Julius Africanus

Life

Julius Africanus was a Christian scholar who wrote in Greek and was active from the late second century into the early third century. His birthplace and exact dates are uncertain. Because of the name "Africanus," some hold that he came from North Africa, but he is known to have been closely associated with Palestine. He is said to have served as an envoy petitioning the Roman emperor to rebuild Emmaus in Palestine as a city named Nicopolis. Records also indicate that he was involved in establishing a library in Rome for the emperor Severus Alexander.

Syriac tradition sometimes refers to him as a bishop, but scholars generally consider him to have been a lay intellectual who held no ecclesiastical office.

Work and Achievements

The Chronicle. Africanus's principal work is the Chronographiai (Chronicle) in five books. It covered history from the Creation to about 221, correlating biblical chronology with Greek and Roman history. He is known to have viewed the age of the world within a six-thousand-year framework and to have dated the birth of Christ to 5500 years after creation. This calculation is related to the interpretation that treats one day as a thousand years (Psalm 90:4) and is thus connected to early discussions of eschatology. The original work has not survived; it remains only in fragments quoted by later writers. His explanation of the "seventy weeks" of Daniel 9 as a calendrical calculation has likewise come down through later citations.

Interpretation of the genealogy of Jesus. The Gospel of Matthew names Jacob as the father of Joseph of Nazareth, while the Gospel of Luke names Heli. In a letter to Aristides, Africanus explained this difference by appeal to levirate marriage (the practice whereby, if a man died childless, his brother married the widow to continue his line; Deuteronomy 25:5–10). According to his explanation, Jacob and Heli were brothers who shared the same mother. When Heli died childless, Jacob married his widow and fathered Joseph; Joseph was therefore Jacob's son by blood and Heli's son by law. This letter is preserved through quotation in Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History, Book 1, chapter 7.

Other works. He wrote a letter to Origen questioning whether the story of Susanna, one of the additions to the Book of Daniel, originally belonged to Daniel, and Origen wrote a reply. This exchange is regarded as a source illustrating early church discussions of the canon. He also wrote the Kestoi, a miscellany covering a wide range of subjects, including medicine, military matters, and agriculture.

Assessment

Africanus is regarded as a pioneer of Christian chronography. His chronological calculations were transmitted through Eusebius's chronicle into the historical writing of the Byzantine period. At the same time, critics have noted as a limitation of his genealogical explanation that it relies on tradition to reconstruct family relationships not stated in Scripture. He himself reportedly presented this explanation as a tradition that could not be proven. His dating of the birth of Christ to 5500 years after creation is likewise not accepted by scholars today as historical chronology.