Ryan Boissonneault Ancient Atheism

A Crisis of Credibility: Porphyry’s Exposure of Hypocrisy and Contradiction in the New Testament 

The deep and critical reading of scripture marks the beginning of the end for Christian credibility. Biblical criticism, as it’s called—an analytical approach to studying the Bible using literary and historical methods—was founded, it could be argued—not by Celsus (who adopted a cruder approach)—but by the more intellectually sophisticated Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry of Tyre in the 3rd-century CE. 

Highly trained and educated in both literary and historical criticism—in addition to philosophy under the guidance of Plotinus—Porphyry “set out to write the longest, most learned, and most punishing critique of Christianity the world had yet known,” according to translator and scholar of early Christianity M. David Litwa. This work, composed of 15 books, would be titled Against the Christians.

Porphyry was, without question, one of Christianity’s most respected (and feared) early critics. Porphyry’s writings—particularly Against the Christians—prompted dozens of volumes of rebuttals from theologians; Apollinaris, the bishop of Laodicea, wrote thirty of them, as one example. Even St. Augustine called him “the most learned of philosophers,” Christianity’s “most bitter enemy.” 

But Porphyry was far too effective a critic for even his own good; not one, or two, but three Roman emperors ordered all copies of Against the Christians to be burned, decreeing that anyone in mere possession of the book would be guilty of a capital offense. Clearly, Porphyry had hit a nerve, to the degree that, by the end of the 5th century, all copies of the book were completely erased. 

It seemed that the religious bigots had won. Except that they forgot to order all fragments of the book to be destroyed, and so, again, as with Celsus, we can reconstruct some of the book through its preservation in antagonistic texts. 

But we don’t have much. Of the original 15-book work, we have some fragments and commentaries, here and there, by less-than-sympathetic Christian authors (just about the last ancient group you would want to be quoted from). But what we do have still speaks volumes—particularly in highlighting scriptural difficulties that apologists still struggle to answer today (much more on that in a bit)—and gives us a glimpse into Porphyry’s critical insights and genius. 

In this post, we’ll pay due respects to the thinker that, in large measure, began the long tradition of attacking the Bible just where it hurts the most—namely, through the contradictions, inaccuracies, and absurdities contained within its very own text. 

The anti-intellectual origins of the faith

Porphyry does not pull punches. In comparing the lofty works of ancient Greece—particularly Plato—to scripture, Porphyry noted the low moral and literary quality of the Bible. This haphazardly assembled and simplistic text perfectly captured, to him, the anti-intellectual nature of the religion. Porphyry was especially struck by the Christian overreliance on faith:

These Christians cannot offer a clear proof of the truth through demonstrations, but demand those who approach them to focus on faith alone. They cannot convince them any more than they can convince themselves, who, in the manner of a mindless herd, firmly shut their eyes and bravely follow without examination everything they are told. Reasonably, Christians call themselves “believers” because of their mindless belief.

Knowing that mindless belief inevitably collapses under the weight of its own flawed logic, Porphyry aggressively set out to find examples in scripture that could clearly expose Christian hypocrisy and error. And judging by his opponents’ swift condemnation and censure of his book, we can only surmise that he was wildly successful in this task.

At the core of his claims is the idea that the evangelists were, to put it in the harshest of terms, liars, and that, as with all fabricators, if given enough time, they will inevitably trip themselves up—you just have to find it. But with the Christians, things were different, and the stakes were higher. Not everyone, after all, claims to be inspired by the one true God. Since they forced this higher standard upon themselves, any discovery of glaring errors—in this, the holiest of all books—should be enough to demolish the entire edifice of belief. As Porphyry wrote:

The Evangelists were clever and crafty sophists who gratuitously recorded things about their teacher which never happened to him. It seems to me that, either one must believe Jesus’ disciples in all respects, or not at all.

As it turns out, not at all. Let’s review some of what Porphyry found.

Jesus, Peter, and Paul: The Holy Trinity of hypocrisy

Saint Paul—probably the most important early Christian apostle—did the most to spread the faith to both Jews and gentiles alike. Paul was not one of the original twelve apostles—and did not know Jesus during his lifetime—yet that did not stop him from openly and publicly rebuking one of Jesus’s closest disciples, Peter, of which we’ll get to shortly. 

“Paul puts himself forward as an apostle, ‘not sent by people nor through human agency,’” writes Porphyry, “to confute those who claimed that he was not one of the original twelve apostles but sprang up suddenly out of nowhere.” Paul wants us to believe, according to Porphyry, that he received the gospel directly from Jesus himself, and not from the original apostles, to provide himself with self-appointed divine supremacy. 

But this is difficult to reconcile with Paul’s own words and actions, as Porphyry makes clear. This is because Paul insisted that Christ spoke directly through him, and that, in Paul’s own words, “Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20). One would imagine, then, that the words of Paul should match, in tone and character, those of Jesus, found in the Gospels. 

Let us remind ourselves, then, of what Jesus actually said:

“But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you” (Luke 6:27-28)…“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them” (Luke 6:32)…”But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:35-36).

Now, let’s see what Paul—of whom, remember, Christ is speaking through—has to say in response to those who disregarded his preaching against, in this example, circumcision (which was a Jewish practice Paul thought was unnecessary for gentiles to observe). Paul is explicit here: “Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all” (Gal 5:2). 

So what does Paul say to those who decide to get circumcised anyway? Paul is equally explicit: “As for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves!” (Gal 5:12). 

Elsewhere, Paul overtly curses his enemies:

But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse! As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse! (Gal 1:8-9)

Whereas Jesus said to love, bless, and pray for your enemies, Paul is openly cursing people and suggesting they castrate themselves. And yet, we are supposed to believe that Jesus is speaking through Paul. Well, if that’s the case, then either Jesus was wrong the first time, or Paul is majorly mistaken. Take your pick, Porphyry would say; in either case, someone is in error—in what is supposed to be an infallible text.

But it gets much worse for Paul. Intent to prove his own hypocrisy beyond a shadow of a doubt, Paul publicly rebukes Peter for not “walking upright in the truth of the gospels” when Peter is said to have refused to eat with gentiles in the presence of Jews. Paul is adamant that gentiles do not need to observe Jewish customs to attain salvation. This is why he was so opposed to circumcision among gentiles to begin with. So when Peter adjusts his behavior depending on who is in the room (e.g., no longer eating with gentiles, as he had done in the past, when Jews arrive), Paul considers this to be a grievous error. 

Now, imagine for a moment that Paul is right to rebuke Peter. How then can Peter be the one whom Jesus said is the “rock” on which he will “build his church” (Matt 16:18)? How can Jesus have given Peter the “keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 16:19) if Peter so flagrantly and absentmindedly violates the truth of the Gospels? Could Jesus not foresee this? 

Regardless, this is not even the worst part. In the book of Acts, Paul is guilty of far worse than Peter, in terms of dissimulation, when he himself observes a series of Jewish customs for the purposes of appeasement. He shaves his head in Cenchrea (Acts 18:18), makes an offering in Jerusalem (Acts 21:23-26), and, most damningly, actually circumcises Timothy to get him to join his missionary journey (Acts 16:3)! 

Recall that Paul said, “if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all,” and yet he then circumcised Timothy so that Timothy could join him on a mission for Christ, who will—now that Timothy allowed himself to be circumcised—disavow him! Could there be a more obvious case of hypocrisy? Paul apparently forgot to “take the plank out” of his own eye before pointing out the “speck” in Peter’s (see Matt 7:5).

As Porphyry wrote:

In this quarrel, either Peter was wrong or Paul obnoxiously silenced the leader of the apostles. Either Paul boastfully wrote things that Peter did not do, or, if he did do them, Paul obnoxiously rebuked another person for things he himself did. So Peter was wrong or Paul was impudent, or both.

If Paul is right, then we can’t trust Peter, and likewise we can’t trust Jesus, since Jesus placed his trust in such an untrustworthy person. Further, we certainly can’t trust Paul, because either he was wrong about Peter, in which case he’s mistaken or lying, or he was right about Peter, in which case Paul committed the very same transgressions (and worse) of which Peter was guilty. No wonder the Christians wanted Porphyry’s book burned! Porphyry exposed an entire web of incompetence and hypocrisy—and in no less than the three most important figures in the early stages of the faith!

Porphyry’s continued assault on the New Testament

It’s worth pausing for a moment to remind ourselves that Porphyry filled 15 books with observations like the ones above, of which only a tiny fraction survives (perhaps less than 5 percent of the original work). This is good to keep in mind as we review the remainder of the fragments, and as we ponder just how powerful this work truly would have been, even today, had it not been burned to ashes by religious zealots. 

Porphyry resumes his attacks on the New Testament by noting, first, that both Mark and Matthew, in addition to being “ignorant not only in respect to worldly affairs,” but also “of their own scriptures,” misattribute quotes to Isaiah that actually came from the books of Malachi and Psalms. Matthew, for example, writes, “So was fulfilled what was spoken through the prophet: ‘I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world’” (Matt 13:35), which does not, in fact, come from Isaiah, but rather from Psalms: “I will open my mouth with a parable; I will utter hidden things, things from of old” (Psalms 78:2). 

Porphyry next notes how the story of Jesus’s virgin birth is based on a mistranslation of the Hebrew word “almah” into the Greek word for “virgin,” when it really means only “young woman.” Mary’s depiction as a virgin was used, it seems, solely for the purposes of fulfilling prophecy (or what the Greek author mistook for prophecy). But this gaffe shouldn’t surprise us; it comes from the same shoddy scholarly work of an author (Matthew) that we just witnessed misattribute quotes. 

Porphyry next notes the discrepancies in the genealogy of Jesus, and how Matthew and Luke present two entirely different stories regarding Jesus’s birth. Whereas Matthew has Jesus being born in Bethlehem, then traveling to Egypt, then to Nazareth, Luke has Jesus being born in Nazareth and then traveling to Bethlehem before ultimately returning to Nazareth, with no mention of a sojourn to Egypt. This is quite the omission, if it happened, as is the omission in Mark of the virgin birth altogether! If you didn’t know any better, you’d think the Gospel writers were just making stuff up….

In terms of the resurrection, each Gospel writer also tells a different story. None of them can agree about the time, location, witnesses, instructions from Jesus, or details of the tomb. Mark, for example, writes that Jesus’s tomb is already open, with the stone already rolled away (Mark 16:1-4), yet in Matthew, the witnesses see an angel roll the stone away causing a dramatic earthquake (Matt 28:1-2).

Speaking of Matthew, as if to prove his own unreliability, he tells us that “as Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. ‘Follow me,’ he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him” (Matt 9:9). According to Porphyry, “This passage represents either the awkwardness of a lying historian or the stupidity of those who immediately followed Jesus, as though they irrationally followed anyone who called them.” 

As Porphyry continues to highlight the absurdities of the Christian story, he next asks, pointedly, why it took Jesus so long to descend from the heavens to save humanity:

If Christ says that he is the way of salvation, grace, and truth, he locates in himself alone the return of souls who believe in him. What then did people do for so many ages before Christ?

If we accept the scientific consensus that tells us modern humans have been around for approximately 300,000 years, we can ask why God waited for 298,000 of those years before finally deciding it may be a good idea for humans to know how to achieve salvation and escape the pits of hell (of which he presumably created). What happens to the billions of humans who were guilty of nothing other than being born before the appearance of Christ? Or, for that matter, for being born on the wrong side of the planet during the time of Christ, and therefore having never heard of him? 

Perhaps, the apologist will claim, everyone will one day be resurrected and ascend to heaven, as part of Christ’s glorious Second Coming. Perhaps, but Porphyry has his doubts: “Are we to stand up again in this very body, or in another body?” And if in our own body, at what age and condition are we to be resurrected? And what of those whose bodies have been devoured or destroyed? As Porphyry wrote:

Come, let us investigate what I said closely. For instance: someone is shipwrecked, then mullets eat his body, then some fishermen eat the [fish] that ate him, and they, in turn, are devoured by dogs; crows and vultures completely consume the dogs when they die. Now, how will the body of the sailor be reassembled, digested as it is by so many animals? And indeed, another [person] is destroyed by fire and another brought to an end by vermin—how and in what manner will they turn back into the distinct subsistent individuals they were originally?

Is there any answer to this question that you, yourself, wouldn’t be intellectually ashamed to put forward? 

Porphyry and the origins of biblical criticism

Prior critics of Christianity, those like Celsus, could, honestly, be more easily dismissed or ignored. While Celsus had some valid arguments, they were largely ad hominem attacks on the character and intelligence of Christians, along with some suggestions of unoriginality in Christian scripture. Although Celsus’s case for Christian cultural appropriation is, to varying degrees, sound, you can imagine the faithful reading Celsus and walking away largely undisturbed in their faith. 

But with porphyry, things are different. Porphyry asks the Christian to consider the deep contradictions and paradoxes found within their own holy book. The quarrel between Paul and Peter, for example—along with Paul’s hypocrisy and both Peter and Paul’s dissimulation, which stands, crucially, in sharp contrast to Jesus’s instruction to not lie or be deceitful—is simply impossible to square. “All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one” (Matt 5:37), as Jesus said. Yet Paul, as we’ve seen, simultaneously prohibits circumcision and then actually performs one on Timothy to get him to join his mission. Is Paul then to be thought of as “the evil one?”

We can ask similar questions of the Gospel writers, who cannot seem, for the life of them, to agree on any of the details regarding the birth, life, and resurrection of Jesus. Porphyry would tell us we have three options in regard to the four Gospels: (1) assume they are all right (this is impossible, since they’re all very different), (2) assume only one is right (by what standard would we make this determination?), or (3) assume none of them are right (seems most likely). 

If you’re a Christian, perhaps you feel like you have answers to these questions and contradictions (although I’d be baffled to know what they are). But one thing you should not be is undisturbed by them. These discrepancies demand answers, and cannot be ignored; they have, in fact, created enough doubt, historically, to lead many people out of the faith altogether. In this way, Porphyry began a long tradition of disabusing people of the fallacies of faith, and should therefore be rightfully celebrated as the true originator of serious biblical criticism.

Further reading