judgment? Arian and Orthodox Interpretation of Mark 13:32 in the Ancient Latin West

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As is now widely recognized, the Scriptures and their interpretation did not serve as mere embroidery upon a larger theological dispute during the “Arian controversy.”All dates in this essay are C.E. In the past two decades, scholars have identified many difficulties with the term “Arian Controversy”; thus the quotation marks. In 1988, R. P. C. Hanson (The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988] xvii) stigmatized the term as a “serious misnomer.” Michael H. Barnes and Daniel H. Williams (Arianism after Arius: Essays on the Development of the Fourth Century Trinitarian Conflicts [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993] xiv) have nicely summarized the findings of recent scholarship: “Perhaps the most central finding in the last fifteen years … has been to show how peripheral the person of Arius was to the actual debates which occupied the Church for most of the [fourth] century.” I use the terms “Arian” and “Arianism” in this study, in the absence of a better term, as a shorthand way of referring to the Latin theological opponents of the Nicene party. In fact, the relationship between theological discourse and the Scriptures is rather the reverse of the one often assumed. The Scriptures were themselves the source of the dispute, and not fodder for the proof-texting of predetermined theological positions. Theological discourse was, in fact, the fruit of reflection and argument over key scriptural passages. It may well be true that the controversy stemmed from dispute over the meaning of only a dozen or so such texts. Alois Grillmeier is on the mark when he observes, “However much the whole of scripture continued to be read, theological polemics, precisely in trinitarian and christological discussion, restricted themselves to a certain number of important or disputed scriptural texts.”Christ in Christian Tradition: From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965) 7. But this is very different from suggesting that the Scriptures functioned merely as proof-texts to what was central—namely, philosophically informed theological argument. These scriptural texts were the initial and abiding source of the dispute. As Robert C. Gregg and Dennis E. Groh have observed, “the picture of Arius as a logician and dialectician” has been so “firmly entrenched in all our minds that it has been easy to overlook the degree to which appeal to the Scriptures was fundamental for Arius” and, it might be added, the later Arians.Early Arianism: A View of Salvation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981) 3. Following Athanasius too closely, some modern scholars have argued that it was only the Arian side that so interpreted the Scriptures. See T. E. Pollard, “The Exegesis of Scripture and the Arian Controversy,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 41/2 (1959) 414–29, at 416: “That the Arians were extreme literalists is borne out by Athanasius's criticism of them. He criticizes them, however, not because they interpret the Scriptures literally, but because they isolate carefully selected texts from their context and interpret them literally without any regard for their context of for the general teaching of Scripture.” But the pro-Nicenes were no less capable than their counterparts of reading the text of Scripture in this decontextualized fashion. Indeed, it could be argued that the Arians were generally on much stronger ground when exegeting the Bible. Hanson, too, is on the mark when he states that “the dispute was about the interpretation of the Bible” and that the philosophical language used by Athanasius was “all devoted to what was ultimately a Scriptural argument.”Search, 8, 422. Examining both unmediated, genuine Arian sources as well as hostile orthodox testimony, I will analyze in this essay the extensive dispute in the “Arian controversy” over Mark 13:32, where Jesus appears to acknowledge unambiguously his ignorance of the time of the day of judgment. While both sides agreed that this text was central to the controversy, they disagreed radically on its meaning. Their differences in interpretation, I argue, are rooted in quite different theories of salvation.