If you’re the kind of person who reads blogs like this one, chances are you’ve heard Tertullian’s famous quip, “What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?” in his Objection Against Heretics.
It’s a good line. Often, it is referenced as a stand-in for a much larger idea: the tension between orthodox Christianity (or Judaism) and pagan paideia. Tertullian ostensibly takes one horn of the dilemma, opting for revelation over Hellenism’s reason. He especially seems to have hated philosophy, rather in contrast to the later synthesis of Christianity with select elements of the pagan world, a synthesis that has inflected Christianity ever since.
So Tertullian was a rigorist and separatist who hated philosophy and the higher things of pagan culture, right?
I think this take is flatly wrong, or at best grossly misleading.
On our end, the trouble is that where context is concerned, the quip is simply “too good to check,” and the idealized dichotomy it seems to provide, simply too useful to too many essays on religion. In reality, the superficial reading I sketched above does not really account for how Tertullian is using “philosophy” in that particular document itself, much less his well-documented propensity for hyperbole.
Consider: if we’re just operating on small excerpts or quotations, we could just as easily cite his On the Pallium (i.e., the traditional garb of the philosopher). Addressing the pallium itself, he declares at the pamphlet’s end, “Rejoice and exult, pallium! Now a better philosophy has deemed you worthy, since a Christian has begun to wear you.” Of course, Tertullian has his own ideas of what Christian philosophy (and paideia writ large) ought to look like, but it’s hardly the utter rejection one expects from the modern popular narrative. From the Pallium quotation alone, Tertullian doesn’t seem much different from most Christian intellectuals before or since.
So what’s going on with the ancient Christianity and pagan learning?
Here’s a structural, historical fact that might clarify some things. In the Roman world, virtually any author in the sense we normally use that word—excluding non-literary cases like papyri recording taxes or civic inscriptions asking the good townsfolk to cease dumping ordure on public property—was definitionally soaked to the bone in “pagan” education. There are some interesting edge cases, such as Jews like Josephus and Paul, but I am increasingly persuaded that these too usually had more than a smattering of Greco-Roman education.[1] Remember, basic literacy itself is a rare skill in this environment; the more generous estimates might put it around 15% of the male population.[2]
The ability to compose a text was even rarer. It meant that you had advanced beyond learning letters at the elementary level to the higher grades of grammar and then rhetoric (the distinction between these two could be fuzzy in practice with plenty of overlap). For some theorists, philosophy was then the highest grade of all; for others, they might have seen philosophy more as a niche, alternative “major” to rhetoric.
In any case, this all means that basically every early Christian writer that you know, from the New Testament to Augustine, went through significant portions of the pagan educational cursus. By the sixth century, at least in the post-imperial West, there are signs that the system has seriously degraded.
And it is true that educational path certainly caused friction. In his thought provoking study of ancient Christian institutions, Christoph Markschies offers a fulsome and vivid description of the situation faced by the young Christian student. Pupils would be expected to copy dictated phrases vocabulary words such as, “Homer was not a human being but a god.” Then there would have been the concomitant exposure to Greek mythology, often containing morally unsavory episodes of murder or risqué sexual behavior.
There are signs of resistance. Markschies notes, for instance, an “Egyptian school notebook from the fourth century” that “begins every page with a carefully drawn sign of the cross and the first page with the additional invocation, ‘praise be to God.’” The notebook then juxtaposes the vocabulary item “Zeus, the father of gods and human beings” with a list of other humdrum or unflattering words, “goat, cattle, vulture, and tree.” The implication is that “Zeus” is no different than these other, lowly words. Other Greek divinities receive the same treatment. But as Markschies rightly explains, most Christians “hardly complained” explicitly, even into the post-Constantinian era.[3]
Take Tertullian’s older contemporary, Irenaeus of Lyons. In his own anti-heretical treatise (Against Heresies 1.9.4), Irenaeus quotes a string of ten random Homeric verses, showing off his detailed knowledge of Homer and the Homeric characters, which was precisely the kind of material one mastered in grammatical schooling. The ten lines of Homer quoted by Irenaeus are drawn equally from the Iliad and Odyssey: noteworthy because the Iliad was far more popular than the Odyssey as a school text. Irenaeus even repeats the comparatively unpopular, neglected books of Homer (e.g., Iliad 14, 19, 20, 21). By contrast, he uses only one line from the first six books of the Iliad, which were far and away the most studied, most popular sections of Homer.[4]
While it’s possible Irenaeus had copies of all these texts before him or had taken this collection of verses from another author, I think it is more likely that he is quoting from memory, which is a grammatical skill and social game that Greco-Roman elites played among themselves for centuries.[5] Think about the many hours of exposure that would have required of Irenaeus.[6]
The same kind of exposure to pagan education is manifest in Tertullian himself, as scholars have recognized for decades. His writings are suffused with rhetorical devices and structures straight out of the rhetorical handbooks. Among the many pagan philosophers he has read, Plato stands out prominently.[7] With that in mind, there is no way to take Tertullian as seriously proscribing paideia, as any of his (educated) readers would have understood: the rhetorically vivid and memorable image contrasting Athens and Jerusalem is all but an implicit endorsement of Athens’ importance.
Now, there is still some truth to the idea that some believed Christianity was incompatible with pagan education, but it’s better demonstrated in other sources. First and foremost is the Didascalia Apostolorum, a third-century Syrian church rulebook that flatly forbids the reading anything pagan: the kind of rigid rejection that is often read back into Tertullian and that was decided outlier in ancient Christianity. The later emperor Julian with his pagan revanchism also comes to mind, forbidding Christians from teaching the pagan classics. Although it is the reversal of the typical narrative, I think there is more evidence of coolness or outright hostility to pagan liberal arts after the Christianization of the Roman world, which can be seen in figures such as Augustine, Jerome, and Caesarius of Arles, all of whom wrestled with their pagan education to one extent or another.
What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem? As another educated Christian might have put it, “Much in every way.”
Josephus claims he needed some help from friends to get his writing into Greek, though I think this is sometimes read as a conventional false humility. While no one at the time would have considered him world-class, Paul’s compositional and rhetorical skills necessarily put him in elite company.
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See the case study of Judaea in Michael Owen Wise, Language and Literacy in Roman Judaea : A Study of the Bar Kokhba Documents (Yale University Press, 2015), 350.
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Christoph Markschies, Christian Theology and Its Institutions in the Early Roman Empire: Prolegomena to a History of Early Christian Theology, trans. Wayne Coppins (Baylor University Press, 2015), esp. 38ff.
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Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2001), 194–7. ↑
See the recent discussion of the Homeric cento and an argument in favor of Irenaeus’ authorship in Grayden McCashen, “Homer in Irenaeus,” Harvard Theological Review 118, no. 2 (2025): 264–84.
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Even if we have the particulars wrong on the cento, McCashen still shows that Irenaeus demonstrates knowledge of the ins and outs of Homer quite well.
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T. D. Barnes, Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study (Oxford University Press, 1971), 205–6. ↑