Moses the Hellenic Sage: Re-reading Julian’s Against the Galileans

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Some sixty years after Julian the Apostate died on a Persian battlefield, Cyril of Alexandria responded at length to one of the emperor’s final treatises, the anti-Christian Against the Galileans. Christians like Cyril were long preoccupied with Julian’s treatise, and this fixation suggests that its rhetorical potency endured well after the demise of its author and his short-lived political threat. Despite this fixation by ancient Christians, modern scholarship routinely treats Against the Galileans as intellectually and rhetorically anemic, leaving unanswered how Julian’s text could have unsettled so many Christians. This article explores what was so compelling about Against the Galileans. In short, it argues that the enduring existential heft of Julian’s treatise lay in the strategy of narrative subsumption: drawing on his training in Christian scripture and doctrine, Julian fractured the Christian master narrative and rearranged the shattered pieces into a new coherence within his alternative, Hellenic narrative. Julian’s subtle strategy is most evident in the way he co-opts Moses as a mediocre Hellenic-style sage and lawgiver—a fact that also explains the misleading analyses of Against the Galileans in modern scholarship. These evaluations routinely overlook Julian’s nuance by regarding him as flatly critical, as ambivalent, or as outright inconsistent in his treatment of Moses. This article argues to the contrary that Julian’s subtle co-opting of Moses offers a window onto his grander strategy: to undermine the Christian narrative by offering a more compelling account of its key episodes, reconstrued within a Hellenic narrative.