The Journey Up and Down: Pythagoras in Two Greek Apologists

Abstract

One of the major goals of the early Christian apologists was to demonstrate the cultural acceptability of Christianity. In order to achieve this goal, a number of them (notably Justin, Tatian, Athenagoras, and Theophilus of Antioch) drew comparisons between doctrines of the Greek philosophical tradition and those of Christianity, usually demonstrating the uniqueness and superiority of the latter. They thus unwittingly preserved for us doxographical data concerning Greek philosophers, some of which is to be found nowhere else. When we meet with such a doxographical hapax legomenon, we are faced with the problem of its reliability, since we lack comparative data. Does the author in question give a reliable version of the tradition, or does he misrepresent it because of his own inadequate understanding of the material?