From Adam to Abraham

43

deserving of the description “universal”. For the same reason, however, Eusebius could
never see his way clear to the construction of a fully integrated history of the world
predating the birth of Abraham, much less one beginning from Adam.
Owing partly to dissatisfaction with Eusebius’ inconclusive handling of the sub-
ject, Christian chroniclers after him began exploring with heightened interest a period
in the past in danger of disappearing in the mists of “pre-history”. In the early 5th
century, for example, Panodorus, an Alexandrian monk and chronicler severely critical
of Eusebius, claimed to have found in a controversial Jewish apocalypse known as the
Book of Enoch a solution to the wide chronological disparities between Genesis and
the records of the Babylonians and Egyptians. Panodorus’reclamation of these sources
was far more than a matter of solving a puzzle that had previously confounded Afri-
canus and Eusebius. In doing so, he had also managed to cobble together from various
witnesses a highly developed picture of early civilization, even postulating the exis-
tence of monarchy before the universal flood. Like Malalas, Panodorus was a student
of the euhemerist school. The “sons of God” mentioned however briefly in Genesis 6
were in his view not heavenly beings, but rather the earliest kings of Babylonia and
Egypt. Neither Panodorus’ efforts, nor those of his like-minded contemporary Anni-
anus, met with much approval in Byzantium; later chroniclers mainly cleaved to the
more conventional view that kingship did not arise until after the flood.82 Even so, it
was an ingenious achievement. Euhemerizing historiography, and the supplementary
witnesses of Jewish sources of the Second Temple period, made it possible for him
to fashion a picture of early world civilization more attuned to the requirements of a
“universal” chronicle.
The same can be said of Malalas. While the principle characters of his own account
of early world history are recognizably Greek, they have been removed from Greek
soil, historicized, and relocated on the stage of universal history. The result is a work
largely free of the rancor and polemic against the moral excesses of the gods of the
Greeks and Romans that we are used to finding in other Christian sources. The Greek
gods, now understood as flesh and blood figures of the past, come off quite sympa-
thetically in Malalas as sages, philosopher kings, inventors, even monotheists, linked
together by a common lineage. If these figures were misunderstood as deities, it was
only because of “Hellenism” (z. e. paganism), a religious error introduced sometime
later. A modern commentator has described Malalas’ euhemerizing explanation of
Greek mythology, and his resettlement of Greek gods in the Near East, Egypt, Rome,
and Egypt, as “de-Hellenization”.83 Insofar as the national gods of Greece are now
actors on the world stage, this is no doubt accurate. But in its own way, Malalas’project
faithfully embodies, in a Christianized form, the ecumenical and universalizing ideals
of the Hellenistic age. If, then, we want to identify the historical models informing
Malalas’ own treatment of this remote epoch in world history, we should extend the
82 For a later critique of Panodorus and Annianus, see Georgius Syncellus, Edoga chronographica 61-63
(pp. 34,22-36,9 Mosshammer); see further Adler (1989), pp. 75-80; Gelzer (1885), pp. 193-214.
83 On Malalas’“de-Hellenization”, see Scott (1990), p. 67.