The quote below includes Doherty's notes on the dating of Aristides as well as him addressing some of my comments on the topic.
I've highlighted Doherty's statement that "Aristides does mention a human Christ, based on the gospels". Note that Aristides also refers to Christ coming from "a Hebrew virgin" -- no Marcionism there! -- if that helps with the dating.
Without going into a lot of detail, I will note that Rendel points out some confusion arising from Eusebius' references to Aristides and Quadratus. Both, says Eusebius (History of the Church IV, 3) wrote apologies to Hadrian, making them contemporaries. And yet in IV, 23 Eusebius' discussion of a letter by Dionysius of Corinth which mentions Quadratus seems to place this Quadratus in the time of Dionysius, a good half century later. Through an argument covering several pages, Harris opts to place Aristides in the reign of Antoninus Pius, in other words, sometime between 138 and 161, perhaps a couple of decades or so beyond the usual date (à la Eusebius) assigned to Aristides' Apology, which is 125. As for Quadratus, the leeway with which he can be assigned a date, simply on the basis of material in Eusebius, may be as much as half a century; one wonders how reliable even the attribution of the single preserved fragment to this obscure figure may be. As noted earlier, one can see how the reliability of early Christian traditions, including the dating and ascription of documents, often rests on quicksand.
In the Supplement volume of the Ante-Nicene Fathers (X, p.259f), the translator and commentator of the Apology, D. M. Kay, addresses the diverse interpretations of the date of Aristides. (The discrepancies are due to differing elements of the text between the rediscovered Syriac version, Armenian fragments discovered not too long before the Syriac, and an incorporation of a Greek version in an early medieval romance called The Life of Barlaam and Josaphat.) Kay opts to reject Prof. Harris' findings on the grounds that "this requires us to suppose that Eusebius was wrong," and that "Jerome copied his error." Heaven forbid that anyone should consider that Eusebius might have gotten something wrong, or that later Christian commentators like Jerome might have been mistaken about earlier traditions, and Kay decides "to rest in the comfortable hypothesis that Eusebius spoke the truth." Victorian England may have been quite willing to find comfort in its naivete, but we have surely learned since then that Eusebius is anything but dependable, and that many traditions he reports (and sometimes fabricates) have since been proven to be untenable or highly questionable. Once again, my contention that all such claims have to be taken with a grain of salt, or even set aside as unverifiable (the default position ought to be that early Christian traditions are not to be relied on), is shown to be justified and anything but "outrageous." When a tradition 'preserved' in the early Church proves incompatible, or difficult to bring into conformity, with what we can read on extant pages, there should be little doubt in which direction the weight should lie.
GDon spotlights three quotes from the Apology of Aristides:
* "It is impossible that a god should be bound or mutilated; and if it be otherwise, he is indeed miserable." [ch. 9]
* "And they say that [Tammuz] was killed by a wound from a wild boar, without being able to help himself. And if he could not help himself, how can he take thought for the human race? But that a god should be an adulterer or a hunter or should die by violence is impossible." [ch. 11]
* "And [Osiris] was killed by Typhon and was unable to help himself. But it is well known that this cannot be asserted of divinity....And how, pray, is he a god who does not save himself?" [ch. 12]
Now, let me allow that all these statements do constitute criticisms of features of pagan theology which could be said to have their counterparts in the Christian religion. Certainly, Christ was mutilated, he died by violence, and he did not choose to save himself from death. In ridiculing those ideas in pagan thought, Aristides offers no qualification for the supposed parallel situations in regard to Christ's life, situations we assume he was familiar with, since he refers to "written gospels" (though no authors and only basic details are mentioned). But context is everything, and we need to consider that context. First, let us note that this apology is on a lower level of sophistication than anything produced by the likes of Tatian, Theophilus, or Athenagoras. No Greek philosophical concepts are presented, much less a Logos doctrine. GDon has contrasted these excerpts from Aristides with a quote from Minucius Felix, "...neither are gods made from dead people, since a god cannot die...", but there is no debate here as in Felix, no give and take. Much care was taken constructing arguments in the latter work, while Aristides is clearly an inferior writer and thinker to Felix and most other apologists.
I suspect that Aristides was simply oblivious to any contradictions; they would have gotten lost in the shuffle. The great bulk of his Apology is taken up with diatribes against the theological beliefs of the Greeks, Jews, Egyptians, and Barbarians. He goes into great detail, ridiculing and condemning all, about the worship of natural elements, about the absurdities of the Greek myths and the reprehensible behavior of their anthropomorphic gods, about the stupidity of deifying animals as the Egyptians do; he is a little less harsh with the Jews, though he maintains that they are deceived into directing their rituals toward the angels rather than God himself. In the midst of all this, and quite in keeping with the negative image in which he is trying to cast the other religions, he throws in some criticisms which resemble features of the Christian faith. But even here, we might excuse him for not thinking that qualifications were needed for Jesus, since the contexts are not that close. When he condemns the idea of a god being bound and mutilated, he is speaking of the myth of Zeus doing this to Kronos, one god to another, not of some allegedly historical event on earth; the mutilation involved the latter's genitals. Should we really expect Aristides to worry about an obscure parallel with Christ, let alone trouble himself to offer a proviso in his case?
Osiris, similarly, is murdered in a squabble between rival gods. Tammuz dies as the result of a hunting accident. Neither, Aristides scoffs, was able to help himself and prevent his death, which is the apologist's point. Is this to be considered a pertinent parallel to Christ, who came to earth to willingly undergo the cross for the sake of human salvation? It probably never occurred to the philosopher to offer some saving qualification for Christ's death; it would hardly have seemed applicable. GDon has taken such remarks out of context and made far more of them than they deserve. Moreover, despite the tedious attention he devotes to the mythologies of other religions, Aristides seems little concerned with comparing them to Christ himself, for he gives only the barest outline of the Christian genesis in Jesus and the events of his life, and then only as part of his introduction. In the body of his Apology, what he offers in contrast to the theistic beliefs of the pagans is a survey (distinctly idealized) of Christian ethics, thinking thereby to prove the superiority of the Christian faith and gain the emperor's sympathy.
Nor is the overall situation between Aristides and the other apologists the same. Aristides does mention a human Christ, based on the gospels; no concealment there. The apologists I have examined, with the exception of Justin, do not. If GDon sees a contradiction, supposedly requiring qualification, between the passages he has highlighted and the 'historicist' nature of the author, that is his prerogative; but this is precisely what we do not find in the major apologists, since they contain no such contradictions, having no reference to a human Jesus who had presumably undergone the very things being ridiculed in the pagan myths. This is simply being read into them. Nor does Aristides make statements which contain a denial or exclusion of supposedly key Christian beliefs. There is no silence in the face of requests for "minute detail" about the faith, as there is in Athenagoras. There is no definition of "Christian" given which implicitly excludes an historical Jesus, as there is in Theophilus. There is no equation of Greek myths with Christian stories, as there is in Tatian. There is no rejection of the worship of a crucified man, as there is in Minucius Felix.
In all, I would suggest that the nature of Aristides' Apology when compared with the major apologetic works of the second century makes the lack of any qualification regarding the criticisms he directs at the pagan gods virtually insignificant.