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The figure of Socrates features prominently in the works of earliest Christian authors and their attempts to negotiate a viable relation between pagan intellectual tradition and the exigencies of a newly founded religion. The analysis of all relevant ante-Nicene Greek and Latin texts shows that early Christian writers reconstruct "Socrates" with a striking degree of interpretative freedom. Although it is impossible to establish a unified perspective on Socrates in these texts-let alone a positive one, as many previous commentators thought-, the interpretations of the Athenian sage are not entirely haphazard. I argue that they are heavily constrained by apologetic aims of early Christian authors and closely connected to epistemic justification of faith by means of miracles, superior moral behaviour, divine inspiration and prophecy, and, finally, the emphasis that is placed on the limitations of human, all too human, wisdom.

For the larger part of modern western intellectual history, it has been assumed that the study of morality and religion requires special methodology, insulated from, and in some important aspects incongruent with, the scientific method commonly used in the realm of natural sciences. Furthermore, even if it would be granted that moral and religious behavior is amendable to scientific analysis, the prospects of using evolutionary theory in particular to do the heavy lifting in explanation of these phenomena have been bleak, since many scholars doubted that a biological theory could possibly offer any valuable contribution. Recent advances in the fields of Evolutionary Ethics and Cognitive Science of Religion disprove both claims, emphasizing empirically founded explanations, demonstrating extraordinarily high degree of methodological consilience, and revealing utmost importance of the application of evolutionary theory in fields of study once deemed to be exclusive domains of social sciences and philosophy.

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Much of the scholarly discussion pertaining to epistemological assumptions regarding the earliest Christian authors has been framed by a series of dichotomies, placing "faith" and "religion" on one side and "reason" and "philosophy" on the other. I argue in this paper that uncritical use of these hard-to-define and overly general concepts as blanket categories to analyse Christian writings from the first three centuries CE inevitably causes major methodological issues and could be seen as heuristically unjustified. I suggest that a more frugal approach may be initiated by reconceptualizing the traditional "faith" vs. "reason" dichotomy in terms of the concept of personal and impersonal epistemic justification.