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“Christ the Power and Wisdom of God”: Biblical Exegesis and Polemical Intertextuality in Athanasius’s Orations against the Arians

Three times in the Orations against the Arians, Athanasius quotes from Asterius’s exegesis of 1 Cor 1.24. In this paper, I show how Athanasius extracts four motifs from this discussion, and uses them to distinguish his own doctrinal position from Asterius, Marcellus, and Eusebius of Caesarea: the eternity of the Son; the Son’s being as “proper to the essence of the Father”; the co-existence of Father and Son; and the generativity of the divine nature. Athanasius hides this complex engagement in order to achieve a polemical simplification of the post-Nicene debates into the binary framework of “orthodoxy” vs. “heresy.”