The History of the Apocriticus to 1867.
The book seems to have disappeared until the ninth century. This is not to be wondered at when the anti-Christian blasphemy of the questions is remembered, which might have caused its suppression under the edicts of Theodosius II or Justinian. Possibly the survival of the copy then brought to light was due to the fact that it had as frontispiece a portrait of the author in ecclesiastical vestments. In the Iconoclastic controversy, those who were in favour of the destruction of images garbled a quotation from it as a support to their position. Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople, in answering them, had some difficulty in finding out anything about it. He was able to show that his opponents had used it wrongly, but regarded it with little favour on the ground that it was inclined towards heresy. His importance, however, lies in the fact that he also quoted a fragment from the first book, which has not been preserved otherwise. It contains part of the answer of Macarius to an objection to the miracle of the woman with the issue of blood, in which the story appears that she was a great woman of Edessa named Berenice, and that a bronze statue in that city still commemorated her healing.
The Apocriticus next appears in the sixteenth century, when it was one of the favourite weapons in the patristic armoury of the Jesuit Franciscus Turrianus (De la Torre) in his controversy with the Lutherans.1 He not only quotes from all the extant books, but makes a quotation from the lost fifth book. He gives the author's name as Magnetes, and places his date soon after A.D. 150. His opponents in the Eucharistic controversy refused to believe that there was such a book, and when search was made in S. Mark's Library at Venice, the MS. was nowhere to be found, though mentioned in the catalogue. Little is heard, about the book in the centuries that followed. Boivin, of Paris, considered the author to have been a younger contemporary of Athanasius. Magnus Crusius,2 a Gottingen professor, believed his opponent to be none other than Porphyry the Neoplatonist, and placed the work at the end of the third or beginning of the fourth century. He held that neither of the author's appellations was necessarily his proper name, as of course Macarius Magnes may simply mean "The Blessed Magnesian."
Footnotes:
1See F. Turrianus, Adversus Magdeburgenses, Colon. 1573, ii. 3, p. 165; i. 5, p. 21, and ii. 13, p, 208.
2See Migne, Patr, Graec. X. p. 1343 et seq. His opinions are summarised by Pitra, Spicil. Solesm. i. p. 545.