Justin, Tatian and the Forging of a Christian Voice

1 Genre?

Any utterance depends for its capacity to communicate on being recognised as a type of communication: a greeting, an insult, a warning and so forth. The question of voice is therefore intimately related to that of genre: what we say of ourselves depends on how we say it, i. e. the linguistic medium we adopt. As Mikhail Bakhtin notes, however, the “wealth and diversity of speech genres are boundless because each sphere of activity contains an entire repertoire of speech genres that differentiate and grow as the particular sphere develops and becomes more complex.”^[16] Until relatively recently, much of the analysis of both the First Apology and To the Greeks rested on the false assumption that they must belong to a single genre, and it is simply a question of identifying what that is.

Justin styles his work as an “address and an intercession” (προσφώνησιν καὶ ἔντευξιν)^[17] addressed to the Emperor Antoninus Pius, phrasing that identifies the text with a libellus (cf. βιβλίδιον),^[18] i. e. a petition by a private individual seeking a favour or redress from a Roman official.^[19] This generic self-identification should clearly not be taken at face value: the First Apology looks nothing like any other extant imperial petition. The latter are concise and specific in their demands, and “follow a common path by a uniform rhetorical structure”;^[20] there was a precise form and process to be followed in the case of such legal appeals.^[21] Justin’s text, by contrast, is a vague, prolix protest, running to over 14.500 words (even before we start considering the so-called Second Apology), which complains in general terms about unspecified “accusations” and “punishments” allegedly levelled at Christians as a group. A libellus that was intended to make an intervention in a legal decision would have a defined addressee; Justin by contrast addresses his to the emperor Antoninus Pius (and his son and adopted son), the Senate, and to the People of Rome.^[22] Justin’s text, then, seems likely to have shared the same (distant) relationship to a real petition that, for example, Dio Chrysostom’s lengthy Kingship Orations held to genuine addresses to the emperor Trajan.^[23] We should recall that the 2d century saw the peak of the vogue for “pseudo-documentarism,” i. e. affixing to texts peritexts that make them look official or genuine (often with knowing irony, and without any intention to deceive).^[24]

The transmitted title of Tatian’s oration, meanwhile, is πρὸς Ἕλληνας: this could be translated either as To the Greeks, casting the Greeks as the addressees of a speech or an epistle, or Against the Greeks. Both valences are no doubt in play: the “men of Greece” ([ὦ] ἄνδρες Ἕλληνες)^[25] are addressed in the vocative throughout, as if the text were simply “to” them; but in fact Tatian’s stance is mockingly pugilistic. But either way, this clearly is not a public address. Tatian does, for sure, evoke that world: the vocatives, notably, might be taken to resemble the phrase “o men of Athens” (ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι) that is so characteristic of the Attic orators. He summons “witnesses” in support of his argument,^[26] in the manner of a classical orator, and refers to his “audience” (τοὺς ἀκούοντας;^[27] cf. ἀκούετε^[28]). Yet this is not borne out by the rest of the text. The addition of Oration to Tatian’s title in modern editions is unwarranted and misleading:^[29] this is not a record of an oral performance, or even a sophistic mimesis of an orally delivered speech,^[30] but a self-consciously written text that refers to itself as such on several occasions.^[31] Tatian plays adeptly with different voices, sometimes provisionally adopting the fiction of oral performance, sometimes abandoning it. The text as a whole, indeed, flits between invective, apologetic, protreptic and epideictic modes. Rather than attempting to nail To the Greeks down to one genre or another, recent scholarship has focused more on the “pluriform nature of the contents and modes of expression.”^[32]

Both Justin and Tatian, then, should be seen not as writing within one particular (Christian or “pagan”) genre but as appropriating genre-specific features of the pagan literary heritage for their own experimental purposes. The dominant “feel,” for sure, is often that of rhetorical confrontation in an (imaginary) judicial setting, Justin on the defensive (speaking “for the Christians,” ὑπὲρ Χριστιανῶν)^[33] and Tatian on the attack (speaking “against the Greeks,” πρὸς Ἕλληνας).^[34] This court-room mimesis simultaneously grounds the texts in a familiar, prestigious Hellenic cultural idiom and buttresses the rhetorical construct of two communities at odds with each other. It is, however, indicative not of a coherent genre, but of a general framework within which other genres are mixed freely. We see the same kind of generic variegation (ποικιλία) within a wider frame, indeed, in multiple authors of the time: for example, the novelist Achilles Tatius, the satirist Lucian, and the biographer Philostratus.^[35]

2 Rhetoric?

Justin’s Apologies and Tatian’s To the Greeks are rhetorical in that they are in the business of persuasion. I have argued that what they are seeking to persuade their readership of is not what it seems at first sight: Justin does not seek to sway the Emperor towards going easy on Christians, nor does Tatian seek to convince an international community of Greek-speakers about the superiority of the Christian message. The persuasive effort, rather, is devoted to creating the impression of two distinct communities, the Christian and the pagan, the relationship between which is defined by antipathy and conflict. This makes them rhetorical in a secondary sense, one that is characteristic of the Greek literary culture of the 2d and 3d centuries CE. In this period, as has often been noted, declamation has a strongly fictionalising aspect.^[36] Sophists often performed in persona, acting out either historical/mythical themes (“Alexander before the battle of Granicus,” “The Embassy to Achilles” etc.) or imaginary courtroom scenarios.^[37] Justin’s First Apology and Tatian’s To the Greeks clearly show some kinship with the latter group, often referred to as suasoriae: we can imagine these texts as rooted in ethopoeic responses to prompts such as “what would an orator say to the Emperor to defend Christians against persecution?” and “what would an orator say to convince the Greeks that their philosophy was wrong?”

Clearly, neither text is fully fictionalised: there is in both a necessary link between the real, biographical author and the persona adopted and enacted in the work. They are not suasoriae in any narrow sense; as we have seen, they are generic experiments that operate within the broad field of rhetoric. A good parallel comes in the Kingship Orations of Dio Chrysostom: whether or not these were originally delivered to Trajan (which I strongly doubt), we know for certain that they were (also) circulated among a wider readership, for whom the scenario of a performance before the Emperor was purely imaginary.^[38] In such cases, the speaker is fictionalised, in the sense that the mise-en-scène is constructed through verbal confabulation alone. The name of the real author/performer is also that of the fictionalised speaking subject, what is more, so that the drama enacted in the text by the latter also metaleptically enhances the authority of the former. More generally, this is a period when authors and readers of fiction take joy in exploiting the ambiguous gap between the narrating “I” of a text and that of the real author;^[39] when a historian can refer to himself as “Xenophon,” as if he were fully inhabiting the persona of the classical Athenian historian;^[40] and when an epic poet can self-consciously “perform” the poetic I of Homer.^[41] The literary “I” in this era is even at its most straightforward highly stylised, and more commonly caught up in a complex process of oscillation between real and invented (or mimicked) personae.

Both authors, naturally, disavow rhetoric entirely—Tatian with a particular vehemence. At Ad Graecos 1,3 he associates ῥητορική with corruption and vexatiousness (ἀδικίᾳ καὶ συκοφαντίᾳ);^[42] at 40,1 he condemns Greek “sophists” (σοφισταί) for distorting and appropriating the more ancient wisdom of Moses, and for concealing what they did not understand with “some invented chicanery” (διά τινος ἐπιπλάστου ῥητολογίας).^[43] The public disavowal of rhetoric is, however, the oldest trick in the rhetorical handbook: this is “the rhetoric of anti-rhetoric,” in Jonathan Hesk’s phrase.^[44] The rejection of rhetoric, that is to say, is (or at least can be) a profoundly rhetorical act. Tatian certainly narrates his own biography in terms of “conversion” away from sophistry (he once “practised sophistry in your fashion”),^[45] much as Dio Chrysostom did; but as with Dio, the biographical reality is hidden behind the sheen of manipulated self-representation, and (again as with Dio) the final impression is that sophistry is not so much rejected wholesale as tactically redeployed in a game of “fort-da.”^[46]

Both authors, what is more, push hard the idea that what they, and Christianity in general, have to offer is philosophy—an older and better form of philosophy than the Greeks ever had (though Justin at any rate concedes that the Greek philosophers glimpsed an intimation of Christian truth).^[47] But to embrace philosophy was in this era not necessarily to reject rhetoric: the choice between the two no longer presented itself in the 2d century as a binary one. The idea of philosophers who use rhetoric—“those who philosophise in the guise of sophistry” (τοὺς φιλοσοφήσαντας ἐν δόξῃ τοῦ σοφιστεῦσαι), in Philostratus’ phrase^[48]—is common in the era, a time when Athens had lost its institutional monopoly on philosophy, and when dogmatic schools were giving way to “pop-up” philosophies. From the 1st century onwards we see eclectic philosophers setting up shop all over the Empire, from Apollonius in Tyana (and beyond) to Plutarch in Delphi to Epictetus in Nicopolis. A “philosopher” was coming to be defined less by institutional badge-carrying than by the cultivation of public profile.^[49] The effect of this was that Dio and his peers were only superstar sophists and philosophers if they could persuade their audiences they were; self-presentation was crucial. Nor was this phenomenon limited to rhetoric and philosophy: “similar struggles for disciplinary self-promotion . . . were replayed in many different contexts across the Roman Mediterranean.”^[50] The same is true of Justin and Tatian: there was in the 2d century no real church to define institutional roles for them, so that their authority had to be won competitively. Both Justin’s Apology and Tatian’s To the Greeks are the work of men on the make.^[51] This is not to mark them out as social climbers or cynical manipulators, simply to note that they are products of their era, a time when rhetoric was a medium for creative first-person presentation was expected within the rhetorical culture of the time.^[52] Their hybridisation of philosophy and rhetoric is entirely in keeping with the times.

3 The first person in Justin and Tatian

How do Justin and Tatian style themselves in the first person? First, both authors frequently intervene in their texts to add emphasis, usually while underlining speech acts. For example: “I tell you, our teacher predicted that all this would come to pass”;^[53] “I boast that I could show you such men”;^[54] “I call upon Eleusis for my witness”;^[55] “let the far-shooter now tell me.”^[56] Such passages are not at first sight especially distinctive, but nor are they superfluous: they do an important job of consolidating the didactic, assertive authority of the speaker. They echo, what is more, Jesus’ own habit (as recorded in the Gospels) of using illocutionary phrases such as “but I say to you” (ἐγὼ δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν).^[57]

More colourful are those instances where the speaking “I” claims the power to ridicule. This mode is relatively subdued in Justin, though not absent: on one occasion he refers counterfactually to behaviour that would be “absurd” (γελοῖον) if enacted, and on another he calls the allegorical interpretation of Athena as “thought” (ἔννοια) “most laughable” (γελοιότατον).^[58] Tatian, by contrast, fully embraces the gelastic. “His [the ancient philosopher’s] modern disciples too are good for a laugh”;^[59] “I mock Pherecydes’ old wives’ tales”;^[60] “Who would not find it ridiculous that . . .?”;^[61] “Who would not laugh at . . .?”;^[62] “I ridicule the skill of Mico.”^[63] This tactic of Tatian’s does more than just embed his polemical stance, and seek to consolidate the Christian community through the shared experience of mockery. As Laura Nasrallah has argued, “Tatian’s over-the-top critique of the Greeks . . . draws upon satirical conventions of the second sophistic”;^[64] in particular, it invites comparison with his contemporary, the satirist Lucian, another self-professed Syrian outsider to Greek culture. Like Lucian, indeed, Tatian advertises his sophisticated grasp of recondite Greek material even as he distances himself from it: Pherecydes, after all, was not on the bedtime reading-table of many in the 2d century CE. Tatian’s laughter is thus more than just aggressive: it is also designed to portray him as distinctively wry and cultivated, his humour rooted in his bicultural expertise and status as participant-observer of mainstream Greek culture. The hostile stance he takes towards Greek culture is partly offset by his ostentatious display of his facility with it.

4 Autobiographies of risk

A more forceful form of self-stylisation comes in the autobiographies that both writers, in different ways, construct for themselves, dramatising the riskiness of Christian expression. It is easy to be beguiled into taking these as realistic, especially given the theological significance of martyrdom narratives (I return to this below). But it is crucial to remember that narratives of risk also serve the rhetorical function of enacting the speaker’s credentials as a free-speaker, an agent of what Greeks called παρρησία. As Michel Foucault emphasises, “somebody is said to use parrēsia, and deserves to be considered as a parrhesiast, if and only if there is a risk, there is a danger for him in telling the truth.”^[65] We know of at least one case where an individual in the era of Justin and Tatian was accused of deliberately engineering conflict with Roman authorities, despite the indifference of the latter: “he was on everyone’s lips, as ‘the philosopher driven into exile on account of his free-speaking and excessive frankness (τὴν παρρησίαν καὶ τὴν ἄγαν ἐλευθερίαν)’.”^[66] Autobiographies of risk need not be fictional, but they are invariably—to return to the language used above—fictionalising, in that there is always an element of self-celebration.

In Justin’s Apologies, it is the story of the conflict with the philosopher Crescens^[67] that most vividly dramatizes the risk to the speaker:

And I anticipate that I will be plotted against and fixed onto wood by one of those mentioned, and in particular by Crescens, that lover of noise and bluster (τοῦ φιλοψόφου καὶ φιλοκόμπου). For it would not be proper to call the man a lover of wisdom (φιλόσοφον): after all, he bears public witness to things of which he has no understanding, claiming that the Christians are impious atheists, doing this to please and ingratiate himself with the misguided masses.^[68]

The passage uses Crescens as a foil to Justin’s own persona, creating a formal opposition between false and true philosophy (the form punningly labelled “philopsophy,” “love of noise”).^[69] At the same time, it dramatizes the personal danger to Justin in challenging the false philosopher. Justin is even implicitly compared to Christ. The expression “fixed onto wood” is strangely vague, and could refer to any number of scenarios (stocks? Torture? Hanging from a plank [σκολοπισμός]?); crucially, however, it does not rule out the suggestion that he might face a Christ-like death on the cross in the future.^[70] The crucifixion, of course, is the hypotext for every martyrology.^[71]

Crescens is also the pivot that connects Tatian to Justin. Tatian brings him in in the context of a discussion of the hypocrisy of philosophers:

For example, Crescens, who made his nest in the capital, outdid all others in his lust for boys, and was completely devoted to money-making. This man who claimed to hold death in contempt was himself so fearful of death that he arranged it so that death was inflicted on Justin, as it was on me,^[72] as though it were an evil—because he [Justin] would preach the truth, and prove that the philosophers were greedy cheats.^[73]

Once again the Christian voice is compared and contrast to that of the philosopher. In both Justin and Tatian, Crescens is presented as exemplifying and encapsulating all the vices of pagan philosophers as a general class. Tatian’s account in particular is dominated by stereotypes, that occupy the negative poles of his binary rhetorical schema. Crescens indulges in the paradigmatic urban vice of pederasty; he is obsessed with money-making; he affects to despise death, but in reality considers it a “great evil.” Crescens’ role as the embodiment of all that is corrupt serves to offset the image of Justin (and by extension Christians in general). The effect is to describe a triangular relationship between Christians, philosophers and sophists: Christians and philosophers alike define themselves against sophists; philosophers notionally aim for the same truths as Christianity, but take the wrong route.

Of greater interest to us now, however, is Tatian’s reminiscence of the alleged persecution of the pious Justin by Crescens. Not only does Tatian directly echo Justin’s own account in the Second Apology; he also, apparently, claims that the same thing happened to Justin as has happened to himself (καθάπερ καὶ ἐμέ). “Tatian’s reduplication,” comments Candida Moss, “places himself in a literary mimetic relationship with the martyred Justin.”^[74] Crescens, then—the only contemporary pagan mentioned by name by Tatian in To the Greeks serves as a foil to both authors’ self-construction as paradoxical philosophers.

In the background of both authors’ self-presentation lie not only the Jewish tradition of Maccabean martyrs (about which neither author has anything to say, in this anti-Jewish phase of early Christianity), but also the figure of Socrates, the dominant model (for many Christians, as for pagans alike) for the idea of the unwavering philosopher who rejected worldly misprision, and was put to death for holding true to his beliefs.^[75] Crescens plays the role of Anytus and Meletus, the jealous antagonists of Socrates who conspired to bring about his death. Justin, indeed, specifically identifies Socrates as a proto-Christian who “sought by true reason and examination to bring this [the fact that the Greek gods are really demons] to light, and to lead men away from demons,” and who was executed for that very reason,^[76] and explicitly compares the situation of present-day Christians (the demons “act in the same way towards us.”)^[77] If Justin himself titled his text Apology (which is far from certain: see above), this will have strengthened his self-identification with Socrates. The figure of Socrates is thus important to both not just for his quasi-monotheistic beliefs but also for the idea of biographies of risk, which was so important to philosophical identity in the 2d century. In this respect both can be compared to Dio Chrysostom, whose self-aware adoption of Socratic and other personae to narrate the story of his alleged exile have been well discussed.^[78]

These two passages have been heavily influential in the shaping of the reception particularly of Justin; his epiclesis “Martyr” depends upon them. Eusebius was a crucial conduit: his Ecclesiastical History^[79] takes the two passages as testimony (the only testimony he mentions, which therefore presumably means it was the only testimony he knew)^[80] for Justin’s martyrdom. From there, Justin’s reputation was born. There are, however, quite clearly problems with using these passages as evidence in this way. Justin cannot offer evidence for his own martyrdom—as indeed Eusebius knows full well (he has to take Justin’s words as a “prophecy,” πρόρρησιν).^[81] Tatian’s claim that he himself has been killed in the way as Justin, meanwhile, is obviously bizarre.^[82] Once again, however, textual problems get in the way. Nesselrath’s text of the passage quoted above states that Crescens arranged for death to befall Justin “as it did me, as though it were an evil” (καθάπερ καὶ ἐμὲ ὡς κακῷ). This reading, however, reflects a mediaeval correction to the nonsensical text that is transmitted in the solitary extant manuscript (which originally read καθάπερ καὶ ἐμὲ οὓς κακῷ). We have no way of telling whether the corrector of the text had access to a better text of Tatian, or was simply guessing. Meanwhile our textual tradition of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, where the passage is quoted, uniformly transmits a different reading: Crescens arranged Justin’s death “as though it were a great evil” (καθάπερ μεγάλῳ κακῷ).^[83] This looks prima facie like a much more plausible reading: on this version, Tatian is not claiming to have been executed (!) at all.

Nevertheless it must be admitted that the text is messy and poorly evidenced at this point. It is perfectly possible that Tatian made some kind of claim about his own prospects for martyrdom, or even that he had already been martyred (in the way that someone who steals from a crime boss might say “I am a dead man”). Nor, it must also be admitted, is he at all specific about how Crescens allegedly engineered Justin’s death. Modern commentators tend to assume that he told the Roman authorities that Justin was a Christian, and this led to judicial trial and execution;^[84] but this assumption imports a martyrology that is not explicit in the text (and, indeed, leans on martyrological theology). Tatian may have been deliberately vague: perhaps the explanation was mundane (Crescens failed to call for help when Justin was hit by a chariot, passed on a communicable illness to him, or accelerated his death through stress with his acerbic counterarguments). Or perhaps Crescens had nothing at all to do with Justin’s death, and Tatian made it up. Perhaps Crescens never existed at all. The one thing we can say for sure is that Tatian, as Justin’s self-appointed successor, felt himself bound to close the loop that Justin had opened up, by “fulfilling” his predecessor’s prophecy of a Christ-like execution at the hands of Crescens; and this ramped up the fictionalisation of Justin’s status.

This, then, is a case where analysing Justin and Tatian in terms of rhetorical role-playing bites hard. We have no way of telling whether the historical Justin deserves the surname “Martyr”; that is a conclusion that will be hard to swallow for some. What we can say with some confidence, however—and this will be even harder for those who cleave to the idea of “Justin Martyr”—is that that he fashioned an autobiographical narrative of martyrdom for himself, without knowing whether it would be fulfilled, in order to enhance his own self-projection as a free-speaking parrhesiast; and that Tatian, Eusebius and the late antique authors of the alleged martyr acts progressively rewrote his own autobiography of (imminent) risk.

5 I, Tatian

Let us turn, finally, to the end of Tatian’s To the Greeks, where he offers the most vivid autobiography to be found anywhere in any of the so-called apologists:

All this that I have expounded I have learned not from any other (οὐ παρ’ ἄλλου μαθών), but after travelling many a land (Tatian’s πολλὴν . . . ἐπιφοιτήσας γῆν), first practising sophistry in your manner (σοφιστεύσας τὰ ὑμέτερα) and familiarising myself with many tricks and ideas, and then residing in the city of the Romans and learning about the subtleties of the statues which they took from you and brought to their land. I do not seek to fortify myself with the beliefs of others, as is the custom of most; no, I want the contents of the account that I have composed to be entirely things that I myself have apprehended. For that reason, I bade farewell to Roman arrogance and Athenian logic-chopping (incoherent belief systems) and dedicated myself to “barbarian philosophy,” as you call it.^[85] I started writing about how this is older than your disciplines, and then postponed because of the pressing nature of my account; but now that I have the time, I shall try to speak about its beliefs. But do not cavil at our learning, or contrive some counterargument full of scurrilous nonsense against us, saying “Tatian is trying to go beyond the Greeks (ὑπὲρ τοὺς Ἕλληνας) and the innumerable host of philosophers by fiddling around with his barbarian beliefs!”^[86]

As Laura Nasrallah has stressed, this narrative of Christian becoming resembles that of Justin in the Dialogue with Trypho, where the author presents himself as having spent time with a Stoic, then a Peripatetic, then a Pythagorean, and finally a Platonist, before meeting a Christian, who was instrumental in his conversion. Both present themselves as coming finally to Christianity after a journey testing out other doctrines.^[87] As ever, Tatian binds his identity closely to that of Justin. As Nasrallah also points out, the idea of the personal philosophical quest is something of a topos in the era. Crucially, we should add, all such narratives ultimately allude to Socrates, and in particular to Plato’s Apology (the importance of which for both Justin and Tatian we have already noted). In Plato’s text, similarly, Socrates is said to have acquired his wisdom from personal experience, undertaking a “wandering” (πλάνην)^[88] and studying with and testing out “those with a reputation for wisdom” (τῶν δοκούντων σοφῶν εἶναι).^[89] Underlying the Socratic model, moreover, is that of Homer’s Odysseus, whose wanderings gave him a form of wisdom. The two personae are blended by Dio Chrysostom in his account of how he “converted” from rhetoric to philosophy;^[90] and it is hard not to hear an Odyssean echo in Tatian’s claim to have “travelled many a land” (πολλὴν . . . ἐπιφοιτήσας γῆν), too.^[91] Paradoxically, then, Tatian’s presentation of himself as intellectually self-sufficient, and non-dependent on others, is expressed via a familiar form of literary mimesis. This gives a particular edge to the extraordinary ventriloquism with which the passage closes, wherein the author imagines his audience accusing him of trying to out-Greek the Greeks. That, arguably, is precisely what Tatian is trying to do, at multiple levels. The phrase “beyond the Greeks” (ὑπὲρ τοὺς Ἕλληνας) might even be read as a conscious echo of the text’s title, To the Greeks (πρὸς Ἕλληνας).

That final sentence is also striking for the prominence of Tatian’s own name. This reappears in the text’s coda:

Such, men of Greece, is the text I, Tatian, philosopher in the barbarian manner, have composed for you (Ταῦθ’ ὑμῖν, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἕλληνες, ὁ κατὰ βαρβάρους φιλοσοφῶν Τατιανὸς συνέταξα). I was born in the land of the Assyrians (ἐν τῇ τῶν Ἀσσυρίων γῇ), and educated first in your doctrines (παιδευθεὶς . . . πρῶτον μὲν τὰ ὑμέτερα), but later in the matters that I propose currently to proclaim. Well then, given that I know who god is and what he has created, I present myself to you: I present myself to you, prepared as I am for the examination of my beliefs (τὴν ἀνάκρισιν τῶν δογμάτων), though to my mind the existence of god’s kingdom remains beyond denial.^[92]

Tatian’s use of this autobiographical σφραγίς, found elsewhere in historiography^[93] and historicising romance,^[94] performs several functions. First, it readvertises his name, adding in what Alexander Beecroft has called a “scene of authorship,” which is to say a fleshing out of the author’s background and how he came to write this text.^[95] As Beecroft argues, successful ancient Greek texts were typically attached to an author, and authorship entailed not just a name but also a sense of self.^[96] It is striking, indeed, that in the final sentence author and book become conflated, as Tatian “presents myself to you” for the examination of the readership. Second, this self-aggrandising spotlighting of Tatian’s name draws together all of the threads to do with identity in the text as a whole. The only contemporary names mentioned in To the Greeks are those of Crescens, Justin and Tatian himself; the personalities of the first two are locked tightly to Tatian’s own self-representation. The epilogue revives the polarities that structure the text as a whole, pugnaciously opposing Greek (“you”) and barbarian (“we”), in an ostentatious reversal of conventions.^[97] This reversal, of course, demonstrates an awareness and cunning subversion of Greek protocols, a point that reinforces his claim to have mastered Greek παιδεία in the past. The pretension to worldliness expressed in the journey from the “land of the Assyrians” to Greece and beyond undergirds his promotion of an allegedly universal wisdom that transcends the ethnocentric wisdom of the Greeks, and will survive their “examination.” Even as he articulates this ambition, however, Tatian remains locked into Hellenocentric categories: the barbarian persona that he cultivates is, inevitably, structured by Greek projections of alterity, and by the Greek models of the cosmopolitan wandering philosopher.

6 Conclusion: Confessions of a sophist

The publication in 2018 of the 4th volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality refocused attention onto the nature of the early Christian voice. According to Foucault, the emergence of Christian identity is intimately linked to a new way of speaking truth about the self: confession, the full exposure of the body’s secrets to the scrutiny of God and his community on earth.^[98] For Foucault, confession was the Christian version of Greco-Roman παρρησία (“freedom of speech”), the truth spoken by fearless philosophers to tyrannical power; but whereas παρρησία marked a bilateral relationship between the embodied self and the tyrant, confession indicated a wholly new understanding of the relationship between the self and the flesh, which was at once integral to selfhood and separate from it.^[99] Indeed, Foucault saw the invention of confession as a decisive break between antiquity and the post-antique world, the thread connecting the Christianisation of the Greco-Roman world with bourgeois modernity. Already in the 1st volume of the History of Sexuality, Foucault had identified the “continuous incitement to discourse and to truth” that underpins modern European conceptions of sexual identity as rooted in an extension of Christian confession beyond the narrow confines of the Church.^[100] “Western man,” he wrote, “has become a confessing animal.”^[101]

Foucault’s thoughts on confession have been influential, and indeed they themselves channel influential models for thinking about Christian voice. But they are not without their problems. As so often with Foucault’s thought, the genealogical model he adopts is linear, unidirectional and teleological, as if there were but one (western) history, and as if the role of ancient history is simply to challenge, through varieties of reverse-engineering, the present. Beyond that, however, Foucault’s readings privilege the earnestly normative,^[102] and leave little room for the dynamism and complexity characteristic of many ancient texts. Finally, like all narratives insisting on “Christian invention,” Les aveux de la chair overstates historical rupture in a way that always risks backsliding into theologically inflected successionism (or even supersessionism).

The voice of the so-called apologists Justin and Tatian, as we have seen, is not confessional, or at least not straightforwardly so (even if language that would later be used of confession is on occasion found).^[103] The voice they adopt is, rather, of the kind that we hear in 2d-century Greek culture as a whole: performative, mimetic, fractured and complex, rooted in rhetorical self-presentation but encompassing many other generic modes including fiction, invective and satire. This is not necessarily to doubt the earnestness of Justin’s and Tatian’s faith. Nor does it mean that Justin and Tatian necessarily misrepresented the level of risk that attached to the expression of their message (though it seems likely to me that it was indeed overdramatised). Nor does it mean that they compromised the “purity” of their Christian voices by blending in “alien” elements drawn from Greek rhetoric. Christians did not become Greco-Roman in the 2d century, for Christianity was never not Greco-Roman. But Justin and Tatian negotiated their relationship with their intellectual peers in what was for Christianity a radically new way, taking onboard the new resources available at the time for impersonation, rhetorical role-playing, and indeed self-fictionalisation. Christianity prospered in this era not because it was rooted in deep theology—theology was a later development—but because it was nimble, resourceful and adaptive. For Justin and Tatian, the Christian voice was not confessional, in the sense of being summoned from the depths of the soul; it was, rather, lent authority by sophisticated, metaleptic transitions between different cultural idioms and different modes of self-presentation and self-fictionalisation.