not have resorted to so indecisive and circuitous a mode of opposing them, as this which we are now examining: men of such learning as these writers would not have risqued extravagant fictions, merely to keep way with a history which they had more immediate means of refuting: on the other hand, if their absurdity should lead any man to suppose that they forged these accounts by way of parody and in ridicule of the gospels, the accounts themselves give the strongest evidence to the contrary, and it is clear beyond a doubt, that both Porphyry and Jamblichus mean to be credited in their histories of Pythagoras, as seriously as Philostratus does in his of Apollonius Tyaneus.

This will more fully appear by refering to the circumstances that occasioned these histories to be written.

Christ having performed his miracles openly and before so many witnesses, it is not found that the matter of fact was ever questioned by any who lived in that age: on the contrary, we see it was acknowledged by his most vigilant enemies, the Pharisees : they did not deny the miracle, but they ascribed it to the aid of the prince of the devils; so weak a subterfuge against the evidence of their own senses probably satisfied neither themselves nor others; if it had, this accusation of sorcery (being capital by their law, and also by that of the Romans) would have been heard of, when they were so much to seek for crimes, wherewith to charge him on his trial: if any man shall object, that this is arguing out of the gospels in favour of the gospels, I contend that this matter of fact does not rest solely on the gospel evidence, but also upon collateral historic proof; for this very argument of the Pharisees, and this only, is made use of by those Jews, whom Celsus brings in arguing against the Christian reli,

gion; and those Jews, on this very account, rank Christ with Pythagoras; and I challenge the cavillers against Christ's miracles either to controvert what is thus asserted, or to produce any other argument of Jewish origin, except this ascribed to the Pharisees by the gospel, either from Celsus, as above mentioned, or any other writer.

Celsus, it is well known, was a very learned man, and wrote in the time of Adrian, or something later; this was not above fifty years after the date of Christ's miracles. Celsus did not controvert the accounts of them, who were witnesses of the miracles, or attempt to shew any inconsistence or chicanery in the facts themselves; he takes up at se. cond hand, the old Pharisaical argument of ascribing them to the power of the devil: In short, they were performed, he cannot deny it; there was no trick or artifice in the performance, he cannot discover any; the accounts of them are no forgeries, he cannot confute them; they are recent histories, and their authenticity too notorious to be called into question he knows not how the miracles were performed, and therefore they were done by the invocation of the devil; he cannot patiently look on and see that learning, so long the glory of all civilized nations, and which he himself was to an eminent degree possessed of, now brought into disgrace by a new religion, professing to be a divine revelation, and originating from amongst the meanest and most odious of all the provincial nations, and propagated by disciples, who were as much despised and hated by the Jews in general, as the Jews were by all other people. Unable to disprove the account, and at a loss how to parry it from hearsay, or from what he finds in former writers, he has no other resource but to bring forward again those cavilling Pharisees, and roundly to assert in general

terms, (which he does more than once) that these miracles are all the tricks of a sorcerer, and for this he expects the world should take his authority.

I have said that Celsus adduces neither oral nor written authority against Christ's miracles; but I am well aware it may be said, (and modern cavil lers will affect to say it with triumph) that authorities are silent on the subject; there are none which make mention of these miracles, at least none have come down to our times.—If this silence implies a want of collateral evidence, which, in the opinion of our modern disbelievers, vitiates the authenticity of the gospel, how much stronger would the argument have been in Celsus's time than in ours! Why does he not avail himself of it? And why does he take such pains to controvert accounts of which no man had ever spoken either in proof or disproof? May it not be fairly presumed, that he forbears to urge it from plain conviction, that it would operate the contrary way to what he wished, and that the reason why contemporary writers were silent, was not because they were ignorant of the facts, but because they could not confute them? Here then we will leave the case for the present; the heathen writers, contemporary with Christ, make no mention of his miracles; they are interested to disprove them, and they do not disprove them; modern unbelievers think this a reason that these miracles were never performed; Celsus writes fifty years after the time, never urges this silence as an argument for their non-existence, but virtually, nay expressly, admits Christ's miracles, by setting up Pythagoras's in competition with them.

Neither is it Pythagoras alone he compares to Christ, he states the performances of Aristeas Proconnesius and Abaris also. Of Aristeas, the first account we have is in Herodotus, and he gives it

only upon hearsay: he relates that it was reported of him, that he died at Proconnesus, and appeared there seven years after, and having written some verses, disappeared; but that two or three hundred years after, he had appeared again at Metapontum, where, by special direction of Apollo, he was worshipped as a god of Abaris, Celsus relates, that he rode through the air on an arrow, passing over mountains and seas in his passage out of Scythia into Greece, and back again into Scythia.

Hence it came to pass that other heathen writers, after the example of Celsus, published their accounts of Pythagoras and Apollonius Tyaneus ; not so much for the purpose of giving the histories of those persons, as to set them up in opposition to Christ and his disciples. Porphyry composed the history of Pythagoras, after he had written fifteen books professedly against the Christian religion; these were suppressed by the Christian emperors who succeeded Galienus, in whose time Porphyry wrote his history of Pythagoras in the island of Sicily, whither he retired in disgust with the Emperor for his favour to the Christians, and would have put himself to death with his own hand, if Plotinus had not prevented him. Galienus soon died, and the succeeding emperors being disposed to persecute the Christians, Porphyry published his history. Jamblichus published his account of Pythagoras in the reign of the Emperor Julian, with whom he was in high favour, as the letters of that Emperor sufficiently testify. Hierocles also, in the time of Dioclesian, published two books against the Christian religion under the title of Philalethes, and for these was promoted by Galerius from being chief judge at Nicomedia to the government of Alexandria. These books are now lost, but we are informed by Eusebius they were mostly copied

from Celsus, and set up Aristeas, Pythagoras, and Apollonius Tyaneus against Christ, whom, he says, the Christians, on account of his doing a few teratyai, call a God, and concludes with these words, viz. That it is worth considering that those things of Jesus are boasted of Peter and Paul, and some others of the like sort, liars and illiterate and impostors; but for these things of Apollonius, we have Maximus and Damis, a philosopher, who lived with him, and Philostratus, men eminent for their learn ing and lovers of truth.'

As for these witnesses to Philostratus's legend of Apollonius, Maximus's minutes go no farther than to two or three years of Apollonius's life passed at Egæ, when he was about twenty years old; and what he had from Damis was a table-book of minutes, which a nameless man, pretending to be a relation of Damis, brought to Julia the mother and wife of Caracalla, and were by her given to the Sophist Philostratus to dress up in handsomer language.

Such are the authorities for the legend of Philo. stratus, written above a hundred years after the death of Apollonius, who died a few weeks after the Emperor Domitian, in the year of Christ 96. This Apollonius was of the sect of Pythagoras, and the patroness of Philostratus's history was the monster Julia, mother and wife to the detestable Caracalla.