St. Quadratus of Athens

Quadratus lived in the generation that followed the Apostles, and the tradition of the Church numbers him among the men who had heard the apostolic preaching at its source. He is honored as a bishop of Athens, set over the church that the Apostle Paul had founded on the Areopagus.

In his day the Christians were slandered by their pagan neighbors and harassed by the authorities, and the Emperor Hadrian, in the course of his travels through the East, came among them. To him Quadratus addressed a written defense of the faith, an Apology, the first of its kind of which the Church keeps any memory, setting the truth of the Gospel against the calumnies laid upon it.

The work itself is lost, but the historian Eusebius preserved one passage of it, in which Quadratus answers those who said the wonders of Christ were illusions. The deeds of our Saviour, he wrote, were always present, for they were true: those who were healed and those who were raised from the dead were seen not only in the hour of their healing but afterward, and some of them survived even to our own times. So the living witnesses themselves stood against the lie.

By this single surviving sentence Quadratus speaks across the centuries as the first of the apologists, the forerunner of Justin and the long line of those who gave the Church a reasoned defense before the powers of the world. Of the rest of his life little certain is recorded.

The Church keeps his memory on the twenty-first of September, honoring Quadratus of Athens as the earliest of the apologists and a defender of the faith before the emperor.