bad become associated with the apocnphal literature
and Celsus, in his attacks on the Co-pel. often reminds us of the vulgar gibes and ribald remarks ol' Thomas Paine : but nothing of this is found in Porphyry Speaking in the name of philosophy, he assumes a dig-
treatment of his subject, akin to that of the judge, v bo is supposed impartially to survey the whole field of ev- idence, and to give weight t loubtful Btatemi nts, i"
no specious arguments. I ndoubtedly honest in his con- victions and iii hi- attachment to the philosophy of his
master, he brought the resources ofa great, a cultured mind lo bear against the more vulnerable points of the
Chri-tian system, testing it by weapons of the highest tempi r. Porphj ry certainly enjoyed a vantage-ground in the school of philosophy to which he belonged, l'la- tonism, as alread} suggested, approximated morenearlj than any of the other philosophic systemB of antiquity to the elevated teachings of the Gospel. But during the past century or two. while Christianity had been through the Roman world, this philosophy, under the teachings of Plotinus, had been drawing nearer to the doctrines of the New Ti -lament, inso-
PORPHYRY
423
PORPHYRY
of the Jewish Church. It is traceable to a more lim- ited extent in the inspired writers of the New Testa- ment, and in most of the fathers; but in the school of Alexandria it was adopted as a formal system of inter- pretation. It is tliis allegorical system which Porphyry attacked. He assaulted the writings of those who had fancifully allegorized the Old Testament in the pious desire of finding Christianity in every part of it, in spite of historic conditions; and he hastily drew the infer- ence, with something like the feeling of doubt which rash interpretations of prophecy are in danger of pro- ducing at this day, that no consistent sense can be put upon the Old Testament. His fourth book was a criti- cism on the Mosaic history, and on Jewish antiquities. But the most important books in his work were the twelfth and thirteenth, which were devoted to an ex- amination of the prophecies of Daniel; and in these he detected some of those peculiarities on which modern criticism has employed itself, and arrived at the conclu- sions in reference to their date revived by the English deist Collins in the last century, and by many German critics in the present. It is well known that half of the book of Daniel is historic, half prophetic. Each of these parts is distinguished from similar portions of the Old Testament by some peculiarities. Porphyry is not recorded as noticing any of those which belong to the historic part, unless we may conjecture, from his theory of the book being originally written in Greek, that he detected the presence of those Greek words in Nebu- chadnezzar's edicts which many modern critics have contended could not be introduced into Chaldrea ante- cedently to the Macedonian conquest. The peculiarity alleged to belong to the prophetical part is its apoca- lyptic tone. It looks, it has been said, historical rather than prophetical. Definite events, and these in a dis- tinct chain, are predicted with the precision of his- torical narrative ; whereas most prophecy is a moral sermon, in which general moral predictions are given, with specific historic ones interspersed. Nor is this, which is shared in a less degree by occasional prophe- cies elsewhere, the only peculiarity alleged, but it is af- firmed also that the definite character ceases at a par- ticular period of the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, down to which the very campaigns of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic dynasties are noted, but subsequently to which the prophetic tone becomes more vague and in- definite. Hence the conjecture has been hazarded that it was written in the reign of Antiochus by a Palestin- ian Jew, who gathered up the traditions of Daniel's life and wrote the recent history of his country in eloquent language in an apocalyptic form, which, after the liter- ary fashion of his age. he imputed to an ancient seer, Daniel; definite up to the period at which he composed it, indefinite as he gazed on the future. It was this pe- culiarity, the supposed ceasing of the prophecies in the book of Daniel at a definite date, which was noticed by Porphyry, and led him to suggest the theory of its au- thorship just named. He seems also to have entered into some examination of the specific prophecies, for he objects to the application of the words "the abomina- tion of desolation" to other objects than that which he considers its original meaning (see Jerome on Matt, xxiv, 15). These remarks will give an idea of the crit- ical acutcness of Porphyry. A few other traces of Por- phyry's views remain, which are of less importance, and are levelled against parts of the New Testament : e. g. the change of purpose in our blessed Lord (John vii), [Jerome, vol. iv, pt. ii, p. 521 {Dial. adv. Pelaff.); Ep. (101) ad Pammach. Several are given in Holsten. (Vit. Porphyr. p. 86)], the reasons why the Old Econ- omy was abrogated if divine [August. Epist. (102, olim 49, Benedict, ed. 1689), ii, 274, where six questions are named, some of which come from Porphyry] ; the question what became of the generations which lived before Christianity was proclaimed, if Christianity was the only way of salvation ; objections to the severity of Peter in the death of Ananias; and the inscrutable