Although it is widely recognised that οἱ πιστεύοντες was a self-designation of the early Christ groups, this is not reflected in scholarship on Romans and Galatians, where the participle is usually taken as a generic substantive. Such a rendering obscures the force of Paul's rhetoric, which presupposes the status of οἱ πιστεύοντες as a shared self-designation and mobilises it in an effort to naturalise Paul's claims regarding the exclusive justificatory value of his addressees’ πίστις. Accordingly, in Rom 3.22 and Gal 3.22, where οἱ πιστεύοντες appears in close connection with πίστις Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, it is unlikely that the latter phrase designates Christ's own faithfulness.

It is regularly suggested that the great weakness of reformational orderings of ‘faith’ and ‘justification’ is that they fail to coordinate Christology and the doctrine of justification. Behind this assertion is a particular construal of the pistis Christou debate: the interpretative decision to read Christ as the object of faith contributes to an anthropocentric account of justification whereas a ‘subjective’ interpretative of the genitive phrase restores the (Pauline) relationship between Jesus and justification. This article will argue that this is a misreading of Protestant theology, at least as it comes to expression in Martin Luther's exegesis of Galatians 2.16, 19-20 which presents a radically Christocentric account of ‘faith in Christ’. For Luther, the sola fide, as an interpretation of a Pauline antithesis—‘not by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ’—, is an anthropological negation and a christological confession: it excludes the human as the subject of salvation and confesses Christ, who is present in faith, as the one by, in, and on the basis of whom God justifies the ungodly.

This article is a response to the recent work of Michael F. Bird and Michael R. Whitenton, in which they argue that Hippolytus's De Christo et Antichristo provides a clear instance of a subjective genitive πίστις Χριστοῦ construction and unambiguously identifies πίστις as Jesus' death on the cross. However, in light of (1) a significant textual variant, and (2) the role that πίστις plays in Hippolytus's theology of martyrdom, the construction in fact supports the reading of an objective genitive.

The debate over the meaning of πίστις Χριστοῦ has been continuing for some time and shows no signs of abating, yet one conclusion has remained constant: the Church Fathers, generally, did not understand πίστις Χριστοῦ in the Pauline materials in the subjective sense as the ‘faithfulness of Christ’. Furthermore, there has heretofore been no text that correlates Jesus' faithfulness with his death on the cross in patristic writings. In light of that, the aim of this study is (1) to offer a critique of recent work on πίστις Χριστοῦ in the Church Fathers, and (2) to break the longstanding silence by presenting overlooked evidence from Hippolytus's De Christo et Antichristo that unambiguously relates Jesus' faithfulness to his death on the cross.