On "Christian Antioch" by D. S. Wallace-Hadrill ***

This work details the culture and ideas that developed among Christians in Antioch in the third century through into the seventh and even the ninth. As such, it's a bit out of my usual reading about Christian history, insofar as I mostly focus on the first two centuries. Still, knowing how thought progressed later can be helpful in understanding how it progressed earlier--or at least, that was my hope. The work is very much one of scholarship and not terribly accessible. Although terms are defined and people introduced, the degree to which such specialist terms and people are referenced throughout the work means that you have to read very slowly, take notes, or have recourse to some kind of reference work to get the full scope. That said, the gist of the arguments can still be gleaned from even a quicker read.

Watson-Hadrill shows how Antioch grew in distinctive ways from the process of thought that came to be more acceptable in Alexandria and, by extension in Rome. Antioch, though influenced by ideas coming out of these places, turned much of its attention to the east--to Mesopotamia and Persia, where its ideas found slightly more accepting ground.

After a brief introduction on the background of the church, Watson-Hadrill focuses on six major themes: biblical interpretation, historiography, the nature of God, the use of Greek philosophy, Christology, and desert monks. With regard to interpretation, I'd long read that Antioch took a more literal view of scripture as opposed to the Alexandrian way of reading scripture allegorically. What Watson-Hadrill brought out was somewhat surprising, however. Certainly, qualifiers must be made, insofar as many Antiochenes still used typography and this is really not easily differentiated at times from allegory. But what came to me as a surprise is the fact that some Antiochenes read the scriptures really literally--to extents that some come off sounding like today's secular reading of scriptures. They might go so far as to reject the idea, even though its made explicit in the New Testament, that Noah's ark or the Red Sea were types of baptism. More to the point, they often rejected prophecies taken to be about Jesus or future events, stating that these pertained only to ancient Israel.

With regard to historiography, the writers Watson-Hadrill studies are mostly later ones. As such, he talks a bit about Eusebius's history as being an interpretation of Christianity as reaching its fullness with the adoption of it by Constantine. It is a story, in other words, of triumph. Later historians in the region would try to pick up where Eusebius left off, but by then, such triumph was clearly not the end of the story, given how much infighting there had been in the church. As such, one might pick up the history from where Eusebius leaves off, but no one picks up the same story.

The nature of God, philosophy, and Christology discussions get truly into the weeds, with the Arians versus the Trinitarians and various groups in between (Monophysites, Nestorians). I always find this discussion a bit frustrating if not over my head. It's frustrating because these theologians get so caught up in the philosophy behind theology and lose track of, it seems to me, the real message--the way one should act (in some cases, it's not even clear that they're really that far apart in terms of thinking--but that doesn't stop them from treating each other horribly). The Nestorians, we might say, largely emphasized the human side of Jesus, while the Monophysites emphasized his divinity and the unity of God. Interestingly, Wallace-Hadrill points out how the Antiochenes and the Eastern church focused more on Aristotle's philosophy than Plato's, even though they might not have known it. Rather than the "ideas" being real and everything physical being a copy of those ideas, as in Plato's system; Aristotle focused on the particulars being real and the "ideas" being abstractions. As such, one can read the trinity as three persons who are unified as "God" as a kind of concept, rather than as a concept that finds form in three manifestations (although, in asserting that last part, I'm really presenting the trinity as modalism, which of course is another heresy to most Christian thinkers and so not a precise way to think of the concept).

In a final section, Wallace-Hadrill focuses on the religious devotion of many of the Antiochenes, Syrians, and Eastern Christians. He makes a case that their form of asceticism differed from that of the earlier Gnostics insofar as it was not asceticism based on the evil nature of physical things but on a desire to get closer to God, in the same way that Jesus was close. It's a valuable distinction but also, like so much that the church in the third through seventh centuries argued over, one that is difficult to really see. After all, the Gnostics too, even if rejecting the physical as evil, were aiming to get closer to God and the spiritual; that, after all, was the whole point.