Athenagoras’ Corpus
The Works of Athenagoras of Athens
Athenagoras of Athens
A philosopher’s calm, addressed to emperors who could have killed him for it.
- Catch rate
- 150 / 255
- Base research
- 70
- Stat total
- 204
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
Two short works — a plea to the emperors and a defense of the resurrection — argued with a philosopher’s calm rather than a polemicist’s heat. Modest Contend that grows as its arguments deepen.
Athenagoras survives in a single main witness (the Arethas codex, A.D. 914) — a clear text, but a narrow thread, so Defend is middling.
Little read outside specialists — slow to the debate floor.
Cited for this book
Athenagoras of Athens (fl. c. A.D. 176), who styled himself “the Athenian, philosopher, and Christian.” His two surviving works — the Embassy and On the Resurrection — reach us through the Arethas codex (Parisinus graecus 451, A.D. 914), from which every later manuscript descends.
Development
A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Embassy | History | Argument | 50 | 100% | 20 |
| 1 | On the Resurrection | Eschatology | Argument | 55 | 100% | 15 |
| 1 | Expose Contradictions | Rationality | Status | — | 100% | 15 |
| 10 | Word Made Flesh | Christology | Argument | 70 | 100% | 10 |
| 14 | We Pray for Caesar | Rationality | Argument | 55 | 100% | 20 |
| 18 | Body and Soul | Anthropology | Argument | 60 | 100% | 15 |
| 25 | Diagonalization | Biblical Theology | Argument | 85 | 100% | 5 |
Read it: The Lute and the Player
The passages the Scriptorium holds on screen, word for word from a public-domain translation. Written in Koine Greek.
“If, therefore, the world is an instrument in tune, and moving in well-measured time, I adore the Being who gave its harmony, and strikes its notes, and sings the accordant strain, and not the instrument. For at the musical contests the adjudicators do not pass by the lute-players and crown the lutes.”
Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians 16 (trans. Pratten, ANF 2, public domain).
“But among us you will find uneducated persons, and artisans, and old women, who, if they are unable in words to prove the benefit of our doctrine, yet by their deeds exhibit the benefit arising from their persuasion of its truth: they do not rehearse speeches, but exhibit good works; when struck, they do not strike again; when robbed, they do not go to law.”
Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians 11 (trans. Pratten, ANF 2, public domain).
“What, then, are those teachings in which we are brought up? ‘I say unto you, Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; pray for them that persecute you.’ … who of them have so purged their souls as, instead of hating their enemies, to love them; and, instead of speaking ill of those who have reviled them, to bless them; and to pray for those who plot against their lives?”
Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians 11 (trans. Pratten, ANF 2, public domain).
“But the Son of God is the Logos of the Father, in idea and in operation; for after the pattern of Him and by Him were all things made, the Father and the Son being one. And, the Son being in the Father and the Father in the Son, in oneness and power of spirit, the understanding and reason of the Father is the Son of God.”
Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians 10 (trans. Pratten, ANF 2, public domain).
“Who, then, would not be astonished to hear men who speak of God the Father, and of God the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and who declare both their power in union and their distinction in order, called atheists?”
Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians 10 (trans. Pratten, ANF 2, public domain).
“For it does not belong to the same person to regard the very foetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God’s care, and when it has passed into life, to kill it… We, deeming that to see a man put to death is much the same as killing him, have abjured such spectacles.”
Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians 35 (trans. Pratten, ANF 2, public domain).
Athenagoras the Athenian, "philosopher and Christian," addressing the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus. Internal evidence dates it to A.D. 176–177.
He is answering three specific charges: atheism, cannibalism, and incest. Chapter 35 is his answer to cannibalism — and the answer is that Christians will not even watch a man die in the arena.
Read chapter 11 in its setting. Athenagoras has just described professional philosophers as men who "reduce syllogisms, and clear up ambiguities, and explain etymologies." Then he points at the old women. The old women win.
"Their power in union and their distinction in order" — that is remarkably precise Trinitarian language for the 170s, and he uses it to make the atheism charge collapse.
No early historian mentions Athenagoras at all; Methodius cites him about a century later. Everything we have descends from the Arethas codex, Parisinus graecus 451, copied in A.D. 914.