The Heathen Objections in the Apocriticus
Nowhere else does so detailed an attack on Christianity remain to us. It evidently comes from one who is not merely engaged in the vulgar work of trying to destroy the faith; for he claims a higher morality, and writes as a philosopher. And the modern character of many of his attacks, and of some of his actual arguments, give his work more than an antiquarian interest. These assaults of long ago, which were successfully parried by a champion of the faith, may have a reassuring effect upon those who think that their religion has never met with such plausible assaults as to-day. They reflect the master-mind of Porphyry, the great Neoplatonist philosopher, but even Harnack admits that they are borrowed from him by some smaller man, who thus popularised his work. This is exactly the case of so many who speak and write against the Church to-day. And the most recent tendency of those who refuse to accept the Christian faith is to approve at least in some sense of its Founder Himself, but deny that the Church has either the power or the right to interpret Him to the. world. The objections before us are mostly to the human side of the faith, and are directed against the Evangelists rather than the Leader whose words and deeds they profess to recount, and against the unreasonableness of the Apostles and their teaching rather than that of Christ. We will take the theory as substantiated that the author was Hierocles, who attacked Christianity with the pen before he tried to destroy it with the sword of persecution. Harnack has given unintentional support by showing that the Apocriticus is really to be divided into two parts, after iii. 19, though the author has concealed the division. This is a new argument for the theory that he is using the two books of the Philaletheis Logoi, or Philalethes, of Hierocles. But there are other problems connected with the Apocriticus which this theory helps to solve. For instance, Duchesne adduces an inscription1 as proving that, before his governorship of Bithynia in A.D. 304 he had been in office at Palmyra. Now Macarius came from Asia Minor, but when he points his opponent to the effects of the faith, it is to Syria that he turns, especially to Edessa and Antioch. Again, we find that in the Apocriticus the life of Christ is belittled by adducing that of Apollonius of Tyana, whose miracles were said to be superior, and who, instead of humbly submitting to death, "spoke boldly to the Emperor Domitian and then disappeared." Eusebius himself wrote an answer to Hierocles, in which he says that Apollonius was thus adduced, and gives a statement of Philostratus about him, saying, "He says that he disappeared from the judgment-seat."2 Lactantius gives similar testimony, for in writing about Hierocles he speaks of Apollonius "who, as you describe, suddenly was not to be found at the judgment-seat, when Domitian wished to punish him."3 It may be added that, whereas the language of theobjector in the Apocriticus has nothing in common with the extant words of Porphyry, there are a few sentences given by Eusebius4 as occurring verbatim in the Philalethes of Hierocles, in which, out of eleven words of a distinctive kind, no less than seven are found in the Apocriticus.5
Footnotes:
1Corpus Inscript. Lat. t. 3, No. 133, ap. Duch. p. 20.
2Euseb., In Hieroclem, in Gottfriedus Alearius's edition of Philostratus, Lipsiae, 1709, p. 459. ἀφανισθῆναι φησὶν αὐτόν should be compared with ἀφανὴς ἐγένετο of the Apocriticus.
3Div. Instit. v. 3.
4Migne, Patr. Graec. xxii. pp. 797-800, ch. 2.
5For details, and for further points in this connexion, see J.T.S. of April 1911, p. 377 et seq.