ABSTRACT
The second and third centuries were a profoundly important and uniquely fertile period for the early church in terms of the manner in which it assessed and re-articulated the evangelical and apostolic data it had received about Jesus. The Christology of this era has customarily commanded less attention than that given to the theologies of the New Testament, or to those of the fourth century or “Golden Age” of patristic christological thought. Often the transitional age of the second and third centuries was regarded as disappointingly vague. Scholars, alert to the deep subtleties of the New Testament literature, tended to feel it was an era of decline. It was generally regarded by Protestant scholarship up to the twentieth century as an age which continued the falling off in inspirational quality characteristic of the later Catholic Epistles, as compared with the evangelical or Pauline materials. In this same period, Catholic patristic scholarship found these ancient writings relevant only insofar as they could provide the apologetic materials of a defense of eucharistic realism, or the antiquity of episcopal governance, or evidence in support of Roman primacy. Twentieth-century scholars repaired some of the neglect, but even so, still tended to look upon the second and third centuries as simply an antechamber for the more important patristic epochs that would follow, especially seeing the christological formulae of this time as “undeveloped” except when they tended to have an afterlife. By this notion of being theologically undeveloped or even defective, scholars usually, and anachronistically, almost always meant “not in line with” or “up to the standard of” classical Nicene orthodoxy. On both counts, the Christology of these centuries seemed doubly enigmatic to commentators and was often passed over too quickly. Perhaps of all ages, it is our own, with its recent and remarkable advances in genetics, that is in a position to reaf¬rm the signi¬cance of embryology as important for what it reveals in se and not merely for that which it adumbrates. If so, these centuries should rightly be looked at once more, not solely to judge them for how they “bridged” eras before and after, but particularly for what they had to say on their own terms.
