God Against the Gods (31 page)

When Constantius II died and Julian declared the pagan restoration, the pagans of Alexandria felt themselves at liberty to seize George and throw him in jail. On December 25, 361—by pagan tradition, the birthday of
Sol Invictus
—a mob broke into the public cells, dragged out several Christian prisoners, including George, and lynched them. The corpse of Bishop George was tied to a camel, and the others were dragged along behind, all to the amusement of the mob. At last, the bodies were burned—as a precaution against supplying the Christians with yet more “corpse-pieces”—and the ashes were dumped into the sea.

Julian, as it turned out, had known George in early childhood.

During his years of confinement at Macellum, long before George was appointed to the see at Alexandria, Julian had been permitted to visit the library that George maintained in his quarters in nearby Caesarea. The young man admired the works of philosophy and rhetoric that he found there, and the bishop allowed him to borrow them for reading and copying, although Julian later wrote contemptuously of the books that were concerned with “the teachings of the impious Galileans, which I would like to see entirely destroyed.”
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Julian did not instigate the pagan riot that ended in the murder of Bishop George, but neither did he do much about it. He contented himself with a mild scolding of the citizenry of Alexandria. “Perhaps your anger and rage led you astray,” writes Julian in a public letter. “I administer to you the very mildest remedy, namely admonition and arguments.”
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Then he turned to what he found to be a much more compelling aspect of the whole ugly incident. The bishop had brought his books with him to Alexandria, but his library had been broken up and dispersed. Now the emperor wrote to his agent in Alexandria and instructed him to gather up as many of the volumes from the dead bishop’s library as he could recover and send them back to Constantinople.

Julian was plainly guilty of indifference to the sufferings of the Christian victims of the mob violence that erupted during the pagan restoration. “I might even admit,” he writes of George, “that he deserved even worse and more cruel treatment.” From the Christian perspective, however, he was an accomplice to murder. The pagan rioters in Phoenicia and Alexandria, as the Christian sources see it, were Julian’s unwitting agents in a subtle campaign of terror against the Christian minority. “Julian shrank from a death penalty,” concedes Ricciotti, but only because to do otherwise “would have removed the disguise from his system of veiled persecution.”
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Whenever the mob took to the streets, he insists, they were doing the emperor’s dirty work: “Churches were sacked, priests tortured, consecrated virgins violated, stomachs of victims were slit open and barley thrown into them to feed the pigs,” reports Ricciotti. “Local governors, knowing the attitude of the emperor, tolerated such crimes.”
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“One Stone Upon Another”

Far more often, however, Julian’s torment of the Christians was characterized by the wry and whimsical, if also slightly devilish, quality that sparkles in the letters and orations that were his best-loved pastime. But nowhere is Julian’s fanciful nature more richly on display than in the single most grandiose of all his undertakings—the restoration of the temple in Jerusalem where the God of Israel had been worshipped until the end of the Jewish War in 70 C.E., when one of his less gentle predecessors on the throne pulled it down. Julian intended to honor the ancient faith of the Jews by permitting them to return to their homeland and rebuild their temple, or so he vowed. He also delighted in vexing the Christians by bestowing imperial favor on the original monotheists—whom, ironically, they now regarded as their worst enemies.

So Julian addressed a remarkable public letter to the Jewish community of the Roman empire in which he vows that they, too, would enjoy the blessings of pagan toleration. Julian promises that the punitive taxes that had been imposed on them by his predecessors—“by far the most burdensome thing in the yoke of your slavery”—will be lifted. The various accusations and denunciations by Christians against Jews “that were stored in my desk,” he assures them, “I threw into the fire.” He declares that “everywhere, during my reign, you may have security of mind,” and he implores them to “offer more fervid prayers for my reign to the Most High God, the Creator, who has deigned to crown me with his own immaculate right hand.”
⁵⁵

Then he makes a vow that reveals not only his expert knowledge of monotheism, not only his pagan commitment to religious toleration, but—above all—his guile and his sly gamesmanship. Julian knew from his own reading that the Jews once sacrificed to the God of Israel at the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, the only place where sacrifice had been permitted since the days of King Josiah. And he saw a striking commonality between the worship of Yahweh as it was actually described in the Bible and the worship of the gods and goddesses of paganism. The Jews, of course, offered worship to one god only, and the pagans offered worship to many gods. “We have all else in common—temples, sacred precincts, altars for sacrifice, and purifications,” writes Julian, “in all of which we differ not at all from one another.”
⁵⁶
But he also understood that Judaism had been cut off from the old rituals of worship to the God of Israel after the Roman legions marched into Jerusalem and razed the Temple.

Julian understood, too, that the events of the Jewish War figured crucially in Christian theology and, especially, the Christian denunciation of Judaism. Jesus is shown to prophesy the destruction of the Temple in the Christian Bible: “Verily I say unto you, there shall not be left here one stone upon another.”
⁵⁷
The new temple that Jesus promises to raise up in its place is not a physical structure but rather “the temple of his body.”
⁵⁸
The fact that the Roman army left the Temple in ruins at the end of the Jewish War was seen by Christians as incontrovertible physical proof that the prophecy of Jesus had been fully realized and, therefore, Jewish monotheism had been repudiated and superseded by Christianity.

So Julian decided to strike a blow against Christianity by the simple if astounding feat of rebuilding the Temple and thus permitting the Jews to resume the rituals of animal sacrifice to the God of Israel that had been abandoned nearly 300 years before. Jesus had destroyed the old Temple, but now Julian would build a new one. “The high priest of the Hellenes would embarrass the God of the Galileans on His own terrain,” as Abbot Ricciotti puts it, “making Him out to be a charlatan.”
⁵⁹
What more eloquent way to repudiate the Christians, Julian calculated, than to befriend the Jews and, especially, to prove the cherished scriptures of the Only True God to be wrong?

Julian acted with characteristic energy and resolve to set his audacious plan into motion. He allotted funds from the imperial treasury, and he dispatched one of his trusted courtiers, a man called Alypius, from Antioch to Jerusalem to oversee the project. Encouraged by the remarkable decree, Jews from both the Roman empire and Persia began to make their way to Jerusalem, a place from which they had been excluded by imperial decree. Some of the rabbis, who had replaced the old priesthood after the destruction of the Temple, saw the remarkable promise of Julian as a sure sign that the Messiah was on his way.

A synagogue was opened in one of the Roman colonnades that had been built over the site of the former Temple. Rubble and ruins were removed from the site by an ardent and inspired workforce that included both Jewish men and women who rejoiced at the opportunity to rebuild the sacred structure. Stonemasons started cutting and dressing the first of the massive stones that would be needed for the new temple; by pious tradition, their tools were fashioned out of silver rather than iron, all in compliance with the dictates of the Bible. An inscription carved into one of the surviving stones of the Western Wall—“When you see this, your heart shall rejoice”—may be the handiwork of one of those masons.
⁶⁰

The work on the temple was interrupted, according to the ancient chronicles, by a series of ominous mishaps. First came torrential rains; then an earthquake caused the stonework to tumble and crush several of the workers. “Frightful balls of flame kept bursting forth near the foundations of the temple and made it impossible for the workmen to approach the place,” writes Ammianus, “and some were even burned to death.”
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The flames reached storerooms where the building materials were stored. Secular historians are willing to entertain the idea that these were unremarkable natural phenomena, and one Jewish historian proposes that the damage was the result of vandalism and arson by Christian zealots who resented the whole undertaking, just as Julian himself had intended.
⁶²
Christians, of course, saw the tremors and fireballs as nothing less than the wrath of the Only True God. Whatever the cause of the calamities, construction of the new temple came to a halt.

Julian himself recognized that the task would not be completed until he had attended to the urgent task that now faced him: the defeat of the Persian armies that were once again threatening the
Pax Romana
on the eastern frontier of the empire. Indeed, he would have to put aside
all
his visionary undertakings in order to devote himself to the campaign against the Persians. He implored the Jews to address “their suppliant prayers on behalf of my imperial office to Mighty God” at this moment of greatest peril to his life and reign.

“This you ought to do,” he concludes, “in order that, when I have successfully concluded the war with Persia, I may rebuild by my own efforts the sacred city of Jerusalem, which for so many years you have longed to see inhabited, and may bring settlers there and, together with you, may glorify the Most High God therein.”
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To the Persian Front

Julian rode out of Constantinople at the head of an army to engage the Persian enemy in the summer of 362. The Roman road on which Julian traveled was now put to its original and essential use—a military highway intended to permit the rapid deployment of the legions to the farthest stretches of the empire. On his way, he paused at the ancient temple of Cybele, the Great Mother of the Gods, and he passed the site where Alexander the Great had fought and beaten the Persian army seven centuries before—Julian, it was said, believed himself to be the reincarnation of the original philosopher king and the founder of Hellenism. At last, he reached Antioch, where the army would rest and resupply while he awaited the campaigning season to come the following spring.

The sojourn at Antioch lasted eight months. Julian found an opportunity to pore over the books that had formerly belonged to Bishop George, which caught up with him there, and he dutifully presided over public sacrifices to the old gods in the company of his old comrades and confidants, including Maximus of Ephesus and Priscus, his former tutors in the Neoplatonist mysteries, and his personal physician, Oribasius, all of whom had known him when he was still a secret pagan. The largely Christian citizenry of Antioch, however, treated the young emperor with coldness and contempt.

The local Christians resented his pagan piety. They bridled at the decrees he enacted to address the problem of grain shortages and price inflation and they even scorned the new currency that he had introduced, both for its pagan motifs and for the fact that the emperor was depicted with a beard in defiance of long tradition. Julian, in an utterly characteristic gesture, responded in the self-revelatory and bitterly sarcastic
Misopogon
(“Beard Hater”). He ordered the work to be posted on the palace wall, where all could read his account of his own flaws and eccentricities. “For criticising myself,” writes the Augustus in a startling exercise of
lèse-majesté
, “I have countless reasons.”
⁶⁴

Julian contented himself with the company of his fellow pagans, and he busied himself with preparations for the campaign on which he would soon embark. He also found encouragement in a series of good omens that seemed to confirm that he enjoyed the favor of the gods, if not the citizenry of Antioch. A swan, the bird whose form the high god Zeus had once taken, was caught along the nearby banks of the Orontes. And when Julian offered a blood sacrifice in the temple of Zeus, the swan rose in flight and headed toward the east, a sure sign that he was destined to vanquish the Persians.

A Willing Sacrifice

On March 5, 363, Julian and his army resumed the march toward the Persian frontier. Along the way, he paused to sacrifice a white bull, a particularly auspicious offering, and later he celebrated the festival of Cybele by ritually immersing an image of the Great Mother of the Gods in the waters of the Euphrates. Soon the whole of Julian’s army was across the Euphrates and then the Tigris, and he began to encounter mounted patrols of Persian cavalry on reconnaissance missions.

On the day before he crossed into Persian territory, Julian addressed the soldiers under his command with words that were recorded by an eyewitness, the pagan historian Ammianus. “Angered by the fate of captured cities and defeated armies, I am resolved to make our territory safe and strong,” he declared. “Should I be killed in battle, it will be as a willing sacrifice for my country.”
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Now that his army was on Persian soil, Julian found himself under attack by units of Persian archers and cavalry that were testing his strength and harrying his progress. The terrain was broken up by irrigation canals and tributaries of the bigger rivers, and the Persians flooded the line of march. The Roman army moved with difficulty into its first major operations, besieging a series of fortified Persian cities that ultimately fell to Julian’s catapults and battering rams, and suffering a series of stinging attacks as the legions slogged off in search of the Persian army. By May 29, Julian’s army caught up with the enemy and Julian himself marched into battle as he had once done in Gaul, personally directing his men in close combat. When the sun set, some 2500 Persians lay dead against a Roman death toll of only 70. The auguries, it seemed, had been accurate, and the gods seemed to be on Julian’s side.