In First Apology 14, Justin speaks of following “the only unbegotten God through His Son (Gk: θεῷ δὲ μόνῳ τῷ ἀγεννήτῳ διὰ τοῦ υἱοῦ)" (ANF 1:167). Leslie William Barnard, in a note to her translation of this text, notes that
Justin, with other second-century Christian
writers, consistently uses agennētos,
(“unbegotten”) to describe the transcendence of God, rather than agenētos (“uncreated”), which he nowhere
uses. In Dial. 5 Justin states “for
God alone is unbegotten (agennētos)
and incorruptible, and therefore He is God; but all other things after Him are
created (gennētos) and corruptible.”
It would then seem that for Justin agennētos
means “underived,” “ultimate,” and that gennētos
means “derived.” He is using these terms in a sense that would later have been
expressed by agenētos and genētos. In the second century the
denotations “unbegotten” and “uncreated” were virtually identical. But when the
main interest of theology turned from monotheism to Christology, the spelling agennētos raised agonizing difficulties
and proved a cornerstone of the Arian system. If Christ was not agennētos, but begotten, then was He to
be reckoned with created things? The solution for Christian orthodoxy lay in
making a firm distinction between agennētos
and agenētos and by placing most
stress on the latter as describing uncaused Being. But in the second century
such fine distinctions were not needed. The view that God is transcendent,
separated from matter, uncaused and unbegotten is ultimately Platonic. A full
discussion in given by G. L. Prestige, God
in Patristic Thought (London, 1936), 39–43. For the classical background in
Plato and Aristotle, see Wartelle, 250.
On the term “τῷ ἀγεννήτῳ,”
Gildersleeve notes that
Otto
would now read everywhere with Ashton and Waterland ἀγένητος, ‘unoriginated,’
instead of ἀγέννητος, ‘unbegotten,’ and cites a large number of passages to
show that at this period God was called ἀγένητος, not ἀγέννητος. See Athenag.
Suppl. 4, 15. Böhringer (ap. Ott.) says that Justin calls God the unbegotten,
partly in contrast to the begetting of gods which went on so freely in
polytheistic Paganism (c. 25), partly by way of distinction from the begotten
Son, the Logos. (Basil L. Gildersleeve, The Apologies of Justin Martyr, to
Which is Appended the Epistle to Diognetus [New York: Harper and Brothers
Publishers, 1877], 132)
