other · 125 · Athens
Until now the church had answered the empire in the dock. Under Hadrian two Athenians answered it on paper. Of Quadratus there is a single sentence left, and Eusebius kept it because of what it claims: that those the Saviour healed and raised from the dead were seen not only in the moment of the healing but afterwards, and some of them survived even to his own time — an argument that puts living witnesses within reach of the writer. Of Aristides nothing was known in Greek at all until 1889, when the whole text turned up in Syriac and Armenian and then, astonishingly, embedded whole inside the medieval romance of Barlaam and Josaphat, where it had been sitting unread for centuries. His argument is the one from the four races: barbarians, Greeks, Jews and Christians, each judged by what they say God is and by how they treat each other. Eusebius dates both to Hadrian and says Aristides' book was still in wide circulation in his own day; the Syriac heading names Antoninus Pius instead, so the year here is Eusebius's and is not certain.
To put the case for the Christians to an emperor in writing, addressed to him rather than extracted from a prisoner under questioning.
The apology becomes a form. Everything Justin, Athenagoras, Theophilus and Tertullian later write descends from this moment, and almost none of what was written here survives.