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Introduction
The Hellenization of Christianity is a long-standing and notoriously contentious historiographical construct in early Christian studies.1While it has been deployed in surprisingly fluid ways, most scholars associate the thesis with Adolf von Harnack, for whom it acquired a decidedly critical valence. The "Hellenic spirit"--a concept Harnack usually left undefined--constituted a threat to the undogmatic gospel of Jesus. 2Whenever this adversarial Hellenic spirit triumphed, as it inevitably did, it corroded an authentic living Christianity into an institutionalized, dogmatic religion.3For many others, both before and after Harnack, the Hellenization of Christianity has signaled a similar narrative of decline. The teachings and way of life that marked an authentic Christianity often stood in a disjunctive relationship with Greco-Roman culture, especially its philosophies. The influence of the latter precipitated a debasement of Christianity, the ossification of its teachings, or more seriously, the infiltration of heresy. 4
Origen's doctrine of pre-existent souls--that human souls originally flourished in a discarnate state prior to a transgression that led to their subsequent embodiment--has often been considered a spectacularly embarrassing episode in the Hellenization of Christianity. 5Rather than espouse the biblical view of the soul's relationship to the body, Origen opted for the conflicting view of Plato, the authoritative Greek philosopher throughout much of late antiquity. This critical interpretation of Origen's account of pre-existence has circulated widely in the modern literature, but it is important to underscore that it also has a long lineage. Already several of Origen's late antique detractors leveled the charge of excessive Hellenism against his teaching of the soul, perhaps none more forcibly than his chief ecclesiastical prosecutor, Justinian. In the spring of 553, the Byzantine emperor wrote the following of Origen's account of pre-existent souls:
So Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus and their followers, who agreed that souls are immortal, declared that they exist prior to bodies and that there is a great company of souls, of which those that transgress descend into bodies. . .. But the church, following the divine scriptures, affirms that the soul is created together with the body, not first one and the other later, according to the insanity of Origen. 6
For Justinian, Origen's doctrine of...