Abstract

Abstract:

In an apologetic work dated between the end of the third and the beginning of the fifth centuries and generally known as Apocriticus, Macarius Magnes reports and refutes the views of an anonymous pagan thinker, whom he designates as "the Hellene." In 1916, Adolf von Harnack identified the anonymous Hellene as Porphyry of Tyre and used Macarius's text to reconstruct Porphyry's lost treatise Against the Christians. Since then, the relation between Porphyry's anti-Christian work and Macarius Magnes's Apocriticus has been subject to an ongoing scholarly debate. In this paper, I focus on fragments 76 and 77 von Harnack. I argue for the significant Platonic foundation of both criticisms and endeavor to show that the views expressed in them share similarities with Porphyrian views, although the fragments' relation to Against the Christians remains uncertain.

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