THE CITY

Winter 2015
land.” Though expressed differently, the same point is made in Tg. Ps
53:1, “The fool has said in his heart that God does not punish him.”
Accordingly, the atheists of the Bible are those who believe God
takes no notice of human behavior, either to reward or to punish.
The wicked man, therefore, may do as he pleases. He need not fear
that God will observe or take action against him. The fool’s assertion
that “There is no God” is not an expression of philosophical atheism
but rather a reckless assumption that God takes no interest in human
affairs.
In late antiquity things began to change. To be sure, belief in God
(or, in most cases, in the gods) remained almost universal. Explicit and
outright atheism is very hard to detect in the classical world of late
antiquity (though see the discussion of Philo below). Nevertheless,
in some philosophical circles traditional beliefs about the gods were
beginning to be questioned. A small number of philosophers and
writers in the Greek world questioned the existence of the traditional
gods, that is, the gods of Olympus. For example, some claimed that
Epicurus, who publicly taught that the gods existed but took no
notice of human affairs, was really an atheist but kept this opinion
private out of fear of the public (apud Cicero, On the Nature of the
Gods 1.85.121). In an academic setting as described in Plato the
question of the existence of gods or God was raised (Apology 26c).
Elsewhere Plato speaks of contemporaries who believe that the
world is governed by chance, not gods, and that morality is manmade,
not divine (Laws 10, 889a–890a). Similarly, in a play by Critias
a character asserts that the gods are an invention designed to deter
crime that otherwise would go undetected and therefore unpunished
(Sisyphus frag. 19). Plato also speaks of those (like “public” Epicurus)
who assert that the gods exist but are indifferent to humanity (Laws
10, 885b, 899d-e). Here we have a practical atheism not unlike what
we see in the Hebrew Psalms.
Although theism was almost universal in the Mediterranean world
of late antiquity, a “vocabulary of atheism,” one might say, did emerge.
The two principal words are atheos, an adjective that means “godless”
or “ungodly,” and atheotēs, an adjective that means “ungodliness.”
Neither word implies the idea that there is no god. The words almost
always are used in reference to the impious or to those who fail to
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