Justified True Belief

(●) The emperor who was raised in the church, left it in secret, and spent his short reign trying to argue and legislate it back out of the world. + Every other Roman emperor after Constantine was a Christian of some kind. Julian was the exception, and he is the only one. That is how he came by the name the church hung on him: an apostate is a man who abandons a faith he once professed, and Julian had professed this one thoroughly. He was Constantine’s nephew, baptized as a boy, catechized by bishops, which is to say given the church’s own course of instruction in what it believed, and set to read the Scriptures aloud in church as a young man. Then he walked away, and when he came to the throne at about thirty he set out to reverse his uncle’s work: temples reopened, sacrifices restarted, Christians eased out of the schools and the civil service, and a book written in his own hand explaining why the whole faith was a mistake. He is here because of that book. Julian is not a bystander who happened to dislike Christians. He had been inside, he knew the Bible well enough to quote it against itself, and he had read the philosophers with real skill. He would not call his opponents by the name they called themselves either; in his pages they are always Galilaeans, the followers of a man from Galilee, a backwater and meant to sound like one. Against the Galileans, written at Antioch in the winter of 362 to 363, is among the ablest attacks on the Christian faith that survive from the ancient world, and a good deal of what is said against Christianity today he had already said, and said better. Here is the fact worth remembering. That book does not survive as a book. Almost every line of it we still have was copied out by Cyril of Alexandria, a Christian bishop, two generations later, so that he could answer it paragraph by paragraph. Julian’s case against the church reaches us only in the hands of the church, which is a small parable of his whole reign. His birth year is given as 331 in most reference works and as 332 in others, and the ancient evidence does not settle the question either way, so the year carries a "c." for circa, the Latin for "about."

(●) c. 331 AD: Born in Constantinople into the family that had just made the empire Christian. + Flavius Claudius Julianus was born in the new capital on the Bosphorus, probably in 331, into the most powerful family in the world. His father, Julius Constantius, was a half-brother of the emperor Constantine. His mother, Basilina, came from a well-connected Bithynian family and died within months of his birth, so he never knew her. He was raised by servants, tutors and relatives, in the shadow of a court where being related to the emperor was the most dangerous thing a man could be. The Christianity around him was the official kind, new and confident and entangled with power. Constantine had ended the persecutions less than twenty years earlier and had called the council at Nicaea in 325, six years before Julian was born. To a boy of that household, the church was not the hunted community of the martyrs. It was the imperial establishment, and his own relatives ran it.

(●) 337 AD: Soldiers killed most of his family, and the surviving boy was brought up by bishops. + Constantine died in May 337, and in the weeks that followed the army massacred the side of the imperial family that might have contested the succession. Julian’s father was killed. So was his eldest half-brother, and a row of uncles and cousins. Two boys were spared: Julian, who was about six, and his half-brother Gallus, who was ill and not expected to live. Constantine’s three sons divided the empire, and one of them, Constantius II, was left holding the East and, in Julian’s settled opinion for the rest of his life, holding the knife. Years later, in an open letter to the city of Athens, Julian laid the deaths of his father, his brother and their cousins at Constantius’ door in plain words. His education was then handed to churchmen. Eusebius of Nicomedia, the bishop who baptized Constantine and who was kin to Julian’s mother, oversaw the arrangements. A eunuch named Mardonius, who had taught Basilina her Homer, now taught her son, and taught him so well that Julian was still writing fondly of him as emperor: the old man kept him away from the racetrack and the theater and gave him the Iliad instead. Around 342 the two brothers were sent to Macellum, an imperial estate in the highlands of Cappadocia, and kept there for roughly six years with tutors, servants, and no company of their own age. They were also enrolled in the church. Sozomen, a Christian historian writing in the next century, reports that both boys were made readers, the junior clergy who read the Scriptures aloud to the congregation (Ecclesiastical History 5.2). Sozomen adds, with an "it is said" of his own, that the brothers divided between them the work of raising a building over the tomb of the martyr Mamas at Caesarea, and that Julian’s half of it would not stand. Julian later described those years as a gilded imprisonment. It is worth holding both facts together: the young man who would write Against the Galileans spent his adolescence reading the Bible aloud in a Cappadocian church.

(●) c. 351 AD: At about twenty he left the faith, and told almost no one for ten years. + Released from Macellum, Julian was allowed to study, and he went where the best Greek philosophy was still being taught: Nicomedia, then Pergamum, then Ephesus. At Pergamum he found the school of Aedesius, and through it a teacher named Maximus of Ephesus who practiced theurgy. The word needs unpacking, because it is the hinge of his life. Theurgy, literally "god-work," was ritual Neoplatonism: not merely thinking about the divine but performing rites, hymns and invocations meant to draw the soul upward into contact with the gods. Where a philosopher argued, a theurgist also lit incense and expected an answer. Maximus was famous for it, and by the accounts we have he made a statue of Hecate appear to smile and its torches light themselves. Whatever happened in that room, the twenty-year-old came out of it converted. He said so himself, later, without hedging. Writing to the people of Alexandria as emperor, he described his own life as two roads: "For you will not stray from the right road if you heed one who till his twentieth year walked in that road of yours, but for twelve years now has walked in this road I speak of, by the grace of the gods" (Letter 47, Wright translation). For those twelve years he kept up appearances. He attended church, observed the feasts, and by his own later admission worshipped the gods in private while Constantius watched. In 354 his brother Gallus, raised to Caesar and then accused of misrule, was arrested and executed, and Julian spent months under suspicion himself. In 355 he was permitted a season of study at Athens, where a fellow student named Gregory, later the bishop known as Gregory of Nazianzus, watched him and, as Gregory told it afterward, did not like what he saw.

(●) 355 AD: Sent to Gaul as a figurehead, he turned out to be a soldier, and his own troops made him emperor. + On 6 November 355 Constantius pulled the bookish young man out of Athens, made him Caesar (junior emperor), married him to his sister Helena, and sent him to Gaul, where the Rhine frontier had collapsed and the Alamanni were raiding at will. Nobody expected much. He was about twenty-four, he had never commanded anything, and the officers around him reported to the court, not to him. Two years later, at Strasbourg on the Rhine, he fought the confederated Alamanni under their king Chnodomar and broke them. Ammianus Marcellinus, a Greek-speaking staff officer who served in these campaigns and wrote the finest Latin history of the age, gives Julian about 13,000 men against 35,000; historians today think the German force was smaller, perhaps not much larger than the Roman one, but nobody disputes the result. Chnodomar was captured and sent on to Constantius, and from there to Rome, where he died in the barracks of the foreign troops. Over the following seasons Julian crossed the Rhine repeatedly, rebuilt the frontier forts, brought thousands of Roman captives home, and cut the taxes of a province that had been squeezed flat. In February 360 Constantius ordered the best of the Gallic troops east for a Persian war. The soldiers, who had enlisted on terms that kept them in the west and who were now being asked to leave their families behind, mutinied at Paris, surrounded Julian’s residence at night, and raised him on a shield as Augustus, full emperor. He wrote afterward that he had resisted and that the gods had overruled him. Whether or not he had, his position was now perfectly simple and perfectly dangerous: there were two Augusti, and the senior one had not agreed to the second. Civil war was avoided by a coincidence his enemies found suspicious and his friends found providential: while marching west to fight him, Constantius fell ill and died in Cilicia on 3 November 361, reportedly naming Julian his heir. On 11 December Julian entered Constantinople unopposed, and the empire discovered what its new master actually believed.

(●) 362 AD: He reopened the temples, and set about building a pagan church to compete with the real one. + Julian’s religious policy was cleverer than persecution, and he said so. He did not order executions. He restored the temples and their revenues, sacrificed publicly and often, and then in February 362 issued an edict of toleration recalling the bishops Constantius had exiled over the Arian controversy, the long fourth-century fight over whether the Son is fully God. Ammianus, who was a pagan and who admired him, says drily that Julian knew exactly what he was doing: let the rival Christian factions back into the same cities and they would tear at each other, and no wild beast is as dangerous to a man as Christians are to one another (Res Gestae 22.5.4). Then came the constructive half, which is the half worth watching. Julian had noticed something about the church that pagan religion had no answer to, and he tried to copy it: a trained clergy held to a moral standard, organized charity for anyone who needed it, hostels for travelers, and care for the dead. He wrote to his high priests ordering them to keep out of taverns and theaters, to preach, and to feed the poor, and he allotted grain and wine from imperial stores to pay for it (T4). On 17 June 362 he signed the law that did him the most damage. Christian teachers of grammar and rhetoric were required either to teach Homer, Hesiod and Demosthenes as pious men who honored the gods, or to stop teaching. Since the entire education of the empire ran through those texts, the effect was to push Christians out of the schools without laying a hand on them. His own explanation of the law survives as a rescript, a written imperial ruling issued in answer to a question, and it is franker about the purpose than the law itself ever was. The last stop was Antioch, where he arrived in July 362 to prepare a Persian war, and where the whole program ran into a city that would not take him seriously. Antioch was mostly Christian, thoroughly urban and fond of a joke, and it laughed at him: at his philosopher’s beard, at his shabby clothes, at the herds of oxen he sacrificed. Things then got worse in a hurry. In October the great temple of Apollo at Daphne burned down, and it burned shortly after Julian had ordered the removal from the site of the remains of Babylas, a bishop of Antioch who had died in an earlier persecution and whose relics had been drawing Christian crowds to the place; Julian closed Antioch’s cathedral in reprisal. As for the laughter, he answered it with a satire against himself and them, the Misopogon or "Beard-Hater," in which he defends the beard by admitting it is a thicket: "For the same reason I put up with the lice that scamper about in it as though it were a thicket for wild beasts" (Misopogon 338, Wright translation). An emperor publishing a pamphlet to out-joke a city is not a thing the ancient world had seen before.

(●) 363 AD: He ordered the temple in Jerusalem rebuilt, and the work stopped. + Early in 363 Julian gave orders to rebuild the temple at Jerusalem, destroyed by Titus in AD 70 and never restored. A letter to the Jewish communities remitting a tax and promising the rebuilding comes down under his name, and scholars are divided on whether he wrote it. What is certain is that he put a senior administrator on the job, Alypius of Antioch, who had once run the British provinces as deputy prefect, with the governor of the province to assist him. His motives ran together, and there is no need to sort them into one. He genuinely thought the Jews had been treated badly, he approved of animal sacrifice and wanted it going again in the one place where the Jews believed it belonged, and it did not escape him that Jesus had said of the temple buildings, "there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down" (Matthew 24:2). A rebuilt temple would embarrass the Galileans on their own ground. The work never got past the foundations. Ammianus, who was neither Jewish nor Christian and who thought Julian the best emperor of his lifetime, reports what happened next: as Alypius pressed the work, balls of flame kept bursting out near the foundations, burning the workmen and making the site impossible to approach, until the attempt was given up (Res Gestae 23.1.2 to 3). Christian writers, Gregory of Nazianzus among them, told the story with more detail and more theology. The natural explanation deserves its hearing too, and it is not a difficult one to give: an earthquake struck the region in 363, and gas collecting in old underground chambers and catching fire is a documented thing that happens on building sites in ruined ground. What is not in doubt, because a friendly pagan officer records it, is that the empire tried and stopped.

(●) 363 AD: He died in Persia at thirty-one, and the pagan restoration died with him. + On 5 March 363 Julian marched east with a large army, aiming to settle the Persian war his predecessors had left unfinished. The campaign started well. He came down the Euphrates, won a battle in front of Ctesiphon, the Persian capital, and then found he could not take the city. He burned his own river fleet, a decision his officers argued about for the rest of their lives, and turned north through open country in high summer with Persian cavalry harrying the column. On 26 June, near Samarra on the Tigris, a skirmish broke out along the line of march. Julian rode toward it without stopping for his breastplate. A cavalry spear went through his side into his liver. Ammianus, who was there, records the long philosophical deathbed conversation with his friends, refusing to name a successor and speaking of the soul going where it belonged, and says he died quietly in the gloom of midnight, in the thirty-second year of his age. His body was taken to Tarsus and buried in a suburb outside the city. The next morning the army chose an officer named Jovian, a Christian, and he bought the army’s way out of Persia by ceding five provinces and restored the church’s privileges within months. Julian had governed Gaul for a little over five years and ruled the whole empire for less than twenty months. Nothing he built in religion outlasted him by a year. A story first written down nearly a century later, by the historian Theodoret and introduced by him with "it is related," has the dying emperor filling his hand with blood, flinging it into the air, and crying, "You have won, O Galilean." Ammianus, who was with the army and gives the deathbed scene at length, records nothing of the kind. The line is a legend rather than a report, and it has outlived every sentence Julian actually wrote, which he would have found unbearable.

What He Taught

(T1) The sun you can see is the visible image of a god, and the soul climbs home by way of it. + Stand outside on a clear night, look up, and feel the pull. Julian says that is where his religion began, in childhood, before he had a word for it, and his most personal book is a hymn to the sun. The system behind it is Neoplatonism, the late-Greek development of Plato that runs everything back to a single ultimate source, the One, from which all being flows outward like light from a lamp and to which every soul is trying to return. Picture that as a ladder, with the One at the top and this world at the bottom, and Julian’s own contribution is a rung in the middle. On that rung he sets King Helios, the intelligible Sun, meaning the Sun as the mind grasps it rather than as the eye sees it, the divine principle of order itself. The sun in the sky is then its visible image, the same reality shown to eyes that could not bear to look at the original. Get that middle rung right, he thinks, and the whole ladder holds: the gods of the traditional cults are not folk tales but real powers arranged under that order, and the old rites are the way a soul takes hold of them. This is why his paganism could never be a simple return to the temples of Homer’s day. It was a philosopher’s religion, dense with allegory, which is the practice of reading an old story as a coded picture of something else, and it required priests who could explain Cybele and Attis as a doctrine of the soul’s fall and recovery. A Christian can affirm a surprising amount of that. One source of all things, and a world that shows it plainly enough to leave nobody with an excuse: Paul grants the pagans that much in Romans 1:20. What Julian will not have is that the source ever became a man.

(Q) "For I am a follower of King Helios... from my childhood an extraordinary longing for the rays of the god penetrated deep into my soul." + Source: Julian, Hymn to King Helios 130c (Wright translation). Written in December 362 at Antioch, reportedly in three nights over the festival of the Unconquered Sun, and dedicated to his friend Sallust. The lines that follow describe him as a boy staring at the night sky until he lost track of everything else, which is as close to an autobiography of his faith as he ever gave (T1).

(T2) Christianity is a human invention that abandoned Greek reason and Jewish law alike. + A witness who gives two different answers to the same question loses a jury, whatever else he has to say. Julian’s central charge against the Christians is not that they are wicked. It is that they are inconsistent, and he presses the point the way a lawyer presses a man who cannot keep his story straight. Look at what they claim, he says. They claim the God of Moses, but they do not keep his law: no circumcision, no sacrifices, no dietary rules, no Passover as Moses laid it down. They claim the wisdom of the Greeks, but they call the gods of the Greeks demons and teach their children to despise the poets. So they are Jews who have dropped the law and Greeks who have dropped the gods, and what is left is a thing without ancestry, three hundred years old, held together by fear and by stories. Behind the charge is a theology worth stating clearly, because it is where the deepest disagreement lies. Julian held that the creator had given each nation its own presiding god, which is how he accounted for the differences in law and temper between Greeks and Egyptians and Germans, and he thought Moses granted him half the point and then stopped: the Lord took Jacob for his portion (Deuteronomy 32:9), and about who governed the other nations Moses said nothing whatever. So the God of Israel is the national god of one small people, competent within his own territory and no further. Read that way, the Christian claim is not merely false but absurd, a local deity announcing himself as the God of everyone. And he did not confine himself to the comfortable texts. He pushed on the passages a Christian would rather not be asked about first, the jealousy of God in Exodus, the serpent in Eden, the tower of Babel, and he pushed hard. The reply the church made, and still makes, is that Julian read the ancestry backwards. The law was never the point of the covenant with Abraham; the promise ran that "in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed" (Genesis 12:3), which is a claim about every nation from the start.

(Q) "It is, I think, expedient to set forth to all mankind the reasons by which I was convinced that the fabrication of the Galilaeans is a fiction of men composed by wickedness." + Source: Julian, Against the Galileans 39A (Wright translation). The opening sentence of the work, written at Antioch in the winter of 362 to 363. "Galilaeans" is his own coinage for Christians, used throughout in place of the name they used for themselves, and the sentence that follows accuses the faith of working on the part of the soul that loves a story and is childish (T2).

(T3) Nothing in the life of Jesus earned the worship the church gives him. + Julian’s argument against the divinity of Christ has two moves, and both are still in circulation. The first is scale. Set the career of Jesus beside Alexander or Caesar and what is there? A short life in an unimportant province, a handful of village healings, an execution. Julian is not denying that the healings were reported; he lists them, at Bethsaida and Bethany, and simply refuses to be impressed. A god should have done more. The second is development, and it is the sharper of the two. He observes that the earliest Christian writers do not call Jesus God in so many words, and that the plain statement of it comes in John, the latest of the four Gospels. From this he concludes that the divinity of Christ was not the church’s starting point but its drift: something that grew as the movement spread and as the tombs of Peter and Paul began to draw worshippers. The observation is real, and it deserves an answer rather than a shrug. Two things can be said in reply, and the second carries more weight. First, Julian is working with an overly narrow test, the bare word "God," and by that test he has to overlook Paul calling Christ "God over all, blessed forever" (Romans 9:5), and Thomas saying to the risen Jesus, "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28). Second, the earliest Christian language is stranger than a title. Paul, writing within about thirty years of the crucifixion, describes Christ as being in the form of God and emptying himself (Philippians 2:6 to 7), and slots Jesus into the daily Jewish confession that the Lord is one (1 Corinthians 8:6). A movement of Jewish monotheists worshipping a crucified contemporary is the thing that needs explaining, and it is there before John writes.

(Q) "Jesus... during his lifetime he accomplished nothing worth hearing of, unless anyone thinks that to heal crooked and blind men and to exorcise those who were possessed by evil demons in the villages of Bethsaida and Bethany can be classed as a mighty achievement." + Source: Julian, Against the Galileans 191D to E (Wright translation). He is contrasting Jesus with the founders and heroes of the nations that Rome ruled, and the sneer carries an admission with it. A hostile witness three centuries after the fact, with the Gospels in front of him and every motive to say the healings never happened, instead concedes the reports and disputes their weight. Elsewhere in the same work he states his other line plainly: neither Paul nor Matthew nor Luke nor Mark ventured to call Jesus God, and John was the first who dared (327A) (T3).

(T4) Paganism will not win the empire back until its priests out-give the Christians. + This is the most interesting thing Julian ever wrote, and he did not mean it as a compliment. He had reopened the temples and the sacrifices were running, the altars were paid for out of the imperial purse, and it was not working. People were not coming back. So he sat down and asked himself why the Galileans held on to people the way they did, and the answer he arrived at, in letters to his priests, was not their doctrine and not their miracles. It was that they fed strangers, buried the dead, and lived as though someone were watching. Any Christian reading Matthew 25:35 will recognize what he is describing from the inside: "I was a stranger and you welcomed me." His response was to order it copied. Priests were to be examined for character and removed if they failed, kept out of taverns and theaters and low trades, made to preach, and required to run hostels in every city for travelers and beggars, funded by grain and wine from the imperial stores. And it was to be indiscriminate: strangers and beggars, he says, not our own people only. What he could not copy was the reason. Christian charity in the second and third centuries had grown up under persecution, without imperial grain, out of a conviction that the poor man at the door is Christ himself (Matthew 25:40). Julian was ordering the fruit onto a tree that was not growing it, and paying for it out of the treasury. His priests, so far as we can tell, mostly ignored him.

(Q) "For when it came about that the poor were neglected and overlooked by the priests, then I think the impious Galilaeans observed this fact and devoted themselves to philanthropy." + Source: Julian, Fragment of a Letter to a Priest, pages 337 to 339 of volume 2 (Wright translation). The blunter version comes in the letter to Arsacius, high priest of Galatia: "For it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galilaeans support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us" (Letter 22, Wright translation). That letter reaches us through the Christian historian Sozomen rather than through Julian’s own manuscripts, and a few scholars have questioned whether it is genuine for that reason. Not much hangs on the answer. The fragment on the priests and the poor comes down in Julian’s own corpus, and it says the same thing (T4).

(Q) "If, however, they think that those writers were in error with respect to the most honoured gods, then let them betake themselves to the churches of the Galilaeans to expound Matthew and Luke." + Source: Julian, Rescript on Christian Teachers, Letter 36 (Wright translation). The reasoning behind the law of 17 June 362, and the sentence that decided how he would be remembered. Julian argues that a teacher who expounds Homer while believing Homer’s gods to be demons is a hypocrite selling goods he despises, so Christian teachers must either mean what they teach or leave the profession. It reads as a point about honesty and works as an exclusion, since a career in law, government or letters began in exactly those classrooms. Ammianus, a pagan who admired him, called it a harsh thing that ought to be buried in eternal silence (Res Gestae 22.10.7).

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Shut out of the classroom, the Christians answered him with books, and one of them preserved his. + The immediate answer came from a man who had known him. Gregory of Nazianzus had been a student at Athens in 355 while Julian was there, and within a year or two of the emperor’s death he published two long invectives against him, invective being the recognized ancient form for demolishing a man’s reputation, the mirror image of the speech of praise. One passage has stayed famous because it is so personal: Gregory says he watched Julian’s twitching shoulders, wandering eyes and unsteady laugh, and thought, "What an evil the Roman world is breeding" (Oration 5.23 to 24). It is a hostile witness recalling an old impression after the fact, and should be read as one, but it is also the only description of Julian by a Christian who had sat in the same lecture room. The school law produced a stranger response. According to the church historian Socrates, Apollinaris of Laodicea and his father set about rewriting the Bible in classical forms, the books of Moses as heroic verse and the histories as tragedy, the Gospels and the apostles as dialogues after the manner of Plato, so that Christian boys shut out of the pagan classics would have their own (Ecclesiastical History 3.16). The project died with the law, and almost nothing of it survives, but it shows what the law felt like from the receiving end. The lasting answer came two generations later. Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, wrote a long refutation, Against Julian, because the emperor’s book was still doing damage long after its author was buried. Older scholarship put the work in the 430s, while the recent critical edition, the scholarly text that weighs every surviving manuscript against the others, argues for c. 416 to 428. Either way it is the work of a bishop answering a dead man because the living were still reading him. Cyril’s method was to quote Julian at length and then reply, and that method is the reason we can read Julian at all: almost the whole surviving text of Against the Galileans has been recovered from Cyril’s pages (T2, T3). The church kept the objection alive by taking it seriously enough to answer it in full.

(†) His reign handed the church two arguments it has used ever since. + The first is the temple. Jesus had said of the temple buildings that not one stone would be left on another (Matthew 24:2; Luke 21:6), and for three centuries the ruin had stood there. Then the most powerful man alive, with the treasury behind him and every motive to make the prophecy look foolish, ordered the rebuilding, and it stopped. Christian writers reached for the story at once, and they had the advantage that the plainest account of it comes from Ammianus, a pagan officer who thought Julian the best emperor of his lifetime and had no interest at all in vindicating a Christian prediction. The argument should be made at its real strength and no higher: an earthquake is recorded in the region that year, and a natural cause is available. What the episode does establish is that the one serious imperial attempt to reverse Titus was made, and failed, and was never made again. The second is charity, and it is the more durable. Julian is the hostile witness the church can produce whenever someone says early Christianity spread by force or by ignorance. Here is the emperor of Rome, who hates the faith and is trying to erase it, writing to his own clergy that the Galileans are winning because they feed the poor of both religions and bury the dead of both, and ordering pagan priests to do the same (T4). Historians of the early church have leaned on that admission for centuries, and rightly: it is testimony from the one man with every reason to say otherwise.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the Word made flesh, one God over all nations, and a faith that cannot be legislated back into being. + Julian is among the ablest ancient critics of the faith, and the disagreement is worth stating at full strength rather than softened. - The Incarnation. His whole system needs the divine to stay above and be reached by climbing: contemplation, ritual, ascent. The gospel says the ladder came down. "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14) is precisely the sentence he could not accept, and he was right that everything turns on it. If it is false, he has won the argument; the church has never pretended otherwise. - The God of all nations. Julian’s tidy arrangement, a god for each people, keeps every religion in its own territory and costs nobody anything. Scripture will not have it. "I am the Lord, and there is no other, besides me there is no God" (Isaiah 45:5), and the God who made one man to be every nation of mankind has no borders to respect (Acts 17:26). - Who the message is for. He held that the Galileans had won over "the least worthy," and his restored paganism was built for the educated: allegory, philosophy, a priesthood of scholars. That is exactly the boast Paul dismantles. "For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth" (1 Corinthians 1:26). What Julian named as the scandal, the church named as the design. - The method. He avoided martyrs on purpose, and used exclusion instead: the schools, the army, the civil service, the treasury. It was intelligent, and pagans as well as Christians judged it beneath him (Res Gestae 22.10.7). It also gave away what he did not think his gods could manage on their own. A restoration that needs the classrooms closed and the treasury open has conceded the argument it claims to be winning, and it is the opposite of the way the thing he was fighting had started: "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews" (John 18:36). He deserves the last honesty. Julian saw the church clearly enough to name the thing that was actually converting the empire, and he tried to reproduce it with money and orders. It did not reproduce. That failure is his best argument against himself.