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  • 5 - The Apologists

  • from A - LITERARY GUIDE
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 36-44

  • Summary

    The term 'Apologists', as applied to Christian writers of the early period, denotes a series of authors who in the course of the second century composed and circulated addresses and pleas to emperors and others in public authority on behalf of their fellow Christians. A Greek text of The Apology of Aristides was identified as figuring in a novel, Barlaam and Josaphat, that had been written in Palestine in the tenth century. The Syriac text disagrees with Eusebius' statement that the work was addressed to Hadrian and sets it instead in the reign of Antoninus Pius, but three Armenian manuscripts that contain the opening lines of the Apology concur with Eusebius. Sardis was a significant centre of diaspora Judaism, and Melito's stance towards Judaism, that of one who was at once an ungrateful tributary and an indebted foe, illustrates the general position of Christianity in relation to Judaism in his time.