Matthew R. Crawford and Aaron P. Johnson, "Cyril of Alexandria: Against Julian: Introduction and Translation" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

May 25, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In his preface to Against Julian, Cyril of Alexandria writes about the importance of “hating with a perfect hatred,” especially those who “out of stupidity” choose not to love God. That line comes from the same bishop who, in the same massive work, quotes Plotinus, Porphyry, and Homer by the page, often more accurately than any other surviving source. This is the tension at the heart of Cyril that Matthew Crawford and Aaron Johnson have spent years translating: he was a serious theologian and a serious political schemer, a man who distilled metaphysical questions into visceral images and who had gangs of monks who could rough up his opponents. Philosophy was not the opposite of violence for him. And yet, as this new translation shows, he did his homework.

Why Cyril wrote a 10‑book response to a dead emperor

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What you'll learn

1 Timestamped Outline
2 (00:00) **Episode Introduction** - Host Mike sets up the episode and introduces guests Matthew Crawford and Aaron Johnson
3 (04:53) **How the Translators Got Into Cyril** - Matt and Aaron explain their各自的 paths to this project
4 (09:09) **How the Collaboration Worked** - The mechanics of two scholars translating a massive text together
5 (11:40) **Who Was Cyril?** - A sketch of Cyril's biography and place in late antiquity
6 (13:57) **Cyril's Reputation vs. His Writings** - The gap between the "mafia boss" image and what his own texts show
7 (16:22) **Why No Translation Until Now?** - The reasons this text was avoided for so long

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

In 362/363 the Roman emperor Julian composed a treatise titled Against the Galileans in which he set forth his reasons for abandoning Christianity and returning to devotion to the traditional Greco-Roman deities. Sixty years later Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, composed a response. His resulting treatise Against Julian would dwarf the size of Julian's original work and in fact serves as our primary source for the fragments of it that have survived. Julian's treatise was the most sophisticated critique of Christianity to have been composed in antiquity and Cyril's rebuttal was equally learned. The Christian bishop not only responded directly to Julian's own words but drew upon a wide range of ancient literature, including poetry, history, philosophy, and religious works to undermine the emperor's critiques of the Christian Bible and bolster the intellectual legitimacy of Christian belief and practice. Cyril of Alexandria: Against Julian, Introduction and Translation (Cambridge UP, 2025) is the first full translation of the work into English.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review.

Matthew Crawford Program Director, Biblical and Early Christian Studies. Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University

Aaron Johnson, for the past 15 years, has been teaching at Lee University in Tennessee

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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