Cyril of Alexandria was a central figure in many of the theological developments and religious conflicts that challenged the stability of the fifth-century eastern Roman Empire. Crucial moments during his episcopacy (412–44) marking wider and more complex developments may be seen with sharp clarity in the outbreaks of overt violence between Christians and Jews and between Christians and “pagans” in the metropolis of Alexandria during the first years of his episcopal career. Moreover, roughly halfway through his tenure as bishop, he would involve himself in a doctrinal dispute underway in the eastern capital of Constantinople, opposing its bishop Nestorius because he believed the truth of the gospel was dangerously undermined by what he took to be Nestorius’ errant Christology. Through the savvy manipulation of ecclesiastical and imperial politics, Cyril succeeded in having Nestorius deposed by the Council of Ephesus in 431, though it took eighteen months of negotiations to restore communion between the warring factions. The result would be a delicate peace that did not last long after his death and a theological controversy over his legacy that would persist for two centuries, with its influence still being felt today.

Much of his vast literary output is of interest to the theologian, while his ecclesiastical-political machinations readily merit the attention of the historian. Yet, amidst his sprawling corpus comprising ten volumes of the Patrologia Graeca sits a lengthy apologetic work that has garnered surprisingly little consideration in the scholarly investigation of his place within late antique intellectual, theological, and literary developments. Nonetheless, this largely ignored treatise directed against the long-dead Roman emperor Julian (whose short, twenty-month reign lasted from 361 to 363) is of fundamental relevance for appreciating the interreligious dynamics of Cyril’s Alexandria, since it highlights the mutual imbrications of biblical, historical, theological, and philosophical ways of thinking, and allows one to trace a formidable appropriation of the classical heritage as an expression of the vibrant intellectual culture of late antiquity. Cyril’s Against Julian (hereafter abbreviated c. Iul.) has long been ignored no doubt partly because, until very recently, there existed no translation into any modern language.Footnote ¹ The present volume represents the first complete English translation of the work, and the following introductory discussions aim to provide several angles by which readers as yet unfamiliar with its nature and importance can fruitfully approach this important and fascinating text.

The Dating of Against Julian

According to the tenth-century History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, Cyril composed Against Julian after certain philosophers confronted him with the arguments of Julian in circulation among them. The emperor was notorious for having abandoned the Christianity of the emperor Constantine and his sons and reinvigorating worship of the traditional Greco-Roman deities throughout the Empire through a variety of means, including writing a treatise against the Christian faith.Footnote ² Presumably it is to this treatise, known to us as Against the Galileans, that the History alludes, though its author probably had no first-hand acquaintance with the work. According to the History, when Cyril read Julian’s arguments, he found them to be “worse even than the works of Origen and Porphyry.” Unable to destroy all existing copies of the apostate emperor’s treatise, Cyril gained the support of the current emperor in opposing Julian’s works and composed “homilies and discourses” against them, a rather vague and expansive gesture that no doubt includes Against Julian (and possibly some of his Festal Letters, as we shall soon see).Footnote ³ While the History does not provide greater precision as to the date of Cyril’s anti-Julianic activity, it explicitly places it before the outbreak of his conflict with Nestorius, which occurred in 429.

Generally dismissive of any objective merits possessed by the History, modern scholarship had until recently preferred a date later in Cyril’s episcopacy for his composition of Against Julian on the basis of a letter of Theodoret written in 448 to Dioscurus of Alexandria, Cyril’s episcopal successor.Footnote ⁴ Theodoret’s letter mentions that Cyril had sent the work to John of Antioch (bishop 429–41) with a request that he distribute it to other ecclesiastical leaders of the East. The scholarly consensus was that this transmission must have taken place in either 434–37 or 439–41, in other words the two periods when Cyril and John would have been on friendly terms. However, Pierre Évieux sagely advised that, when considering the letter as evidence for dating Against Julian, we should distinguish between the time of its composition and that of its circulation among the bishops of the East; Theodoret can only be taken as evidence for the latter.Footnote ⁵ Évieux concluded that, although Cyril may have begun composition of the treatise before the Nestorian conflict, he probably continued to work at it beyond the peak years of the controversy and sent it to John in one of the two chronological windows amenable for doing so.Footnote ⁶

Considerations supporting a later date for Cyril’s publication of the treatise, if not the composition itself, have based themselves upon external motivations or constraints and internal features of the text. The former set of considerations would include, on the one hand, the possibility that he may have wanted to supersede the response to Julian that had been written by Theodore of Mopsuestia, who became one of Cyril’s primary theological opponents in the 430s,Footnote ⁷ while, on the other hand, the treatise’s depth and range would seem to have required an extended period for composition. The latter set of considerations emphasize “stylistic ticks” internal to his corpus, which, while seductive, unfortunately point in different directions. For instance, quite strikingly Cyril avoids discussing the epithet Theotokos (“mother of God”) for Mary, in spite of the fact that Julian himself uses the term in his critique of Christian views.Footnote ⁸ This could be evidence for a date of composition before the Nestorian controversy, at which point the term became a shibboleth of Cyril’s understanding of orthodoxy. Yet, at the same time, it is also possible that he prescinds from the topic out of awareness that his audience includes the uninitiated (as acknowledged in c. Iul. 8.34.24–29 immediately after the relevant passage from Julian). Furthermore, an assertion in older scholarship had claimed that the frequent application of the epithet “all-wise” to the apostle Paul indicates a later date for Against Julian (whereas it had seemed to be limited to Moses alone in earlier texts). But this should probably be questioned: while not frequent in his early writings, it is present; and, in any case, the apologetic treatise assigns “all-wise” to a strikingly large number of other figures besides Moses and Paul – from Abraham, Isaiah, John, and God to Plato and even Julian himself (obviously with a good deal of sarcasm in the latter case).Footnote ⁹ Consideration of the relative frequency of other phrases, which earlier scholars thought might confirm a later date, turn out upon inspection to be either inconclusive or even suggestive of an earlier date.Footnote ¹⁰ The mixed results of stylistic investigation should caution against making any firm judgments of date based on apparent trends in the ebb and flow of Cyril’s verbal mannerisms, especially when examining a corpus of diverse texts, from commentary to polemic.

Fortunately, recent work by Markus Vinzent and Marie-Odile Boulnois has provided more definitive results: there are signal similarities in terms of content and wording between Against Julian and a small number of securely dated Festal Letters.Footnote ¹¹ The latter is a corpus of letters, one for (almost) every year of Cyril’s episcopacy, each of which announced the date for Easter (and thus the commencement of Lent) and elaborated upon pastoral concerns deemed most important at the time. According to Vinzent’s useful survey of all the letters, those for the years 424–26 (namely, Letters 12–14) evince a marked increase in Cyril’s worries over paganism and critiques of Christianity; according to Boulnois, the letter for 427 (Letter 15) has unmistakable similarities with the eighth book of Against Julian (itself unique within the apologetic work as something of a short Trinitarian and Christological treatise). The identification of parallels between these letters and Against Julian appears compelling, and, since the stylistic investigations do not preclude an early dating, we would locate the composition of all (or at least most) of the ten extant books of Against Julian in the middle years of the 420s and thus roughly a decade after he became bishop of Alexandria.Footnote ¹²

The Historical Context of Against Julian

As recounted in the Ecclesiastical History of Socrates Scholasticus, the early years of Cyril’s episcopal tenure were notoriously unsettled.Footnote ¹³ In order to succeed his uncle Theophilus as bishop of Egypt’s capital upon his death in 412, Cyril and his supporters had to fend off a powerful competing candidate, the archdeacon Timothy.Footnote ¹⁴ Furthermore, once he had secured the throne of Saint Mark, he found himself in a series of conflicts with the city’s Jewish population and the imperial prefect Orestes, culminating in the horrific lynching of the philosopher Hypatia in March 415, one of the most iconic episodes of late antiquity.Footnote ¹⁵ The latter conflict is relevant for setting the context of Against Julian, because it reveals a simmering tension between Christian and pagan communities in Alexandria that, while at times latent, could on occasion be intense enough to lead to violence.Footnote ¹⁶ According to Socrates’ account, when a band of 500 Nitrian monks stormed the city and attacked the prefect, they accused him of being a “sacrificer and a Greek” (θύτην καὶ Ἕλληνα), while Orestes protested that he had been baptized as a Christian by Atticus, bishop of Constantinople.Footnote ¹⁷ Suspicion about Orestes’ religious commitments no doubt stemmed at least in part from the fact that he was “meeting more frequently” with Hypatia, perhaps the most prominent, non-Christian public intellectual at the time.Footnote ¹⁸ In the much later and overtly hagiographical account of John of Nikiu, this religious point is made explicit: he has Hypatia beguiling Orestes with her magic and convincing him to stop attending church.Footnote ¹⁹ While the precise details around Hypatia’s tragic death remain frustratingly murky, these comments from Socrates and John suggest that the event came about, at least in part, due to a rivalry between Christians and pagans in the city and an attempt by some to ensure that the boundaries between these groups remained clear.

Prior to Hypatia’s murder, the most recent episode of conflict between Alexandria’s Christian and pagan populations had occurred in 391–92 with riots that resulted in the Christian takeover of the city’s Serapeum on the orders of Emperor Theodosius I.Footnote ²⁰ The Serapeum was devoted to the Alexandrian deity Serapis and was renowned as the most magnificent temple outside the city of Rome,Footnote ²¹ so its destruction sent shockwaves throughout the Mediterranean world. Cyril must have been an adolescent at the time. In fact, he himself attests to the widespread practice of sacrifice within his own lifetime, writing in book 4 of Against Julian,

The use of the imperfect tense (ἐτέλουν) in this passage probably indicates that public sacrifice had ceased by the time Cyril was writing.Footnote ²³ Nevertheless, despite the loss of Alexandria’s most famous temple and despite imperial legislation outlawing sacrifice, devotion to the traditional deities continued in other forms. In the section immediately prior to the passage quoted above, Cyril refers to the gods Cronus, Zeus, Ares, Artemis, and Dionysus as “those who are still even now being worshipped.”Footnote ²⁴ In other words, at the time he was writing, ubiquitous public sacrifice to the gods was still a recent memory, and Alexandria continued to be home to those who maintained devotion to the traditional deities amidst an empire that was resolutely Christian, either by worshipping these deities with other forms of sacrifice that were permissible or by sacrificing in secret.

Moreover, Christians and pagans continued to sit side-by-side in Alexandria’s famous classrooms throughout the fifth century.Footnote ²⁵ Hypatia’s own students included not only pagans but also Christians such as Synesius, who became bishop of Cyrene.Footnote ²⁶ The philosopher Hierocles, who stood in the Iamblichean stream of Neoplatonism, studied in Athens but also taught in Alexandria in the first half of the fifth century, being held in high esteem among his contemporaries for his eloquence and probably counting among his students the Christian author Aeneas.Footnote ²⁷ The later systematizer of Iamblichean Neoplatonism, Proclus, studied rhetoric, Aristotelian philosophy, and mathematics in Alexandria until he went to Athens in 430–31 to continue his philosophical studies.Footnote ²⁸ Ammonius, a student of Proclus, would later return to Alexandria (c. 470) to teach philosophy to an audience of diverse religious beliefs, from Damascius, who would go on to lead the Platonic school at Athens, to the Christian Zacharias, later bishop of Mytilene.Footnote ²⁹ Christians and pagans could, therefore, sit alongside one another in the same classrooms in Alexandria well into the late fifth century and beyond, but this did not preclude the existence of intense dialogue and indeed debate between these religious groups. The texts later written by Aeneas and Zacharias (Theophrastus and Ammonius), while fictional, testify to the intellectual scuffle that could take place in a classroom as objections, rebuttals, and counterobjections flew back and forth between Christians and pagans over the philosophical merits of Christian teaching in comparison with the tenets of Neoplatonism.Footnote ³⁰ On occasion these debates could turn violent, most notably in 486 when a Christian student was attacked for insulting a pagan teacher, resulting in riots and the destruction of an Isis sanctuary in the Alexandrian suburb of Menouthis.Footnote ³¹

Although we lack sources that provide detailed information about the educational scene in Alexandria specifically for the period of the 410s and 420s when Against Julian was probably composed, there is no reason not to assume that the kind of religiously diverse classroom settings we observe in the preceding and subsequent decades were not also a reality in this period, along with the concomitant rivalry between educated Christians and non-Christians.Footnote ³² Clues within the text itself hint at just such a setting as the context that provided the impetus for Cyril to take up his pen and oppose the long-dead emperor. In his “Dedication” to Emperor Theodosius II, the bishop explains that the primary audience for his apologetic treatise consists of Christians, both those “whose hearts are fickle and are very easily snatched and carried off to what is inappropriate” as well as “those who have a firm footing in the faith.”Footnote ³³ With his treatise, Cyril explains, Julian “is rattling many people and causing no small amount of injury,” including both of the aforementioned groups of Christians, not just those who are weak but even those who are mature in the faith.Footnote ³⁴ But it does not seem as if these Christian readers had simply stumbled upon Julian’s Against the Galileans on their own. Rather,

Although Cyril does not specify the location in which his Christian followers encountered pagans boasting of Julian’s erudition, Alexandria’s religiously diverse classrooms are one plausible setting where such discussions would have taken place, though it need not exclude other possibilities as well. Furthermore, the mention of “teachers” in this passage is perhaps significant. Again, Cyril does not specify who these teachers are. They could be Christian professors who taught various traditional subjects, such as rhetoric or mathematics. More likely, however, the reference is to Christian teachers who provide instruction in distinctly Christian subject matter. In a revealing passage, Julian himself in fact had complained about the “school” in Alexandria run by Athanasius, which offers “instruction” (κατηχήσει) and “teaching in the scriptures.” So effective is Athanasius’ “school,” according to Julian, that “many of his pupils” could take his place once he was exiled.Footnote ³⁶ Julian seemingly refers here to some kind of catechetical school, though the details of it remain murky. Whatever the case, it is clear that he has in mind an institutional structure under the oversight of the bishop of the city that offers instruction in the scriptures, something we can presume was also operative during Cyril’s episcopate several decades later. If so, then the pagan boast reported by Cyril in the above passage probably refers to teachers associated with the church who, in the view of his contemporaries, had never responded to Julian’s forceful critique of Christianity.

Presumably Cyril refers again to this same group of contemporary pagans when, early in book 1, he speaks of some who are “seeking to implant into others the sickness of so shameful a superstition,” who are like serpents “injecting the poison of perdition into people who are easily led astray.”Footnote ³⁷ These are, in other words, proselytizing pagans who are engaging Cyril’s flock in debate. And a few paragraphs later he once more claims, “the children of the Greeks think highly of their own teachers and suppose they can frighten some people by name-dropping for our benefit the Anaximanders, Empedocleses, Protagorases, and Platos of the world.”Footnote ³⁸ The mention of “teachers” here again is striking and suggests that the term “children” is probably being used metaphorically to refer to students, whether those who are currently students or those who once were students and now consider themselves the offspring of their former teachers.Footnote ³⁹ Cyril, therefore, in Against Julian speaks of Christian “teachers,” probably associated with the church, as well as presumably pagan “teachers” and “children” who pride themselves in their allegiance to famous Greek philosophers.

The language of the classroom appears elsewhere in the treatise as well. Notably, Cyril tends to introduce quotations from non-Christian sources by referring to their authors as Julian’s “teachers,” including Plato, Aristotle, Porphyry, and the Hermetic corpus.Footnote ⁴⁰ Later, in response to Julian’s argument that Christians should stick to studying only the Bible if they really think it is sufficient, he remarks that Christians “have no need of external teachers” to become “wise,” but they nevertheless investigate “the opinions of the Greeks” since “it is sweet to know all.”Footnote ⁴¹ The last line is a tag from Menander (Epit. fr. 2) that, perhaps not coincidentally, was also quoted over a century later in the Introduction to Philosophy by the Alexandrian Neoplatonist Elias.Footnote ⁴² Finally, when Julian boasts that the Greeks surpass the Christians in “the spheres of the arts, wisdom, and understanding,”Footnote ⁴³ Cyril retorts “there are a very great many excellent teachers of the arts and sciences among us.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The context of this line is a contrast between gods who teach arts and sciences and humans who do the same, suggesting Christian teachers might not be specifically in view, though the passage nonetheless shows the relevance of the classroom to the apologetic debate.

These textual clues suggest that contemporary pagans in Alexandria, who were either current or former students of philosophy, were taunting their Christian peers with the fact that Julian’s critique of Christianity had never been refuted by a Christian teacher or author. It was specifically Julian’s apparently expert knowledge of the Christian scriptures, a product of his instruction at the hands of bishops, that made him a formidable opponent in the eyes of Cyril’s flock.Footnote ⁴⁵ As leader of the Christian community in the city and thus its most prominent teacher, Cyril took up the challenge of offering a response, in so doing contributing to the institutional rivalry between Alexandria’s traditional classrooms and the instruction in Christian sacred texts proffered by the church and its intellectuals.

We should, moreover, resist the temptation to reduce Cyril’s comments about his contemporary setting to mere posturing on the part of a bishop in need of a safely deceased opponent against whom to burnish his reputation. The Neoplatonist Eunapius of Sardis published his Universal History as well as his Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists around the turn of the fifth century and in both works Julian is the clear hero, representing an alternative future in which the Roman Empire would have returned to paganism, had not the emperor suddenly met his death in the ill-fated invasion of Persia. Moreover, in the Neoplatonic school of Athens, the memory of Julian’s reign remained alive until its closure at the hands of Justinian in 529.Footnote ⁴⁶ It is, therefore, eminently plausible that Alexandrian pagans with Neoplatonic sympathies in the 410s and 420s continued to hold the emperor in high esteem and boasted of the erudition and persuasiveness of his attack on the Christian faith.Footnote ⁴⁷ This is the most plausible setting for the composition of a sustained written response that would dwarf Julian’s books against the so-called Galileans and would stand as the most extensive engagement with non-Christian philosophy ever produced by an Alexandrian bishop.

Cyril’s Handling of Julian’s Text

Had it not been for the format Cyril chose for his response to the emperor, nearly all of Julian’s text would be lost to us today. Since Against the Galileans does not survive in the direct manuscript tradition, we can only access it through other texts that engaged with Julian’s work and provide us with fragments and testimonia. By far the majority of these remnants come to us thanks to Cyril’s Against Julian, as is evident in the fact that ninety-four of the one hundred and seven fragments in the most recent critical edition of Against the Galileans derive from Cyril, while the remaining thirteen come from five other authors (for a table with the locations of the fragments from c. Gal. preserved in c. Iul., see the Appendix to this volume). This is because Cyril entered the fray with his opponent in the most direct manner possible by structuring his apologetic rebuttal as a series of responses to excerpts from Julian himself.

This approach marks a contrast to apologetic texts roughly contemporary to Cyril’s Against Julian, such as Augustine’s De civitate Dei and Theodoret’s Cure for Greek Maladies, neither of which engages at such length with a single opponent whose own words are incorporated into the text itself.Footnote ⁴⁸ The closest analogue to Cyril’s method is Origen’s Against Celsus written two centuries earlier, which similarly consists of quotations from that earlier Platonist critic of Christianity followed by Origen’s response.Footnote ⁴⁹ Cyril’s Against Julian, however, is more overtly structured in a manner designed to keep Julian’s and Cyril’s comments distinct, as though he were an actual interlocutor in a debate. Whereas Origen often incorporates Celsus’ words in the midst of his own paragraphs of prose, interspersed with his own commentary, and is not always clear about when he is paraphrasing or quoting verbatim,Footnote ⁵⁰ Cyril’s quotations of Julian for the most part consist of verbatim block quotations. Consequently, disentangling Julian’s words from those of Cyril is a less complex task than is the case for those of Celsus. In fact, because the textual breaks are usually clear and unobjectionable, scholars since the sixteenth centuryFootnote ⁵¹ have inserted the headings “Julian” and “Cyril” into the text for the benefit of readers, a practice that we continue. To be sure, Cyril on occasion departs from this procedure, quoting a line or two from Julian in the midst of his own commentaryFootnote ⁵² or summarizing otherwise lost portions of text that he does not quote verbatim.Footnote ⁵³ Nonetheless, for the most part he provides the reader with Julian’s own words, allowing him, in a sense, to speak for himself before providing his response. Cyril would later adopt this same procedure with respect to Nestorius’ homilies during his infamous conflict with his Constantinopolitan counterpart.Footnote ⁵⁴

As seen below in the summary of the text, Cyril postpones direct engagement with his opponent until the second book of his treatise. At the outset of book 2, he briefly recounts the methodology he will follow in the remainder of his apology:

Three aspects of this passage are worth noting. First, Cyril claims to be setting forth Julian’s words verbatim. Thus far no one has identified any instances in which this claim might be doubted and so, until evidence to the contrary can be found, we should take Cyril at his word that he is accurately quoting from his opponent. At any rate, if Julian’s treatise was indeed being read among Alexandrian pagans (see “The Historical Context of Against Julian” above), this would limit Cyril’s ability to emend his opponent’s text, since his version could be compared with other copies in circulation. Second, Cyril states that he intends to quote selectively from Julian’s text, omitting portions that directly defame Christ. There are indeed hints at times that he is responding to passages of Against the Galileans he has chosen not to quote,Footnote ⁵⁶ but no clear allusions to anything that would fit the criteria stated above, so we can only speculate about what statements have been suppressed. Finally, Cyril complains that Julian’s treatise lacks proper order and that, to avoid repetition, he has sorted the extracts taken from it into categories so that he only has to treat each topic once.

By choosing to quote Julian verbatim rather than use polemical paraphrases, Cyril has constrained himself to responding to his opponent’s points in their original phrasing in a manner that would seem persuasive to his readers, since they also had ready access to Julian’s words within Cyril’s very treatise. That is, he has elected to limit his authorial freedom to otherwise misrepresent the viewpoints expressed by Julian or to ignore them and set forth his own views instead.Footnote ⁵⁷ Nevertheless, as Cyril himself admits, his chosen method does not eliminate his own authorial agency, since he is the one who decides which portions of Julian’s treatise are quoted, at what length, and in what sequence.

But just how much reshuffling of Julian’s fragments did Cyril engage in? The answer seems to be not as much as the above passage would lead one to expect.Footnote ⁵⁸ For the most part he seems to quote Julian’s fragments generally in sequence, though of course with omissions along the way. This is evident in the fact that, when Julian refers to topics he intends to take up later, these indeed usually do occur in fragments subsequently quoted by Cyril. For example, in c. Gal. fr. 31,Footnote ⁵⁹ he alludes to a future discussion of whether Jesus really is the Son of God, which appears in c. Gal. frs. 62, 64, and 79.Footnote ⁶⁰ Moreover, some fragments quoted in succession by Cyril seem to have been directly contiguous with each other in Julian’s original composition.Footnote ⁶¹ Finally, even the order of the component parts of Julian’s treatise seems to have been kept in sequence. In the methodological passage quoted above from his second book, Cyril refers specifically to Julian’s “first book.”Footnote ⁶² While we cannot be certain that all of the fragments quoted in books 2–10 of Against Julian come from the first book of Against the Galileans, Julian himself alludes to a future examination of Jesus’ discordant genealogies that he intends to undertake in his “second book,”Footnote ⁶³ and topics related to Jesus’ infancy narratives do indeed appear in the surviving fragments of Cyril’s eleventh book.Footnote ⁶⁴ This pattern suggests that, in broad terms, the fragments of Against the Galileans quoted in Against Julian books 2–10 probably come mostly from Julian’s first book, while from book 11 onwards Cyril probably responded to Julian’s second book, though it is impossible to be more precise than this, and some degree of reorganization of material could have occurred that is impossible to detect.Footnote ⁶⁵

Some instances of Cyril’s reorganization are easier to identify. For example, c. Gal. fr. 4, which recounts several Greek myths, is quoted at c. Iul. 2.11 but topically has no relation to the preceding or subsequent Julianic fragments that appear in book 2. In this case Cyril seems to have relocated the excerpt to this place in his argument because Julian’s admission in fr. 4 that Greek myths are “unbelievable and fabulous” serves as an effective reply to his demand in c. Gal. fr. 3 to know why Christians abandoned Hellenism, which also skillfully turns back upon Julian the criticism voiced in c. Gal. fr. 1 that Christians believe in myths.Footnote ⁶⁶ Aside from book 1, which does not quote any passages from Julian, the only book that strikingly departs from Cyril’s usual pattern is book 8, the subject of a recent study by Marie-Odile Boulnois.Footnote ⁶⁷ She has highlighted the fact that in this book Cyril only quotes five fragments from Julian, fewer than he does in other books, and that he has carefully chosen these Julianic passages to allow himself to craft book 8 as a sort of dual treatise on the topic of the Trinity (c. Iul. 8.18–34) and the incarnation (c. Iul. 8.34–51). The unusual character of book 8 is also evident in the fact that it contains the only instance in which Cyril quotes a passage from Julian a second time. He had already quoted c. Gal. fr. 46 at c. Iul. 6.22, presumably in the sequence where it originally appeared in Julian’s treatise, and he now provides a shortened version of it again at c. Iul. 8.50 since it serves for him as a foil representing the pagan notion of a divine incarnation. However, this pattern in book 8 is an exception to his usual habit of treating the passages raised by Julian seemingly as they occurred in the sequence of Against the Galileans, albeit selectively.

In terms of how he responds to a given fragment after quoting it, Cyril tends to be very methodical, addressing in sequence each of the points raised in a passage he has just cited and often reusing the exact terminology employed by his opponent. His response to c. Gal. fr. 58Footnote ⁶⁸ is a good example. In this lengthy fragment, Julian raises the following objections, to which Cyril responds in the sections noted in parentheses: the writings of the Jewish prophets disagree with those of Moses (c. Iul. 7.29); Christians have adopted impiety from the Jews and vulgarity from the Greeks (c. Iul. 7.30); Christians reject other deities even though Moses instructed the Israelites not to blaspheme the gods (c. Iul. 7.31); and Christians are lax in their dietary practices and even more vulgar in their morals than the Greeks (c. Iul. 7.32–37). In a few instances he treats the topics raised by his opponent in a given fragment out of sequence, but when doing so usually makes sure to return and address the portion he had skipped over. So, for example, in c. Gal. fr. 67,Footnote ⁶⁹ Julian first raises the issue of the “sons of God” mentioned in Genesis 6 who mingled with the “daughters of humans” and then points out that Moses never mentions the “Son of God” in whom Christians believe. Cyril initially replies to the latter point (c. Iul. 9.3–10) before returning to the first one (c. Iul. 9.11–12).

This kind of methodical treatment of Julian’s extracts suggests that, despite its intense polemical force, Cyril’s apology has been carefully constructed to address what he took to be the most pressing issues raised by Julian’s Against the Galileans. Moreover, this close engagement with his opponent’s actual words turns his treatise into a kind of dialogue, albeit one in which one party is in firm control of how the conversation proceeds. And even though Julian is not present to give a rejoinder to his fifth-century Christian interlocutor, Cyril on occasion provides a hypothetical one for him (e.g., c. Iul. 8.22.1–7). The dialogue-like format of the text is also heightened by Cyril’s penchant for addressing his interlocutor in the second person, using the ancient rhetorical device of apostrophe.Footnote ⁷⁰ His chosen mode of engagement with his opponent thus not only preserves a remarkable number of fragments from an otherwise lost treatise written by the most prolific and notorious emperor-author of the Roman Empire, but also enlivens the style of the text we read.

Cyril’s Sources

When Cyril came to draft his apologetic response to Julian, he had already staked a significant claim to being a master reader of the biblical texts. If indeed his apology was written in the mid 420s, he had already by this point composed several hefty expositions of the Old Testament and possibly his Commentary on John. Readers of his polemic against Julian could thus expect a heavyweight in biblical exegesis to be entering the ring to challenge the close readings of scriptural texts within Julian’s treatise that had proved so threatening to Alexandrian Christians (a fact that Cyril himself alludes to in the very first sentence of book 1). They would not be disappointed in this expectation. Nonetheless, the showcasing of the voices of others is not limited in Against Julian to block quotations from his opponent Julian or the myriad of shorter quotations, paraphrases, or allusions to biblical passages that span the entirety of what remains of Cyril’s text.

Rather, a singularly powerful feature of Cyril’s apologetic project is his wide-ranging and sophisticated use of pagan sources. A stunning array of quotations beginning chronologically with Homer (over a millennium before Cyril by his own dating of the poet) and reaching down to Porphyry (whose death was only a little more than a century before Cyril became bishop) fill the pages of Against Julian and appear to have accomplished a variety of literary and polemical needs.Footnote ⁷¹ Furthermore, just below the surface of his explicit invocation of named sources there is a clear but complicated engagement with his almost entirely unnamed Christian apologetic predecessors. Careful and painstaking analysis of all of these sources, both pagan and Christian, is ongoing;Footnote ⁷² the survey here can only indicate some of the basic contours of Cyril’s negotiations with both sets of sources.

The Argument of Julian’s Against the Galileans

Although it possesses obvious import for our appreciation of Julian’s brief but tense stay in Antioch where it was composed in the winter of 362–63, as well as his literary, philosophical, and religious thought, there is nevertheless much that we do not know about the argumentation and scope of Against the Galileans. Frustratingly few references to the work survive. For example, Gregory of Nazianzus shows no awareness of it, despite having composed two lengthy orations attacking the recently deceased emperor (Or. 4 and 5).Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Aside from those works written in direct response to Julian’s treatise (and Cyril’s is the only one of these to survive in anything like its original form), only two other ancient texts mention it. In his funeral oration for the emperor, his coreligionist Libanius states,

The most that can be gleaned from this passing reference is that Julian attacked the Christians’ sacred texts and the deity of Jesus, features which do indeed accurately characterize its surviving portions. Some scholars have attempted on the basis of the above passage to posit that the emperor used Porphyry’s own polemical treatise Against the Christians as a source for his anti-Christian arguments, though Libanius is unfortunately not so forthcoming about the relation of the two texts.Footnote ¹⁶¹

The only other ancient reference to the text comes from Julian himself, in a letter with its own curious transmission history. A sixth-century doctrinal treatise contains a Latin translation of an excerpt from a letter composed by the emperor to Photinus, a Christian bishop who propounded a controversial Christology (and who perhaps not incidentally is mentioned by Julian in c. Gal. fr. 64 Mas. [= c. Iul. 8.15–16]). In the passage Julian praises his correspondent’s views in contrast to those of Diodore of Tarsus and then writes:

Though Julian does not specify in what format he intends to critique Diodore’s views, the allusion to the Muses points towards a written work and scholars have long assumed, for good reason, that he is referring to his intention to write the treatise we know as Against the Galileans. As in Libanius’ summary account, here again the deity of Jesus features prominently in the forecasted argument.

With these being our only two ancient references to Julian’s anti-Christian treatise, there is no incontrovertible evidence for the work’s title or the number of books it originally comprised. Cyril’s dedicatory preface to Theodosius II only periphrastically refers to Julian’s books “against the holy gospels and against the pure religion of the Christians.”Footnote ¹⁶³ Elsewhere in Cyril (and other Christian authors), it is merely designated as the work “against us.” Most modern treatments plausibly accept the title Against the Galileans (rather than Against the Christians) since Julian avoided the label “Christians” with striking consistency and instead opted for the culturally and geographically diminutive epithet “Galileans.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ While it should be remembered how little we know with certainty about the title, we have adopted the standard modern rendering Against the Galileans.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

Aside from Julian’s own reference in one of Cyril’s quoted fragments to a “second book,”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ the only overt evidence in antiquity for the number of books of Julian’s anti-Christian treatise is inconsistent. First, in Cyril’s opening “Dedication” to Theodosius II, only two manuscripts of Against JulianFootnote ¹⁶⁷ contain the crucial numeral “three” at the mention of Julian’s books against the Christians,Footnote ¹⁶⁸ although this reading receives additional support from marginalia in manuscripts B and Q (which draw upon other manuscript witnesses)Footnote ¹⁶⁹ as well as the quotation of the passage by Michael Glycas. Secondly, however, two passages of Jerome inform us that it comprised seven books.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Scholars since at least the nineteenth century have almost universally rejected Jerome’s report and, aside from Jerome’s claim that the seventh book contained an attack on the evangelist Matthew’s use of Hosea 11:1 (cf. Matt 2:15),Footnote ¹⁷¹ there is complete silence in all our sources about any books that may have been written beyond a third (and even for the third book, we are severely lacking in information outside of the evidence noted above). Neumann, who edited the editio princeps of Against the Galileans, suggested that Jerome mistakenly reported the number seven from his reading of one of the polemics against Julian written by Theodore of Mopsuestia or Philip of Side, which may have extended up to at least a seventh book;Footnote ¹⁷² Jerome then, not otherwise having direct access to Against the Galileans itself, could have erroneously attributed his Julianic material to a seventh book of Julian’s treatise rather than the seventh book of the Christian refutation from which it had in fact been drawn. While tempting, this suggestion can neither be affirmed nor denied given the paucity of our evidence, though an example of precisely this kind of mistake does appear in the church historian Socrates Scholasticus.Footnote ¹⁷³

It may be troubling that Cyril, our primary (and nearly sole) source for both the precise wording and the general content of Julian’s Against the Galileans, claimed early on that he could bring himself neither to quote some of the more blasphemous elements of Julian’s polemic nor to follow the alleged repetitiveness or disorder of the treatise he targeted (on which see “Cyril’s Handling of Julian’s Text” above). Nonetheless, we can trace the main lines of its argumentation with relative firmness (even if Évieux may have been too generous in claiming that we have the argument of Julian’s first book “as if in its entirety”).Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Julian himself summarizes his overarching critique of Christianity in a fragment presumably from the preface: Christians are guilty of a double-apostasy by betraying the ancestral religious traditions of the Greeks and adopting those of the Jews, only to jettison the latter for poorly invented fairy tales and misleading rituals;Footnote ¹⁷⁵ at the same time, Christians are guilty of a double-dependency by borrowing, like “leeches,”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ “atheism from the Jewish villainy, and … a debased and lax manner of life from the apathy and vulgarity among [the Greeks].”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Strikingly, such a framework of critique had already been laid out by the unnamed targets of Eusebius of Caesarea in his great apologetic treatise of the generation before Julian’s birth, namely the Preparation for the Gospel.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ These anonymous critics (whether real or invented for the occasion by Eusebius) could themselves find a predecessor for their double-apostasy schema in Celsus (as preserved in Origen’s Against Celsus). Indeed, as noted already, Eusebius is the only Christian apologist to be named in the extant remains of Against the Galileans,Footnote ¹⁷⁹ while careful analysis has shown that Julian likewise almost certainly had Origen’s apology before his eyes as he composed his polemic.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Was Julian, then, merely carrying the hackneyed themes of his predecessors into the new context of a progressively ascendant imperial Christianity? That is, was his Against the Galileans just a derivative work, exhibiting in its unoriginality the weakness of a defeated paganism?

Study of Julian’s work would suggest the contrary. Patient analysis of the surviving fragments demonstrates, in fact, that Julian seems to have been intentionally and carefully responding to the two apologetic powerhouses of the previous hundred years. Rather than feebly adopting the critiques of Celsus and the anonymous opponents of the Preparation, Julian targeted their respondents, OrigenFootnote ¹⁸¹ and Eusebius. His accusation of double-apostasy (combined with the double-dependency motif mentioned above) appears to have kept its critical eye consistently fixed upon the earlier Christian responses to such an accusation while elaborating that accusation in such a way as to overwhelm their apologetic enterprises. He did so in two fundamental ways: unlike Celsus, he exhibited a thorough knowledge of the Christian scriptural texts, even at the level of noting problems of textual criticism; and unlike Eusebius’ anonymous opponents (who may be no more than a literary construct themselves), he would not defend an uncritical acceptance of any and every element of the Greek religious (and literary and philosophical) traditions, but would provide a philosophically defensible understanding of that religious heritage (for instance, quickly accepting that Greek myths were foolish and opting instead for a Platonic understanding of cosmogony). These two ways of meeting the challenges set down by Origen and Eusebius prompted Julian to formulate his attack (at least in what survives of it) according to the following broad outline:

1. 1. Preface and ground rules for debate (preserved in c. Iul. book 2): his motive for writing was to expose the “Galilean intrigue” as being without divine origin but instead the result of a “human fabrication,” which took advantage of the senseless part of human souls;Footnote ¹⁸² Christian respondents should limit their answers to the points he was making and not bring in counteraccusations and so muddle the quasi-judiciary proceedings that his work pursued;Footnote ¹⁸³ his general plan of attack would start with the human conception of God and then proceed to a comparison of Greek and Hebrew teachings on the divine to substantiate the accusation that Christians have committed a double-apostasy (rejecting what was good first in their ancestral religious traditions and then in those of the Jews) and a double-dependency (adopting what was worst from each group).Footnote ¹⁸⁴

2. 2. Foundations of rational religion (also preserved in book 2): first, all humans (as individuals and as nations) have some notion of divinity prompted by a “common desire” for the divine, even if precise knowledge of the divine nature is difficult to attain and impossible to communicate to others;Footnote ¹⁸⁵ second, all humans recognize the visible gods of heaven (even if they believe in others transcending this).Footnote ¹⁸⁶

3. 3. Christian apostasy from Greeks: the importance of a comparative approach (synkrisis) to the biblical and Platonic accounts of cosmology (also preserved in book 2); problems in the biblical account of the first humans (the creation of woman as an “assistant,” the prohibition from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the biblical omission of any account of the creation of lesser divine beings such as the local god of the Jews, and so on; preserved in book 3); a comparative approach to biblical and Greek accounts of national gods as well as to the nations’ relative contributions to arts and sciences, along with legislation, governance, and military success (preserved in books 4–7).

4. 4. Christian apostasy from Jews: the importance of a comparative approach to the Old Testament and New Testament, as well as early Christian theologies (preserved in book 8) and rituals (preserved in books 9–10).

Because it seems that Cyril responded to the second book of Against the Galileans in his second decade of books (books 11–20, if there even were twenty total), which now survive in only fragmentary form, our knowledge of his argument in that portion of the work is even more spotty. Many of the surviving fragments of Cyril’s later books were excerpted by compilers more interested in Cyril’s views than the ways in which such views were meant to answer a criticism levelled by Julian. From what we can ascertain in these fragments, Julian certainly seems to have subjected the New Testament itself to a sustained critique in this section (as he hinted he would).Footnote ¹⁸⁷ We discern, for instance, indications that he was concerned about the nature and duration of the star of the Magi,Footnote ¹⁸⁸ the apparent need of the Word to experience growth in a body if he was God,Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Christ’s alleged gluttony in comparison with the asceticism of John the Baptist,Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Christ’s fulfilling the law (while seeming to break it),Footnote ¹⁹¹ his admonition not to love family more than him,Footnote ¹⁹² the necessity of Christ’s endurance of suffering (and his prayer acknowledging that suffering was “not my will”),Footnote ¹⁹³ or his ability to preach to (and save) those who had already died.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ He criticized Christ’s claim that he would be with the thief “today in Paradise” although he would simultaneously be in the heart of the earth,Footnote ¹⁹⁵ as well as the contradictions of the evangelists in their resurrection accounts and the genealogies of Christ,Footnote ¹⁹⁶ the impossibility of a camel entering the eye of a needle and other sayings of Jesus,Footnote ¹⁹⁷ the Christian practice of praying for those who suffer or pitying evildoers who had fallen into misfortune,Footnote ¹⁹⁸ and the evangelist John’s assertion that “the whole world” could not contain all the stories about Christ if they were written down.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Furthermore, Julian seems to have raised yet again the sensitive topic of the Christian veneration of martyrs and Christ.Footnote ²⁰⁰

Thus, in the second book of Against the Galileans, it appears that Julian maintained his overall strategy of keeping his criticisms close to the biblical texts (unless this is merely an impression given by the interests and proclivities of our Christian sources). Likewise, some themes remain constant between his first and second books: the incongruity of Christian teaching and the law of Moses; the problematic status of the cult of the martyrs; the nature of Christ; and the morality that would result from reading the biblical texts. If our Christian witnesses to Julian’s anti-Christian polemic are a reliable indication, he seems to have constructed a sustained and coherent critique of Christianity that renders plausible Cyril’s claim that it was threatening to Christians, both weak and mature.Footnote ²⁰¹

The Argument of Cyril’s Against Julian

Due to its nature as a text responding directly to another text, the flow of the argument in Cyril’s Against Julian often seems somewhat ad hoc. Answering his opponent point by point naturally required Cyril to track Julian’s lead wherever it went, and consequently multiple topics are treated in each book, often seemingly unrelated to one another. Some books are, nonetheless, largely focused around one or two main topics, such as book 2’s discussion of cosmology and book 9’s examination of Christian observance of Jewish legal regulations. Moreover, at key points of his polemic Cyril limited and curated the quotations of his opponent in order to unfold more methodically his own distinctive historical or theological claims: book 1 does not cite any fragments from Julian, leaving Cyril free to structure it as he saw fit, and it indeed has a clearer sense of progression with explicit transition points; book 8, as noted above, is unique among the other books since it quotes the fewest number of Julianic passages, and those that do appear were carefully chosen to produce a dual treatise on the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation. For the remaining books, the collection of topics that appear together is not always easily summarized; the following section therefore provides not an outline but more of a play-by-play account of the various issues raised in the course of this debate in order to give prospective readers an overview of the terrain it covers.Footnote ²⁰² Since no other summary of the argument of Against Julian in its entirety is currently available in English, the specificity of the following overview hopes to be an aid for those readers with more focused interests seeking to locate particular portions of Cyril’s argument rather than reading the whole. Other readers may prefer to dive into the apology and read it in its entirety, an experience we highly recommend.

The “Dedication” to Emperor Theodosius II praises the emperor’s piety and presents Cyril and his sovereign as engaged in a common endeavor to defend the glory of God against its detractors. The preeminent opponent of Christ’s glory is Julian, who is unsettling the faith of Christians with his books. Cyril mentions Julian’s early life as a baptized Christian and claims some believe he had a thorough knowledge of the sacred scriptures, though in fact he has entirely failed to understand them. Since Julian’s followers are boasting that no Christian teacher has yet responded to his attack, Cyril himself steps into the arena to come to the aid of his brethren in the faith.

Book 1 opens with a contrast between the “wise … experts in the sacred dogmas” who are able to interpret the scriptures rightly and those like Julian who fight against the “dogmas of piety” under the influence of Satan (1.1–3). Cyril then announces the twofold goal of the book, first to demonstrate that Moses is more ancient than the Greek wise men, and second to prove that the Greek wise men agree with one another when they have followed Moses’ ideas but fall into irresolvable disputes when they depart from him (1.4). The first objective is undertaken in 1.5–20 and is heavily reliant on Eusebius’ Chronicon from which Cyril takes passages from the historians Alexander Polyhistor and Abydenos, along with extensive chronological reference points from the birth of Abraham up to the birth of Christ (1.6–16). He then relies on passages and arguments taken from Pseudo-Justin Martyr’s Cohortatio to demonstrate that the Greeks were aware of wisdom from Egypt and would have learned of Moses’ writings (1.18–20). The remainder of the book, devoted to the second half of Cyril’s argument, is subdivided into two sections. The first details the theological view held by Abraham and Moses and claims that they both maintained a firm ontological distinction between the one Creator and all that he has made, while also believing the one Creator God is none other than the divine Trinity (1.21–34). The final section of the book aims to examine the theological views held by those persons esteemed by the Greeks. Orpheus and Homer are both said to be monotheists (1.35–37), in contrast to the diverse and incompatible theologies propounded by the seven sages (1.38–40). Moreover, Hermes Thrice-Greatest, Pythagoras, Plato (mediated by Porphyry), Pseudo-Sophocles, and Xenophon all affirmed belief in the one Creator God (1.41–44), while Plato, Orpheus, and Hermes also were aware of the only-begotten Word of God (1.45–46), and Plato and Hermes acknowledged the Holy Spirit (1.47–49). This proves that, though the Greeks often went astray in their view of God, they were not entirely bereft of the true theology stemming from Moses (1.50).

Book 2 introduces Julian’s treatise and lays out Cyril’s intended method of dealing with it (2.1–2) and then covers various introductory matters such as the meaning of the term “Galilean” (2.3), myths (2.4–6, 11), Julian’s proposed law-court metaphor for assessing Christianity (2.7–10), and Christianity’s relation to Judaism and Hellenism (2.11–13). Cyril next turns to the topic that will occupy the remainder of the book, cosmology. He first preempts Julian’s praise for Plato’s cosmology by laying out a variety of contradictory views on the creation of the world found among Greek intellectuals, drawing upon the epitomized version of Aetius’ Placita (pseudonymously attributed to Plutarch), Porphyry, and Pseudo-Justin’s Cohortatio (2.14–17), and then inserts Julian’s quotation of the Mosaic cosmology from Genesis 1 to present the alternative, true account, according to which there is one Creator, who is distinguished from everything else that exists, which was brought into existence by him (2.18–21). Hints of the same, correct view are found among the Greeks themselves, including Plutarch (really the epitomized Aetius again), Hermes Thrice-Greatest, and even Julian himself (2.22–23). This Creator–creature distinction central to Moses’ doctrine is sharply contrasted with Hesiod’s Theogony and the Greek practice of worshipping creation (2.24–26). Moreover, his account has the virtue of simplicity, since it does not attempt to explain the incomprehensible process by which everything was made but simply emphasizes that the world came to exist by God’s Word, a view confirmed once more by Hermes Thrice-Greatest (2.27–31). Cyril next quotes a lengthy passage in which Julian in turn quotes the famous speech of the Craftsman to the younger gods in the Timaeus, and he spends the next several sections critiquing Plato’s cosmology, focusing above all on the question of why the Craftsman does not make humanity himself but instead delegates the task to other, lesser beings. To support his case Cyril calls upon another passage of the Timaeus, along with Porphyry, Alexander of Aphrodisias, and Hermes Thrice-Greatest (2.32–42). Julian’s exegesis of the Craftsman’s speech is quoted next, to which Cyril responds by reiterating many of the same critiques already voiced, bolstered by passages from Aristotle and Plotinus (2.43–49). A final passage from Julian stating that all humans, including Greeks and Hebrews, naturally came to believe heaven to be God prompts Cyril to emphasize again the basic ontological distinction between Creator and creature, adding that the orderliness of the creation should lead one to conclude it has a Maker, but not that it is itself divine (2.50–56).

Book 3 continues the debate over the early chapters of Genesis by focusing on the story of the Garden of Eden. In response to Julian’s critique of the creation of Eve, who brought not benefit but loss to Adam, Cyril counters, first, by highlighting the problematic nature of Hesiod’s account of the making of a woman and its conflict with Plato’s Timaeus, and then goes on to clarify the type of assistance Eve was designed to provide, namely reproduction (3.1–6). He then introduces a theme that will run as a leitmotif through the remaining books of Against Julian, human freedom: God cannot be blamed for the fateful error of Adam and Eve because virtue and vice require the possession of free will, as was recognized by Porphyry and Alexander of Aphrodisias (3.7–10). Julian next raises the topic of God’s prohibition upon eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, leading Cyril to defend the necessity of laws for restraining the human inclination towards evil, akin to natural laws that govern the universe and serve as the manifestation of divine providence, as Alexander of Aphrodisias likewise emphasized (3.11–15). Moreover, Cyril proposes that the prohibition served as a constant prompt to the human couple to contemplate their maker, the summit of happiness, a point again made by Alexander, and he cautions against questioning the appropriateness of God’s actions, as Porphyry also warned (3.16–19). The topic of the speaking serpent arises next, a phenomenon that Cyril claims should not be surprising, since Greek sources also acknowledge that daemonsFootnote ²⁰³ can make inanimate objects speak, citing examples from Homer, Porphyry, Philostratus, and Isogonus of Citium (3.20–22). The fact that Moses’ god bars humanity from knowledge of good and evil is next subjected to scrutiny by Julian, leading Cyril into a digression on human moral psychology, followed by his assertion of a distinction between the knowledge of good and evil and the experience of it (3.23–28). The appropriateness of God’s punishment of the first couple is the “climax” of Julian’s argument, which Cyril counters by quoting Porphyry again on the topic of divine judgment (3.29–32). The flow of the argument then shifts direction somewhat abruptly back to Genesis 1. Against Julian’s attempt to demote the Mosaic deity to a lower metaphysical rank, Cyril defends at length the claim that he is the highest God, appealing to Numenius for support (mistakenly thinking he was quoting Plato) (3.33–37). The identity of the Mosaic deity remains the focus for the remainder of book 3, with Julian highlighting his limited domain over the nation of Israel and Cyril arguing that, although Israel played a unique role in the divine plan of salvation, God always intended to save all of humanity (3.38–53). The topic of divine jealousy and patience is treated briefly in the book’s conclusion (3.54–55).

Book 4 continues the thread of Julian’s argument from the conclusion of book 3, with him now setting forth the alternative Greek view of divine providence to show the insufficiencies of Jewish and Christian particularism. Rather than the highest God only being concerned about a single nation, Julian contends that the Craftsman has cared for all humanity by assigning specific governing deities to each one, whose own essence corresponds to the disposition of that nation (4.2). This claim launches Cyril into one of his longest stretches of argumentation uninterrupted by a further quotation from Julian, in which he relentlessly attacks the traditional Greek deities and relies on repeated antithetical arguments to box Julian into a logical corner. On the one hand, a good Craftsman would certainly not have entrusted his creatures to morally corrupt overseers and, on the other hand, the notion that these overseers determine each nation’s disposition undermines free will and thus virtue (4.3–7). These deities are in fact fallen daemons who induce humans to worship themselves, unlike the angels, who direct all praise to the one true God (4.8–12). The portrait of these beings becomes progressively darker as Cyril calls on Porphyry and Homer to highlight the daemons’ delight in blood sacrifice, and then demonstrates that they even seduced their followers into engaging in human sacrifice, citing as evidence Deuteronomy, various sources previously mentioned by Clement, and Porphyry (4.13–20). As Porphyry and Hermes Thrice-Greatest recognized, piety towards the one true God is the best way to avoid the evil daemons, not apotropaic sacrifices (4.21–23). Julian next highlights the distinct propensities and laws each nation possesses, to which Cyril responds with a robust assertion that all humans have a common nature and the freedom to pursue virtue, since they were made by a good Craftsman, as Alexander of Aphrodisias recognized (4.24–26). He also draws upon Clement to enumerate a range of famous individuals who defied ethnic stereotypes, calling into question Julian’s seeming ethnic determinism (4.27–28). An exchange on the Tower of Babel story and human diversity follows, with Julian emphasizing the limited explanatory power of the biblical account and Cyril asserting once more, first, that human freedom causes diversity, and, second, that God exercises universal providence (4.29–37). Julian then returns to the identity of the God of Genesis, expressing uncertainty about whether he is himself the Craftsman or merely a local deity; Cyril in turn emphasizes Trinitarian monotheism (4.38–39). In the subsequent fragment, Julian extends his providential theory by expanding the levels of divine hierarchy and taking account of natural laws. Cyril reiterates his prior position that diversity is due to human factors, citing Sophocles; he quotes Plotinus to underscore how the moral problem of defective overseers would reverberate all the way up to the highest levels of the Platonic metaphysical scheme; and he argues indignantly that human skin color has no relation to one’s mindset or ethical capabilities (4.40–42). A penultimate fragment returns to the Tower of Babel and whether or not Moses believed in a multiplicity of divine beings (4.43–45). In a final passage Julian asserts once more the superiority of his Hellenic theology to that of Jews and Christians, with Cyril retorting that Christ came to redeem humanity from the evil daemons Julian valorizes (4.46–48).

Julian’s comparative project continues in book 5, moving on to examine legal matters among the Jews and the Greeks. In response to his sarcastic disdain of the Ten Commandments as banal, Cyril defends their wisdom, especially the prominence they grant to correct worship of the one true God, and he accuses Julian of arrogance in refusing to accept them simply because the precepts they enjoin are also esteemed by other nations (5.1–5). The topic of divine jealousy and punishment for human wrongs next arises and becomes a dominant theme for much of this book. Julian accuses the Mosaic deity of jealousy and impotence, leading Cyril to defend divine impassibility, relying on Alexander of Aphrodisias, and to explain that the Bible predicates emotions of the divine as an anthropomorphic necessity that is pedagogically useful for humanity (5.6–11). After a puzzlingly brief interlude (5.12), Julian presses his critique by highlighting a biblical episode in which God was so angry he was prepared to destroy hundreds of thousands for the trivial reason that a small number worshipped other deities. Cyril replies that apostasy is a serious matter which God punishes for humanity’s own good, and that the biblical story in question is actually evidence of God’s mercy, not his harshness. After all, Porphyry likewise recognized that God sometimes removes people for the greater good and that his providential judgments should not be questioned (5.13–23). The aforementioned negative aspects of the biblical deity are, in Julian’s estimation, absent from the esteemed lawgivers in his own tradition, such as Lycurgus, Solon, and the Romans. Cyril once more explains that lawgivers, including God, can punish wrongdoing without being subject to the passion of wrath, and he skillfully turns Julian’s Hellenic tradition against him by pointing out that religious faults were also punishable in the laws issued by those people, adducing the famous example of Socrates’ execution for such crimes (5.24–27); Julian should therefore not be so surprised to see the biblical God acting similarly to restrain apostasy. A further Julianic critique of the negative emotions displayed by the Hebrew deity prompts Cyril to appeal once more to anthropomorphic language and then go on the offensive, citing episodes from Euripides and Homer that reveal the Greek gods acting even more unjustly (5.28–32). In the final two fragments quoted in this book, the focus shifts away from the Hebrews to other nations who, the emperor claims, have received much greater divine gifts, especially the Greeks, who have perfected the mathematical sciences. Cyril appeals to passages in Plato (quoted via Clement and Eusebius) and Porphyry to argue that true wisdom consists in knowing the one true God and living a virtuous life, goals to which the arts and sciences contribute nothing (5.33–40).

The next stage of Julian’s comparison of Hellenic and Jewish history expands to take in a range of different professions and individuals. In his opening fragment of book 6 Julian names eight famous individuals among the Greeks, and Cyril systematically takes up the first four with the aim of dismantling their reputation: Socrates (with the assistance of passages from Porphyry and Plato), Plato (using passages from the Philebus and Symposium), Cimon, and Aristides (6.1–7). In contrast, the lives of biblical heroes were exemplary, and the punishments doled out for crimes, including apostasy, were fair and not so different from the Greeks’ own attempts to legislate right religious belief (6.8–9). Julian next highlights famous Greek military and political leaders, with Cyril again offering less flattering alternative character portraits and dismissing much of the stories in question as myth (6.10–11). Jesus himself then takes center stage, as Julian contrasts the limited and parochial scope of his supposed deeds with those of the aforementioned great men, prompting Cyril to emphasize the divine quality of Jesus’ miracles, in contrast to the Homeric gods who are unable to save their own followers from death (6.12–13). Rome itself becomes the focus in the subsequent two fragments, with Julian enumerating the divine gifts bestowed upon the Empire, from the lawgiver Numa to the shield that fell from the sky, and the general Marius. Cyril replies by aligning Numa with Pythagorean-inspired correct worship of the deity; defending the power of the cross and those Christians who draw it on their houses and foreheads; and pointing out that Marius sacrificed his own daughter to the foul daemons (6.14–19). Divination and prophecy as divine gifts are briefly debated (6.20–22), followed by Asclepius, whom Julian takes to be a god born from Zeus, while Cyril dismisses him as a mere human who arrogantly called himself divine and was appropriately executed by God (6.22–24). In the subsequent fragment Julian dismisses Christian piety as mere worship of a Jewish corpse, along with all the martyrs. Cyril explains that, although he was a genuine human who did indeed die, Jesus was also divine, and that Christians do not worship the martyrs but instead honor them as athletes for piety, a practice akin to Greek oratorical contests memorializing soldiers who died at Marathon; moreover, it is in fact the Greeks themselves who have deified humans (for this last point Cyril relies on a confused tradition supposedly from Senchoniathon preserved in Josephus in turn preserved in Clement, though Eusebius is his immediate source) (6.25–30). Next, Julian’s disparaging of the low social status of Christian converts prompts Cyril to return to a theme he first enunciated in book 4, emphasizing once more that all humans have a single nature and are capable of virtue, despite external differences or advantages. After all, Porphyry acknowledged the unimpressive backgrounds of Socrates and Plato and said Pythagoras inducted slaves and women into philosophy; in fact Porphyry himself admired his wife’s philosophical ability (6.31–36). Political themes take up the remainder of the book. Julian gives a litany of episodes from the Hebrew scriptures to emphasize the paltry political fortunes of the Jews and then points out that Jesus was one of Caesar’s subjects, and not a very impressive one at that, since he was unable to persuade even his own family to follow him. Cyril argues in reply that Julian’s gods, who have now been defeated by Christ, could not possibly have granted power to Rome to rule; that submitting to legitimate political authority is no moral fault; and that Christ became incarnate in humble circumstances so that people might not be compelled to believe in him by force but be persuaded to do so, and so that no one would mistake him for a deified human emperor (6.37–46).

Julian’s comparative project continues in the fragments quoted in book 7, seemingly picking up right where the final fragment of book 6 ended, now with a focus on military success. He contends that the Hebrews had no one who could remotely rival Alexander or Caesar, a point that Cyril regards as entirely irrelevant to the question of deciding whether true doctrine lies with the Christians or the Greeks; he nonetheless makes sure to highlight some miraculous military victories recounted in the Hebrew scriptures (7.1–5). Julian next raises various other aspects of human culture, explicitly rejecting Eusebius’ claim that the Hebrews were artistically and intellectually advanced. Cyril once again views this topic as beside the point and emphasizes instead the importance of right doctrine and right living which are found in the Mosaic writings (7.6–8). The subsequent Julianic fragment looks specifically at the case of Solomon. Cyril parries Julian’s critique of Israel’s wisest king by pointing out that Solomon was not in the first rank of the saints; that he was raised in luxury, which tends to produce moral faults (in contrast to Socrates who exhibited similar vices but had no such excuse); and that he was led to worship other deities only because he was seduced by a foreign woman (7.9–15). A contest of authoritative texts comes next, with Julian arguing that studying Greek literature is capable of leading to self-improvement while Christian sacred texts are unable to offer any benefit. Cyril, expectedly by now, highlights the pure doctrine of God and high ethical precepts evident in the scriptures, which have the added benefit of being written in a register intelligible to all humanity, not just the elite, since eloquence alone is unable to render someone a friend of God (7.16–23). A list of various Greek deities follows, each of whom, according to Julian, preside over a distinct domain of human life; such limited knowledge and skill in fact reveal, in Cyril’s view, that these beings are not gods and in many cases are even inferior to humans (7.24–27). Julian then reprises the double-apostasy theme with which he began his treatise, adding further detail about the defects Christians took from the Greeks and the Jews. This leads Cyril to defend Christian opposition to the worship of multiple deities, in accordance with Moses, and the Christian practice of eating all foods since all of creation is good; besides, true defilement comes from moral vice, such as the temple prostitution encouraged by the Greek gods (7.28–37). In a final fragment, Julian attacks the moral character of Christians, basing himself on Paul’s description of the Corinthians’ pre-Christian life, and mocks the notion that baptismal water can cleanse a sinner. Cyril responds by defending the kindness of Jesus in helping sinners; clarifying that baptism cleanses the soul, not the body; and emphasizing the magnificence of the salvation experienced by Christians (7.38–45).

The flow of the debate between the bishop and the emperor noticeably shifts upon reaching book 8. It is not clear whether the Julianic fragments included by Cyril in this book originally followed directly those in book 7, although it is likely that they did not, since Cyril has carefully selected the passages to structure the book as a dual treatise on the doctrine of the Word’s eternal existence and incarnation. Moreover, the book is framed by a sort of inclusio, beginning with Julian’s claim that Moses did not prophesy the coming of Jesus and ending with Cyril’s lengthy explication of fulfilled prophecies. The first fragment presented in book 8 argues that Moses honored only one God and knew nothing of the existence of the only-begotten Son of God, whom Julian terms a “second God,” despite the appeal Christians make to passages like Deuteronomy 18:15, Genesis 49:10, Numbers 24:17, and Isaiah 7:14 (incidentally, all of which were also discussed in Origen’s Against Celsus). In response, Cyril argues that Moses was a true monotheist, since he believed his God was not merely “pre-eminent” over others but was actually the only true God, and he explains at length how Deuteronomy 18:15 and Genesis 49:10 were in fact prophecies about Christ (8.1–14). In the next fragment, Julian continues his argument that the Jewish scriptures leave no room for worshipping a second god, invalidating the Gospel of John’s ascription of deity to Jesus and the Christian practice of referring to Mary as “God-bearer” (theotokos). Cyril’s reply is the longest single section of this book: he first lays out the logic of Trinitarian doctrine, arguing that it does not conflict with belief in divine unity and simplicity; then he quotes Plutarch and Plato (via Eusebius) to show that the Greeks believed in the oneness of God; next he returns to the Hebrew scriptures to find evidence for the Son’s existence therein; he then calls on Plato to show the folly of not believing those who speak authoritatively about God; and finally he returns to the Greeks, quoting passages from Porphyry, Plato and Numenius (via Eusebius), Plotinus, and Hermes and identifying multiple similarities between Platonic theology and what Christians believe about the Trinity (8.15–33). A further fragment, in which Julian once more denies that Mary could be the mother of a God who saves, sets up the remainder of the book. However, rather than launch into a discourse on the doctrine of the incarnation, which would be inappropriate for those who are uninitiated into the church’s mysteries, Cyril instead recounts redemptive history, beginning with creation and explaining why the Craftsman himself became a human to rescue his fallen creatures, as foretold by the Hebrew prophets; in the process he quotes Plotinus to defend the Word’s divine immutability even in his incarnate state; Amelius’ brief exposition of the Gospel of John’s prologue (via Eusebius), to show that even the Greeks did not completely dismiss Christ’s incarnation; and finally Julian himself, to set forth his Asclepius-savior myth as a foil. The book concludes with a rhetorically powerful contrast: if Plato said humans should believe the descendants of the gods even in the absence of them providing “plausible or compelling proofs,” the Christian account is much more believable, since it relies upon a host of fulfilled prophecies (8.34–51).

Book 9 continues the argument over whether or not Moses believed in the Son of God, with Julian pointing out that Moses rather freely refers to many beings as gods or sons of god, but never speaks of Jesus as such. In response, Cyril adduces a number of passages that, he claims, refer to the Son under a myriad of different titles (e.g., “hand,” “arm,” “power”) and even foretell his incarnation in the flesh (e.g., Jacob’s wrestling with God), and then argues that the “sons of God” mentioned in Genesis 6 were not angels, as Julian contends, but righteous humans (9.1–12). The next Julianic fragment, preceded by an unusually lengthy prefatory remark by Cyril, introduces the theme that will dominate the remainder of the book: Jewish religious practice and Christians’ refusal to abide by the Mosaic prescriptions. Julian aligns Jewish customs with those of the Greeks and other nations, and specifically argues that the “scapegoat” ritual in Leviticus 16 is in fact a description of an apotropaic sacrifice. Cyril’s reply is the lengthiest piece of sustained exegesis of a single biblical passage in all of his treatise. He first takes Julian to task for only reading the passage literally, an embarrassing mistake given that the Greeks themselves highly prize figural language such as hieroglyphs and riddles (with Porphyry summarizing the latter), and then sets forth alternative readings of the Levitical passage that accord with the Pauline “mystery of Christ” (9.13–20). Julian next claims that Moses was in fact an “expert” in sacrifices and that contemporary Jews still practice sacrifice despite the loss of their temple, prompting Cyril to explain that God in fact never desired blood sacrifice (as again Porphyry realized) and only instituted the Mosaic sacrificial system as a mode of instruction particularly suited to the immature state of the Israelites, though he did so in such a way as to wean them off of such material realities and encourage them to see the truth of Christ outlined within. However, now that Christ, the truth himself, has appeared in the flesh, the shadows have been illumined and Christians continue to abide by the Mosaic law but in a spiritual and intelligible manner (9.21–31). Dietary regulations are the next topic for debate, with Julian denouncing Christian libertinism with respect to food, founded in Peter’s vision in Acts 10, and Cyril arguing that the dietary laws of the Pentateuch should be interpreted as representations of various classes of immoral or moral human beings (9.32–38). As he argues in the next fragment, such regulations are, in Julian’s view, eternally binding, since Moses did not entertain the possibility of a revision of them or foretell a second law to replace his own. In response Cyril reiterates the Christological transformation of the law, which is indeed eternal, though observed in diverse ways by the Hebrews of old and the Christians of his own day (9.39–45). In the conclusion to the book, three final passages from Julian are rapidly summarized, the first concerning Jewish restriction of sacrifice to Jerusalem; the second arguing that even the Holy Spirit recognized the eternality of the Mosaic law (in Acts 15); and the third highlighting the disagreement between the apostles Paul and Peter. Cyril quickly dispatches these notions by agreeing with Julian’s critique of sacrifice being limited to Jerusalem and appealing to the apostles’ supremely wise mode of accommodating their guidance and behavior to the specific needs of their audience (9.46–47).

The opening of book 10 goes back to the topic that appeared at the beginning of the previous book, continuing the debate over the ascription of deity to Jesus, though with Julian now attempting to debunk the evidence from the New Testament writings used to support this notion. Julian offers a fascinating and idiosyncratic historical reconstruction of the origin of Christ worship and claims only the evangelist John referred to Jesus as divine, and even he did so with questionable motives. Cyril in reply runs through a litany of passages from the Pauline corpus and all four gospels that, in his view, attribute divine qualities and actions to Jesus and, in some instances, even explicitly refer to him as God (10.1–7). In response to a further attempt from Julian to identify contradictions in the prologue to the fourth gospel, Cyril then clarifies the sense in which Christians can be said to have “seen God” even though the divine remains unseen (10.8–10). The cult of the martyrs is the next topic for debate, with Julian expressing disgust at the fact that Christians have piled so many “corpses” upon the “corpse” of Jesus and Cyril reprising the analogy he drew in book 6 between reverence for the martyrs and Athenian celebrations of fallen military heroes. He adds that the pollution and stench that come from dead bodies are powerless to bring true defilement, which consists of immoral actions, and points out once more the impotence of the Homeric deities when faced with human death (10.11–16). Julian then proposes that Christians picked up the practice of sleeping among the tombs from the Jews, at which point Cyril goes on the offensive, arguing that the pagan temples were themselves built upon the tombs of human beings, as acknowledged by Dinarchus, Porphyry, and Clement of Alexandria (10.17–21). In the remaining fragments in this book, Julian seemingly returns to the main topic from book 9, namely Jewish religious rituals, which Christians reject. He highlights the use of fire in the sacrifices of Elijah and Moses, and then emphasizes the distinction between Cain and Abel’s sacrifice, arguing that God rejected the former’s offering because ensouled beings are more valuable than plants. In response, Cyril asserts that the fire of the Jewish sacrifices was a symbol of the divine nature, which is now fulfilled in the light of the Holy Spirit that shines upon the church; in short, as he argued at length in book 9, the types and shadows have given way to the truth. Moreover, the prescriptions for sacrifice in the Hebrew scriptures include the offering of plants, so God must not have rejected Cain’s sacrifice on such grounds; rather, he found fault with Cain because God tested his motivation and found it wanting (10.22–30). Circumcision is the next topic for debate. Against Julian’s insistence that circumcision in the flesh is what Moses envisioned, Cyril argues that removal of the physical foreskin is pointless and that the rite was always meant to foreshadow the removal of passions from the soul by the Holy Spirit, which is efficacious even if certain people invalidate the gift by failing to use it properly (10.31–36). Abraham serves as the final figure considered in this book, with Julian proposing in two fragments that the patriarch practiced both sacrifice and divination, the latter via stars (Gen 15:5), birds (Gen 15:10–11), and his servant (Gen 24). Cyril offers an alternative take on each of the passages in question: God drew Abraham’s attention to the number of the stars, not their ordering or movement; he used an ancient Chaldean oath-making ceremony to confirm Abraham’s weak faith; and Abraham’s servant did not rely on divination but instead prayed to God to find a maiden (10.37–41). In a brief final paragraph, Cyril says Julian claims he knew he would become emperor due to divination with birds, a notion he finds more worthy of ridicule than serious debate, dismissing it with a skillfully repurposed quotation from Euripides leading into a concluding doxology to the Trinity (10.42).

The surviving fragments from books 11 to 19 are even more difficult to summarize due to their scattered nature. The single most fruitful source for recovering fragments of Against Julian is the extensive florilegium known as the Sacra. However, in keeping with the interests of the compiler of that text, most of the passages that it contains are timeless aphorisms that reveal little about the argument of these later books. Some fragments from other sources are, nonetheless, more helpful. The most consistent feature is a focus on the gospels, which aligns with Julian’s stated intention that he would cover such material in his second book (cf. c. Gal. fr. 64).Footnote ²⁰⁴ Some fragments address the infancy narratives (frs. 3a; 3b; 4; 26; 75; 76); others focus on the passion and resurrection accounts (frs. 13; 14; 15; 16; 19; 22; 23; 24; 27; 28; 41); and still others discuss various dominical sayings and episodes (frs. 30; 39; 40b; 43; 45; 52; 61; 67; 72; 73; 74; 77). It is possible that some of the other fragments discussing issues like almsgiving (frs. 31; 32; 60; 61), anger (frs. 38; 48; 49; 69; 70), prayer (frs. 18; 47; 54), and fasting (fr. 55a) were also originally situated in arguments over various passages from the gospels, but this is impossible to determine with certainty. A final noteworthy feature of the surviving fragments is the repetition of some material already presented in books 1–10, such as honoring the martyrs (frs. 64a; 64b; 65) and a recounting of the tombs of Zeus and Dionysus (frs. 42; 64b).

The Transmission and Reception of Against Julian

Based upon quotations of Against Julian in later sources, we can be fairly confident of the format in which the treatise was published in late antiquity. The late fifth-century Florilegium Cyrillianum contains five extracts from Cyril’s apology: two come from books 6 and 8 and are said to derive from the “second volume (βιβλίον)” of the treatise,Footnote ²⁰⁵ while three passages from books 12, 13, and 14 are said to be found “in the third volume.”Footnote ²⁰⁶ Similarly, when the Council of Constantinople III cited an extract from Cyril’s twelfth book, it too is said to be found in the “third volume” (= c. Iul. fr. 13). This format is also evident in the lost Codex Capnioneus used by Oecolampadius for his Latin translation; he states that, according to his exemplar, the sixth book of the work was the start of the liber secundus, with liber here presumably being a translation of the word βιβλίον used in our Greek sources.Footnote ²⁰⁷ The fact that books 6 and 8 were in a second volume while books 12–14 were in a third indicates that the treatise was originally grouped together into pentads, each housed in a separate codex.Footnote ²⁰⁸ That is, books 1–5 were in the first volume, books 6–10 in the second, and so on.Footnote ²⁰⁹ The first and second volumes containing books 1–10 of Against Julian continued to be copied, and survived to the present day in the direct manuscript tradition. In contrast, the third and fourth volumes containing the later books perished at some point between the eighth and thirteenth centuries and can now only be recovered in fragments from other sources.Footnote ²¹⁰ From the lost books, fragments have survived that are said to come from books 11–19, which may imply there never was a twentieth book. Although Neumann suspected that Cyril originally composed thirty books of refutation,Footnote ²¹¹ the fact that no trace of a third decade has survived probably means it never existed.Footnote ²¹²

The original circulation of Cyril’s lengthy apology is mostly opaque to us, though a plausible scenario has been reconstructed by Wolfram Kinzig.Footnote ²¹³ From the aforementioned letter of Theodoret, we know that Cyril sent a copy to John of Antioch so that John could further disseminate the work among “the eminent teachers of the East,” a request with which John must have complied, since Theodoret states that he himself had read the work with admiration.Footnote ²¹⁴ In light of the “Dedication” to Theodosius II, we may assume that a copy was sent to Constantinople and stored in the palace library. Finally, a copy was no doubt placed in Cyril’s own patriarchal library in Alexandria. Beyond these three presumably complete copies, we have hints of the existence of others. The acts of the Third Council of Constantinople explicitly drew upon a copy of Against Julian residing in the patriarchal library in the eastern capital,Footnote ²¹⁵ and a copy was possibly also available in Rome, since the Roman legates at the same council had used a dyothelite florilegium that included an extract from book 12. Finally, because the treatise was used liberally in the seventh-century compilatory work known as the Sacra (once thought to be by John of Damascus and now by an otherwise unknown John the Monk), one can posit that Against Julian was available in Palestine, possibly at the patriarchal library in Jerusalem or at the Monastery of Mar Saba. The discernible traces of the presence of the treatise in these various locales might suggest Cyril took care to send copies to all of the major Christian sees of his day – Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, and Jerusalem – though this hypothesis is naturally impossible to confirm.

Although substantial engagement with Cyril’s apology is hard to identify in the period of late antiquity, there are clues that attest to its reception among a number of readers already within Cyril’s own lifetime. The letter of Theodoret must once again be mentioned here, and the fact that Theodoret claims to have read Cyril’s work naturally raises the question of whether it had any influence on his own apology for the faith, The Cure for Greek Maladies. Opinion remains divided on the question of whether Against Julian influenced Theodoret’s treatise or vice versa, and of course hinges on the respective dating of the two works, which is also debated.Footnote ²¹⁶ The argument for some kind of relation between the two texts, or at least a common source used for both, is compelling, since both authors cite a Platonic passage taken from Clement of Alexandria and make the same mistake (if not intentional) of extending the quotation by including the first sentence of Clement’s commentary on it (see above on Cyril’s sources). Cyril’s contemporaries Sozomen and Socrates Scholasticus, each of whom composed an Ecclesiastical History, also apparently read Against Julian, though without acknowledging having done so. Socrates quotes a fragment of Julian’s Against the Galileans and claims that it derives from the third book of the emperor’s work, but in fact he seems to have taken it from Cyril’s third book.Footnote ²¹⁷ Sozomen, for his part, appears to have copied the concluding benediction of Cyril’s “Dedication”Footnote ²¹⁸ and reused it for the dedication to Theodosius II that appears at the outset of his own work.Footnote ²¹⁹ Furthermore, at some undetermined point in the fifth century, the author of the Testimonies against the Jews (pseudonymously attributed to Gregory of Nyssa) also tacitly drew upon books 1, 3, 8, and 9 of Cyril’s Against Julian, at times verbatim and at times through paraphrasing summaries.Footnote ²²⁰

A few decades after Cyril’s death, Against Julian was drawn into the debates over his legacy that followed the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The aforementioned Florilegium Cyrillianum, a pro-Chalcedonian collection of extracts from Cyril’s corpus composed prior to 483, included five passages from his apology and was read by Severus of Antioch while he was residing in Constantinople between 508 and 511. To defend his miaphysite cause, Severus composed a twofold reply to the Florilegium consisting of his Philalethes and Apology, in which he corrected and supplemented some of the extracts the original compiler had chosen, showing an impressive eye for detail that in some instances is helpful for establishing the original text.Footnote ²²¹ The original Florilegium survives in Greek, while Severus’ reply exists only in Syriac translation in two sixth-century manuscripts which represent the oldest indirect manuscript witnesses to Cyril’s treatise.Footnote ²²² Severus apparently read Against Julian closely because he also cited it in a letter on the obscure matter of a textual variant in Luke 22:43–44.Footnote ²²³ There is, in fact, a possible allusion to Severus’ reading of Cyril’s apology in his biography written by his contemporary Zacharias of Mytilene. In recounting their student days together in Beirut in the late 480s, Zacharias reports that he and Severus agreed to a plan of supplementing their studies by reading works of various patristic authors, including Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Cyril, and that they “began with writings against the pagans.”Footnote ²²⁴ Although no specific works by Cyril are named, the content of Against Julian would certainly have been relevant to the anti-pagan interests of Severus and Zacharias and, if Severus had read the work as a student, this would accord with his later detailed familiarity with the treatise.

Another of Zacharias’ works might also reveal awareness of Against Julian, namely his fictional dialogue titled Ammonius, which claims to represent conversations that took place while he was studying in Alexandria between 485 and 487. Zacharias recounts that Plato’s theory of the forms came up for discussion one day as the Neoplatonist philosopher Ammonius was lecturing on Aristotle. To prove to his teacher that Aristotle himself rejected Plato’s famous theory, Zacharias quoted Posterior Analytics 83a32–33 (“Good riddance to the forms. For they are mere prattle and, even if they do exist, are irrelevant”).Footnote ²²⁵ This passage was rarely cited in antiquity, but one of the few places it does appear is in book 2 of Against Julian, where it is similarly deployed with the aim of driving a wedge between Plato and his most famous pupil.Footnote ²²⁶ It is, therefore, plausible that Zacharias drew this argument from Cyril’s Against Julian, regardless of whether the exchange actually took place in an Alexandrian classroom or was merely created for the fictional dialogue. Furthermore, the emphasis on divine envy one observes in the cosmological arguments of Zacharias and his associate Aeneas of Gaza could be an echo of Cyril’s repeated use of this theme in his engagement with Julian on the topic of cosmology in book 2 of Against Julian.Footnote ²²⁷ If these clues suggest that Zacharias and others in his circle were reading Against Julian, then this instance of the reception of Cyril’s apology conforms to the hypothesis offered above about the origins of the work, specifically that Cyril was inspired to respond to Julian’s attack on the faith because it was being used by learned pagans to unsettle the confidence of Alexandrian Christians, and perhaps especially Christian students sitting in religiously diverse classrooms. Cyril’s apology was too overtly polemical ever to be taken seriously by a professional philosopher like Ammonius or Hierocles but would have had obvious appeal to their Christian students, since it provided them with an arsenal of counterarguments they could use to rebut the criticisms of Christianity voiced in those settings.

Passages from Against Julian were also excerpted and included in a wide range of later florilegia and catena. The Commentary on Genesis composed by Zacharias’ brother, Procopius of Gaza, who also studied in Alexandria, includes passages from book 10 in paraphrased and abbreviated form, though without explicit acknowledgement of his source.Footnote ²²⁸ A testimony to an otherwise lost passage from book 16 survives in the catena on Mark compiled by Victor of Antioch,Footnote ²²⁹ and the catena tradition on Romans and Hebrews also incorporated passages from Against Julian, which were erroneously included in Pusey’s nineteenth-century edition of the fragments of Cyril’s Pauline commentaries;Footnote ²³⁰ catenists working on Acts and Luke did the same.Footnote ²³¹ The fact that books 11 through 19 do not survive raises the possibility that still other fragments from the catena tradition, which have been assumed to derive from Cyril’s lost biblical commentaries, were in fact also taken from the lost portion of Against Julian.

Finally, the monumental florilegium known as the Sacra, which was compiled in the seventh century by an otherwise unknown John, contains far more quotations from Against Julian than are found in any other single source, including forty-eight extracts from the lost books alone. Three of these were only published for the first time in 2018 and 2019 in the new edition of the Sacra that is still in process.Footnote ²³² As progress on the edition of the Sacra continues, still more new fragments might come to light. Moreover, at least based on the portion of the Sacra that has thus far been published, it would appear that the compiler drew more passages from Against Julian than from all of Cyril’s other works combined, a somewhat surprising pattern given that his dogmatic and exegetical works are those for which he has been best-known, both in antiquity and in modern scholarship.Footnote ²³³

Although we have no trace of a complete translation of Against Julian into Syriac, select passages survive in later Syriac sources.Footnote ²³⁴ A number of still unpublished Syriac florilegia contain extracts from Against Julian, and the work is also referenced by George of B‘eltan (eighth century), Moses bar Kepha (ninth century), Isho‘dad of Merv (ninth century), Dionysius bar Salibi (twelfth century), and Bar Hebraeus (thirteenth century).Footnote ²³⁵ On occasion we can trace plausible lines of reception. For example, the three fragments of Against Julian found in George of B‘eltan’s Commentary on MatthewFootnote ²³⁶ were probably taken from the lacunose florilegium in the manuscript British Library Add. 17214,Footnote ²³⁷ while Dionysius bar Salibi in turn used George’s commentary as a source for the same three Julianic objections that are reported, without mention of Cyril, in his own commentary on the gospels.Footnote ²³⁸

The case of Dionysius bar Salibi illustrates another way Cyril’s Against Julian was received by later readers – as a source book from which to draw passages belonging to other authors. The testimonies to Julian’s Against the Galileans found in the Byzantine authors Photius and Arethas were probably taken from Cyril’s treatise rather than from firsthand acquaintance with Julian’s work.Footnote ²³⁹ Similarly, the learned Italo-Greek monk Philagathos of the twelfth century refers in his homilies to three of Julian’s criticisms of the gospels which were almost certainly also taken from Cyril, in light of his use of typically Cyrilline imagery and terminology.Footnote ²⁴⁰ And it was not only passages of Julian that were taken up by later authors. Quotations from Pseudo-Sophocles, Pseudo-Orpheus, the Hermetic corpus, and Porphyry were also extracted from Against Julian by John Malalas and by the compilers of florilegia in the complex tradition of Byzantine theosophy.Footnote ²⁴¹

Deriving from the ancient copies of Cyril’s Against Julian, fourteen manuscripts containing books 1–10 or a portion thereof have survived to the present day, produced between the twelfth or thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, along with excerpts found in still other manuscripts. A thorough description of these witnesses and a proposed stemma may be found in the introduction to the recent GCS edition.Footnote ²⁴² Only five contain the entirety of the extant text, with the textual basis for books 6–10 being sparser than for books 1–5. In addition to the surviving Greek manuscripts, we are fortunate to have the aforementioned Latin translation published in Basel by the Reformer Johannes Oecolampadius (1482–1531), which was based upon the now lost Codex Capnioneus (κ). Oecolampadius’ Latin translation was sufficiently literal that in many instances it can be used to infer the reading of κ which turns out to play a prominent role in the reconstruction of the text, especially in books 6–10.Footnote ²⁴³

The first manuscripts of Cyril’s Against Julian to reach the West probably arrived in connection with the Council of Ferrara–Florence that began in 1438.Footnote ²⁴⁴ The treatise received some attention in the early seventeenth century with the publication of a partial edition,Footnote ²⁴⁵ but the editio princeps of the entirety of books 1–10 did not appear until 1638 in volume vi of Jean Aubert’s edition of Cyril’s Opera,Footnote ²⁴⁶ which would serve as the primary basis for all research on Julian’s Against the Galileans and Cyril’s Against Julian for nearly four centuries.Footnote ²⁴⁷ His text was reprinted in the 1696 edition of Julian’s writings produced by Ezekiel Spanheim, which in turn was used for the edition of Against Julian that appeared in volume lxxvi of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca in 1859, supplemented by a collection of fragments prepared by Angelo Mai. In 1880 Karl Neumann published the first properly critical edition of Julian’s Against the Galileans, along with a German translation,Footnote ²⁴⁸ extracting Julian’s fragments from Spanheim’s edition of Cyril’s text but also taking into account additional manuscript witnesses and adding Greek and Syriac fragments from other sources.Footnote ²⁴⁹ The edition of Against the Galileans that Wilmer Cave Wright published in the Loeb Classical Library in 1923 was essentially that of Neumann, and Wright’s English translation in the same volume has been the basis for much English-language scholarship on the treatise up to the present day, despite its flaws.Footnote ²⁵⁰ William Malley made plans to produce a new edition of Against Julian in the mid twentieth century, but these never came to fruition.

The first new partial edition of Against Julian since the editio princeps finally appeared in 1985, when Paul Burguière and Pierre Évieux published a revised text and French translation of the first two books in the Sources chrétiennes (SC) series, based upon a broader manuscript base than Aubert had used.Footnote ²⁵¹ Five years later Emanuela Masaracchia would release a new edition of the fragments of Against the Galileans that would surpass Neumann’s, along with an Italian translation and extensive apparatuses. Masaracchia’s edition was reprinted with a French translation and an appendix of new fragments in 2018 in a volume by Angelo Giavatto and Robert Muller.Footnote ²⁵² But by far the most significant advance in scholarship in this area was the publication in 2016–17 of a two-volume edition of Against Julian in the renowned series Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten Jahrhunderte (GCS). The culmination of over two decades of meticulous research involving a large team of European scholars, the GCS edition has provided us with a much-improved text, a lengthy introduction, and an overflowing apparatus fontium that will no doubt inspire much further research.Footnote ²⁵³ A German translation based on the GCS edition was just published, unfortunately too late to be taken into account for the present volume aside from a handful of passages,Footnote ²⁵⁴ and Marie-Odile Boulnois has continued the project begun by Burguière and Évieux by publishing two further volumes in the SC series covering books 3–5 and 8–9, which largely reproduce the critical text of the GCS edition alongside a French translation; plans are underway to continue with more volumes in the SC series for the remaining books. A selection of passages from Against Julian was published in English in 2000 in an introductory volume to Cyril, but, as noted above, the present book is the first time the entire treatise has been published in the English language.Footnote ²⁵⁵

The Significance of Against Julian

Because Against Julian has been almost entirely neglected in scholarship until very recently, much work remains to be done to elucidate its significance for the disciplines of patristics, late antique studies, ancient philosophy, and historical theology. We can, nonetheless, gesture towards the general contours of such an account based on our own close reading of the text in the process of translating it, which might also offer entry points for further research. First, as outlined above, Against Julian is a veritable treasure trove of other texts, most prominently of course Julian’s Against the Galileans but also a wide range of other literature. There are few other early Christian texts that engage with such a wide and diverse array of Greek sources, and in such a variety of different modes, from vehement refutation to creative appropriation. In this respect Cyril’s massive apology far exceeds the Apocriticus of Macarius Magnes and rivals the achievement of Origen’s Against Celsus, Eusebius’ Preparation for the Gospel, and Augustine’s De civitate Dei.

Of course, it is also fair to say that Cyril was not as philosophically astute as the earlier Alexandrian, as erudite as his Caesarean predecessor, or as deeply reflective as his contemporary in Hippo. Moreover, those who come to Against Julian expecting to find something rigorously rational or deferential to the earlier philosophical tradition are bound to be disappointed. Nevertheless, even if Cyril’s mode of argumentation in this text is frequently antagonistic to the ancient philosophical sources upon which he draws, the positions that he defends are not without philosophical and theological interest, such as the idea that all humans share a common nature based upon their creation by a single Maker; the notion that religious devotion develops over time akin to the progress seen in arts like medicine and statue-making; or the claim that all languages exhibit a relative beauty and elegance when considered on their own terms. Moreover, if he was anything, Cyril was a master polemicist skilled at deconstructing what he took to be a fallacious viewpoint and identifying latent tensions or contradictions in his opponent’s authoritative texts and conceptual framework. As just one example, his relentless attack upon Plato’s Timaeus aims to demonstrate that the Craftsman of that dialogue falls short of the Platonic ideal of a nonenvious deity, since he refuses to make humanity immortal. In other words, in this text Cyril is often at his strongest when highlighting the inadequacies of Julian’s esteem for the Hellenic tradition than when he is setting forth a carefully worked out rationale for Christian belief.

Against Julian is also significant within Cyril’s wider corpus since it is a precious witness to his formation as a thinker. If we did not have the present treatise, we would probably never have known that he read so extensively in Porphyry, the Hermetic writings, and most of the other non-Christian literature he quotes, as well as most of the Christian sources upon which he is dependent, such as Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius. We should not necessarily assume he had read these texts prior to undertaking his refutation of Julian in some earlier stage of his formal education, though that cannot be excluded.Footnote ²⁵⁶ What is, nonetheless, evident is that he was doing his own research as he pursued the project, using proximate Christian sources like Pseudo-Justin and Eusebius as prompts to consult other texts. Although previous scholarship on Cyril has investigated the degree to which his thought was shaped by the philosophical tradition,Footnote ²⁵⁷ this has mostly been pursued in the absence of engagement with Against Julian. Consequently, one task for future research will be to consider whether the influence of the wide reading evident in the present treatise can be traced in his other works and whether it was formative for his theological outlook.

Finally, Against Julian is notable as a particularly revealing window into the contest underway in late antiquity between Christianity and traditional religious cult. Of course, both our authors are at pains in this literary debate to construct the boundaries between these two ways of life as starkly and uncompromisingly as possible, and, of course, life “on the ground” for devotees of Christ or, say, Asclepius may have been a much messier and more complex matter. Nevertheless, the virtue of Against Julian is that it allows the reader to hear two forceful advocates for these two viewpoints speaking in their own words about what they think is at stake. Cyril has chosen which parts of Julian we are privileged to encounter, but it is still Julian’s voice that we meet in these pages, using every bit of rhetorical skill and intellectual power he could muster to convince his Christian subjects to abandon the false religion based on the corpse of a dead Jew and embrace the traditional deities to ensure their own well-being, as well as that of the empire. And in Cyril we witness the bishop of the most intellectually renowned city of the ancient world mining all the texts available to him to find arguments he could deploy to rebut Julian’s critique and persuade his readers that Christ-worship deserved the imperial patronage it enjoyed in his day and should continue its forward march, dislodging the daemons from their tyrannical strongholds. Among all the ancient literature that has come down to us, perhaps only Origen’s Against Celsus showcases such a sustained back-and-forth debate in which two authors advocate in their own words for their religious views, and the status of Cyril as a bishop of the Theodosian age and of Julian as the last pagan emperor lends a greater gravitas to this engagement. Thus, while Cyril’s Against Julian lacks the grand scope and ambition of Augustine’s De civitate Dei, as well as the carefully considered structure and smooth eloquence of Theodoret’s Cure for Greek Maladies, it presents a liveliness of actual debate not found in those contemporary apologetic treatises.

Principles of Translation

We have used the critical text of the GCS edition as the basis for our translation, though we have also consulted the texts printed in the volumes in the SC series for books 1–5 and 8–9. Departures from the GCS are invariably footnoted where they occur,Footnote ²⁵⁸ except for changes to the paragraph breaks in the text (in a number of places we have altered the paragraph breaks to make the stages of Cyril’s argument more intelligible for the reader). The only addition to the GCS text that we include here are the three aforementioned new fragments from the Sacra that were published for the first time in 2018 and 2019, subsequent to the publication of the GCS edition.Footnote ²⁵⁹

Those familiar with Cyril’s Greek will appreciate the difficulty of rendering into intelligible prose his highly idiosyncratic vocabulary and lengthy periods.Footnote ²⁶⁰ We have not attempted to capture the former feature in our translation, though we did try to avoid interrupting his periods and succeeded in doing so in most cases.Footnote ²⁶¹ We suspect our translation is, as a result, rather more intelligible to the average reader than the Greek original would have been to its first audience, though our readers probably will not mind, and, in any case, ours is still a translation that errs on the side of accuracy rather than readability. An attempt was made to bring out in English the many vivid metaphors and analogies that Cyril employed throughout his treatise. We also felt that some important or technical terms warranted providing the Greek in the notes or strict uniformity in their English equivalents, while others received a more diverse range of renderings; we appreciate that many readers will have their own particular interests and questions about the text and might have wished for more (or different) noting. We are convinced that this is a rich and fascinating text that will reward further study.

As to the process we have followed in producing the present volume: Johnson took responsibility for drafting an initial translation of books 3–7 and Crawford took the “Dedication,” books 1–2 and 8–10, and the fragments, with each of us then checking the other’s work for accuracy and making suggestions for improved readability. Moreover, the entire translation of the Greek text was meticulously checked by Edward Jeremiah, who provided countless suggestions both to improve accuracy and readability, based on extensive comparanda from Cyril’s corpus and other ancient Greek sources. So many of Jeremiah’s specific suggestions were adopted and so rich was the body of background material he provided that we felt it only right to acknowledge his contribution by listing him as a contributor on the cover and title page of the volume, though Crawford and Johnson retained final judgment over what went into the text and are solely responsible for the notes and introduction. Furthermore, in several instances in book 7, we have adopted the judicious renderings of Margaret M. Mitchell (in a paper originally presented to the North American Patristics Society at our invitation). Crawford’s translation of the Syriac fragments was checked for accuracy by Hannah Stork and revised accordingly, and Adam Carter Bremer-McCollum provided a translation for the single (possible) fragment of the treatise that survives in Coptic.Footnote ²⁶² Once all of the text had been checked for accuracy twice, Crawford and Johnson subjected it to multiple further rounds of revision for readability and consistency, aided by the careful eye of Brad Boswell, who performed numerous copy-editing tasks essential for preparing the text for publication and joined us for weekly reading sessions over the span of nearly three years.

We have decided to adopt the format used by Henry Chadwick for his well-known translation of Origen’s Against Celsus by placing the words of Julian in italics to easily distinguish them from Cyril’s prose. Moreover, when Cyril repeats or echoes wording from a passage of Julian in his response to it, we have attempted to italicize these words as well, so that our readers can more easily track his engagement with his opponent’s text. And, as noted above, we have continued the practice of inserting the headings “Cyril” and “Julian” into the text, though these do not appear in the manuscripts. In terms of footnotes to the translation, we made no attempt to be comprehensive with listing comparanda, as the GCS apparatus does, and those who wish to study the text closely will want to consult it as well as the notes found in the SC volumes (both the GCS and the SC editions contain a wealth of highly useful information and set a high watermark for scholarship). Where Cyril or Julian is relying on a clear source, it should nonetheless be appropriately indicated in a footnote. We have, moreover, footnoted a more limited range of relevant comparanda, focusing especially on other apologetic literature from the period, such as Origen’s Against Celsus, Athanasius’ Against the Greeks, Eusebius’ Preparation for the Gospel, Pseudo-Justin’s Exhortation to the Greeks, Macarius Magnes’ Apocriticus, Augustine’s De civitate Dei, and Theodoret’s Cure for Greek Maladies. In terms of secondary literature, we have generally limited ourselves to the scholarship we found most useful. However, we hope that our translation serves as a gateway into the recent spate of scholarship on Against Julian, most of which has been published in German and French. To that end, we have tried to be as comprehensive as possible in noting relevant literature specific to this treatise published up to the time of sending the book to press.

Finally, to aid ease of reference for readers wanting to consult the original text, we have included the page numbers of the GCS edition in the margins of our text (or in square brackets in the digital version). For the Syriac fragments, we have noted in the heading to each fragment the page numbers both for the German translation (which is printed consecutively along with the Greek of the remaining fragments), as well as the Syriac original (edited by Kaufhold and collected in a separate section of the GCS edition). Where we have added words to the translation that are not in the Greek, we have used square brackets to indicate our additions only when the addition is perhaps controversial or involves some interpretive judgment; other instances of addition, such as inserting the word “Julian” as the subject of a verb when he is clearly the person in view, have not been marked in any way. Angled brackets (i.e., <>) indicate lacunae or conjectural emendations. Ellipses within square brackets indicate portions of a quotation that have been omitted.