figures were, in some sense, prototypes for the Christian exemplar, the nationalistic morality they embodied was roundly excoriated by early Christians like Augustine, whose interpretation of the exempla virtutis emphasized allegiance to a transcendent order beyond the saeculum.[9]
Christians may have been critical of the particular ways in which exemplarity was manifested in pagan thought and culture, but the idea of exemplarity itself thrived within Christianity. For Christians, writes Peter Brown, “God Himself was proposed to man as the Exemplar behind all exemplars.”[10] The exemplary relationship of God to man was facilitated by the idea that God, for all of His omniscience and omnipotence, was not an absolute Other to humanity. The creation myths of the early Hebrew Bible bequeathed to Christians the idea that human beings had been made in God’s image and raised the prospect of a godly original condition or essential nature that could be discerned and promoted even within the context of a fallen world. “The result of this view,” Brown continues, “was to present human history as containing a sequence of exemplars, each of which made real, at varying times and in varying degrees, the awesome potentiality of the first model of humanity.” While precedents can be identified in the prophetic tradition of the Christian Old Testament, the gospel narratives brought this idea of exemplarity to its climax in the figure of Jesus Christ, in whom “the original beauty of Adam. . . blazed forth.”[11] The precise nature of Christ—the relationship of His divine qualities to His human qualities—was of course one of the prickliest controversies within the early Church, and the significance of Christ’s deeds was interpreted differently depending on where one placed emphasis. But as early as the Epistles of Paul there was suggestion that Christ’s example was meant to be imitated by ordinary Christians: “Follow my example,” Paul exhorted the Corinthians, “as I follow Christ’s.”[12] According to this conception of examples building upon examples, an apostolic disciple of Christ like Paul was, as John Howard Yoder writes, “merely an exemplary follower of the true example.”[13]
Paul’s words capture both the foundational quality of exemplarity within Christianity—Christ conceived, henceforth, as the ultimate exemplar, a point of reference for all who follow Him—and
