Porphyry's "Against The Christians"

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TILL
Here is another posting from Adnan's list that shows early contesting of
fundamental Christian claims.
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Porphyry of Tyre (232-305CE)-- Was one of the more prominent pagan
intellectuals to question the claims of the early Christian church. He had
been a student of a school run by Plotinus in Rome. After Plotinus' death,
Porphyry developed a distaste for what he thought of as the superstitions of
the empire. He wrote a book discussing the defects of the cults called Pro
Anebo. Porphyry was said to have heard Origin's preaching in his youth, and
to have found him lacking in philosophical consistency. He is also known to
have studied the Hebrew scriptures, especially the prophets. His book,
Against the Christians, (Kata Christian on), was written some time after
270CE and remained popular until 448, when his fifteen-book Kata, along with
various books from other authors, were sentenced to be burned. What very
little we know of his work come to us preserved in the writings of Eusebius,
Apollinarius, and, primarily, the Apocritus of Macarius Magnes.

The following excerpts are taken from "Porphyry's Against the Christians:
The Literary Remains," translated by R. Joseph Hoffman, Prometheus Books,
1994.

As Hoffman says in the intro: "Having been buried-- more or less
successfully-- since 448, the words should be permitted at last to breathe
their own air" (19).

PORPHYRY ON CHRISTIANITY (~270CE)


"The evangelists were fiction writers-- not observers or eyewitnesses to the
life of Jesus. Each of the four contradicts the other in writing his account
of the events of his suffering and crucifixion" (32).

"[It follows that] if these men were unable to be consistent with respect to
the way he died, basing their account simply on hearsay, than they did not
fare any better with the rest of their story" (33).

"Anyone will recognize that the [gospels] are really fairy tales if he takes
the time to read further into this nonsense of a story..." (35).

"This silliness in the gospels ought to be told to old women and not to
reasonable people. Anyone who should take the trouble to examine these facts
closely would find thousands of similar tales, none with an ounce of sense
to them" (36).

"'If you believed Moses, then you would believe me. For he wrote about me.'
The saying is filled with stupidity! Even if [Moses] said it, nothing of
what he wrote has been preserved... All the things attributed to Moses were
really written eleven hundred years later by Ezra and his contemporaries"
(41).

[footnote says: "The philosopher shows a surprising awareness of the history
of the biblical text in denying the traditional attribution of the books of
the law of Moses." see Neh 13:1-3]

"Another section in the gospel deserves comment, for it is likewise devoid
Of sense and full of implausibility; I mean that absurd story about Jesus
sending his apostles across the sea ahead of him after a banquet, then
walking across to them 'at the fourth watch of the night'...Those who know
the region well tell us that, in fact, there is no 'sea' in the locality but
only a tiny lake which springs from a river that flows through the hills of
Galilee near Tiberias... Mark seems to be stretching a point to extremities
when he writes that Jesus-- after nine hours had passed-- decided in the
tenth to walk across to his disciples who had been floating about on the
pond for the duration... It is fables like this one that we judge the gospel
to be a cleverly woven curtain, each thread of which requires careful
scrutiny" (46-7).

"A famous saying of the Teacher is this one: 'Unless you eat my flesh and
drink my blood, you will have no life in yourselves.' This saying is not
only beastly and absurd; it is more absurd than absurdity itself and more
beastly than any beast: that a man should savor human flesh or drink the
blood... and that by so doing this he should obtain eternal life! Tell us:
in recommending this sort of practice, do you not reduce human existence to
savagery of a most unimaginable sort?" (49).

"In another passage Jesus says: 'These signs shall witness to those who
believe: they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover. And if
they drink any deadly drug, it will hurt them in no way.' Well then: the
proper thing to do would be to use this process as a test for those who wish
to become priests, bishops or church officers. A deadly drug should be put
in front of them and [only] those who survive drinking it should be elevated
in the ranks [of the church]. If there are those who refuse to submit to
such a test, they may as well admit that they do not believe in the things
that Jesus said. For if it is a doctrine of the Christian faith that men can
survive being poisoned or heal the sick at will, than the believer who does
not do such things either does not believe them, or else believes them so
feebly that he may as well not believe them" (50).

"A similar saying to this runs as follows: 'Even if you have faith no bigger
than a mustard seed, I tell you in truth that if you say to this mountain,
Be moved into the sea-- even that will be possible for you.' It seems to
follow that anyone who is unable to move a mountain by following these
directions is unworthy to be counted among the faithful" (51).

"If its the way of the world to be a source of misery, it must be objected--
so loudly that the creator will cup his ears at the protest-- that he is the
whole source of the misery and grief: he is the source of the problem... It
is he who must repent for botching things, and he must choose to patch up
the holes in the wall of his own creation" (67).

"Another of his astonishingly silly comments needs to be examined: I mean
that wise saying of his, to the effect that, "We who are alive and persevere
shall not precede those who are asleep when the lord comes; for the lord
himself will descend from heaven with a shout... and the trumpet of god
shall sound, and those who have died in Christ shall rise first; then we who
are alive shall be caught up together with them in a cloud to meet the lord
in the air... Indeed-- there is something here that reaches up to heaven:
the magnitude of this lie. When told to dumb bears, to silly frogs and
geese-- they bellow or croak or quack with delight to hear of the bodies of
men flying through the air like birds or being carried about on the clouds.
This belief is quackery of the first rate..." (68).

"And there is more to Paul's lying: He very clearly says 'We who are alive.'
For it is now three-hundred years since he said this and nobody-- not Paul
or anyone else-- has been caught up in the air. It is high time to let
Paul's confusions rest in peace!" (70).

On the resurrection of the flesh: "Just to think of this silly teaching
makes me light-headed. Many have perished at sea; their bodies have been
eaten up by prey, the wild animals, and birds. How will their bodies raise
up? Or let us take an example to test this little doctrine, so innocently
put forward [by the Christians]: A certain man was shipwrecked. The hungry
fish had his body for a feast. But the fish were caught and cooked and eaten
by some fisherman, who had the misfortune to run afoul of some ravenous
dogs, who killed and ate them. When the dogs died, the vultures came and
made a feast of them. How will the body of the shipwrecked man be
reassembled, considering it has been absorbed by other bodies of various
kinds> Or take a body that has consumed by fire or a body that has been food
for worms: how can these bodies be restored..." (91).

"Yet you say, 'He will raise up the rotten and stinking corpses of men,'
some of them, no doubt, belonging to worthy men, but others having no grace
or merit prior to death. A very unpleasant sight it will be. And even if god
should refashion the dead bodies... there would still be this: it would be
impossible for the earth to accommodate all those who have died from the
beginning of the world if they should be raised from the dead" (92).



Farrell Till
Skepticism, Inc.
jftill@midwest.net

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