Apollonius of Tyana


Apollonius of Tyana, sometimes also called Apollonios of Tyana, was a Greek Neopythagorean philosopher from the town of Tyana in the Roman province of Cappadocia in Anatolia.

Life dates

Apollonius was born into a respected and wealthy Greek family. Although the precise dates of his birth and death are uncertain, most scholars agree that he was a contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth. His primary biographer, Philostratus the Elder, places him circa 3 BCc. 97 AD.
, now in Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete.

Biography

Historical facts

With the exception of the Adana Inscription from 3rd or 4th century CE, little can be derived from sources other than Philostratus.
The Adana Inscription has been translated by C.P. Jones as: " 'This man, named after Apollo, and shining forth from Tyana, extinguished the faults of men. The tomb in Tyana his body, but in truth heaven received him so that he might drive out the pains of men." It is thought to have been brought from Cilicia, perhaps Aegae. However Miroslav Marcovich translates part of the text as "Sure enough, Apollonius was born in Tyana, but the full truth is that he was a heaven-sent sage and healer, a new Pythagora"
As James Francis put it, "the most that can be said... is that Apollonius appears to have been a wandering ascetic/philosopher/wonderworker of a type common to the eastern part of the early empire." What we can safely assume is that he was indeed a Pythagorean and as such, in conformity with the Pythagorean tradition, opposed animal sacrifice and lived on a frugal, strictly vegetarian diet. A minimalist view is that he spent his entire life in the cities of his native Asia Minor and of northern Syria, in particular his home town of Tyana, Ephesus, Aegae and Antioch, though the letters suggest wider travels, and there seems no reason to deny that, like many wandering philosophers, he at least visited Rome. As for his philosophical convictions, we have an interesting, probably authentic fragment of one of his writings, in which he expresses his view that God, who is the most beautiful being, cannot be influenced by prayers or sacrifices and has no wish to be worshipped by humans, but can be reached by a spiritual procedure involving nous, because he himself is pure nous, and nous is the greatest faculty of humankind.

Miracles

Philostratus implies on one occasion that Apollonius had extra-sensory perception. When emperor Domitian was murdered on 18 September 96 AD, Apollonius was said to have witnessed the event in Ephesus "about midday" on the day it happened in Rome, and told those present "Take heart, gentlemen, for the tyrant has been slain this day ...". Both Philostratus and renowned historian Cassius Dio report this incident, probably on the basis of an oral tradition. Both state that the philosopher welcomed the deed as a praiseworthy tyrannicide.

Journey to India

Philostratus devoted two and a half of the eight books of his Life of Apollonius to the description of a journey of his hero to India. According to Philostratus' Life, en route to the Far East, Apollonius reached Hierapolis Bambyce in Syria, where he met Damis, a native of that city who became his lifelong companion. Pythagoras, whom the Neo-Pythagoreans regarded as an exemplary sage, was believed to have travelled to India. Hence such a feat made Apollonius look like a good Pythagorean who spared no pains in his efforts to discover the sources of oriental piety and wisdom. As some details in Philostratus’ account of the Indian adventure seem incompatible with known facts, modern scholars are inclined to dismiss the whole story as a fanciful fabrication, but not all of them rule out the possibility that the Tyanean actually did visit India. Philostratus has him meet Phraotes, the Indo-Parthian king of Taxila, a city located in northern Ancient India in what is now northern Pakistan, around 46 CE. And the description that Philostratus provides of Taxila comports with modern archaeological excavations at the ancient site.
What seemed to be independent evidence showing that Apollonius was known in India has now been proven a forgery. In two Sanskrit texts quoted by Sanskritist Vidhushekhara Bhattacharya in 1943 he appears as "Apalūnya", in one of them together with Damis, it is claimed that Apollonius and Damis were Western yogis, who later on were converted to the correct Advaita philosophy. Some have believed that these Indian sources derived their information from a Sanskrit translation of Philostratus’ work, or even considered the possibility that it was really an independent confirmation of the historicity of the journey to India. Only in 1995 were the passages in the Sanskrit texts proven to be interpolations by a late 19th-century forger.

Writings

Several writings and many letters have been ascribed to Apollonius, but some of them are lost; others have only been preserved in parts or fragments of disputed authenticity. Porphyry and Iamblichus refer to a biography of Pythagoras by Apollonius, which has not survived; it is also mentioned in the Suda. Apollonius wrote a treatise On sacrifices, of which only a short, probably authentic fragment has come down to us.
Philostratus' Life and the anthology assembled by Joannes Stobaeus contain purported letters of Apollonius. Some of them are cited in full, others only partially. There is also an independently transmitted collection of letters preserved in medieval manuscripts. It is difficult to determine what is authentic and what not. Some of the letters may have been forgeries or literary exercises assembled in collections which were already circulated in the 2nd century AD. It has been asserted that Philostratus himself forged a considerable part of the letters he inserted into his work; others were older forgeries available to him.

Comparisons with Jesus

Biblical scholar Bart D. Ehrman relates that in the introduction to his textbook on the New Testament, he describes an important figure from the first century without first revealing he is writing about the stories attached to Apollonius of Tyana:
Sossianus Hierocles argued in the 3rd century that the doctrines and the life of Apollonius were more valuable than those of Jesus', a viewpoint reportedly held by both Voltaire and Charles Blount during the Age of Enlightenment. In his 1909 book The Christ, John Remsburg postulated that the religion of Apollonius disappeared because the proper conditions for its development did not exist. Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam thrived however, because the existing conditions were favorable. In his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, comparative mythology scholar Joseph Campbell lists both Apollonius and Jesus as examples of individuals who shared similar hero stories, along with Krishna, Buddha, and others. Similarly, Robert M. Price in his 2011 The Christ-Myth Theory and its Problems, notes that the ancients often compared Jesus with Apollonius and that they both fit the mythic hero archetype. G. K. Chesterton, however, noted that the unique trial, suffering and death of Christ stand in stark opposition to the stories about Apollonius which he felt were very likely spurious. While Jesus' encounter with the provincial Roman authorities in Judea ended fatally, Apollonius was said to have survived unscathed a face-to-face confrontation with Domitian, one of the most harsh of Roman Emperors; therefore, the myth of Apollonius lacked the element of martyrdom, central to that of Jesus.

Impact

Antiquity

In the 2nd century the satirist Lucian of Samosata was a sharp critic of Neo-Pythagoreanism. After 180 AD he wrote a pamphlet where he attacked Alexander of Abonoteichus, a student of one of Apollonius’ students, as a charlatan; and suggested that the whole school was based on fraud. From this we can infer that Apollonius really had students and that his school survived at least until Lucian’s time. One of Philostratus’ foremost aims was to oppose this view. Although he related various miraculous feats of Apollonius, he emphasized at the same time that his hero was not a magician, but a serious philosopher and a champion of traditional Greek values.
When Emperor Aurelian conducted his military campaign against the Palmyrene Empire, he captured Tyana in 272 AD. According to the Historia Augusta he abstained from destroying the city after having a vision of Apollonius admonishing him to spare the innocent citizens.
In Philostratus’ description of Apollonius’ life and deeds there are a number of similarities with the life and especially the claimed miracles of Jesus. Perhaps this parallel was intentional, but the original aim was hardly to present Apollonius as a rival of Jesus. However, in the late 3rd century Porphyry, an anti-Christian Neoplatonic philosopher, claimed in his treatise Against the Christians that the miracles of Jesus were not unique, and mentioned Apollonius as a non-Christian who had accomplished similar achievements. Around 300 AD, Roman authorities used the fame of Apollonius in their struggle to wipe out Christianity. Hierocles, one of the main instigators of the persecution of Christians in 303 AD, wrote a pamphlet where he argued that Apollonius exceeded Christ as a wonder-worker and yet wasn’t worshipped as a god, and that the cultured biographers of Apollonius were more trustworthy than the uneducated apostles. This attempt to make Apollonius a hero of the anti-Christian movement provoked sharp replies from bishop Eusebius of Caesarea and from Lactantius. Eusebius wrote an extant reply to the pamphlet of Hierocles, where he claimed that Philostratus was a fabulist and that Apollonius was a sorcerer in league with demons. This started a debate on the relative merits of Jesus and Apollonius that has gone on in different forms into modern times.
In Late Antiquity talismans made by Apollonius appeared in several cities of the Eastern Roman Empire, as if they were sent from heaven. They were magical figures and columns erected in public places, meant to protect the cities from afflictions. The great popularity of these talismans was a challenge to the Christians. Some Byzantine authors condemned them as sorcery and the work of demons, others admitted that such magic was beneficial; none of them claimed that it didn’t work.
In the Western Roman Empire, Sidonius Apollinaris was a Christian admirer of Apollonius in the 5th century. He produced a Latin translation of Philostratus’ Life, which is lost.

Apollonius of Tyana in Bahá’í Scripture

The Tablet of Wisdom, written by Bahá'u'lláh, the founder of the Bahá'í Faith, names "Balinus" as a great philosopher, who "surpassed everyone else in the diffusion of arts and sciences and soared unto the loftiest heights of humility and supplication." In another text Baháʼu'lláh states that he "derived his knowledge and sciences from the Hermetic Tablets and most of the philosophers who followed him made their philosophical and scientific discoveries from his words and statements". The use of talismans is commonplace in Bábí and, to a lesser extent, Bahá'í writings.

Modern era

Beginning in the early 16th century, there was great interest in Apollonius in Europe, but the traditional ecclesiastical viewpoint prevailed, and until the Age of Enlightenment the Tyanean was usually treated as a demonic magician and a great enemy of the Church who collaborated with the devil and tried to overthrow Christianity.
Comparisons between Apollonius and Jesus became commonplace in the 17th and 18th centuries in the context of polemic about Christianity. Several advocates of Enlightenment, deism and anti-Church positions saw him as an early forerunner of their own ethical and religious ideas, a proponent of a universal, non-denominational religion compatible with Reason. These comparisons continued into the 20th century.