The encryption here is rather obvious: the letters ‘Iota’ and ‘Eta’ are the tenth and eighth letters of the Greek alphabet, and are the first two letters of Iēsous; while the letter ‘Tau’ represents the number 300, and stands for the cross.
“No doubt Barnabas thought himself quite ingenious, when in fact he should have been quite embarrassed; Genesis was written in Hebrew, not Greek! This is the same error decried by the esteemed bishop Irenaeus, who wrote more than a century ago of the folly of ‘transferring the name Jesus, which belongs to another language, to the numeration of the Greeks.’ But while Abraham could hardly have ‘received the mysteries of the three letters’ in Greek, Barnabas’ readers were familiar only with the Septuagint, so it was rather easy for him to foist this gematrial nonsense on the unwary.
“Yet what is most telling in this passage is the author’s claimed imparting of this special ‘knowledge’ to the ‘worthy.’ Only to the chosen ones is the ‘secret’ mystery revealed; nothing is divulged to the uninitiated. And who among us would not wish to be numbered among the ‘elect’ and therefore somehow special and favored? Do not be fooled, my brothers and sisters. We are all worthy of receiving the truth! And the only ‘secret’ is that those who perpetuate such mystical foolishness are themselves far from the truth.”
Arius could tell that his words were resonating with his listeners, as most of them nodded approvingly. Only a few in the crowd shifted uncomfortably. Did Alexander’s spies realize he was speaking of them? How could they not? Just as the Pharisees knew when Christ’s thinly veiled parables warned the crowds to beware of the teachers of that time, so too they knew now. But it did not matter; Arius could hold back no longer. It was time to plant the seed:
“My friends, we must guard as well against interpretations that press the meaning of Scripture beyond what is supported by the text. Consider Christ’s declaration in John’s gospel, ‘Very truly I tell you, before Abraham was, I am.’ Some see in this a reference to the Mosaic “I AM WHO I AM,” rendered ego eimi ho ōn in the Greek of the Septuagint, the Greek that Christ never spoke. John writes in Greek, and quotes only the ego eimi, only the ‘I am,’ and not the ho ōn, ‘the One who is,’ ‘the Being,’ ‘the existent One.’ According to John, Christ never used these additional words that designate the very name of God; yet, we are told by our preachers, he meant to imply them. Surely, they tell us, Christ would have simply said ‘I was’ rather than ‘I am’ if he meant the reference only temporally. Surely, they assert, the Jews who were prepared to stone him for this pronouncement correctly understood him as making a blasphemous declaration of divinity. My brothers and sisters, we must resist such speculations. There is a claim here of preexistence, to be sure; but that is not the same as claiming to be God! It is, in truth, claiming no more than to be the first-born of God. Thus does the venerable Justin Martyr describe the pre-existent Christ as ‘distinct from Him who made all things,’ ‘first power after God,’ ‘the first-born of God.’
“And so it is that we must ask ourselves how Christ can be, as the Apostle Paul wrote to the Colossians, ‘the first-born of all creation,’ unless he himself was created. And if created, in what sense can he be thought of as God?”
There! The challenge was laid down; there could be no turning back now.
Chapter 7
Out of breath and sweating profusely, Athanasius had literally run the entire sweltering distance from Baucalis to the bishop’s residence, demanding an immediate audience. This news, he knew, could not wait.
The color drained from Alexander’s face as he received his excited pupil’s report of Arius’s sermon, virtually word for word. Athanasius had that kind of memory, and a keen intellect to go with it. When his prize student had finished, Alexander exhorted him to sit and rest, and then paced slowly around the room, nervously stroking his beard. “I knew this day was coming, and feared it greatly. It is just as Paul warned in his letter to Timothy: ‘For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths.’ We must stop that wandering before the flock is lost. How do you suggest we respond to this heresy? Should we engage Arius in public debate?”
“That is a possibility, to be sure,” the young deacon responded, elated that Alexander was seeking his opinion. “But one fraught with risk. Arius was shrewd to use Justin Martyr as his foil today. He knows that if we rely on Justin’s distinction between the immanent Logos and the expressed Logos, between an idea in the mind of God and the speech which expresses that idea, he can fall back on many of Justin’s writings that support his own theories, pointing out Justin’s own distinction between God and God’s subordinate Logos.”
Alexander nodded in agreement as he paced around the room, still tugging at his beard. “Right. Then we will simply ignore Justin, and condemn Arius’s teachings as excluded by John’s gospel, which casts Christ as the Logos, and the Logos as God.”
Athanasius was more circumspect. “A public discussion of the nuances of the Logos is one I think we may wish to avoid, my bishop. Arius is masterful at exploiting double meanings, and will do so with Logos’ double meaning of Word and Reason. No doubt Reason always existed with God, but the unlearned will naturally assume that God’s Word emanates from Him at a particular time—and Arius will quickly enmesh us anew in debating Justin Martyr’s immanence/expression dichotomy. I am concerned about affording him any opportunity to focus attention on this.”
“I see no reason to fear any double meaning here,” Alexander replied, “as long as Arius concedes that one meaning of Logos is indeed as the Wisdom of God, ‘preceding the Word which announces her,’ as Origen put it in his commentary on John’s Gospel. The Book of Wisdom refers to her as ‘a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness.’ Surely reflections and images co-exist at all times with their sources, do they not?”
“Arius can make the opposite case rather easily,” Athanasius rejoined in a respectful tone. “The verse you quote is immediately preceded by a reference to Wisdom as ‘a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty,’ which Arius will argue are manifestations that, like breath itself, issue at a given point in time rather than eternally. Worse, there are passages in Scripture which he can quote as proofs that Wisdom was not eternally co-existent. Consider the twenty-fourth chapter of Sirach, which likewise states that Wisdom ‘came forth from the mouth of the Most High,’ but then recites that ‘the Creator of all things gave me a command, and my Creator chose the place for my tent,’ and also ‘Before the ages, in the beginning, he created me, and for all the ages I shall not cease to be.’ If we go down this path, Arius will quickly trap us and cut off any retreat except for the one he knows we do not wish to take: defending the Sabellian proposition that there is no distinction between creator and creature.”
“Perhaps he will try. But he cannot deny that the Fourth Gospel quotes Christ as acknowledging that ‘the Father and I are one.’ Where is his retreat from that?”
“An easy retreat, my bishop. The Fourth Gospel quotes Christ as using the same word ‘one’ when he prays ‘Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.’ And again, ‘I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one.’ If Christ used the word ‘one’ to describe the relationship between himself and his disciples, and indeed the relationship among all believers, it follows that the sense of ‘one’ used here by John’s gospel cannot be that of identicalness in substance or being. Are we all
