For 16 centuries, Porphyry's work "Against the Christians" has been lost. It was a polemical treatise aimed at refuting Christian theories and combating Judaically inspired doctrines that were fanatically and intolerantly directed against Hellenistic philosophies and the Greek way of life.
Porphyry's work was condemned by the imperial church and burned in the year 448. Only a part of it survives: mainly the excerpts preserved by the Christian cleric Macarius Magnes in his work "Apocriticus to the Greeks," as well as scattered testimonies.
The philosopher Porphyry (232-305), a student of Plotinus, with many literary and theological treatises to his credit, a deep connoisseur of both the Gospel and History, drawing arguments from the arsenal of the Neoplatonic school as well as from common human logic, carries out relentless criticism: against Jesus, whom he considers an insignificant Jew, against the evangelists whom he regards as uneducated storytellers, against the Apostles Paul and Peter whom he views as unscrupulous charlatans, and also against Christian apocalyptic theology, which he considers blatantly erroneous.
Porphyry's work offers the modern scholar a picture of the pagan polemic of the 3rd century A.D., a time marked by the relentless yet futile persecutions against Christians, and generally by the struggle for survival that the empire waged against its internal and external adversaries.
