HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

UNIVERSAL HISTORY 300‒1000 19positively to advance claims to authority and antiquity. By the endof the second century A.D., Clement of Alexandria could build onthe efforts of numerous predecessors, including co-opted Jewish learning,to assert the temporal and logical priority of Christian revelation.He compared biblical time-spans with parallel evidence forAssyrian, Egyptian, and Greek history and showed that God’s revealedtruth predated and nourished Greek philosophy. Outward-lookingargument claimed title by precedence and suggested the practicalreach of sacred chronology and the common human roots traced inBible. Both the origin and end of time figured in the Chronographyof Julius Africanus, who, after schooling in Alexandria, elaboratedthe first, broadly framed Christian treatement of world-historical data(ca. A.D. 217). In addition to showing Old Testament priority bymeans of its synchronies with other world history, Africanus explicitlyfixed Christ’s birth in the year 5,500 from Creation, based onbiblical sums that he confirmed—as Nero’s identity is revealed inthe Apocalypse—by symbolical substitution. The coherence of biblicalhistory invited typological proofs, whose hallmark was to bridge thedivide of the Incarnation, where ancient foreshadowings resolve inthe Christian “fullness of time”. 6 To start, Africanus presupposed alifespan for the world of 7,000 years, and followed in that an establishedcosmic remapping of the Six Days of Creation, plus a Sabbathof Rest, which literally accounted “a day in God’s sight as a thousandyears” (cf. Ps. 89:4; 2 Pet. 3:8). Christ, the Beginning and Endof Creation (cf. Rev. 21:6), thus died in his Passion at the half pointof the sixth day of the week ( John 19:14), and so the Incarnation ofthe 5,500th year coincided with its own sacramental fulfillment inthe final week and day of the Saviour’s earthly work. Africanus, alayman in imperial service, cribbed this ambitious typological keyfrom the Commentary on Daniel (ca. A.D. 204) of Hippolytus, a rigoristpresbyter and later schismatic bishop of Rome, who himself issueda tightly focused Chronicle in A.D. 234, near the end of a life markedby confessional strife, secular persecution, and his own major summationof church liturgy and discipline, the Apostolic Tradition (A.D. 215).Hippolytus and Africanus together bear witness to an intense preoccupationwith the details of history, as number and symbolicalconfirmation, deployed to address the situation of believers in time.6Gal. 4:4. On the Bible and its interpretation, see de Lubac (1959–64).