Apologetics has nothing to do with saying sorry
In an Athenian courtroom the prosecution delivered the kategoria, the charge, and the accused answered with an apologia, a formal defence. Socrates gave the most famous one. Religious apologetics borrows that courtroom sense: reasoned argument in defence of a faith. Cardinal Newman played on both meanings when he titled his 1864 autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua.
The Christian version grew out of persecution. Roman critics accused believers of starting the fire of Rome, a charge Tacitus said Nero invented, as well as cannibalism, from a literal reading of the Eucharist, and incest, because Christians called one another brother and sister. Writers between roughly 120 and 220, among them Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, answered such accusations and commended their faith to outsiders. Tertullian of Carthage, sometimes called father of the Latin Church, gave Christianity the word Trinity and probably the formula three persons, one substance.
Later apologists shifted from rebutting slanders to building positive cases, using ontological, cosmological and design arguments for God and wrestling with the problem of evil, where Alvin Plantinga's work proved influential. Many are academic philosophers; others, such as G. K. Chesterton, wrote for a broad public.
The practice is far from uniquely Christian. Jewish apologetic writing reaches back to Aristobulus of Alexandria, who addressed a defence to Ptolemy VI, and Josephus answered accusations against Judaism in Against Apion. Islam developed kalam, literally the science of discourse, to defend its tenets against sceptics. One of the earliest Buddhist examples, The Questions of King Milinda, explores the doctrine of no-self, and Meiji-era contact with Christianity spurred a Japanese New Buddhism with its own apologetic magazine. Deists argue for God from reason and nature alone, without revelation.
Hindu apologetics took shape under British rule, as Indian intellectuals pushed back against colonial disdain for their traditions, a push that helped preserve and translate Sanskrit texts. Early in the 18th century the missionary Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg exchanged arguments with Tamil priests who sent him 99 letters, later published in German. In Bombay in 1830 and 1831, the missionary John Wilson held public debates with Brahmin scholars, one of whom set out his replies in a Marathi treatise.
Source: Apologetics
