HistoricalChristian.Faith

Athenagoras of Athens on the Nephilim

Dates: c. 177 · Wikipedia
Summary: Athenagoras, in his Plea for the Christians addressed to the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, reads Genesis 6 as sober angelic history: angels set over matter and its forms "fell into impure love of virgins," and "of these lovers of virgins … were begotten those who are called giants." The giants' disembodied souls, together with the fallen angels themselves, become the demons that "wander about the world" — the very beings the pagans worship as gods.

Claims & evidence

The angels appointed over matter fell into love of women and begat the giants

Some, free agents, you will observe, such as they were created by God, continued in those things for which God had made and over which He had ordained them; but some outraged both the constitution of their nature and the government entrusted to them … these fell into impure love of virgins, and were subjugated by the flesh, and he became negligent and wicked in the management of the things entrusted to him. Of these lovers of virgins, therefore, were begotten those who are called giants.

— A Plea for the Christians, Chapter XXIV, source. Athenagoras grounds the account in revelation, not poetry — "we say nothing without witnesses, but state the things which have been declared by the prophets" — and treats the angelic fall as the true history behind the Greek myths of the giants.

The souls of the giants are the demons who wander the world

These angels, then, who have fallen from heaven, and haunt the air and the earth, and are no longer able to rise to heavenly things, and the souls of the giants, which are the demons who wander about the world, perform actions similar, the one (that is, the demons) to the natures they have received, the other (that is, the angels) to the appetites they have indulged.

— A Plea for the Christians, Chapter XXIV, source. This is the distinctive demonological etiology of 1 Enoch — demons as the spirits of the dead giants — stated as fact to a Roman emperor.

Notes

• Athenagoras is a second-century witness to the full angelic reading, with the Enochic demon-origin that no purely Sethite reading can carry — set beside Justin (c. 165) and Irenaeus (c. 202).
• Like Justin and Eusebius, he ties the fall to pagan idolatry: the worshipped "gods" are in fact these wandering demonic spirits.
• His "souls of the giants … are the demons who wander about the world" is one of the load-bearing early witnesses for the reading weighed on the are the unclean spirits the dead Nephilim? argument (assessment: contested) — set there beside Justin, Commodian, and Lactantius.