Saint Aristides the Philosopher
Saint Aristides was a native of Athens, and, like Saint Justin, a convert to the Faith of which he became an apologist. The Church historian Eusebius tells us that he composed a defense of the Christian Faith and presented it to the Emperor Hadrian, and affirms that this Apology was preserved even till his own time (he was a contemporary of Saint Constantine the Great). He also connects the Saint’s presentation of his Apology with Hadrian’s first visit to Athens, which took place in 125–26.
For centuries his Apology was thought to be lost. In 1878 a fragment of it, naming its author as “Aristides, the Philosopher of Athens,” was found in Armenian translation made in the fifth century.
A nearly complete Syriac translation of it was discovered in the library of the Monastery of Saint Catherine on Sinai in the following decade. The title of the Syriac version suggests that his apology was presented rather to Antoninus Pius, Hadrian’s successor. It runs, “Caesar Titus Hadrianus Antoninus, Worshipful and Clement, from Marcianus Aristides, philospher of Athens.” Hadrian was also part of Antoninus’s full name, and it has been suggested by Harris that earlier writers, before Eusebius, might possibly have been misled by that to mistake him for the Emperor Hadrian. (The Apology of Aristides, Harris and Robinson, 1893, p. 8). Harris printed the Syriac version of the Apology, and allowed Robinson to read it while in proof. Shortly afterwards, Robinson reports, he happened upon the Latin translation of the life of Saints Barlaam and Joasaph, and, in the speech made by Nachor defending the Faith in Christ and ridiculing the pagan religions, he recognized the Apology of Aristides which he had just read in Syriac (p. 67), so that by the end of the 19th century Greek, Syriac, and Armenian versions of his Apology had been discovered.
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