Against the Christians
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Adversus Christianos (Against the Christians) is a work by Porphyry of Tyre (AD c. 234–c. 305) in fifteen books of which only fragments remain, as quotations adduced in order to be refuted.
In it, he famously is quoted as having said, "The Gods have proclaimed Christ to have been most pious, but the Christians are a confused and vicious sect." Counter-treatises were written by Eusebius of Caesarea, Apollinaris of Laodicea, Methodius of Olympus, and Macarius of Magnesia.
Porphyry's identification of the Book of Daniel as the work of a writer in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes (2nd century BC), is given by Jerome. Augustine and the 5th-century ecclesiastical historian Socrates of Constantinople, assert that Porphyry was once a Christian.
All copies were destroyed in 448 by a decree of the emperors Theodosius II and Valentinian II. (A Study of the Classic Pagan References to Nascent Christianity, 1906 John Robert Bräuer).
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