The Christian Reception of Julian

Abstract

The Christian response to Julian was immediate, long-lasting and complex.1 Christians challenged Julian's pagan policy during his reign and immediately afterwards, and these writings were to shape the images of the emperor in the following centuries.As the last pagan emperor of Rome, Julian would be a point of reference in the understanding of history for all societies that inherited Greco-Roman culture: Byzantium, the Latin West, but also Syriac and Arab culture.2By and large negatively coloured, Christian views have often been rejected as the projection of clichés onto the historical figure Julian, who is hence supposed to be understood from his own writings.3Yet this is too simple an image.Both sides produced interpretations of the events that were rooted in their understanding of society and the world and they did so in full awareness of the alternative versions in circulation.Christian views were therefore formed in active engagement with the positive self-images that Julian projected in his own writings and with the idealising pictures shaped by his supporters Libanius, Eunapius and later Neoplatonist philosophers.In other words, not a single source allows us 'objective' access to Julian.As such, the study of the reception of Julian should be the starting point of modern scholarship -be it merely to avoid that modern debates (for example on the characterisation of Julian's anti-Christian measures as a persecution4) merely reproduce ancient arguments.This chapter offers an overview of the three main stages in the Christian reception of Julian until the sixth century.The first phase was one of polemic and started already during the reign of Julian.Through invective, Christian authors, in particular Gregory of Nazianzus and Ephrem, responded to the challenge that Julian presented to the role of Christians in the Empire, and, 1 The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement no.313153. 2 For overviews, see

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.