178 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacyplausible way of understanding his Christology.^43 Maurice Dowling is probably clos-
est to the mark in suggesting that Marcellus is simply uninterested in Christ’s human
soul.^44 As Dowling hints, in focusing his God—ἄνθρωπος contrast on human flesh,
Marcellus jeopardizes the sense that Christ encompasses Adam’s humanity. The ques-
tion of Christ’s humanity does not arise in the same way in Irenaeus because he does
not contrast God and ἄνθρωπος to the same extent.
Marcellus’s conception of the distinction between God and ἄνθρωπος coheres
with his understanding of what an image is. While Irenaeus emphasizes the similar-
ity between an image and the thing it images, Marcellus emphasizes the difference.
Marcellus insists that an image is not the thing imaged.^45 As Parvis notes, Marcellus’s
exegesis here is driven by his opponents. He accepts Asterius’s argument that an image
is different from the thing it images but says that this does not imply a distinction
between God and his Word because the Incarnate Christ, and not the eternal Word,
is image.^46 Nonetheless, the distinction is quite consistent in his extant fragments. He
genuinely incorporated it into his theology. In Marcellan theology, referring to Christ
as “God’s image” does not denote his divinity.
Because Marcellus does not conceive of God’s spirit as part of God’s image, he
avoids the loss of human autonomy in which Irenaeus’s soteriology culminates, but
humanity is correspondingly less intimate with God. As both thinkers have a strong
sense of God’s overwhelming power and glory, this sacrifice is logically required.
Humanity may either be independent or indescribably intimate with God; Irenaeus
and Marcellus share the implicit assumption that it cannot be both.
Eustathius
Eustathius’s conception of God’s image in Adam and Christ shares the principal themes
common to Irenaeus and Marcellus: Christ fulfills Adam: he is “Last Adam,” much like
Irenaeus’s “second Adam” and Marcellus’s “first new ἄνθρωπος.”^47 God’s image in Adam
and Christ is corporeal; God’s image reveals God. Like Marcellus, Eustathius sees more
disjunction between God and ἄνθρωπος than Irenaeus does. However, this disjunction
plays out differently in Eustathius, with divergent anthropological consequences. In
particular Eustathius’s later, highly divisive Christology allows a fuller articulation of
Christ’s full humanity than is found in Marcellus.
For Eustathius, “God’s image” describes both a relationship between the Father and
the Son and a relationship between God, Christ, and Adam. The Son is the Father’s
image in the sense that “like having been begotten from like, the ones begotten appear
as true images of their begetters.”^48 Conversely, Christ is not “true image”: “the human
being whom... [the son] bore is the image of the son, as images are made from dis-
similar colors by being painted on wax, some being wrought by hand deliberately
and others coming to be in nature and likeness.” Humanity is conformed to Christ’s
image.^49 Eustathius’s anthropological definition of image shares much with Marcel-
lus’s: they both try to qualify the sense in which “God’s image” implies resemblance
between humanity and God, and both think that “God’s image” in Adam and Christ
denotes something totally other than God, which nonetheless represents God. Again,
our image-status is dependent on Christ’s.