‘Living Like a Christian, but Playing the Greek’: Accounts of Apostasy and Conversion in Porphyry and Eusebius

This study focuses on a set of conversion narratives from the late third and early fourth centuries: Porphyry of Tyre’s and Eusebius of Caesarea’s conflicting accounts of Origen’s reputed apostasy from Hellenism and Ammonius Saccas’s alleged abandonment of Christianity for philosophy, and fourth-century reports of Porphyry’s supposed flirtation with Christianity. It argues that these narratives functioned as a means for Christian scholars and pagan philosophers to establish boundaries between themselves and their opponents and as a way to obfuscate broad dogmatic and practical similarities between Platonists and Christians. This reading of conversion and apostasy narratives opens the door to a more nuanced, if more complex, appreciation of the fluidity and permeability of religious and philosophical identities in Late Antiquity