This multilingual collection arises out a conference, held in Bern in 2017, attendant to the publication of the first critical edition of Cyril of Alexandria's Contra Iulianum (GCS n.s. xx–xxi). Aiming to stimulate scholarly interest beyond the editors and their immediate colleagues, its twelve papers serve as a kind of first fruits of some two-and-a-half decades' effort.
The first five papers focus on Julian, the following seven on Cyril. The foreword is focused on the editorial process, and, although it summarises all the articles, an initial study on Julian's philosophy and political aims would have helped to frame what amounts, despite a lack of formal segmentation, to a two-part collection. Instead, the first three articles all treat aspects of Julian's anti-Christian efforts. Heinz-Günther Nesselrath gathers anti-Christian motifs from across Julian's corpus; a more extensive bibliography might have enabled, for example, discussion of the authenticity of ep. lxxxiv, which some readers may still doubt. Adolf Martin Ritter discusses Julian's attitude toward Judaism and knowledge of contemporary Christian controversy; though each treatment is interesting, a unified whole does not quite emerge. Ritter's repeated engagement with Nesselrath's article, furthermore, does not lead to a similarly tight integration of the volume's other articles. An opportunity to put the intellectual profits of the new edition on even more prominent display was therefore missed. The next paper is none the less impressive, as Maria Carmen De Vita not only teases out fine allusions to contemporary intra-Christian debates in Contra Galilaeos, but also argues, as Nesselrath had briefly suggested, that To King Helios states the positive case for Hellenism that Contra Galilaeos makes in the negative.
Stefano Trovato and Augusto Guida study Julianic reception. Moving nimbly through medieval Byzantine literature, Trovato explores the diverse ways in which Julian was used to condemn Christians; he draws particular attention to a misidentification of the Dormitio Virginis of John of Thessalonica as Julian's and to the polemics of Liutprand of Cremona and his Byzantine predecessors. More historical context would have made the piece easier for a non-Byzantinist to navigate. Less dense, Guida's two-part article shows, through a succinct survey of parallels, that a sixteenth-century Spanish catalogue of books extant in Greek does not attest to survival of a manuscript of Contra Galilaeos. The source is instead the cabbalist Johannes Reuchlin, who knew Contra Iulianum and was the first modern author to refer to Contra Galilaeos by that title. The second part discusses Gian Francesco Pico della Mirandola's assertion that Julian named the star of the magi ‘Asaph’ and said it had a period of four hundred years. Guida finds a vague parallel in a Syriac fragment on the magi, and traces the reception of the curious report into the nineteenth century.
Wolfram Kinzig's contribution makes the lack of a properly introductory piece on Julian more keenly felt. After a thorough but efficient summary of the contents of Contra Iulianum, he contends that Cyril chose Julian's work for refutation because it was (as has been doubted) an intellectual monument taken seriously by Alexandrian pagans and Christians interested in Hellenism. The case is thoroughly convincing and ought to stimulate further study of both Julian's and Cyril's readers, though Kinzig must lean on the evidence (rather shaky, as he underscores) of the tenth-century church historian Sawirus ibn al-Muqaffa‘.
The four articles that follow concern the methods and, to a lesser degree, the content of Cyril's argumentation. Michael Schramm examines his criteria of truth and rhetorical strategies. A lucid survey demonstrates that Cyril is, at the granular level of argumentative technique, a rhetorician able to match his apologetic predecessors. Also focused on rhetorical detail, Thomas Brüggemann explores Cyril's use of apostrophes to Julian. He suggests, in conclusion, that Contra Iulianum, fragment 78, relayed by Sawirus, might, if genuine, present ‘das gesamte Werk als eine Art Gerichtsprozess’ (p. 163). That fragment is the same discussed by Kinzig; there would again have been opportunity to tie the book's studies more tightly together. If sustained, the conclusion would also mirror Christian Tornau's arguments about Augustine's City of God, and so help to place Cyril's effort in an even wider intellectual context.
Two articles by Marie-Odile Boulnois offer the most sustained engagement with Cyril's text. The first is a wide-ranging discussion of the Christological and Trinitarian Contra Iulianum 8. Building on the work of Markus Vinzent, Boulnois argues, cautiously, that Contra Iulianum has shaped and so precedes Festal letter 15, of 427. She then shows, in broad lines, how Cyril handles Julian's text, arguing that his quotations are close but framed to suit Cyril's own thematic structuring, not Julian's, and that he is similarly independent in his use of pagan learning, both his own and Eusebius’. The second article works through Julian's discussion of the prologue to John's Gospel, then through Cyril's replies. Of greatest interest to the non-specialist is her demonstration that Julian rebuts a specifically Nicene reading of John.
The last two papers treat Cyril's transmission. Hubert Kaufhold, editor of the Syriac fragments in GCS n.s. xxi, surveys Syriac translations of Cyril, thus placing in context the limited transmission of Contra Iulianum in that language. Many texts are represented, but comparatively few manuscripts, most stemming from the library of Moses of Nisibis and now in the British Library. Christoph Riedweg, finally, summarises the editors’ shifting knowledge of Cyril's direct and indirect transmission, drawing attention to some recent discoveries. The highlight is the discovery, based on comparison of the hands of marginal notes, that the sixteenth-century Augsburg humanist David Hoeschel had collated several manuscripts. An addendum, written with Katarzyna Prochenko, describes Codex Patmos 263 (ninth/tenth century), which Prochenko discovered to contain excerpts from Contra Iulianum in a text probably older than the reconstructed archetype.
An index of names is a welcome help for navigating the volume. These papers bring an impressive range of material to light, and promise both individually and collectively to stimulate research not just on Julian, whose fragments are now available in properly edited context, but also on Cyril and on the later reception of their works.
