Porphyry It is beyond question that Porphyry had a detailed knowledge of both the
Old and the New Testament. But two problems persist, one specific and one
much more general. The specific one is: did Porphyry read the Old Testa-
ment in the original? So far as I can see, there is nothing in the later Christian
tractates (themselves in Greek or Latin) on his hostile critique of the Bible
to show that he did.
Once again, however, the negative cannot be proved. The more general
question, then, is: should we then, none the less, envisage his intellectual
relationship with Jewish sacred texts specifically as a reflection of a wider
engagement with a Near Eastern, Semitic-language culture? In short, is this
engagement with the Old Testament to be seen as in some sense an expression
of Porphyry’s own culture and identity, of who Porphyry ‘‘was’’?
We would in principle be entitled to assert this even if Porphyry himself
had not done so, if (for instance) we could set his work against a body of
contemporary ‘‘Near Eastern’’ literature (in one or more Semitic languages),
and if the comparison clearly showed patterns of thought which were not
characteristic of contemporary Greek writing as a whole.
Such a project would go far beyond the scope of this paper. But two warn-
ing notes have to be sounded. Firstly, the history of the Near East in the Ro-
man period in no way supports the notion that the common use of a group
of Semitic languages (Aramaic in its various dialects, Hebrew, and—perhaps
still—Phoenician) instilled any sense of a common ethnic or cultural iden-
tity in its various peoples. Secondly, in the specific case of Porphyry, his own
words tend in quite the opposite direction. Far from locating their author as
‘‘belonging’’ to the culture of this region, they explicitly distance him from
its manifestations.
We might start by contrasting what Porphyry says of Bardesanes with the
detailed account of the latter’s Syriac writings and their Greek translations
which Eusebius offers (text to n. above). Porphyry does refer to Bardesanes
once, in hisOn Abstinence from Living Things: ‘‘But the Brachmans inherit a
theosophiaof this type by descent, like a priesthood, while the Samanaioi are
chosen, and their ranks are filled up from those who volunteer totheosophein
[contemplate divinity]. This is the state of affairs in their case, as Bardesanes
wrote, that is a Babylonian who lived in our fathers’ time, and encountered
the Indian ambassadors who were sent with Dandamis to Caesar.’’^26 TheBook
oftheLawsofCountriesdoes indeed speak of the ‘‘laws [or better ‘‘customs’’] of
the Brahmins who (are) in India (NMWS’ DBRKMN’ DBHNDY’),’’ though
it does not make the precise point which Porphyry cites, nor allude to the
.De abst.,,–.