Against the Christians
Against the Christians is a late 3rd-century book written by Roman-Phoenician Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry of Tyre, challenging the writings of Christian philosophers and theologians. Due to widespread censorship by Roman imperial authorities, no known copies of this book exist. Only through references to it in Christian writings criticizing it can its contents be reconstructed.Background
During his retirement in Sicily, Porphyry wrote Against the Christians which consisted of fifteen books. Some thirty Christian apologists, such as Methodius, Eusebius, Apollinaris, Augustine, Jerome, etc., responded to his challenge. In fact, everything known about Porphyry's arguments is found in these refutations, largely because Theodosius II ordered every copy burned in AD 435 and again in 448.
Augustine and the 5th-century ecclesiastical historian Socrates of Constantinople assert that Porphyry was once a Christian.Contents
Porphyry saw Christians as treasonous and immoral, and believed that those who would not convert away from the religion should be executed. He saw it as a religion of women and the lower class which was superstitious and not respectable: by drawing people away from the worship of the traditional gods, it was endangering the safety of the Empire. As quoted by Jerome, Porphyry mocked Paul and the early Christians while suggesting that the "magical arts" performed by Jesus of Nazareth and his followers were nothing special, done similarly by other figures of Greco-Roman history:Porphyry claimed the Gospel authors were not eyewitnesses but "fiction writers" who based their accounts on "hearsay" and likewise denied Moses' authorship of the Pentateuch, stating that "all the things attributed to Moses were really written eleven hundred years later by Ezra and his contemporaries" after the end of the Babylonian captivity. He also challenged the prophecy of Daniel, because Jews and Christians pointed to the historical fulfillment of its prophecies as a decisive argument: but these prophecies, he maintained, were written not by Daniel but by some Jew who in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes gathered up the traditions of Daniel's life and wrote a history of recent past events but in the future tense, falsely dating them back to Daniel's time. He based this on the fact the book accurately describes all the events which happen up to the 160s BC, while all its predictions for after that time failed to materialize. According to Jerome:Translations and commentaries
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