The Works of the Emperor Julian, Vol. 1 (Loeb)

INTRODUCTION

death. The edict was rescinded by the Emperor Valentinian.

In his dealings with the Jews, Julian reversed the policy of Constantius and Gallus Caesar, who had treated them with extreme harshness.¹ He freed them from the taxes levied on them specifically as Jews and invited them to renew their ancient sacrifices. When they replied that this could be done only in the Temple at Jerusalem, he promised to rebuild the Temple and restore Jerusalem to the Jews. He may almost be called a Zionist. The historians of the Church say that Julian desired to nullify the prophecy of Christ that not one stone of the Temple should remain on another, and they exult in the fact that his project had to be abandoned owing to the earthquakes that were experienced in the East in the winter of 362–363. Julian himself speaks of his plan of rebuilding the Temple,² and Ammianus says that the work was entrusted to Alypius, the ex-Governor of Britain—to whom Julian, when in Gaul, wrote Letters 6 and 7—and that it was abandoned owing to mysterious “balls of flame” which burned the workmen. Almost the same account is given by Philostorgius (7. 9), Theodoret (3. 15), and other Church historians. Nevertheless, Lardner in Jewish and Heathen Testimony (4. p. 47) and Adler in the Jewish Quarterly Review (1893) deny that the work was ever undertaken, and assert that Ammianus derived his account from Gregory Nazianzen’s

¹ Sozomen 4. 7. 5.
² Vol. 2, Fragment of a Letter 295 c; Letter 51. 398 A; and Lydus, de Mensibus 4. 53, quotes Julian as saying ἀνεγείρω . . . . τὸν ναὸν τοῦ ὑψίστου θεοῦ, “I am rebuilding the Temple of the Most High God.”