Matthew R. Crawford and Aaron P. Johnson, "Cyril of Alexandria: Against Julian: Introduction and Translation" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

New Books in Religion · May 25, 2026 · 1h 5m

In 362/363 the Roman emperor Julian composed a treatise titled Against the Galileans in which he set forth his reasons for abandoning Christianity and returning to devotion to the traditional Greco-Roman deities. Sixty years later Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, composed a response. His resulting treatise Against Julian would dwarf the size of Julian's original work and in fact serves as our primary source for the fragments of it that have survived. Julian's treatise was the most sophisticated critique of Christianity to have been composed in antiquity and Cyril's rebuttal was equally learned…