Porphyry on Christians and Others: "Barbarian Wisdom," Identity Politics, and Anti-Christian Polemics on the Eve of the Great Persecution

This paper argues that we can better appreciate the motivations behind Porphyry of Tyre's anti-Christian polemics if they are placed in the context of his larger philosophical project. Porphyry's investigations of "foreign" religions and philosophies were based on asymmetrical distinctions between Greeks and barbarians that paralleled, and in many cases dovetailed with, the division of the Roman Empire into metropolitan center and provincial periphery. Christian intellectuals, however, imitated Porphyry's project in ways that disrupted these distinctions. Porphyry's polemics were motivated by a need to contain the threat that this disruption posed to the social and material privilege he enjoyed as a Greek philosopher in the Roman Empire. By situating Porphyry's polemics in the contexts of imperial power and subjugation, this paper challenges the divisions between "philosophical" and "political" fields of knowledge and action that underlie many discussions of political and religious change in late antiquity.