SERIES III.8: THE LANGUAGE OF LINEAGE โ HIPPOLYTUS
Nations โข Blood โข One Body
Having examined Hippolytusโ language of race, seed, tribe, and fleshly descent, we now encounter language which at first appears considerably broader. While interpreting the many-colored priestly garment in Daniel, Hippolytus applies its diversity directly to the calling gathered in the Anointed.
For the priestly coat was made up of different colours, as various nations waited for Christโs coming, in order that we might be made up (as one body) of many colours.
For the Word was to bear us all, binding us like a girdle round His body, in His own love. The complete body was His, but we are members in His body, united together, and sustained by the Word Himself.
โ Hippolytus of Rome, Commentary on Daniel, on Daniel 10:5โ6, early 3rd century; ANF 5.
Hippolytus plainly describes a body composed from โvarious nations.โ This should not be ignored when examining his language of lineage: his conception of the Christian body is not restricted to a single national designation but can presume to read as a universalist standpoint until we examine it further.
This language should also be read alongside Hippolytusโ earlier Noahic genealogy. There he describes the whole ฮณฮญฮฝฮฟฯ of man multiplying through Noahโs sons โaccording to race,โ and then derives the nations from named ancestral progenitors. Within that, โvarious nationsโ does not mean peoples without genealogy, but distinct nations already situated inside the same inherited descent.
Established earlier in the Refutation, Hippolytus has already treated the nations of Adamic life as branches of one genealogical stock descending through Noah. Thus, when he later speaks of โvarious nationsโ being gathered into one body, those nations are not presented as unrelated peoples without ancestry, but as historically descended branches within the same Adamic-Noahic-Israelite genealogy.
Ad fontes.
III.7
