On "Christianity in the Second Century" by Emily J. Hunt. ****

The subtitle of this book is "The Case of Tatian," which is what this book is really about. I'd have flipped the two titles were it me, since the main title is deceptive and too broad for what the author does here. Certainly, some of what she writes about Tatian establishes ideas about broader trends in second-century Christianity, but the book does not really lay claim to that focus. If I'd wanted a general book about second-century Christianity, I'd have turned elsewhere. Lucky for me, I came to this work because I was looking for a work about Tatian, and it was a ready read.

Tatian was a second-century Christian who grew up a pagan in Assyria. At some point, he went west, became a student of Justin's and then, after Justin's death, apostasized, becoming a gnostic, moving back toward Assyria, and disappearing from history. Or so that is what most histories will tell you, based on the writings of various early church historians. Hunt calls this apostasization into question. The second century was rife with different points of view, and while Tatian's may not have been mainstream, they were hardly gnostic. It seems that the label was assigned him possibly for political reasons by these later church historians.

The two works Tatian is most known for are his Oration to the Greeks, which still survives, and the Diatesseron, one of the first harmonies of the Gospels--and the only version of the Gospels available in much of the church of the East for the first few centuries. Hunt looks closely at the first work to ferret out Tatian's points of view and his likely influences. She comes to believe that Tatian was heavily influenced by his teacher Justin and possibly eastern Christian view but not as much by the Gnostic Valentinus or Greco-Roman philosophy (except insofar as the ideas of philosophy permeated early Christianity generally). There are, of course, some problems with depending so much on the Oration, the main one being that we're not sure when it was written and and therefore what stage of Tatian's point of view it represents. If written early, he could well have changed much of his perspective later on (Hunt doubts not so much the early writing but the idea that he would have actually changed his point of view so greatly as to accept Gnostic ideas, something I find a bit dubious, knowing how some people really do flip in terms of belief systems over the course of their lives); if written later, of course, we're on pretty firm ground to use it to argue that the various early historians had Tatian wrong in many respects.

As per the Oration and what little we have of the Diatesseron, it is evident that Tatian did have ascetic sympathies, much like most other Eastern Christians. It's also clear, however, that he did not believe in more than one God, an evil and a good god, a pleroma of aeons, or the immortality of the soul, as most Gnostics would have. Rather, like Justin, he embraced the resurrection. He thought there to be just one God (curiously, he rarely mentions Jesus in the Oration). He believed demons to be fallen angels. Perhaps one of the most unique aspects of his thought, insofar as what Hunt describes, was his belief that people had been created with the spirit of God but that that spirit was removed when Adam sinned; the Christian process thus is one of having that spirit restored.

As with so much of early Christian history, however, much of Tatian's life and thought is hidden in shadows. We have only the one work and a few early comments about him, each with their own agenda. Hunt's work adds now, many centuries later, to that set of comments; there have been and will be others to do so.