HistoricalChristian.Faith

Theophilus of Antioch on the Historicity of Noah's Flood

Dates: c. 185 · Wikipedia
Summary: Writing to the pagan Autolycus, Theophilus treats Noah's Flood as a datable event inside a continuous Adam-to-Marcus-Aurelius chronology — 2242 years from creation to the deluge, Noah's 600th year — and sets the Mosaic account polemically against the Greek flood-legends. There was one flood, never to recur; eight people were preserved in an ark prepared "not by Deucalion, but by Noah"; Noah preached repentance before it; the waters covered "every high hill," so the whole race outside the ark perished. Against Plato's partial deluge he insists the Flood was geographically universal. He is the earliest witness on this Flood timeline, and his treatment is straightforwardly historical-apologetic, with no allegory layered on.

Claims & evidence

The Flood is a datable event in a continuous chronology — 2242 years from creation, Noah's 600th year

And Lamech's son was Noah, of whom we have spoken above, who begat Shem when 500 years old. During Noah's life, in his 600th year, the flood came. The total number of years, therefore, till the flood, was 2242.

— Theophilus to Autolycus, Book 3, ch. 24, source. Theophilus places the Flood not in mythic time but on a numbered line he carries from Adam down to the death of Marcus Aurelius's co-emperor Verus, summing "all the years from the creation of the world" at 5698 (ch. 28, where he again states "from the creation of the world to the deluge were 2242 years"). The whole point of the chronology is that the Hebrew records are older and more accurate than the Greek poets'; the Flood is one of its fixed datable epochs.

There was one flood only, which will never recur

And neither does he make out that there was a second flood: on the contrary, he said that never again would there be a flood of water on the world; as neither indeed has there been, nor ever shall be.

— Theophilus to Autolycus, Book 3, ch. 19, source. This is aimed at the Greek tradition of multiple cataclysms (he has just named "Clymenus" as the figure of a supposed "second flood" in ch. 18). For Theophilus the singularity of the Flood is part of its historical reality: it happened once, in real time, and the record of "neither has there been, nor ever shall be" another is offered as something the reader can check against the world.

Eight people were preserved in an ark prepared "not by Deucalion, but by Noah"

And he says that eight human beings were preserved in the ark, in that which had been prepared by God's direction, not by Deucalion, but by Noah… And this Noah had three sons (as we mentioned in the second book), whose names were Shem, and Ham, and Japhet; and these had three wives, one wife each; each man and his wife… All the eight persons, therefore, who were found in the ark were preserved.

— Theophilus to Autolycus, Book 3, ch. 19, source. Theophilus reads the Greek Deucalion-and-Pyrrha myth (ch. 18: the pair "preserved in a chest," who flung stones from which men sprang) as a garbled echo of the true history: it is Noah, not Deucalion, and the named eight — Noah, his three sons, and their wives — who were really preserved. He treats the pagan parallel as evidence for the event, not against it.

Noah preached repentance to his generation before the Flood came

…we have elsewhere shown that Noah, when he announced to the men then alive that there was a flood coming, prophesied to them, saying, Come thither, God calls you to repentance. On this account he was fitly called Deucalion.

— Theophilus to Autolycus, Book 3, ch. 19, source. Theophilus makes Noah "a preacher of repentance" — anticipating 2 Pet 2:5 — and even derives the Greek name "Deucalion" from the call he issued. The Flood is moralized as a real judgment that men were really warned of, not as a fable.

The Flood was geographically universal — against Plato's flood "only over the plains"

For Plato, as we said above, when he had demonstrated that a deluge had happened, said that it extended not over the whole earth, but only over the plains, and that those who fled to the highest hills saved themselves… But Moses, our prophet and the servant of God… relating no fable of Pyrrha nor of Deucalion or Clymenus; nor, forsooth, that only the plains were submerged, and that those only who escaped to the mountains were saved.

— Theophilus to Autolycus, Book 3, ch. 18, source. In ch. 19 he spells out the extent: "the water overtopped every high hill 15 cubits. And thus the race of all the men that then were was destroyed, and those only who were protected in the ark were saved." Where Plato had limited the deluge to the lowlands so that hill-dwellers survived, Theophilus insists the Mosaic Flood left no such refuge — the earliest explicit patristic argument for a worldwide, not merely local, inundation.

The ark's remains can still be seen "in the Arabian mountains"

And of the ark, the remains are to this day to be seen in the Arabian mountains. This, then, is in sum the history of the deluge.

— Theophilus to Autolycus, Book 3, ch. 19, source. Theophilus appeals to a then-current report of surviving ark-wreckage as physical corroboration, and closes the account with the flat label "the history of the deluge" — treating the whole narrative as historia, the genre of fact, over against the Greek fables he has been refuting.

Notes

• Theophilus is the earliest witness on the Flood timeline and an unusually clean one: his interest is entirely historical-apologetic — chronology, the singularity of the event, the named survivors, the geographic extent — with no figurative or allegorical reading layered on. He is the baseline against which the later "allegorists" (Origen, Ambrose, Augustine) are measured: they add the figure of the ark (Church / Christ's cross) atop a history Theophilus already states plainly. See the argument Allegory was layered on history, not a denial of it (assessment: sound).
• His argument against Plato's partial flood is the chief patristic prop for the geographic-globality reading (assessment: contested): Theophilus shows the dominant ancient reading was of a worldwide deluge, not merely an anthropologically universal one — though that is a claim about the history of exegesis, distinct from whether strict geographic globality was ever fixed de fide.
• He bears directly on the historic-consensus thesis (assessment: sound): a late-second-century bishop already treating the Flood as datable fact, in a work addressed to a sceptical pagan, anchors the patristic end of the continuity the thesis claims.
• "Noah… prophesied to them, saying, Come thither, God calls you to repentance" is an early reflex of the New Testament's "Noah, a preacher of righteousness" (2 Pet 2:5) — Theophilus reads the Flood, as the apostolic writers did, as a real judgment preceded by a real warning.