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Historian of Christianity Professor Matthew Crawford has been awarded a prestigious fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to carry out research on the remaining fragments of the famous anti-Christian polemic by Julian the Apostate.
Professor Crawford will conduct his research at the University of Tübingen, one of the oldest universities in Germany, to produce a new critical edition and translation of Julian's Against the Galileans, 'Galileans' being Julian's pejorative term for Christians.
Written in 363 by Roman Emperor Julian, the last pagan ruler of the Roman Empire, Against the Galileans attacked the Christian faith by criticising Christians' rejection of pagan Greek and Roman gods, as well as their refusal to follow Jewish rituals and traditions.
Although raised a Christian as a member of the imperial household and educated by prominent bishops, Julian abandoned the faith as a young man, secretly returning to the worship of the old gods.
He made his religious commitment public when he became sole ruler of the Empire and used his short eighteen-month reign to attempt to return Rome back to pagan worship.
After Julian's death, Against the Galileans was mostly lost. The work survives today only in a hundred or so scattered fragments quoted by later Christian authors, including Cyril of Alexandria, and was last translated into English over a century ago.
Professor Crawford, an expert on Christianity in late antiquity, plans to use the latest techniques for reconstructing fragmentary historical sources, a method that has been developed at Tübingen for other ancient texts that also survive only in fragments.
"Julian's life and writings have been a persistent source of fascination in the modern period, from Voltaire in the Enlightenment to the biographical play composed by playwright Henrik Ibsen in the nineteenth-century and the 1964 novel by Gore Vidal," Professor Crawford said.
"My research project will also examine the modern reception of Julian's Against the Galileans, specifically the German translation published in 1941 by the Nazi propagandist Kurt Eggers who appropriated Julian's anti-Christian arguments for his own antisemitic cause."
Professor Crawford is director of the ACU Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry's program in Biblical and Early Christian Studies. He is an expert on Cyril of Alexandria and Christianity's engagement with ancient philosophy.
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