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164 Conclusion The Ammonian Community and the Great Persecution Although the tensions between Porphyry and Origenists, apparent in Methodius’s writings were intramural disagreements, the Hellene’s criticisms helped fan the hostility toward Christians that culminated in the emperor Diocletian’s persecution of 303. Christians had been tolerated for the last four decades of the third century, and Diocletian himself had appointed Christians to his court (Lact. Mort. 10), but imperial officials and oracular priests began lobbying to repress Christian practice at the cusp of the fourth century. Their concern united Porphyry’s criticism of Christian doctrines resulting from the rebuttal of Origenist exegesis with the warnings he had voiced to philosophers about the link between evil daemons and blood sacrifice. Although Porphyry had voiced the latter concern as an argument against the Iamblichaean enthusiasm for eating sacrificial meat,his qualms also pertained to the sacrament of the Eucharist. In other words, Porphyry’s arguments against the Origenists’ reading scripture as a coherent whole led to the conclusion that Jesus was not divine. Porphyry’s conclusion that Jesus, however pious and inspired a teacher, was a mere man—a position that harks back to Ammonius’s view—allowed his readers to infer that the sacramental transformation of the wine and bread into a dead man’s blood and body was a polluting, evil daemon–attracting ceremony carried out by ignorant priests. As a result, certain officials and Apolline prophets not only began to voice concerns that Christians, whom these arguments cast as polluted, were CONCLUSION 165 interfering with the efficacy of traditional civic rites long associated with preserving the community’s health and safety, but they also did so in a way that got imperial attention. The court’s interest,in turn,provided a forum for Porphyry himself to advise the emperors,an outcome coherent with the political role that he and fellow Ammonian Hellenes had espoused, at least since the time of Plotinus. In the end,the dispute between the different branches of the Ammonian community, a quarrel whose origins lay in Porphyry’s disagreements with Iamblichus, contributed to the efforts of the Roman Empire to repress Christianity once and for all.1 This series of events becomes evident only through a comparison of accounts by Christian authors defending their doctrines against the criticisms levied during Diocletian’s persecution. Although Porphyry’s shadow has loomed over the early fourth-century persecution,the fragmentary character of his anti-Christian writing has made his precise role impossible to elucidate by using these texts alone as a source. This chapter will first discuss what little can be gleaned from Porphyry’s writings against Christians, and then will turn to what Ammonian Christian sources themselves say about the role that Porphyry’s ideas played in the onset of the Great Persecution. Porphyry’s fame in late antique Christian sources as the archenemy of Christianity is unparalleled.2 This reputation, together with the chronology of his life—the Suda says that he lived into the reign of Diocletian—suggests, on its own, that he was an important source of the anti-Christian criticisms that circulated in the Roman Empire in the late third century, although his texts are seldom directly connected with this persecution.3 Moreover, the work that goes by the title Against the Christians is easy to associate with Porphyry’s campaign against Christianity. Fragments attributed to this work include the criticisms of Origenists and praise of Ammonius motivated, I argued in chapter 5, by opposition to Iamblichus and all Ammonians whose mistaken exegesis in constructing a philosophy without conflicts had led them to advocate a common path to the divine for all people. Indeed, throughout this book, I have used this fragment of Porphyry’s work as a launching point from which to explore the significance of Ammonius, the problems with 1. Accordingly, although Mark Edwards does not think that Porphyry played as prominent a role in the persecution as I argue here, and he has not developed the implications of the Tyrian philosopher ’s quarrel with Iamblichus, he is right to think that some Christian rhetoric probably also targeted Iamblichus’s positions. Mark Edwards, “Porphyry and the Christians,”in Studies on Porphyry, ed. George E. Karamanolis and Anne Sheppard (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2007), 122. 2. He is so identified in sources from Eus. HE 6.19.9 to the Suda (4.178.14–179.2 Adler). 3. Michael Bland Simmons, Arnobius of Sicca: Religious Conflict and Competition in...

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