Hort's Lecture on Hippolytus and Clement of Alexandria

Fenton John Anthony Hort

            In 1890, Fenton John Anthony Hort (half of the Westcott-Hort duo) delivered a series of six lectures on ante-Nicene fathers.  They were published in 1895, a few years after his death.  What follows here, with slight adjustments, is the fourth lecture in the series.

LECTURE IV:  HIPPOLYTUS AND CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA

            In Justin the Samaritan, who taught and who died a martyr’s death at Rome, we have had before us the most characteristic of the Greek apologists of the second century, a man who went about clad only in the traditional philosopher’s cloak, and who pleaded the cause of the Christians against the assaults of magistrates and populace on the ground that their faith and conduct should commend itself to philosophers and lovers of right reason.

            In Irenaeus, the disciple of Polycarp at Smyrna, who became bishop of Lyons and took an active part in promoting the peace of the Church when endangered by the intolerance of Victor, Bishop of Rome, we have had the first great theologian, in the strict sense of the word, whose writings are to any great extent preserved to us.  His great refutation of the leading doctrines of the teachers called Gnostics, is a still imperfectly worked mine of great thoughts on God's dealings with mankind through the ages, founded on the idea of the Word before and after the Incarnation.

            A few words are due to a disciple of Irenaeus, who forty years ago would have been commonly reckoned an obscure and unimportant Father, viz. Hippolytus.  Shortly after that date there was published from a manuscript then lately brought to Paris an elaborate Greek account and refutation of early heresies, chiefly ‘Gnostic,’ which it was soon recognized could not well have any other author than Hippolytus.  There is no real doubt about the matter, though, for quite intelligible reasons, a few still hold otherwise.  The author writes as a bishop, and Hippolytus is sometimes called Bishop of Rome, sometimes bishop of Portus, the commercial port of Rome.

            What he really was, is still an open question.  The most commonly received view is that which was suggested by Döllinger, that for at least a certain time Callistus and Hippolytus were respectively recognized by different parties in the Roman Church as each the only true and lawful Bishop of Rome, though eventually Callistus alone was officially acknowledged as having been bishop.  The treatise itself is one of much value for the extracts which it gives from Gnostical writings.  But of more general interest is the narrative of some of the inner history of the Roman Church under two successive bishops.  After every allowance has been made for the partisanship of the writer, the picture is not an agreeable one. But this lies outside our proper subject.  Of the part taken by Hippolytus it is enough to say that he regarded Callistus and

the dominant authorities of the Roman Church as dangerously lax in their admission of penitents to communion, and he likewise accused them of favoring a doctrine not far from Sabellianism, while he himself, from the manner in which he expounded the doctrine of the Word, a doctrine which evidently had little meaning for them, was accused by them of setting up two Gods to be worshipped. 

            The end of the story seems to be supplied by a curious early Roman record which states that “Pontianus the bishop” (the second after Callistus) and “Hippolytus the presbyter were banished to Sardinia, to the island of deadly climate.”  Perhaps, as has been suggested, the Roman magistrates took this way of enforcing peace in the Christian community, by getting rid of the two leaders together.  From another record forming part of the same document we learn that the Roman Church in the middle of the fourth century kept on the same day the festival of Hippolytus in one cemetery and of Pontianus in another, both evidently as martyrs.  Apparently they had both perished in the mines of Sardinia, and their bodies had been received back in peace together.  According to a somewhat confused tradition Hippolytus before his death had advised his followers to return to the communion of the Roman Church authorities.

            In the fourth and later centuries the strangest and most contradictory legends of his martyrdom became current.  By a singular good fortune a contemporary memorial of him has been preserved, such as we possess for no other early Father whatever.  Above three centuries ago a large part of an ancient sitting statue was dug up near Rome, and in due time recognized by the very interesting inscriptions on the base to have been no other than Hippolytus, though his name does not appear, and to have been erected shortly after his death.  In the great hall of the

Christian Museum at St. John Lateran, as you walk up between two lines of early Christian sarcophagi of the highest interest for their carving, you are faced by this great statue of Hippolytus looking down upon you from the platform at the end.

Ancient statue of Hippolytus

            Hippolytus was one of the three most learned Greek Fathers of his time, mostly the early part of the third century.  Of one of them Julius Africanus, of whom only fragments remain, I propose to say no more.  To Origen we shall come presently.  Hippolytus’ writings chiefly fall under two heads, doctrinal treatises of a controversial kind, and books connected with the study of Scripture, either actual commentaries or essays at constructing some sort of Scripture chronology.  His defense of the Gospel and Apocalypse of St. John against certain contemporary gainsayers might be reckoned under either head.  He was especially interested in the books of Daniel and Revelation, and in some of the questions which they suggest.  To him they were by no means questions of idle curiosity; for in the new hostility of the Roman state, as shown in the persecution of Septimius Severus, he supposed that he saw a fulfillment of apocalyptic prophecy.  All that remains of him however, with the exception of the great treatise on heresies, itself far from complete, makes up only a small volume. This is the more remarkable as the fame of his writings spread far and wide through the East, though the story of his life was unknown outside Rome or else forgotten.

            Hippolytus, following Irenaeus, has conducted us well into the third century.  We must now go back half a generation or so to make acquaintance with a different region and a different way of apprehending Christianity and its relation to the world, though no doubt to a certain extent anticipated by Justin Martyr.  Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile had long been a special home of Greek learning and philosophy, a place where the culture of Egypt, Asia, and Europe met together. But of still greater moment was the nature of the Judaism which had arisen in the midst of the vast Jewish population of the city, a Judaism almost wholly detached from the legal influences which dominated the Judaism of Palestine, and aiming especially at the comparison and harmonizing of the Old Testament, and specially the Pentateuch, with the better forms of Greek philosophy.  Of this Graecized Judaism we have invaluable examples in Philo’s writings. We know almost nothing of Alexandrian Christianity in its earlier days, but evidently it took its shape in no small degree from the type of Judaism which was already current in the place.

            In the middle part of the second century we hear of a Christian Catechetical school at Alexandria, probably for the instruction of the highly educated converts who joined the Church. The second name preserved to us from the list of its heads or chief instructors is that of the Sicilian Pantaenus, best remembered now as having gone on a missionary journey to India. Among his pupils was Clement of Alexandria, the Father who next claims our attention, and who often speaks of him, chiefly only under the title ‘the elder,’ with enthusiastic affection.  Clement himself is said to have been an Athenian and probably was so.  Profoundly Christian as he is, there is no Father who shows anything like the same familiarity with the ancient classical literature of Greece, especially the poetical literature.  
            It is not clear whether he was of Christian or of heathen parents, but we know from himself that he traveled in early life, and came under the influence of at least six different Christian teachers in different lands, whom he calls “blessed and truly memorable men.”  In Greece he met the first, an Ionian, i.e. probably from Western Asia Minor: two others in Magna Graecia, the Greek-speaking South part of Italy, one from Middle Syria and another from Egypt. Whether he went to Rome, as one would expect, does not appear: at all events he refers to no teacher met there.  From Italy he crossed to the East, and there he learned from an Assyrian, supposed to be Justin’s scholar Tatian, and from another, in Palestine, one of Jewish birth.  The last, he says, in order, but virtually the first, he found lurking in Egypt, and there he rested.  He had found Pantaenus.  There is reason to suppose that after a time he became a colleague of Pantaenus in the Catechetical school, and at all events when Pantaenus died he succeeded him, probably somewhere about the year 200.

            He was now or soon after a presbyter of the Church.  But two or three years later through a change in the policy of the Emperor Septimius Severus a persecution broke out, which fell with much severity on Alexandria, and the teachers of the Catechetical school, evidently including Clement, took refuge elsewhere. A few years after this we have a glimpse of him through a scrap of a letter of his pupil Alexander, fortunately preserved by Eusebius.  Alexander was at this time apparently bishop of a Cappadocian church; certainly he was in prison for conscience sake; and he wrote a congratulatory letter out of his prison on their recent choice of a new bishop, sending it by Clement whom he calls “the blessed presbyter, a man virtuous and well tried”: who by the Providence of God was then with him and had stablished and increased the Church.  

            Clement cannot have lived much longer.  In another letter to Origen, written before 216, Alexander again speaks affectionately of Clement as of Pantaenus, both as now departed.  These testimonies are of value as showing that Clement’s withdrawal from the approaching persecution was due to no selfish cowardice, but to such rightful avoidance of useless sacrifice of life as had been commanded by our Lord Himself when He bade the Apostles, “When they persecute you in one city, flee ye into another.”  For Alexander knew what martyrdom meant.  He was made Bishop of Jerusalem under very peculiar circumstances, partly in consequence of what were regarded as Divine monitions, partly on account of what he had bravely endured in the persecution.  It was the same to the end of his life.  In the year 250 he was brought before the magistrates in the Decian persecution, and thrown into prison, and there he died.

            Clement’s chief writings form a connected series. First comes the Hortatory Address to the Greeks; the purpose is to show that the Christian faith accomplishes what the heathen religions and philosophies vainly sought. It is too florid in style, and overloaded with superfluous illustrations. But it is inspired by the purest Christian fervor, and, apart from details, its general drift is at once lofty and true.  Next comes the Paidagogos, or Tutor.  The Tutor is not, as we might have guessed, the book itself; nor is he a man. It is none other than Christ the Word of the Father, the Tutor of mankind, educating them always in love and for their benefit, sometimes by gifts, sometimes by chastisements. The purpose of the book is the guidance of the youthful convert from heathenism in habits belonging to Christian morality.  The heads of this morality are not vague generalities, but practical and concrete enough; e.g. meat and drink, sumptuous furniture, behavior at feasts, laughter, bad language, social behavior, use of perfumes and garlands, sleep, marriage duties, dress and ornaments, use of cosmetics, use of baths, exercises. Alexandria seventeen centuries ago was clearly not so very different a place from towns better known to us.  The permanent interest of these discussions is very great.  Often as we may have to dissent from this or that remark, the wisdom and large-mindedness with which the Paedagogus is written are above all praise.  On the one hand there is an all-pervading sense that the Gospel is meant to be at once a molding and a restraining power in all the pettiest details as in the greatest affairs of life; on the other hand there is no morbid jealousy of the rightful use of God's good gifts, and no addiction to restrictions not commanded by morality, or not required for self-discipline.

            The third treatise of the series is commonly known by the name Stromateis (Stromata, common in modern books, is incorrect).  A stromateus was a long bag of striped canvas, in which bedclothes (stromata) were kept rolled up. Various writers had used this name for books of the nature of miscellanies. By Clement it is in strictness used only of the seven different books of the great treatise, Stromateus 1, 2 etc. His descriptive title, if less quaint, is more really interesting, “Gnostic jottings” (or “notes”) “according to the true philosophy.”

            The Alexandrian convert from heathenism needed instruction not only in the outward behavior proper to the Christian life but also in the deeper grounds of the Christian morality and religion.  In the schools of ordinary Greek philosophy he would learn the value and the dignity of wisdom and knowledge; and now he had to be taught that, whatever might be said to the contrary by unwise Christians, these things had a yet higher place under the Gospel: for the Christ whom it proclaimed was not only the Savior of mankind in the simplest and most obvious sense, but also One in whom lay hid the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

            Clement was not made timorous by the association of the word gnosis, ‘knowledge,’ with the sects called heretical of those whom we now call Gnostics.  Nay, it rather urged him to claim for the Church a word and an idea which could not be spared.  If St. Paul had spoken of a Christian Gnosis falsely so called, he had thereby implied that there was a right Christian Gnosis, a Gnosis truly so called; and this is what Clement set himself to defend and in part to provide.

            It is a leading idea of Clement that the Divinely ordained preparation for the Gospel ran in two parallel lines, that of the Jewish Law and Prophets and that of Greek philosophy.  His exposition of it is somewhat damaged by his following an old but quite unfounded commonplace of Jewish apologetics, much repeated by the Fathers, that the Greek philosophers borrowed largely from the Old Testament.  But the idea itself enabled him to look out both on the past history of mankind and on the mixed world around him with a hopeful and helpful faith.  The treatise is a very discursive one.  The leading heads are such as these:  faith, Christian fear, love, repentance, endurance, martyrdom, the true doctrine of marriage, teaching by signs and allegories, the attribution of human feelings to God in Scripture.  There is much comparison of Christian teaching on these themes with that of Greek philosophers and also of leading Pseudo-Gnostics, usually in a candid and discriminating manner.  But it is no merely theoretical knowledge that is here celebrated.

            The true Gnostic, according to Clement, is “he who imitates God in so far as is possible [for man] omitting nothing pertaining to such growth in the Divine likeness as comes within his reach, practicing self-restraint, enduring, living justly, reigning over his passions, imparting of what he possesses, doing good by word and deed to the best of his power. He, it is said, is greatest in the kingdom of heaven who shall do and teach in imitation of God by showing free grace like His, for the bounties of God are for the common benefit.”  [From Clem. Alex. Strom. ii. p. 480 Potter.]

            The fourth treatise of the series, written after Clement left Alexandria, was called Hypotyposeis, ‘Outlines.’  The greater part of it unhappily is lost, though a fair number of difficult but peculiarly interesting fragments of it have been preserved.  Its subject was apparently fundamental doctrine, while it also contained expository notes on various books of the Bible, including St Paul’s Epistles and four out of the Catholic Epistles.  What remains enables us to see that this first great attempt to bring the Gospel into close relation with the whole range of human thought and experience en other lines than those of the Pseudo-Gnostics contained, as was natural, various theological crudities which could not ultimately be accepted, while it must also have been rich in matter of permanent value.

            In addition to the great series of four, Clement wrote several minor treatises now almost wholly lost, except a tract on the question “What Rich Man Can Be Saved?” It contains the well-known beautiful story of St. John and the young man who became a bandit.

            We must now bid farewell to Clement of Alexandria.  He was not, as far as we know, one of those whose writings have exercised a wide or a powerful influence over subsequent theology. Large portions of his field of thought remained for long ages unworked, or even remain unworked still.  But what he at once humbly and bravely attempted under great disadvantages at the beginning of the third century will have to be attempted afresh with the added experience and knowledge of seventeen Christian centuries more, if the Christian faith is to hold its ground among men; and when the attempt is made, not a few of his thoughts and words will probably shine out with new force, full of light for dealing with new problems.

            A comparatively simple passage from the Stromateis [From Clem. Alex. Strom, vii. p. 864 P.] on faith, knowledge, love, will sufficiently illustrate his way of writing.

            “Knowledge (i.e. Christian knowledge. Gnosis) is so to speak a perfecting of a man as a man, accomplished through acquaintance with Divine things, in demeanor and life and word, harmonious and concordant with itself and with the Divine Word. For by it faith is perfected, this being the only way in which the man who has faith becomes perfect.  Now faith is a kind of inward good, and even without seeking God, it confesses that He is and glorifies Him as being. Hence a man must start from this faith, and when he has made increase in it must by the Grace of God receive as far as he can the knowledge (Gnosis) concerning Him. . . . Not to doubt about God but to believe is the foundation of Gnosis, while Christ is both at once the foundation and the structure built upon it, even as through Him is both the beginning of things and their [several] ends. And the things that stand first and last, I mean faith and love, do not come by teaching, but Gnosis transmitted by tradition according to the Grace of God is entrusted as a deposit to those who show themselves worthy of the teaching; and from Gnosis the dignity of love shines forth, out of light into light.  For it is said ‘To him that hath shall more be added’; to faith shall be added Gnosis, and to Gnosis love, and to love the inheritance”;  i.e. (I suppose) the fullness of Divine Sonship.”

            I will only add half-a-dozen pregnant lines from another Stromateus [Clem. Alex. Strom. v. p. 633 P.] expounding by a memorable image the true relation between man and God in prayer. “As,” he says, “men attached at sea to an anchor by a tight cable, when they pull at the anchor, draw not the anchor to themselves but themselves to the anchor, even so they who in the Gnostic life draw God to them (i.e. so it seems to them) have unawares been bringing themselves towards God.”

John 1:18 - The Only Begotten Son

John 1:18 in Codex Macedonianus (Y, 034)

            In the preceding three posts about John 1:18, we have considered (1) the case for rendering μονογενὴς as “only begotten,” (2) some patristic evidence for rival readings in John 1:18, and (3) the probable background of Codex Sinaiticus’ exemplar for this verse. 

            Today, we consider the basic question of which reading in John 1:18 was the original text: 

(a)    ὁ μονογενὴς θεός (the only begotten God) or

(b)   μονογενὴς θεός (only begotten God) or

(c)    ὁ μονογενὴς υἱός (the only begotten Son).

            None of these options seems to have been regarded as distinctly unorthodox in the early church:  “only begotten Son” was used by orthodox writers such as Hippolytus, Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine, and Chrysostom; meanwhile “only begotten God” was used by orthodox writers such as Basil, Epiphanius, and Cyril of Alexandria; other writers appear to have used both readings.  However, “only begotten God” appears to have been especially favored by the non-orthodox – specifically, by Valentinian Gnostics. 

            The case that the text of John 1:18 was altered, whether by intent or by accident, in the 100s, and that Valentinian Gnostics favored the text with θεός, begins with evidence that doctrinally driven changes to the text were made by heretics in the second century.  In Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History Book 5:28, one finds excerpts from a composition known as the Little Labyrinth, composed (or at least attributed to) Caius, a presbyter in Rome, written when Zephyrinus was bishop of Rome (in 180-217).  Its author makes the following charges against the Valentinians:

            “They have boldly falsified the sacred Scriptures, and they have rejected the canons of the ancient faith, and they have ignored Christ, not inquiring what the sacred Scriptures say, but laboriously seeing to discover what form of syllogism might be contrived to establish their impiety.”  And a little further on:  “Regarding those men who abuse the arts of the unbelievers to establish their own heretical doctrine, and by the craft of the impious adulterate the simple faith of the divine Scriptures, what need is there to say that these are not near the faith? 

            Because of this they have boldly laid their hands upon the divine Scriptures, alleging that they have corrected them.  And that I do not state this against them falsely, anyone who pleases may ascertain.  For if anyone should choose to collect and compare all their copies together, he would find many discrepancies among them.  The copies of Asclepiades [this was probably intended to refer to “Asclepiodotus,” an individual mentioned earlier in the composition], at any rate, will be found at variance with those of Theodotus. 

            And many such copies are to be had, for their disciples were very zealous in inserting the corrections, as they call them, that is, the corruptions that each of them made. . . . .  Either they do not believe that the divine Scriptures were spoken by the Holy Spirit, and thus are unbelievers, or else they think themselves wiser than the Holy Spirit, and in that case what else are they than demoniacs?  For they cannot deny the commission of the crime, since they copies have been written by their own hands.  For they did not receive such Scriptures from their instructors, nor can they produce any copies from which they were transcribed.”    

            Theodotus, to whom Caius refers, was a leader of the Valentinians.  Samples of his writings are found in Extracts from Theodotus.  (The person who preserved these excerpts, and commented on them, is unknown; some have suggested that it was Clement of Alexandria.)  In Parts 6-8 of the Extracts from Theodotus, we find the following (notice the use of two different forms of John 1:18, in bold print): 

            “The Valentinians understand the verse, ‘In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God” like this:  they say that “the Beginning” is the “only Begotten,” and that he is also called God, as also in the verses which immediately follow, it is explained that he is God, for it says, ‘The only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him.’  Now they say that the Logos – in the beginning (that is to say, in the Only Begotten, in the Mind and the Truth – indicates the Christ, the Logos and the Life.  Wherefore he also appropriately called him God who is in God, the Mind.   ‘That which came into being in Him’ – the Logos – ‘was Life,’ the Companion.  Therefore the Lord also says, ‘I am the Life.’” 

            Therefore the Father, being unknown, wished to be known to the Aeons, and through his own thought, as if he had known himself, he put forth the Only Begotten, the spirit of Knowledge which is in Knowledge.  So he, too, who came forth from Knowledge, that is, from the Father’s Thought, became Knowledge, that is, the Son, because ‘through the Son the Father was known.  But the Spirit of Love has been mingled with the Spirit of Knowledge, as the Father with the Son, and Thought with Truth, having proceeded from Truth as Knowledge from Thought.  And he who remained ‘Only begotten Son in the bosom of the Father’ explains Thought to the Aeons through Knowledge, just as if he also had been put forth from his bosom; but him who appeared here, the Apostle no longer calls ‘Only begotten,’ but, ‘as Only begotten,’ ‘Glory as of an Only Begotten.’  This is because, being one and the same, Jesus is the ‘Firstborn’ in creation, but in the Pleroma is ‘Only begotten.’  But he is the same being to each place such as can be contained [in it]. 

            The author (ceasing to quote his Gnostic source) then says in Part 8:  “But we maintain that the essential Logos is God in God, who is also said to be ‘in the bosom of the Father,’ continuous, undivided, one God.”

            There are quite a few Gnostic concepts that need to be unpacked here; for some idea of what was meant by the references to “Aeons,” “Knowledge,” “Mind,” “Truth,” and “Logos,” see Robert Grant’s introductory description of Gnostic cosmology in his book Irenaeus of Lyons.  The things to see, for our present purpose, is that as the Valentinians assigned fantastical meanings to terms used in the opening chapter of John (especially John 1:1-18), they referred to “the Only Begotten” as a supernatural emanation of God.  They considered “Christ” to be another emanation, dependent on Knowledge.  Irenaeus was justified in his concern that these false teachers attempted to turn “Jesus” and “Christ” into two entities. 

            (Such a concern ought to raise a red flag when we see, in À* in John 1:17, that the word “Christ” is missing.  Perhaps concern should also be felt when we see the editors of the Nestle-Aland compilation (27th ed.) avoid mentioning this in their apparatus.  Did I say that out loud?)     

           
            Irenaeus primarily countered Gnostic teachings that were spread at Rome.  As I proposed earlier, it seems probable (as much as one can gauge probabilities from such limited evidence) that the Valentinians in Rome, such as Heracleon, used a text of John 1:18 which referred to “the Only Begotten,” followed by neither “God” nor “Son.”  But Caius attests that the Valentinians’ copies disagreed among themselves, and nothing precludes the idea that the Valentinians corrupted John 1:18 by putting their phrase “only begotten God” into John’s text. 

            There is no clear evidence that Heracleon, in the West, supported such a corruption.  But what about Basilides and the Gnostics in Egypt in the second and third centuries? 

            There is not much to go on – although it is clear that Clement of Alexandria was well-acquainted with Basilides’ writings known as the Exegetica, because he (Clement) quoted from the 23^rd book of this 24-book presentation of Basilides’ teachings, in Stromateis, Book 4, chapter 12.  Some insight, though, may be gained by considering the contents of the sixteen-page Gnostic composition known as the Trimorphic Protennoia (or, the First Thought in Three Forms), one of the texts among the Nag Hammadi papyri – in Codex XIII.     

            In Trimorphic Protennoia (which resembles in some points another Gnostic composition, the Apocryphon of John), as the author depicts the pre-existent Word as the emanator of celestial entities called Aeons, he writes as follows: 

            “Then the Perfect Son revealed himself to his Aeons, who originated through him, and he revealed them and glorified them, and gave them thrones, and stood in the glory with which he glorified himself. They blessed the Perfect Son, the Christ, the only-begotten God.  And they gave glory, saying, ‘He is!  He is!  The Son of God!  The Son of God!  It is he who is! The Aeon of Aeons, beholding the Aeons which he begot.” 

            A little further along, after the names of the Aeons are listed, the author writes:   “Now those Aeons were begotten by the God who was begotten – the Christ – and these Aeons received as well as gave glory. They were the first to appear, exalted in their thought, and each Aeon gave myriads of glories within great untraceable lights, and they all together blessed the perfect Son, the God who was begotten.”

            If Hort had been aware of the existence of the Trimorphic Protennoia in 1876, he might not have claimed (as he did on p. 9 of his Dissertation), “Neither in the Valentinian nor in any other known Gnostical system could there have been any temptation to invent such a combination as μονογενὴς θεός.”

            I submit that μονογενὴς θεός entered the text of John 1:18 in a manuscript used by Gnostics – a manuscript in which the text of this verse had already been altered (via a mild harmonization to 1:14) so as to contain no explicit reference to the only begotten Son, but only to the Only-Begotten.  A Valentinian scribe added θεός to reinforce Gnostic doctrine about the pre-existent Word as a celestial persona consisting of God’s first thought. 

            This reading became popular in Egypt not only among Gnostics, but also among the orthodox, who gave it an altogether different significance, affirming the deity of Christ.  It may be worth mentioning that Ambrose – not Ambrose of Milan, but Ambrose the Alexandrian who financed Origen – was formerly a Valentinian before being led out of that belief-system by Origen, and Ambrose’s copies of the Gospel of John may have been among the first to have this reading; if so, they were well-situated to have their contents be recopied in Egypt and later in Caesarea, alongside Origen’s copy of Heracleon’s commentary on John.  

In the hands of orthodox fourth-century writers such as Gregory of Nyssa and the well-traveled Basil of Caesarea (not the same Caesarea where Eusebius was bishop in the early 300s, but the Caesarea in what is now central Turkey), ὁ μονογενὴς θεός was not considered intrinsically supportive of Gnosticism.  The translators of the Peshitta must have viewed it as an orthodox statement.  Similarly in modern times, the term is often considered a useful affirmation of the deity of Christ, as if although Westcott and Hort’s revision of the New Testament effectively removed Romans 9:5, and Acts 20:28, and Ephesians 3:9, and Colossians 2:2, and First Timothy 3:16 from the Trinitarian arsenal, compensation was given via the deposit of John 1:18 therein.       

This scenario – in which ὁ μονογενὴς θεός originated in Valentinian manuscripts, in Egypt (or perhaps first in Rome, and then Egypt) – fits the evidence rather snugly.  In addition, despite the use of the phrase by Basil, Eusebius, and the Peshitta, resistance to this reading – expressed by its non-inclusion in the Byzantine Text – may be succinctly accounted for by scribes’ awareness of its association with Egyptian Gnosticism; also notable is Athanasius’ persistent use of ὁ μονογενὴς υἱός.  Although an adept theologian such as Basil could use John 1:18b with θεός in the cause of orthodoxy, forms of John 1:18b with θεός are practically unheard of in Latin antiquity; the Alexandrian reading is not shared by the Western Text, nor the Caesarean Text, nor the Byzantine Text, whether we consult the earliest or youngest Greek representatives. 

There is one piece of the puzzle, however, which does not seem to fit this theory:  Irenaeus’ use of ὁ μονογενὴς θεός in Against Heresies Book 4:11.  It is hard to account for this, especially since Irenaeus quoted John 1:18 with “only begotten Son” at the end of Against Heresies 4:6, introducing the verse with “as is written in the Gospel.”  While I do not want to multiply speculations, I would rather say something instead of nothing when facing this puzzle, so:

I suspect that Irenaeus had encountered a corrupted form of John 1:18 in Valentinian writings, and, while focused on anecdotes in the books of Daniel and Revelation (which he proceeded to investigate), added this quotation somewhat casually and parenthetically, introducing it not with “As it is written in the Gospel of John,” but with the phrase, “of whom also the Lord said.”  Irenaeus quoted from memory at this point, and his memory was influenced by the Valentinian compositions which he had been studying – not unlike the way in which a Christian apologist, after spending days reading the Watchtower Society’s New World Translation, might absentmindedly make a parenthetical quote from it, rather than from his own Bible.  Of course it is impossible to prove this, but the theory wraps up this loose end.       

Just two more things:

(1)  It is sometimes proposed (by Allen Wikgren, for instance, in a brief note added in Metzger’s Textual Commentary) that one reading or the other originated as a transcriptional error; Wilkgren proposed that the reading with θεός originated in the Alexandrian Text when a scribe, using nomina sacra contractions, wrote ΘΣ instead of ΥΣ, a difference of a single letter. 

By itself, this theory does not seem likely, inasmuch as the letters Θ (theta) and Υ (upsilon) do not resemble one another.  But if one introduces a scenario – one I have proposed previously – in which one scribe wrote the main text, leaving overlines with blank space below them, and a proof-reader added the nomina sacra contractions as he proof-read – well, the chance that the proof-reader could write the wrong nomina sacra is higher than the chance that any copyist could mistake  Θ for Υ or Υ for Θ.  (There are many textual contests between competing nomina sacra, or between the presence and absence of a nomen sacrum; I doubt that there are more than a few variant-units anywhere that constitute a contest between Θ and Υ.)  In which case, ὁ μονογενὴς υἱός wins the contest as the reading favored by much more diverse support from early patristic and versional witnesses, besides the enormous manuscript-evidence in its favor; as Ezra Abbot stated in his detailed essay on this subject, the witnesses for ὁ μονογενὴς υἱός “represent every important division of the Christian world.”

(2)  It is sometimes proposed that internal evidence favors “God,” on the grounds that copyists would tend to harmonize it to the more familiar phrase “only begotten Son” that appears elsewhere in the Gospel of John.  But against this theory, no such harmonization was made to 1:14, although the wording there is not found again.  Plus, a consideration of authorial style favors “only begotten Son,” a phrase which is used by John several times, while μονογενὴς θεός is non-Johannine.  Metzger depends on precisely this sort of argument quite often elsewhere; yet here it is abandoned when it weighs in against an Alexandrian reading.


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