「神の像」と「人間」 : 古代キリスト教における思想形成の前提と条件について (完)

Abstract

In studying the development of early Christian thought, two fundamental facts outweigh any other consideration : the Bible as basic material and presupposition of Christian thinking, and the Hebrew way of thinking which Tetsutaro Ariga called "Hayathology" as formative and normative principle of Christian thinking. The Christian Bible as basic material of early Christian thinking develops a long Biblical tradition of texts: the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, and its translations in Aramaic, Syriac, Greek and Latin; and the Greek text of the New Testament, and its translations in Latin and Syriac. These texts and translations belong to one large inner-Biblical interpretative process. Within this process, a profound structural change of thinking occurred, i.e., the change from the binomial relationship of «God-human being» to the trinomial relationship of «God-Christ-human being». These relationships correspond roughly with the Old Testament and the New Testament. These basic considerations enable us to get some important insights into the history of interpretation of imago dei (Gen. 1 : 26-27) in early Christian thought. 1) The prepositions play important roles in translating and interpreting the imago dei texts. Hebrew be (be tselem) in the Hebrew Old Testament expresses its own understanding of imago dei, and Greek kata (kat' eikona) in the Septuagint and Latin ad (ad imaginem) in the Vulgate are interpretations of Hebrew be. Both kata and ad make the direct identification of imago dei with human being almost impossible. For this reason, most Greek and Latin fathers who follow the Septuagint and the Vulgate respectively understand human being as the being created according to imago dei, but not as imago dei itself. 2) The trinomial structure of the New Testament thinking in particular makes such identification utterly impossible, at least in theory. Christ as the Son of God is the imago dei. The human being as Christian is to be transformed eschatologically into this Christ-image. 3) So the adequate definition of human being in term of imago dei can be either "the according-to-imago dei-ness" (to kat' eikona; Bildgemässheit) or the "image of image" (eikōn eikonos). Why the identification of human being=imago dei could occupy an important position in Christian anthropology in spite of the above-mentioned conditions, can be explained by the growing influence of Hellenistic anthropologies which have no idea of creation.