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Otherwise the exactness of the parallel is great; and it is thrown the more into relief when we compare the corresponding passage in St. Luke. The quotation is completed in the next chapter of Athenagoras' work: Athenagoras, Leg. pro Christ. 12. For if ye love, he says, them which love and lend to them which lend to you, what reward shall ye have? Matt. v. 46.
Ibid., XXXVIII. See also V, VIII, and Athenagoras: Embassy, VII; Clem. Alex.: Exhortion to Heathen, VI, XI; Stromata, I, 13; II, 2, 11; V, 14; Tertullian: Apology, XVIII; Methodius: Miscellaneous Fragments, 1. St. Clem. Alex.: Stromata, IV, 25. For a few among many references, see: St. Irenaeus: Against Heresies, V, i, 1; St. Clem.
In Sicily itself Hermocrates, the great Syracusan patriot, repeatedly warned his countrymen of the coming storm, advising them to sink all feuds in resistance to the common enemy. He was opposed by Athenagoras, a democrat who, true to his principles, suspected the story as part of a militarist plot to overthrow the constitution.
When we consider that in the time of Athenagoras, or very soon after, there were three authors living who spoke of the Gospels in the way we have shown, and quoted them in the way we shall now show, why assign these quotations to defunct Gospels of whose contents we are perfectly ignorant, when we have them substantially in Gospels which occupied the same place in the Church then as now?
No mention whatever is made of Athenagoras either by Eusebius or Jerome, though he appears to have been an author of a certain importance, two of whose works, an Apology addressed to Marcus Aurelius and Commodus and a treatise on the Resurrection, are still extant. The genuineness of neither of these works is doubted.
Against the Dardanians, who were now retiring out of Macedonia, he sent Athenagoras with the light infantry and the greater part of the cavalry, and ordered him to hang on their rear as they retreated; and, by cutting off their hindmost troops, make them more cautious for the future of leading out their armies from home.
But the king, not daring to risk so hastily a general engagement, sent four hundred Trallians, who are a tribe of the Illyrians, as we have said in another place, and three hundred Cretans; adding to this body of infantry an equal number of horse, under the command of Athenagoras, one of his nobles honoured with the purple, to make an attack on the enemy's cavalry.
He introduced a taste for philosophy among the Christians; and, though Athenagoras rather deserves that honour, he was called the founder of the catechetical school which gave birth to the series of learned Christian writers that flourished in Alexandria for the next century.
Christian apologists of the second century, such as Tatian, Athenagoras, and very specially Justin Martyr, implicitly relied upon them as indisputable. Even the oracles of the pagan Sibyl were regarded by Christian writers with an awe and reverence little short of that which they inspired in the minds of the heathen themselves.
Athenagoras, in addressing his book, in times posterior to these, to the emperors M. Aurelius Antoninus, and L. Aurelius Commodus, addresses them only by the title of "great princes." In short titles were not in use. They did not creep in, so as to be commonly used, till after the statues of the emperors had begun to be worshipped by the military as a legal and accustomary homage.
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