Christian Visions and Sozomen’s Julian

This article proposes that the visions in Sozomen’s account of Julian’s reign may be read as an attempt to narrativize a response to Julian’s criticisms of Christianity. This overarching claim is supported by broader considerations of how Sozomen’s history contradicts or confronts other Julianic claims. These include Sozomen’s repeated reference to Julian’s persecutions, despite Julian’s expressed interest in not overtly persecuting Christians, his wide-ranging interest in the localization of miracles at the martyrs’ tombs or in connection with relics, and his marked interested in the ethnography of conversion, evident in his detailed accounts of the conversion to Christianity of whole people groups (ἔθνη). The latter amounts to an implicitly barbed attack on Julian’s claims that the members of different peoples had different natures so that they could not be changed by external legislation.