A Christian Response to Julian’s Efforts

He [Julian] was daily growing more infuriated against us, as though raising up waves by other waves. First he went mad and trampled on holy things, acting contemptuously toward the spirit of grace. It is more fitting to call him Jeroboam or Ahab—those most wicked of the Israelites—or Pharaoh the Egyptian, or Nebuchadnezzar the Assyrian, or all of them together, since he shows himself to have united in himself the vices of them all: the apostasy of Jeroboam, the bloodthirstiness of Ahab, the hardness of heart of Pharaoh, the sacrilegious acts of Nebuchadnezzar—the impiety of all put together! For when he had exhausted every other resource and rejected every other form of tyranny over us as trifling and unworthy of him (since there never was a character so fertile in discovering and contriving mischief), at last he stirred up against us the nation of the Jews, making his accomplice in his machinations their well-known credulity and the hatred for us that has smoldered in them from the very beginning, prophesying to them out of their own books and secret teachings that the appointed time had now come for them to return into their own land, rebuild the Temple, and restore the reign of their hereditary institutions—thus hiding his true purpose under the mask of benevolence.

When he had formed this plan and made them believe it (for whatever suits one’s wishes is a ready engine for deceiving people), they began to discuss rebuilding the Temple and set about the work in large number and with great zeal. For the partisans of the other side report that not only did their women strip off all their personal ornaments and contribute them to the work and operations but even carried away the rubbish in the laps of their gowns, sparing neither the precious clothes nor the tenderness of their own limbs, for they believed they were doing a pious act and regarded everything as less important than the work at hand. But they were driven against one another as though by a furious blast of wind and sudden heaving of the earth. Some rushed to one of the neighboring sacred places to pray for mercy. Others, as tends to happen in such cases, made use of what was available to shelter themselves. Yet others were carried away blindly by the panic and knocked into those who were running up to see what was the matter. There are some who say that the sacred place did not let them in: when they approached the folding doors that stood wide open, they found them closed in their faces by an unseen and invisible power that works wonders of this kind to confuse the impious and save the godly. But what all people now report and believe is that when they were forcing their way and struggling around the entrance, a flame issued forth from the sacred place [i.e., the church] and stopped them. It burned some of them up and consumed them so that a fate befell them similar to the disaster of the people of Sodom or to the miracle of Nadab and Abihu, who offered incense and perished so strangely.¹ Others it maimed in the major parts of their bodies and so left them a living monument of God’s threatening and wrath against sinners.

Such then was this event. And let no one disbelieve, unless he doubts likewise the other mighty works of God! But what is even stranger and more conspicuous: there stood in the heavens a light circumscribing a cross, so that that which before on earth was condemned by the ungodly both in figure and in name was now exhibited in heaven and made by God a trophy of his victory over the impious—a trophy more lofty than any other!