This chapter, the first of two devoted to Julian’s Against the Galileans, begins by mapping the narrative structure of Julian’s text. It then traces Julian’s first major step in re-narrating the Christian tradition: casting the ancient Hebrew tradition as existing harmoniously within the broad contours of the Hellenic tradition. Focusing on Moses’s teachings about the creation of the cosmos and about its governance by a hierarchy of gods, Julian shows that the Hebrew tradition, though not terribly impressive, has teachings compatible with Julian’s Hellenic tradition

This second chapter on Julian’s Against the Galileans traces the second movement of Julian’s strategy of narrative subsumption: charting the apostasies that cascaded from, first, the Hellenic and, then, the Hebrew traditions, culminating in the Christian sect. Having pointed out the basic compatibility between Hebrew and Hellenic doctrine, Julian emphasizes next the most significant difference between the two: the glaring inferiority of the Hebrew to the Hellenic tradition. This basic framework makes sense of Julian’s claim that Christians are double apostates: Christians started out as Hellenes, and their first mistake was of degree rather than kind: they opted for the lesser Hebrew tradition, rather than the Hellenic one. They latched onto a deviation within the Hebrew tradition, however, which became the grounds for their second apostasy, now away from the Hebrews, to create a new sect.

Chapter 1 begins with a selective history of Christian–Hellenic intellectual engagement (including a detailed introduction to Julian and Cyril) in order to show simultaneously (1) the historical uniqueness (thus significance) of Julian’s and Cyril’s polemical projects and (2) the fitness of Alasdair MacIntyre’s insights for making sense of their engagement. The second half of the chapter presents MacIntyre’s analysis of the dynamics when “two large-scale systems of thought and practice are in radical disagreement,” with Julian and Cyril in mind. What I call “narrative conflict” is only one part of the theory that emerges from his argument, the complete scope of which pushes us also to consider whether traditions so engaged might have non-intersecting forms of reasoning. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of what Julian’s and Cyril’s “narrative conflict” might contribute to how we think about religious and philosophical argument in late antiquity.