Wednesday, January 3, 2024

Thomas Gaston on "God Manifestation" in Ignatius of Antioch

  

GOD-MANIFEST

 

In these letters we frequently encounter the concept of manifestation. He writes of Jesus being “manifest [ephane] at the end.” (Ignatius, Magesians, 247 [6.1]) But he also writes of God being manifest through Jesus. He writes about “one God, who manifested [phanerosas] himself through Jesus Christ his Son.” (magnesians, 249 [8:2]) This manifestation was, in part, through the actions of Jesus, “who was pleasing in every way to the one who sent him.” But for Ignatius, this process is much more intimate, such that he can talk of the time “when God became manifest [phaneroumenou] in a human way.” (Ignatius, Ephesians, 239 [19:3])

 

In Ephesians 7:2 Ignatius describes Jesus as “God come in flesh” (as per Greek and Latin MS). There is significant variant in the Syriac and patristic quotations: “in man, God”. (The Armenian has “God and Son of Man”. [Gilliam, Ignatius, 36]) Of these two main options, both are problematic and later textual alteration has been proposed for both. Either one, taken out of context, might be taken to imply incarnation. However, given Ignatius’s repeated statements about manifestation, it is simpler to conclude that this is his sense here.

 

Schoedel explains the rationale of Ignatius’ talk of manifestation by arguing that the transcendence of God in Ignatius implied a need for intermediaries, as others will conclude in the second century. Jesus is “the atemporal and invisible God manifesting himself in space and time.” (Schoedel, Ignatius, 20) This is probably true, though perhaps misleading, as it implies that for Ignatius the problem was how a transcendent God could interact with the world. He gives no sense of that. Rather for Ignatius the “problem” is how Jesus can meet two different functional requirements. Jesus had to be passible so that he could suffer for believers, but Jesus also had to reveal God to me. For Ignatius, Jesus is not God-incarnate but rather God-manifest, that is, a human manifestation of God. (Thomas Edmund Gaston, Dynamic Monarchianism: The Earliest Christology? [2d ed.; Nashville: Theophilus Press, 2023], 208-9)

 

The phrase “God come in the flesh,” or ‘’God become incarnate is the reading in Greek and Latin MS, but the patristic quotations read “in man, God,” Grant argues that the latter is the original as it is more coherent with Ignatus’ style, while the former shows signs of later Christology (Grant, Early Christian Doctrine, 39). Schoedel disagrees, suspecting that the patristic reading was a later change made “to avoid any suggestions of an Arian or Apollinarian Christology which denied a human soul to Christ” (Schoedel, Ignatius, 61). (Ibid., 208-9 n. 69)