Chapter 5
Christianity's first conversation with Greek philosophy about the soul and the fate of the dead
Picture a man walking the colonnades of Ephesus in a coarse brown tribōn — the rough cloak that marked him out, to anyone who knew the Greek world, as a working philosopher.1 He has just had a strange conversation by the sea. An old man met him on the shore, asked him what he was looking for in his books, and dismantled, point by careful point, the confidence Justin had placed in Platonism. The cloak still hangs on Justin's shoulders. The man inside it is now a Christian.
That is the scene Justin himself sketches at the start of his Dialogue with Trypho.2 He keeps the cloak. He keeps the title — philosopher. He simply changes what he means by it. Christianity, he insists, is "the only sure and worthy philosophy."3 The Greeks had glimpses of the truth. The Hebrew prophets had more. Now in Jesus the Logos has come in person, and what the philosophers were stumbling toward has stepped out of the shadows.
This is the world of the second-century Apologists. By the time Justin is writing in the mid-150s, Christianity is no longer a small Jewish renewal movement. It has spilled across the empire. Roman officials are noticing. So are the educated pagans — Celsus, Galen, Marcus Aurelius himself — and most of them are not impressed. They think the Christians are atheists (they reject the gods), traitors (they will not sacrifice for the emperor), and worst of all, vulgar — a movement of slaves and women trafficking in "old wives' tales" about a crucified Jew rising from the dead.4
The Apologists answer that charge head-on. They are not running from philosophy. They are claiming it. Justin, Athenagoras, Theophilus of Antioch, and the prickly Tatian — these are the first Christian writers we know of who try to lay out the faith in the categories of the philosophical schools, defend the resurrection as rationally coherent, and stake a position on what happens to a human soul after death. They are not always tidy. They are not always consistent with each other. But what they share is a willingness to engage Greek thought on its own ground. What emerges is a Christianity that affirms a conscious afterlife, a bodily resurrection, and (in different ways) the conditional character of the soul's immortality. None of them sounds like an Augustinian.
Justin was born around the year 100 in Flavia Neapolis, a Roman colony in Samaria.5 His father bore a Latin name. The town sat in the shadow of Mount Gerizim, in the country of the Samaritans, but Justin's family was Greek-speaking and pagan; he tells us he was uncircumcised. What we know of his early life comes mostly from the autobiographical conversion narrative in Dialogue with Trypho 2–8. It is a literary set-piece. But the schools he names — Stoic, then Peripatetic, then Pythagorean, then Platonist — were real options for a young man with means and curiosity in the second century, and the story rings true.6
The Stoic, Justin says, knew nothing about God. The Peripatetic asked for tuition. The Pythagorean demanded prerequisites in music, astronomy, and geometry. The Platonist finally gave him what felt like the real thing — the contemplation of incorporeal realities, the soaring sense that he was almost ready to see God face to face. Then came the old man by the sea, who in patient Socratic questioning showed Justin that his Platonic confidence was hollow. The soul is not naturally immortal. The philosophers cannot even agree on what a soul is. The only real knowledge of God comes through the prophets and the One they spoke of.7
Justin keeps the cloak and goes to Rome. There he opens a school, probably in a rented room above a bath-house — we have the trial record that names the location.8 Among his pupils is Tatian the Syrian, who will become one of the next generation's leading writers. Justin writes the First Apology to Antoninus Pius around 155, the much shorter Second Apology not long after, and the Dialogue with Trypho last.9 Around the year 165, under the prefect Junius Rusticus, he is arrested, refuses to sacrifice, and is beheaded with six companions. The transcript of his trial survives. He is, as the Church will remember him, Justin the Martyr.
The richest material on the fate of the dead in Justin sits in the opening chapters of the Dialogue with Trypho and in a few key passages of the Apologies. Let me walk through it the way Justin lays it out, then step back and assess.
In First Apology 18, defending the Christian doctrine of judgment against the charge that it is mere superstition, Justin argues from common ground. The pagans themselves believe in ghosts, oracles of the dead, possessed bodies, and the soul's survival; Plato, Pythagoras, Homer, and the Greek poets all assume it. Why then should Christians be mocked for affirming what their accusers already grant?10 The argument is rhetorical, but it tells us where Justin stands. He believes the soul is conscious after death. He believes there is a real intermediate state. He believes that judgment is coming.
The deeper question is whether the soul's survival is automatic — built into its nature, as Plato had said — or a gift from God. Here Justin is sharper than almost anyone before him. The crucial passage is Dialogue with Trypho 5, where the old man at the sea presses him:
"Are souls, then, immortal?" "No," I said; "since the world has appeared to us to be begotten." "But I do not say, indeed, that all souls die; for that were truly a piece of good fortune to the evil. What then? The souls of the pious remain in a better place, while those of the unjust and wicked are in a worse, waiting for the time of judgment. Thus some which have appeared worthy of God never die; but others are punished so long as God wills them to exist and to be punished … whatever things are or shall be after God, these have the nature of decay, and are such as may be blotted out and cease to exist."
ANF 1:197Read that slowly. It is not the language of the Platonist. It is not the language of Augustine. Justin holds three claims together. First, the soul is not by nature immortal; only God is unbegotten, and "whatever has had a beginning may have an end." Second, the souls of the wicked do not pass into nothingness at biological death — they remain, waiting for judgment, conscious and able to suffer. Third, the wicked are punished "so long as God wills them to exist and to be punished" — and what does not have the nature to last forever may "be blotted out and cease to exist." This is conditionalist language at the source. The soul's continuance after final judgment is contingent on the will of God, not on the soul's nature.11
Justin says something similar from the other side in 1 Apology 28. There he is willing to use the strong Greek phrase for endless duration — aperantos aiōn, an "unending age" — when he speaks of the punishment of the devil and his angels. The point is small but important: Justin can say "endless" in unambiguous Greek when he means it.12 When he uses the bare word aiōnios (age-related, age-lasting) elsewhere — for instance of the kolasis aiōnios of the wicked in Dialogue 117 — we cannot simply read it as the modern English "eternal" without thinking twice. He had a more precise word available. He used it sparingly, and not for ordinary human punishment.
Justin defends the resurrection at length in 1 Apology 18–19 and again in chapter 52. The Christian hope, he insists, is not the disembodied immortality of the Platonists but the raising of this body — the same flesh, restored and made incorruptible. He grants that this sounds incredible. He asks which is harder to believe: that God can re-form the flesh he once made, or that out of a drop of semen God can already produce the wonder of a human being?13 The argument may seem quaint, but it does theological work. Justin is refusing the Platonic instinct that the body is the soul's prison. Both the righteous and the wicked are raised: the righteous to life with God; the wicked to judgment and to whatever lies on the far side of it.
If the conditionalist passages in Dialogue 5 are Justin's most provocative on the fate of the dead, the spermatikos logos material is his most provocative on the scope of salvation. In First Apology 46 he is answering an objection a pagan reader might naturally raise: if Christ was born only a hundred and fifty years ago, what about everyone who lived before him? Were they all lost? Justin says no: "those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them; and among the barbarians, Abraham, and Ananias, and Azarias, and Misael, and Elias."14
The technical phrase Justin develops, especially in Second Apology 8 and 13, is logos spermatikos — the "seed" or "sowing" Logos. Christ, who became flesh in Jesus, is the same eternal Logos who scattered seeds of truth through the human race from the beginning. Socrates lived with that Logos. So did Heraclitus. So did the Hebrew prophets. Wherever a human being lived in accord with reason — the divine Reason — that person was, in a real if incomplete sense, already a Christian.15
The spermatikos logos is not, in Justin, a doctrine of postmortem opportunity in the modern sense. The mechanism is the universal presence of the divine Reason during earthly life. Socrates is in some sense already a Christian because he listened to the Logos in his own day. But Justin's move opens a horizon: if the Logos has been present to every people, the boundaries of who may be saved are not where popular Christian opinion has often drawn them. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and the modern inclusivists (Pinnock, Sanders) will all build on this foundation. See Chapter 7 and Chapter 26.
Two more passages deserve flagging. In Second Apology 7, Justin asks why the great conflagration has not yet come. The world deserves it; God has the power. Why the delay? Justin's answer is that God restrains the eschaton "on account of the seed of the Christians" — the righteous still living, and those still to be born and converted. The world is being held open for the sake of the unsaved, so that as many as can be saved may yet come to faith.16 That is not postmortem opportunity. But it is the same theological intuition that drives the long hope: God's posture toward the unsaved is patient, pursuing, willing to extend time itself for the sake of one more soul.
Then there is the strange "Jeremiah-logion." In Dialogue with Trypho 72, Justin accuses Trypho's teachers of having "cut out" a passage of Jeremiah that the Christians have preserved, which reads: "The Lord God remembered His dead people of Israel who lay in the graves; and He descended to preach to them His own salvation."17 The passage is not in any extant manuscript of Jeremiah, Hebrew or Greek. Irenaeus quotes it five times. Scholars call it the "Jeremiah-logion" and disagree about its source. What matters here is not whether Justin's accusation against the Jewish scribes is fair (it is not). What matters is that Justin thought Scripture taught that Christ descended to the dead to preach salvation to them. He treated that descent-and-preaching as a settled element of the apostolic faith — settled enough to make textual accusations on its behalf.18 The descent-and-preaching tradition we will meet again in the next chapter, and at full strength in Chapter 8.
Athenagoras wrote his Plea for the Christians around 177, addressed to Marcus Aurelius and Commodus. He is the most philosophically polished of the Apologists — a Middle Platonist who has absorbed his Plato and Aristotle and uses both in defense of the faith. The work normally bound with his Plea, On the Resurrection of the Dead, is the first sustained Christian treatise on bodily resurrection.19 Some modern scholars — most influentially Robert M. Grant — have argued that On the Resurrection is not by Athenagoras; W. R. Schoedel, L. W. Barnard, and David Rankin have defended his authorship. Even if not by Athenagoras, the dating is still securely second-century.20
His argument runs along three lines. God's power is adequate to the task — if He could make a human being from nothing, He can certainly remake one from dust. The purpose of human existence is the lasting union of body and soul, so a permanent disembodied state would frustrate creation's design. And divine justice requires bodily judgment — sins of the flesh cannot be answered for in a purely spiritual register. Athenagoras is unembarrassed about his anthropological dualism. Body and soul are real, distinct, intended to be united. Disembodiment is unnatural; it is interim. The proper Christian end is resurrection.21
Theophilus, the sixth bishop of Antioch, wrote his three books To Autolycus around 180.22 Two things make him a landmark. First, he is the earliest surviving Christian writer to use the Greek word trias (Trinity) of the union of Father, Word, and Wisdom (Autolycus 2.15). Second — and this is what concerns us — he gives one of the clearest conditionalist statements in second-century Christian literature. Adam, he writes, "was by nature neither mortal nor immortal. For if He had made him immortal from the beginning, He would have made him God. Again, if He had made him mortal, God would seem to be the cause of his death." God instead made him "capable of both" — receiving immortality as the gift of obedience, or bringing death on himself by disobedience (Autolycus 2.27).23
The principle could not be cleaner. Immortality is not built into the soul. It is the gift of God to those who keep faith. Ilaria Ramelli reads this as straightforward conditionalism and as evidence that natural immortality of the soul is not the early Christian default it is often assumed to be.24 Michael McClymond is more cautious — Theophilus, after all, also speaks of unending punishment, and his anthropology, like Justin's, is not perfectly settled.25 But that Theophilus articulates the principle "immortality is conditional on grace" — and articulates it as uncontroversial, in a work written to a pagan friend — is not in doubt. The modern conditionalist movement is recovering a position with deep roots, not inventing one. We will track those roots to Arnobius in Chapter 20.
Justin's most brilliant and most difficult pupil is Tatian. Born in Mesopotamia, he came to Rome, sat under Justin, returned east after his teacher's martyrdom, and founded — or at least became identified with — the Encratite movement, an ascetic group that rejected marriage and meat-eating.26 Irenaeus would later treat him as a heretic. He is also probably the author of the Diatessaron, the four-gospels-into-one harmony that became the standard New Testament of Syriac-speaking Christianity for centuries.
For our purposes, what matters is his Oratio ad Graecos (Address to the Greeks), written before his break with the mainstream, probably around 170. In chapter 13 Tatian sets out an anthropology even more starkly conditionalist than Theophilus's: "The soul is not in itself immortal, O Greeks, but mortal. Yet it is possible for it not to die. If, indeed, it knows not the truth, it dies, and is dissolved with the body, but rises again at last at the end of the world with the body, receiving death by punishment in immortality."27 Three things stand out. The soul is "in itself" mortal — Tatian flatly contradicts the Platonic doctrine. The soul "rises again at last at the end of the world with the body" — the bodily resurrection is universal. And the wicked receive "death by punishment in immortality" — a phrase scholars have read in different ways. Some take it as ECT (death = misery; immortality = endlessness of misery). Others take it more naturally as conditionalist: the wicked are raised, suffer the punishment of death, and so are extinguished in a mode that is irreversible. Both readings sit comfortably in the Greek. What is unambiguous is that for Tatian, immortality is something the soul has to receive, not something it already possesses.
What unites Justin, Theophilus, and Tatian — and likely Athenagoras as well — is the conviction that the soul's continued existence after the final judgment is not automatic. It is contingent on the will and gift of God. This is the conditional-immortality stream in its earliest patristic form. It contradicts both the Platonic doctrine of natural immortality and the later Augustinian doctrine of eternal conscious torment for the lost. It is in the texts. The modern conditionalist case is not a novelty: it is, at least in significant part, a recovery.
How did the Apologists fare in the centuries that followed? Justin was widely read in the Greek East. Irenaeus quotes him, sometimes silently, and continues both the recapitulation framework and the descent-to-the-dead theme. Clement of Alexandria takes Justin's spermatikos logos and builds it into a full doctrine of the Logos's pedagogy among the nations — the universal Schoolmaster of the human race, drawing every culture toward the truth.28 Origen reads Justin, knows Theophilus, and develops both into the most ambitious eschatology of the patristic age.
But the Apologists' conditional-immortality strand had a different fate. By the late third and fourth centuries, the doctrine of the soul's natural immortality had quietly become the Christian default in both Greek East and Latin West. The Neoplatonic revival under Plotinus and Porphyry strengthened the philosophical case for it, and educated Christians breathed that air. The rise of the cult of the saints made it natural to speak of the saints in heaven as already alive, conscious, and interceding — which, while compatible with conditionalism in principle, made conditionalist phrasing sound jarring. Augustine, in his later anti-Pelagian writings, treated natural immortality of the soul as something close to a fixed point of Christian doctrine, and the West followed him for a thousand years. Chapter 12 will take that story up. The point for now is that the Apologists' conditionalism was not refuted; it was simply forgotten.
Tatian's reception is the strangest. His later Encratism made him controversial; Irenaeus calls him an apostate.29 The Diatessaron circulated for centuries in the Syriac East before being replaced by the separated four gospels. The Oratio survived but was little read in the West. When the conditionalist option was rediscovered in the nineteenth century — by Richard Whately, Edward White, Henry Constable — Tatian's stark second-century statement sat there in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, waiting.
Athenagoras's On the Resurrection shaped the Christian defense of bodily resurrection for centuries. Theophilus's To Autolycus shaped early Trinitarian language before Nicaea, but his conditionalist note in 2.27 was generally ignored — or, when noticed, treated as a comment about Adam-in-the-garden rather than a statement of anthropological principle.
Justin himself was canonized as both saint and martyr in East and West, and has never been controversial in any major Christian tradition — and yet much of what he actually said, read carefully and without assuming Augustinian conclusions in advance, sits uneasily with the dominant Western inheritance.
Let me try to be precise about what the second-century Apologists clearly held and what the historical record leaves contested.
They clearly held a conscious intermediate state. Souls survive bodily death. They are aware. They are awaiting judgment. They are not annihilated at death and "soul-sleep" is not their teaching. On this point Justin, Athenagoras, Theophilus, and Tatian are unanimous, and they are unanimous with the Apostolic Fathers we met in Chapter 4.
They clearly held the bodily resurrection of all the dead — righteous and wicked alike. Athenagoras devotes a whole treatise to it. Justin appeals to it as the public Christian hope. Tatian affirms it even of the unrighteous. There is no early Apologist who treats the resurrection as the privilege of the saints only.
They clearly held that immortality is, in some meaningful sense, conditional. Theophilus says it almost mathematically. Tatian says it baldly. Justin says it in the philosophical mode of the Dialogue. Whether each of these statements adds up to "annihilationism" in the modern sense — the final extinction of the unrighteous after a real but finite punishment — is debated. Ramelli reads the Apologists as broadly conditionalist; the Adventist historian LeRoy Edwin Froom reached similar conclusions in his sweeping Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers. Brian Daley, in The Hope of the Early Church, is more guarded — he treats the Apologists as articulating a doctrine of resurrection-and-judgment without yet fixing the duration or mode of final punishment. McClymond pushes hardest against the strong conditionalist reading, especially of Justin.30
The honest assessment, I think, is this. The Apologists do not give us a worked-out doctrine of either annihilation or universal restoration. They give us a doctrine in which the soul's continuance is genuinely contingent on God's gift, in which punishment is real but its duration is not yet specified in Augustinian terms, and in which God's pursuit of human beings includes — at least in Justin's case — a pre-incarnational presence of the Logos to every people, a delay of judgment for the sake of the unsaved, and a descent of Christ to the dead to preach salvation. That is not the strict deadline doctrine. It is something more open, more tentative, and more theologically generous than what later centuries will sometimes treat as the patristic norm.
"But Justin also speaks of 'unending fire' for the wicked. Doesn't that prove he held eternal conscious torment?" Justin does use such language — most famously in 1 Apology 28, where he uses the strong Greek aperantos aiōn. The honest answer is that Justin uses several different vocabularies in different settings: strict aperantos-language for the devil and his angels, the more flexible aiōnios-language for ordinary human punishment, and explicit conditionalist language for the soul's metaphysics. Reading him as a strict ECT advocate requires either ignoring Dialogue 5 or treating it as inconsistent. Reading him as a strict conditionalist requires explaining 1 Apology 28. Reading him as not yet settled on the question — and as comfortable holding strong moral language about punishment without specifying its final duration in our later categories — is the simplest and most honest reading.
What we cannot conclude is that any of the Apologists explicitly affirmed postmortem opportunity in the modern sense — a continued offer of grace to the unsaved after death. The descent-of-Christ tradition (which Justin clearly held, in the Jeremiah-logion) leans in that direction, but Justin himself does not develop it into a doctrine of ongoing postmortem evangelism. The spermatikos logos doctrine leans in that direction, but Justin's mechanism is the Logos's presence during earthly life, not after it. The Apologists are part of the long-hope tradition's pre-history. They are not yet the long-hope tradition in full bloom.
The Apologists are the first Christians who tried, in writing we still possess, to give the faith a philosophical voice. They are not a uniform school. They disagree on details. But they share a posture: Christianity is not afraid of the philosophical conversation; it can stake out positions, marshal arguments, quote pagan authorities, and hold its own.
What they bequeath to later centuries is, first, an emphatic affirmation of the soul's conscious survival of death and of the bodily resurrection. Both of these are non-negotiable for the long-hope tradition I am tracing in this book. A theology in which the dead simply cease to exist between death and resurrection has trouble making room for the encounters with Christ that the long-hope tradition takes seriously. A theology that denies the bodily resurrection has trouble making room for any kind of robust biblical eschatology at all. The Apologists hold both, unambiguously.
What they also bequeath, more quietly, is the principle of conditional immortality. Theophilus says it most clearly: the soul is "neither mortal nor immortal" by nature. Tatian says it most starkly. Justin says it most philosophically. None of them yet articulates the modern conditionalist position with its full eschatological detail. But the principle is there: the soul's continuance is a gift of God, not a guarantee of its nature. That principle is precisely what the modern conditionalist movement claims, and precisely what the Western Augustinian inheritance has tended to muffle.
Finally, the Apologists give us Justin's spermatikos logos — a Christology generous enough to count Socrates and Heraclitus and Abraham and Elijah as participants in Christ before the Incarnation. That is not a doctrine of postmortem opportunity, but it is an extraordinary opening of the horizon. If the eternal Logos has been at work in every human culture, drawing every reasonable soul toward truth, then the question "what about those who never heard?" cannot be answered by simply consigning them to perdition.
The "modern innovation" charge against postmortem opportunity assumes that the patristic tradition is uniformly restrictivist. The Apologists already disprove that. They affirm conscious intermediate state without affirming Augustinian ECT. They affirm bodily resurrection without affirming the natural immortality of the soul. They affirm a robust Christology without limiting Christ's reach to those who happened to be born after Pentecost. The second century is more theologically open than the polemical use of the patristic tradition often allows.
Justin died around 165 with the philosopher's cloak still on his shoulders. He never resolved every question. He never produced the systematic theology the later centuries would write. But he and his fellow Apologists left the conversation more open than the Augustinian settlement would eventually allow. That openness, that range, that willingness to hold conscious survival and conditional immortality and Christ's reach to the pre-Christian world all together — that is part of what this book is recovering. The long hope did not begin with Origen. It already had philosophical voice in Justin.
↑ 1. On the philosopher's cloak (tribōn) as a recognizable marker of the working philosopher in the second century, see Eric Osborn, Justin Martyr, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 47 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1973), 6–9; Robert M. Grant, Greek Apologists of the Second Century (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1988), 50–54.
↑ 2. Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 1–8; English in Ante-Nicene Fathers (hereafter ANF), ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, 1:194–199; Greek in Miroslav Marcovich, ed., Iustini Martyris Dialogus cum Tryphone, Patristische Texte und Studien 47 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997). The setting is traditionally identified as Ephesus.
↑ 3. Justin, Dial. 8 (ANF 1:198).
↑ 4. On second-century pagan perception of Christians as social and intellectual outsiders, see Robert L. Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). The "old wives' tales" trope (graōn mūthous) appears in 1 Tim 4:7 and is echoed in Justin, 1 Apol. 54.
↑ 5. Justin, 1 Apol. 1; Dial. 28 (ANF 1:208–9); Osborn, Justin Martyr, 6–7. The trial record (Acta Iustini) is translated in Herbert Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 42–61.
↑ 6. Justin, Dial. 2 (ANF 1:195). On the conversion narrative as a literary topos shaped by — though not invented from — Justin's actual experience, see Niels Hyldahl, Philosophie und Christentum: Eine Interpretation der Einleitung zum Dialog Justins (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1966); cf. Osborn, Justin Martyr, 13–24.
↑ 7. Justin, Dial. 3–7 (ANF 1:195–198).
↑ 8. Acta Iustini 3.3 (Musurillo, 46–47): Justin tells Rusticus that he lives "above the bath of Myrtinus" (or Martin).
↑ 9. The First Apology is usually dated 153–157 because of its reference to Lucius Munatius Felix as a recent prefect of Egypt (1 Apol. 29); see Denis Minns and Paul Parvis, eds., Justin, Philosopher and Martyr: Apologies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 32–43. On the relation of the two Apologies, Minns and Parvis argue (against older treatments) that the Second Apology is a kind of appendix or supplement to the first rather than a separate work; see 21–31.
↑ 10. Justin, 1 Apol. 18–20 (ANF 1:168–170).
↑ 11. Justin, Dial. 5 (ANF 1:197). On the conditionalist reading of this passage, see Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 120 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 23–35; LeRoy Edwin Froom, The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, 2 vols. (Washington: Review and Herald, 1965–1966), 1:758–771; and the patristic discussion in William Harrison, Is Salvation Possible after Death? A Biblical and Historical Study, ch. 19 ("The Meaning of Aion and Aionios").
↑ 12. Justin, 1 Apol. 28 (ANF 1:172); Dial. 117. The contrast between aperantos aiōn and the more flexible aiōnios in Justin is one of the standard data points in patristic-Greek lexical studies of the duration question; see Harrison, Is Salvation Possible after Death?, ch. 19; Ramelli, Apokatastasis, 23–35; Heleen M. Keizer, Life Time Entirety: A Study of AION in Greek Literature and Philosophy, the Septuagint, and Philo (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 1999).
↑ 13. Justin, 1 Apol. 19 (ANF 1:169).
↑ 14. Justin, 1 Apol. 46 (ANF 1:178).
↑ 15. Justin, 2 Apol. 8, 13 (ANF 1:191–193). On the spermatikos logos doctrine, see Eric Osborn, The Beginning of Christian Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 99–122; Mark J. Edwards, "Justin's Logos and the Word of God," Journal of Early Christian Studies 3, no. 3 (1995): 261–280; and the appropriation of Justin in Clark H. Pinnock, A Wideness in God's Mercy: The Finality of Jesus Christ in a World of Religions (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), 92–95.
↑ 16. Justin, 2 Apol. 7 (in some editions numbered 6); ANF 1:190.
↑ 17. Justin, Dial. 72 (ANF 1:235).
↑ 18. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.20.4; 4.22.1; 4.33.1, 12; 5.31.1. On the Jeremiah-logion, see Oskar Skarsaune, The Proof from Prophecy: A Study in Justin Martyr's Proof-Text Tradition, Supplements to Novum Testamentum 56 (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 296–304; J. A. MacCulloch, The Harrowing of Hell: A Comparative Study of an Early Christian Doctrine (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1930), 84–87. For the descent-and-preaching tradition more broadly in this period, see James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of the Idea of a Second Chance to Be Saved after Death (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021), 180–183; Stephen Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave: Is Salvation Possible in the Afterlife? A Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Evaluation (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014), Appendix B.
↑ 19. Athenagoras, Legatio pro Christianis and De Resurrectione, ed. and trans. William R. Schoedel, Athenagoras: Legatio and De Resurrectione, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972); English in ANF 2:129–162.
↑ 20. Robert M. Grant, "Athenagoras or Pseudo-Athenagoras?" Harvard Theological Review 47 (1954): 121–129, argued against Athenagoran authorship of On the Resurrection. L. W. Barnard, Athenagoras: A Study in Second Century Christian Apologetic (Paris: Beauchesne, 1972), 28–43, and David Rankin, Athenagoras: Philosopher and Theologian (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 6–9, defend the traditional attribution. Schoedel's edition is studiedly neutral.
↑ 21. Athenagoras, On the Resurrection 12–25 (ANF 2:154–162).
↑ 22. Theophilus, Ad Autolycum, ed. and trans. Robert M. Grant, Theophilus of Antioch: Ad Autolycum, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970); English in ANF 2:89–121.
↑ 23. Theophilus, Ad Autolycum 2.27 (ANF 2:105). The passage continues: God made him "neither immortal nor yet mortal… but capable of both; so that if he should incline to the things of immortality, keeping the commandment of God, he should receive as reward from Him immortality, and should become God; but if, on the other hand, he should turn to the things of death, disobeying God, he should himself be the cause of death to himself."
↑ 24. Ramelli, Apokatastasis, 35–47, reads Theophilus as substantively conditionalist on the soul's nature. Cf. Brian E. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 21–22.
↑ 25. Michael J. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), 1:268–273, criticizes Ramelli's reading of the early Apologists as anticipating apokatastasis, but his caution against reading them as proto-universalists is largely independent of the question of whether they were proto-conditionalists, on which he is more guarded.
↑ 26. On Tatian's life and the Encratite movement, see Emily J. Hunt, Christianity in the Second Century: The Case of Tatian (London: Routledge, 2003); Robert M. Grant, "The Heresy of Tatian," Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 5 (1954): 62–68. Irenaeus's verdict is in Against Heresies 1.28.1.
↑ 27. Tatian, Oratio ad Graecos 13 (ANF 2:70). For the conditionalist reading, see Froom, Conditionalist Faith, 1:771–781; Ramelli, Apokatastasis, 44–47. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Shape of Death: Life, Death, and Immortality in the Early Fathers (New York: Abingdon, 1961), 27–36, gives a particularly thoughtful reading of Tatian's anthropology as a Christian refusal of the Platonic doctrine of natural immortality.
↑ 28. Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 1.5, 6.5–6, 7.2; see Chapter 7.
↑ 29. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 1.28.1 (ANF 1:353).
↑ 30. On the scholarly debate over the Apologists' conditionalism: Froom, Conditionalist Faith, 1:758–793 (a useful survey of the patristic evidence, though shaped by Adventist commitments and over-reading at points); Daley, Hope of the Early Church, 19–25 (more guarded — resurrection-and-judgment without fixing the duration or mode of final punishment); McClymond, Devil's Redemption, 1:268–273 (pushes hardest against the strong conditionalist reading, especially of Justin).