Matteo Milesi, University of Michigan
In this paper I propose a new interpretation of Porphyry’s criticism of Christian allegorical readings of the Old Testament, which is preserved in a long quotation from his work Against the Christians (fr. 6 Becker). I argue that, for Porphyry, Christian readers are to be blamed because their allegorical interpretations are forced upon the text from the outside and thus undermine valuable theological and moral teachings transmitted by the Hebrew Bible.
It is commonly thought that Porphyry’s attacks against Christian exegetes (and especially the great allegorist Origen) are grounded in a-priori assumptions concerning which texts deserve to be read allegorically. Accordingly, Porphyry would be trying to undermine the authority of the Old Testament and its status as a divinely-inspired text (De Labriolle 1948; Pépin 1976; Cook 2008; Schott 2008; Becker 2015). This however is at odds with other works where Porphyry praises the religious piety of the Jewish people (frr. 323-24 Smith), and he is even open to a figurative interpretation of the creation story in Genesis (De Antro 10, 155-57; Ad Gaurum 11, 8-12). How do we reconcile these two attitudes? Building on recent studies (Johnson 2012; 2013) that rejected the picture of Porphyry as a chauvinistic defender of ‘Hellenism’, I argue that Porphyry is not trying to demolish the authority of the Hebrew Bible, but rather the validity of Christian interpretations, which in Porphyry’s opinions are dependent upon a hermeneutics that is both philologically and philosophically flawed.
First, Porphyry accuses Christian readers of committing a philological mistake, as they fail to interpret the Bible from the Bible itself. Christians allegorize passages that, for Porphyry, contain valuable ethical teaching if understood literally. For example, Porphyry praises the Jewish people for following Mosaic dietary laws (De Abstinentia IV.14). Contemporary Christians interpreters like Origen, on the other hand, interpret these same prescriptions figuratively and do not consider them binding (e.g. Orig. Hom. in Lev. 7).
Second, Porphyry dismisses Christian allegorical readings from a philosophical point of view by suggesting that Origen learnt his exegetical method from the Stoics. Porphyry dislikes these radical materialists who reduce all the gods to natural phenomena and deny the existence of anything beyond the sensible world (Ep. Aneb. fr. 81 Segonds-Saffrey). Similarly, Christian interpreters of the Old Testament refer everything to Christ, who for Porphyry is just a mortal man (fr. 345 F. Smith). Hence, Christian readers undermine the most valuable philosophical doctrine transmitted by the Old Testament: the uniqueness and transcendence of God.
My interpretation provides a more coherent picture of Porphyry’s attitude towards the Hebrew Bible; it also has the merit of showing how Porphyry’s criticism is based on a coherent hermeneutical theory, and it is not just an ad hominem attack against a foreign cultural group. It emerges a picture of Porphyry as a sophisticated reader who has a deep trust in the power of what we may anachronistically call the philological method, a method that ideally (and perhaps naively) owns its allegiance to nothing but the text itself.