0.1 Apopompaios: Goat or God?

We begin with a case study. It is, though technical, brief and worthwhile for reasons reaching beyond its natural home in Septuagint (LXX) lexicography, for it provides a snapshot of the “narrative conflict” that I will be arguing characterizes the texts of this study. The LXX text of Leviticus 16:7–10 reads as follows:

This passage, which establishes a central ritual of the Jewish Yom Kippur, or Day of Atonement, is enigmatic because a key word is unclear: apopompaios, in verses 8 and 10 (and the related apopompē, in verse 10). The fault for this ambiguity lies not solely with the LXX translators, who coined the Greek term.Footnote ² The underlying Hebrew word which they render with apopompaios – עזאזל, often transliterated and vocalized as Azazel – is itself ambiguous. It occurs in this one passage in the Hebrew Bible and a few times in later literature with a variety of connotations. Consequently, theories about the meaning of Hebrew Azazel in Leviticus 16 vary. Two proposed options are that it is: (1) a proper name, as in certain Qumranic documents which so name the leader of the fallen angels;Footnote ³ and (2) an etymological conflation of the words for “goat” (ez) and “to go away” (azal), such that Azazel becomes the descriptive title for one of the goats, roughly equivalent to the English word “scapegoat.”Footnote ⁴

The Greek translators seem to have been after something between these two possibilities when they coined apopompaios. Corresponding to option 2 for Azazel, they created a word that, etymologically, includes the notion of being sent away (from pempō, “to send”). But a difficulty with this option is that nothing, etymologically speaking, indicates that they intended apopompaios to label one of the goats itself, and thus the ez component of this theory for Azazel remains unaccounted for in the construction of apopompaios. Corresponding to option 1, another possibility is that the apopompaios is not itself one of the goats, and is rather another being, parallel to tō kyriō, “the Lord.” The parallel syntax of verse 8 supports this possibility: one goat is designated tō kyriō, “for the Lord,” and one is designated tō apopompaiō, “for the apopompaios.” Unfortunately for this hypothesis, the parallelism fails to obtain in verses 9–10, where the first designation is, again, tō kyriō (still in the dative case), but the second designation is tou apopompaiou (now the genitive case). The Hebrew underlying each instance of apopompaios in verses 8 and 10 is the same (לעזאזל, “for Azazel”), so the LXX translators presumably meant to indicate something when they rendered it in Greek with a dative in verse 8 and a genitive in verse 10.Footnote ⁵ I have yet to see a modern solution that adequately accounts for all the peculiar linguistic details at play with apopompaios in LXX Leviticus 16.

This ambiguity did not, however, prevent interpreters from different religious traditions in the ancient world from confidently incorporating Leviticus 16 into their communal practices or religious imaginations. The way two such interpreters did so illustrates a central claim of this study, which has less to do with goats than with how traditions of life and thought function in moments of intellectual conflict. These two interpreters – the Roman emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus, or “Julian the Apostate” (d. 363); and bishop Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444) – are also the main characters of this study. Each interpreted Leviticus 16 as part of a polemical exercise against a traditional rival: Julian, against the Christian communities in which he was raised, and Cyril, half a century later, in direct response to Julian’s provocation.

Their respective interpretations offer not only a lucid window onto how meaning can be made from even the most ambiguous words and texts. They also illustrate the kind of intellectual conflict that can arise when holistic traditions of life and thought disagree in fundamental ways, offering not simply competing answers to central human questions but perhaps even rival frameworks of intelligibility by which one would even know how to know what is meant by this or that question and answer.

In what follows, I consider this kind of conflict as it arises out of Julian’s and Cyril’s relevant texts. Cyril’s lengthyFootnote ⁶ and little-studied Against Julian (abbreviated Juln.) was composed probably in the 420s, and it is virtually the sole repository of Julian’s better-known provoking text from sixty years earlier, Against the Galileans (abbreviated Galil.), which Cyril quotes at length in order to refute.Footnote ⁷ As is explained later, Julian and Cyril offer one of the earliest opportunities from late antiquity for us to study substantial, reasoned argument between representatives of the two traditions of life and thought, Hellenism (as Julian would call his traditionFootnote ⁸) and Christianity.

To see why I think we should characterize this intellectual conflict as “narrative conflict,” we must return to the ambiguous apopompaios and the ritual of Leviticus 16:7–10 that it obscures. The term did not obscure the import for Julian or Cyril, and the way they confidently use this passage to support central features of their larger arguments illustrates the nature of the conflict between them.

Leviticus 16 played an important, if brief, role in Julian’s Against the Galileans. Julian’s fundamental accusation was that Christians were apostates from both Hellenism and Judaism: having started out with the most refined and gifted tradition in the world (i.e., Hellenism), those who became Christians ill-advisedly joined the inferior Jewish tradition, from which they subsequently departed in a second apostasy to innovate the new, Christian modes of worship. Julian knew well that Christians claimed direct continuity with Moses, and he exerted much exegetical energy to undermine this claim and thereby buttress his assertion of their second apostasy. To accomplish this, Julian went a step further than undermining Christian continuity with Moses’s teachings: he also argued that Moses’s laws generally cohered with his own tradition of Hellenism. According to Cyril’s summary of Julian’s twofold strategy, Julian argued that “the [teachings] of the Christians do not agree with the laws of Moses, and they do not deign to live by the customs of the Jews, though these are in harmony with the Hellenes themselves.”Footnote ⁹ The ambiguity of Leviticus 16 plays its role for Julian within this larger project of exegeting Moses’s writings. Since, as Julian thinks, Moses knew and honored “the methods of sacrificing” (Galil. fr. 71.1–2) found among the Hellenes, he thought that, amid accretions and distortions, the Mosaic texts still held hints of the earlier, original divine revelations delivered to Moses for the Jewish people.Footnote ¹⁰

To substantiate his claim that Christians do not live by the teachings of Moses, who in fact honored Hellenic sacrificial customs, Julian turns to Leviticus 16. He quotes directly from verses 5–8, 15, and 16, and he paraphrases briefly from vs. 10. His brief, introductory comment to the Mosaic passage is key: “Listen, now, to all that [Moses] says about the apotropaioi” (Galil. fr. 70.10–11). As Cyril will adamantly point out, Julian has introduced a term that is not in Leviticus (apotropaios) to interpret that passage, and specifically to interpret the ambiguous term, apopompaios.Footnote ¹¹ The equation of apotropaios and apopompaios makes sense. They are etymologically similar, joining the same prefix to two roots that can each have a sense of averting. Tropē most basically means “turning” but is frequently used to indicate the turning away of a hostile force. Similarly, pompē most literally means a “sending,” though it often refers to an “escort” or even a “procession.”Footnote ¹²

Though apotropaios has many semantic valences even within its basic etymological strictures,Footnote ¹³ Julian clearly invokes an older usage, as a substantive, referring to a divine being who diverts evil. We might translate Julian’s introductory statement as directing a reader’s attention to Moses’s comment about the “apotropaic beings,” or even (to stretch it a bit) to what Moses says about “evil-diverting gods.”Footnote ¹⁴ With the reader thus primed by his introductory comment, Julian then quotes from Leviticus, having lit a fuse that will lead directly to the ambiguous apopompaios and that will prove, he thinks, Moses’s status as a proto-Hellenic lawgiver and thereby demolish any notion of Mosaic monotheism.

Julian’s introductory comment thus provides a resolution for the ambiguity of Leviticus 16. By subtly equating apopompaios and apotropaios, we can read verse 8 as commanding Aaron to “place on the two goats one designation for the Lord, and one designation for the evil-averting being.” In short, one goat is for the kyrios of Israel, whom Julian portrays elsewhere as a localized god charged with governing the small Hebrew nation. The second goat is for another divine being, an apotropaic god or spirit who perhaps disposed of the community’s impurities or (given Julian’s enthusiasm for divination) averted unwanted omens from divinatory sacrifices.Footnote ¹⁵

Compared to interpretations that treat the apopompaios as itself the goat that is sent out into the desert (as itself, in other words, a “scapegoat”) Julian’s interpretation more faithfully renders the syntactical structure of verse 8, since the dative tō apopompaiō parallels the dative tō kyriō.Footnote ¹⁶ Whatever the first goat’s relation to the kyrios (presumably the goat is sent “to,” or perhaps is “for” the kyrios), the parallel in syntax would suggest that the same relation is supposed to obtain between the second goat and the apopompaios – an outcome that does not obtain if the apopompaios is treated as the second goat.

More could be said about this passage of Against the Galileans, but the foregoing adequately sketches one option for understanding what an apopompaios is. For Julian, who is confident that Moses’s original laws were perfectly consonant with Hellenic customs, an apopompaios is but one of the many divine beings in the Neoplatonic divine hierarchy. In a display of his Hellenic way of thinking and legislating, Moses gave sacrificial laws that correspond to a cosmos full of gods, spirits, and daemons. Moses “knew the methods of sacrificing” (Galil. fr. 71.1–2).

Unsurprisingly, Cyril of Alexandria totally rejects Julian’s creative interpretation. In response, he offers a counter-explanation that, like Julian’s interpretation, centers and builds on the flexibility of apopompaios.Footnote ¹⁷ Cyril’s counter-interpretation, however, looks nothing like Julian’s, almost as if the two were not even reading the same text.

Before providing his own account of Leviticus 16, Cyril first points out that Julian’s mistake is, at one level, a failure to note that this sacrificial ritual might be a “riddle” or a “symbol” and that there might be more to it than first meets the eye. He briefly detours through how even within Julian’s tradition wise people recognize that many laws, aphorisms, and rituals have a symbolic quality (Juln. 9.15.9–16.26). But Julian, Cyril argues, is too obtuse for such interpretive finesse, even though a good Hellene should know to look for something beyond the surface meaning. Cyril then explains how Leviticus 16 should be read, namely in light of the “mystery of Christ” that is “imprinted in the words enigmatically.” To find this deeper meaning, Cyril explains, one has to refine the “materiality of the account.”Footnote ¹⁸

For his refining, Cyril turns to Paul’s statement about Christ in Philippians 2:5–8, and he emphasizes Paul’s dual presentation of Christ who, first, was incomparably superior to all things; but who, second, nevertheless “emptied himself” to the point of death. This Pauline duality, suggests Cyril, unlocks the mystery of the two goats: “For ‘two’ goats are taken … since instead it was necessary for [Jesus] to be seen both as sacrificed for us and dying according to the flesh on the one hand, and as living according to the spirit, on the other hand.” The twofold-ness of Christ illuminates the two goats in Leviticus 16, one of which is tō kyriō and the other of which is tō apopompaiō. Parallel to several ancient Greek grammarians, Cyril suggests that the klēroi mentioned in Leviticus 16:8–10 (translated as “designations” above, though often as “lots” that are cast) can be “names” (ὀνόματα) for the goats.Footnote ¹⁹

The name given to the first goat is “the lord,” and the name given to the second goat is “the apopompaios” (perhaps “the Sent-Away”). The first name indicates the “lordly” status of Christ who, despite that lordly status, was slaughtered. And the second indicates the fact that Christ was removed – “Sent-Away” – from death through the resurrection. Christ himself, then, is both: the kyrios who was slaughtered for sins, like the first goat; but also the apopompaios, which is nearly opposite to a “scapegoat” that bears off evil from a community. Christ was, says Cyril, “the one sent away (ἀποπεμπόμενος) from the slaughter” (Juln. 9.18.16) as he showed himself ultimately powerful over violence and death by resurrection.Footnote ²⁰

Cyril also offers a second possible way to make sense of the apopompaios of Leviticus 16, building again on scriptural (especially Pauline) linguistic patterns. In this second interpretation, the slaughtered goat stands for Christ, and the apopompaios goat stands for all humans. Again, a highly literal-etymological reading of apopompaios is central: Christ as the first goat is slaughtered on behalf of humanity, and the other goat who “was sent out (ἐξεπέμπετο) from the slaughter” (Juln. 9.20.9) represents those who are rescued from death by Christ’s own self-sacrificial death. Redeemed humans, says Cyril, became the apopompaioi when Christ sent them away from death and corruption (Juln. 9.20.46).

Cyril has much more to say about Leviticus 16, but this should illuminate at least the basic contours of how he rebuts Julian’s interpretation and, relying on the ambiguous word apopompaios, confidently offers an alternative explanation of the passage. Julian takes apopompaios to refer to a specific kind of being, an apotropaic god or spirit, while Cyril understands the term as a meaning-laden name – admittedly enigmatic, but only until Christ came and illuminated the mystery. Their interpretations offer possible resolutions. But what is striking is how their accounts, though built on the same term, look absolutely nothing alike. Something comprehensive must shift between Julian’s and Cyril’s interpretations to make them each intelligible.

What, then, was the meaning of Leviticus 16? Even more modestly, what was the meaning of a single word, apopompaios? The term seems impossibly pliable, yet two competent late ancient interpreters confidently incorporated Leviticus 16 as an illuminating episode in their traditions. What grounded their confidence? More broadly, how should we make sense of their interpretive disagreement?

0.2 Narrative Conflict between Julian and Cyril

I begin with this exegetical skirmish between Julian and Cyril because the ambiguity of apopompaios is at the center of an apt illustration for my thesis, namely that Julian and Cyril were engaged in “narrative conflict.” This phrase is loosely derived from the modern philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre and refers to the kind of intellectual conflict that can obtain when strong traditions do not share adequate language or criteria by which their representatives can adjudicate weighty disagreements. MacIntyre, whose contributions help frame this study of Julian and Cyril, has shown how the meaning of words is inextricably tied to the narrative by which a community makes sense of itself and its place in the world. In a similar vein, Stanley Cavell has said that “we learn language and learn the world together.”Footnote ²¹ Taken together, MacIntyre and Cavell cast some light on our apopompaios example: learning the world through rivaling narratives can produce incommensurate languages, even when the same word-stock is in use.

Of course, most words are used for tasks other than articulating a community’s tradition-constituting narrative and exploring its thought- and life-shaping entailments. Words are used for all manner of more mundane tasks, functioning more or less in the same ways across traditions. That shared use allows members of different traditions (or of no tradition at all) to communicate – and compete, and reason, and collaborate, and disagree, and so forth – successfully about all sorts of things.

As its use between Julian and Cyril shows, apopompaios was different. And its ambiguity allows us to see with unusual clarity how words’ meanings are linked to narratives, and how disagreements between traditions might turn out to be “narrative conflict.” Because it was a neologism and of recent provenance, this term did not yet have a strong history of use to constrain and guide interpreters. As a result, it had a certain semantic pliability. But far from making the term unintelligible to Julian or Cyril, this pliability opens a window onto how the intelligibility it did have for them was tied to a tradition-constituting narrative. And since we have with them two competing narratives by which it was made intelligible, we can see narrative conflict in action.

Returning once more to Julian’s and Cyril’s treatments of Leviticus 16 will illustrate more concretely what I mean. We have seen what they conclude, but we need to step back and trace how they reach these conclusions – what larger context of meaning-making allows them to derive clarity out of ambiguity so confidently.

Julian’s tradition-constituting Hellenic narrative begins with the Neoplatonic one, the “common king and father of all things,” as he calls it (Galil. fr. 21.6–8).Footnote ²² This common king is the source of a cosmos densely packed with spiritual agents of varying power, characteristics, and roles. Among these beings are “ethnarch” gods, who rule over their appointed nation with a subordinate divine bureaucracy, and their individual characteristics determine the unique differences of each nation. Julian’s narrative is focused on the gradual rise to prominence of the people most honored by the gods, the Romans, but it has a place for all the others, including the ancient Hebrew people. As Julian understands it, Moses was their chief legislator and founding figure. He attained some success in philosophical speculation, and he also received laws from the Hebrews’ ethnarch god, their kyrios. Julian recognizes this philosophical speculation and these laws as uniquely Hebraic, in one sense; but he sees more generally an obvious consonance with Hellenic thought and practice. The apparent monotheistic and even proto-Christian teachings that might seem to be in Moses, he suggests, stem from the fact that subsequent generations distorted Moses’s teachings and even corrupted his very texts. In Julian’s interpretation, this offshoot from authentic Mosaic Judaism devolved through several stages, bottoming out eventually with the Christian, or “Galilean,” sects.

With this back-story in mind, the significance of Leviticus 16, as well as how Julian made sense of it, becomes clear. Julian criticizes Christians for claiming to be faithful to Moses yet failing to pursue a religious life anything like what he modeled or commanded, and he presents Leviticus 16 as one example of Moses’s genuinely proto-Hellenic practices. Because of the broader narrative in which Julian makes sense of Moses, he read Leviticus looking for evidence of Moses’s awareness of the Neoplatonic hierarchy of divinities and the accompanying ritual laws. He found just such evidence in Leviticus 16, where Moses commands one goat to be sent to the local ethnarch god of the Jews, their kyrios, and the other to be sent to another member of the governing spiritual bureaucracy off in the desert. This being, the apopompaios, is an apotropaic being, quite literally. The intelligibility of the term – and of the whole passage in which it is found – is rooted in Julian’s larger narrative about the cosmos and everything in it.

Similarly, the narrative backdrop to Cyril’s Christian tradition is what enables his confident interpretation of Leviticus 16. The general contours of his tradition’s story are well known,Footnote ²³ but what bears emphasizing is how Cyril, working from the transformative vantage point of the aftermath of Jesus’s ministry, thought that the laws of the Hebrew Scriptures were in fact “but a shadow of the good things to come” (Hebrews 10:1).Footnote ²⁴ The Mosaic law’s worship – rooted to a particular place and materialistic rituals – was always intended to be temporary and to lead towards a worship that is “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24),Footnote ²⁵ and all of this has been made clear in the “mystery of Christ.” When Cyril read Leviticus 16, then, he looked for how the details about the promised Christ were foreshadowed in the details of the ritual. In short, he has reason to see a mystērion in the text. That mystery, “sketched (σκιαγραφούμενον) in the two goats” (Juln. 9.18.1–2), was illuminated in Christ, and that illumination initiated the uncovering of a “second narrative” upon a rereading of the Old Testament law, to use David Steinmetz’s phrase.Footnote ²⁶

Cyril thus noted that there were two goats and further noted that many biblical presentations give a twofold account of Jesus: as a character who both died and came back to life, as both a man and God, and so forth. In his response to Julian, Cyril tracked how numerous details in Moses’s levitical ritual connect in a systematic and orderly way to various features of Christ’s life and death, to his ministry, to the work of his apostles, and more.Footnote ²⁷ All these commitments were connected to Cyril’s larger narrative of a Triune, creative God, and of this God’s continual rectifying of human sins throughout history. This narrative tells of a salvation which had to be revealed gradually, in shadows and enigmas, due to God’s willingness to accommodate the epistemically weak state of his people.Footnote ²⁸ All these commitments were fundamental in Cyril’s interpretation of Leviticus 16 and the apopompaios. As with Julian, the larger narrative of Cyril’s tradition framed his reading of the Mosaic law.

The meaning of apopompaios is thus inextricably tied to Julian’s and Cyril’s competing hermeneutical narratives, and thus their disagreement over Leviticus 16 is ultimately “narrative conflict.” The argument of this book is that their disagreement should be characterized holistically as arising from such a conflict of narratives. The incompatibility of Julian’s and Cyril’s use of apopompaios, in other words, is not tied solely to this word’s unique ambiguity. Rather, the dynamics in this example extend further, to a range of words, phrases, and sentences that, unlike apopompaios, might appear on their faces to share a clearer meaning across different religious communities of language-use. In the case of Julian and Cyril, the ambiguity of apopompaios calls attention to a systemic impasse of understanding about the language and kinds of commitments that give distinct shape to each of their traditions.

As MacIntyre put it, differences between traditions on these kinds of questions are “always in key part differences in the corresponding narrative.”Footnote ²⁹ But what happens when the narratives are sufficiently different to prevent resolution between the traditions through “rational” engagement? What happens when key terminology or concepts resist translation between traditions? MacIntyre suggests that in disagreements that go as deep as the rival narratives of two traditions, “that narrative prevails over its rival which is able to include its rivals within it,” demonstrating the ability to “retell their stories as episodes within its story.”Footnote ³⁰ Narrative conflict, in a nutshell.

This is certainly what happens with Leviticus 16, an “episode” from (what was, by Julian’s time) Christian Scripture – a textual part of the Christian “story” which Julian attempts to retell as an “episode” that has been reconstrued to fit within his Hellenic story. When Cyril responded, he was showing that this episode selected by Julian for reinscription in the Hellenic narrative did, in fact, make perfectly good sense within his Christian narrative.

Julian’s Against the Galileans, I will argue, in its entirety amounts to a sustained effort to demonstrate that all the episodes of Christianity’s constitutive narrative make better sense within his own Hellenic narrative. The significance and meaning of those episodes in their Christian rendering must be drastically reoriented, of course – to see how the apopompaios is a divine, evil-averting being, you have to see how Moses is a very different kind of character from the one Christians understood him to be. But Julian thinks that such a drastic reorienting of Abraham, Moses, the prophets, Jesus and his disciples, and fourth-century Christians will produce a more plausible and compelling way of making sense of the cosmos and its history. Julian’s literary attack on Christianity has sometimes seemed rhetorically anemic, animus-driven, or (as one study put it) a “hodgepodge of accusations, specious arguments, sarcasm, unargued propositions, adventitious allusion, and special pleading.”Footnote ³¹ MacIntyre’s framing will help us see more clearly the reasoned underlying coherence and Julian’s attempt at much more than a rejection of Christian claims one by one. The strategy latent within the polemics of Against the Galileans is to subsume the whole thing comprehensively.Footnote ³²

Cyril’s response in Against Julian matched Julian’s argumentative strategy. Unlike Julian, Cyril was responding directly to a long set of direct and detailed attacks on his own tradition, and thus his rebuttal is more defensive than Julian’s, as we can see with the Leviticus 16 example. But the broad structure of the conflict in Against Julian is the same as in Against the Galileans: though Cyril was on the defensive and resisting Julian’s fracturing efforts, he simultaneously set about dismembering and subsuming Julian’s Hellenic narrative. Cyril worked to fragment that narrative and to reconstrue the individual “episodes” within a Christian accounting – a move which fully changed the significance they had in their Hellenic configuration.

0.3 Overview of the Chapters

The following chapters substantiate these claims. As Chapter 1 illustrates, this study sits at the intersection of overlapping fields, primarily historical but also hermeneutical. It begins with a selective history of Christians’ engagements with their intellectual critics, starting with the era of Christianity’s origins and leading eventually to Julian and Cyril. This introduction to our two main protagonists illustrates their importance for historians of late antiquity generally, but also for historians of philosophy, historical theologians, church historians, scholars working on religious comparison, and intellectual historians more broadly. Introducing Julian and Cyril somewhat belatedly, after a brief history of Christian critics, also highlights what is historically distinct and thus significant about their polemical projects. This points, in turn, to the fitness of Alasdair MacIntyre’s insights for making sense of their engagement. The second half of Chapter 1 shifts from historical introduction to interpretive framework. It presents, with Julian and Cyril in mind, MacIntyre’s analysis of the dynamics at play when “two large-scale systems of thought and practice are in radical disagreement.”Footnote ³³ What I am calling “narrative conflict” is only one relevant contribution from his theory, the larger scope of which will push us also to consider whether traditions so engaged might have non-intersecting forms of reasoning and, even more broadly, be incommensurable as traditions.

The shift within Chapter 1 from historical to hermeneutical matters may read somewhat discordantly. But historical study is, after all, always inevitably entangled with interpretive commitments. This move from history to MacIntyre makes transparent my hermeneutical framing while also gesturing to a secondary purpose of the book that is intertwined with its primary, historical aim: arguing, by showing more than telling, for the merits of MacIntyre’s deeper arguments about the character, possibilities, and limits of intellectual enquiry writ large. Though often known primarily as the modern ethicist of virtue theory, MacIntyre provides a much broader diagnosis of and vision for human life in the contemporary world. Testing such broad, interpretive paradigms requires demonstration of what they can accomplish as much as explanation of their theoretical features – they are only as good as their ability to make sense of the data (textual, in our case) that they claim to be able to explain.Footnote ³⁴ The proof of the pudding, as the saying goes, is in the eating. So while my main purpose is to make sense of two late antique texts, to the extent that that project is successful it also provides supporting evidence for MacIntyre’s wider understanding of intellectual enquiry. This opening chapter points toward such further implications as it concludes with a brief consideration of what Julian’s and Cyril’s “narrative conflict” might contribute to how we think more broadly about religious and philosophical argument in late antiquity.

After Chapter 1, the next five chapters advance the book’s central, historical treatment of Julian’s and Cyril’s polemical texts and the argument that they were advancing narrative conflict: both were attempting the complicated maneuvers required to dislodge central “episodes” from their rival’s narrative and to demonstrate that their own narrative and its way of making sense of the world provide a better explanatory home for those episodes. Chapters 2–3 are devoted to Julian’s treatise and Chapters 4–6 to Cyril’s. As neither text is “narrative” in genre, I first sketch each text’s narrative structure, which must be read often in between and behind the lines.

After mapping the narrative structure for Against the Galileans, Chapters 2 and 3 offer a comprehensive analysis of Julian’s treatise. Its fragmentary nature creates interpretive difficulties, even if Cyril did overstate his claim about reordering Julian’s arguments to avoid reproducing his erratic and repetitious style. By attending to the narrative conflict, these chapters make sense of Julian’s various arguments, paying special attention to why those arguments seemed existentially weighty to a Christian like Cyril long after Julian was dead.

The next three chapters take up Cyril’s response in Against Julian by examining the narrative backdrop to his arguments (Chapter 4) and by then focusing on clusters of re-narrated episodes (Chapters 5–6). While noting some of Cyril’s defensive responses to specific challenges from Julian, these chapters focus on Cyril’s offensive strategy of cumulative out-narration. Chapter 5 is organized by one of Julian’s own categories: the “gifts of the gods” which, he had argued, were given in surpassing quality and quantity to the Hellenic people. I group Julian’s various iterations of gifts and Cyril’s sprawling responses in three, interrelated categories: exemplary characters, intellectual superiority, and military and political domination. In Cyril’s responses, Minos was no legendary hero but rather imitated the fallen angels’ lust for domination; the Attic language itself (not to mention the convention of writing) derived from proto-Christian sources; and the Jewish people’s turbulent history and the present ascendancy of Rome equally reflect the Christian God’s management of the cosmos.

Chapter 6 turns to a cluster of broadly cosmological episodes: the events and agents of creation, the texts that tell of these events and agents, and the authors who wrote these more and less authoritative texts. It focuses on two stretches of Cyril’s Against Julian, broadly concerning the modes of divine management of the cosmos but covering topics ranging from the breadth of human diversity to the Mosaic sacrificial system to the Tower of Babel and Homer’s Aloadae giant brothers. Cyril’s consistent objective is to dislodge the characters of the gods from Julian’s Hellenic story while also demonstrating how much better sense they make within the Christian story as fallen demons. That “all the gods of the nations are demons” (LXX Ps 95:5) was, of course, a common apologetic line. But this re-narrating claim is more than a polemical trope and in fact structures a surprising range of arguments.

Following these chapters interpreting Julian’s and Cyril’s respective texts, Chapter 7 offers a culminating test for competing rationalities, given how thoroughly Julian’s and Cyril’s texts are focused on re-narrating episodes from their rival. It returns to three specific arguments to consider if MacIntyre’s further claim about incommensurable forms of reasoning obtains in Julian’s and Cyril’s engagement. Three case studies in rationality, focusing on words (genētos, pronoia, and pistis) used by each at crucial points in their reasoning, provide occasion to query whether non-intersecting forms of reasoning are at play in these specific arguments.

Intellectual incompatibilities manifesting around weight-bearing topics can suggest, after all, that the traditions inhabited by individuals engaged in intellectual conflict are more broadly incommensurable.Footnote ³⁵

To clarify further the dynamics of the inter-tradition conflict between Cyril and Julian, Chapter 8 turns from Against Julian to Cyril’s similarly named Against Nestorius. These two texts are strikingly similar, almost as if Cyril followed a formal rubric by which to write polemical treatises. Yet Julian was a Hellene, and Nestorius (notwithstanding some of Cyril’s snide intimations) a Christian. Juxtaposing Cyril’s two polemical treatises allows us to see more clearly the inter-tradition conflict between narratives with Julian in contrast with the intra-tradition conflict with Nestorius that operates within a broadly shared narrative. Cyril and Nestorius presume the same narrative framework, and vis-à-vis the out-narrating dynamic of Cyril’s and Julian’s engagement, the course of their arguments and shape of their rationality shows it, even as they reach opposing conclusions on a question central to their tradition. The chapter concludes with a list of likely features that may mark narrative conflict, drawn from this study of Julian and Cyril but applicable, I think, more widely.

The book concludes with suggestions about how we might go from analysis of two individuals to broader questions about the traditions they represent and steward: from study of Julian and Cyril to Hellenism and Christianity. The weight of this study suggests that Cyril’s disagreement with Julian (especially when compared to his disagreement with Nestorius) amounts to narrative conflict. The narratives that frame and enable their modes of reasoning are different at a depth that produces incommensurate language and forms of reasoning. Or at least so their individual examples suggest. But drawing general conclusions from particular examples is always fraught: granting that general things like “traditions” (in MacIntyre’s sense) exist, particular examples illustrate them only imperfectly. I close with suggestions for posing the questions raised in this study more broadly to traditions in the late antique world and beyond.