Apollonius of Tyana
"Apollonius of Tyana in Cappadocia (Asia Minor) was a Neophyagorean sage: he followed the teachings of the philosopher Pythagoras (born ca. 521 B.C.E.). Apollonius was born about the same time as Jesus and survived until near the end of the first century C.E. Like Jesus, Apollonius was a wandering sage, offering his advice here and there, sometimes without invitation. He was a vegetarian, wore a linen garment, did not bathe, and frequently fasted. He practiced exorcism, cured the sick, and forecast the future. Christian folk in the third century regarded him as a direct competitor of Jesus."
- Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels
"The preserved Life of Apollonius was written by one Flavius Philostratus at the behest of the empress Julia Domna in the early years of the third century and was completed only after her death in 217."
"...The Life of Apollonius presents a literary problem much like that of the gospels. It also resembles them in literary form - after praise of the hero's family and legends about his birth, his childhood is almost wholly passed over and his adult life is presented in a series of anecdotes connected merely by a geographic frame (references to his traveling and the places where this or that happened); the narrative becomes more coherent towards the end of the life with trial, escape, and later adventures, only to blur again when it comes to the death and subsequent appearances. These similarities add weight to another: like the gospels the Life is in part an apologetic work, written not only to glorify its hero, but also to defend him against the charge of practicing magic."
- Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) pp. 113, 114
"...The question of whether Philostratus had access to a firsthand source as he claimed (i.e., the diary of Damis, a disciple of Apollonius) or whether Philostratus simply created a good deal of the material himself is still debated by scholars."
"...In the ecumenical and eclectic climate of the circle of Julia Domna [the Empress who was the wife of Septimius Severus who reigned from AD 193-211], Philostratus possibly borrowed some miracle stories from the Gospels to help him flesh out his portrait of Apollonius as a great philosopher and miracle-worker."
- John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew - Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 2.
According to Philostratus, "Apollonius of Tyana was born of a well-to-do Greek family in the south-central Anatolian town of which his name preserves the memory. His parents sent him for higher education to the Greek city of Tarsus on the south coast about the same time as the Jewish parents of Paul, in Tarsus, sent their boy to Jerusalem for his education. Both boys came down with incurable religiosity: Paul first became a Pharisee and then was converted to Christianity; Apollonius became a Pythagorean and after some years set out for Babylon where he studies with the magi, and then for India to find the Brahmans and learn their teachings. He come back claiming to have done so, formed a circle of disciples, and lived with them as an itinerant philosopher, holy man, and miracle worker, going from temple to temple along the coasts of northern Syria, Anatolia, and Greece, where Paul, shortly before, had gone from synagogue to synagogue. From Greece, in the last years of Nero, Apollonius went to Rome (where Paul had already been executed). A brush with the police may have persuaded him to push on to Spain where one of the Roman governors was plotting a revolt. After the revolt and Nero's suicide in 68 he returned to Sicily and Greece, then visited Alexandria where in 69 he is said have been consulted by Vespasian at the beginning of his revolt. Vespasian went to Rome, Apollonius to the 'naked sages' in upper Egypt, a community of ascetics with pretensions to supernatural powers. Thence he returned to the eastern Mediterranean where he continued his itinerant life until 93 when he went to Rome to face charges of magic and sedition; he was accused of having sacrificed a Greek boy to divine from his entrails the fate of a conspiracy to kill the emperor Domitian. He reportedly vanished from the courtroom in Rome, returned to Greece, and continued his life there and in Asia Minor undisturbed until his death - some said, his ascent to heaven - shortly after Domitian's assassination in 96. He is also said to have appeared after his ascension or death to a young man who did not believe his teachings."
"The historical similarities between Apollonius and Jesus are clear: both were itinerant miracle workers and preachers, rejected at first by their townspeople and brothers, though the latter eventually became more favorable. An inner circle of devoted disciples accompanied each. Both were credited with prophesies, exorcisms, cures, and an occasional raising of the dead. As preachers both made severe moral demands on their hearers. Both affected epigrammatic utterances and oracular style; they taught as if with authority and came into conflict with the established clergy of the temples they visited and tried to reform. Both were charged with sedition and magic but tried primarily for sedition."
- Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) pp. 111-113
'Divine men'
Apollonius was not the only charismatic miracle worker. Our sources mention several 'divine men' - people who were considered to have a personal shortcut to the gods, and frequently tried to reform the religious practices of their age, which sometimes brought them into conflict with more conservative people. We already met Alexander of Abonutichus, who was called 'the oracle monger' by Lucian (above). This man introduced the hitherto unknown god Glycon and started a new oracle, which was extremely successful; Lucian's satire proves that this new god threatened at least some vested interests.Apollonius of Tyana and Alexander of Abonutichus were the best known, but not the only 'divine men'. What to think of Peregrinus Proteus, who called himself a Cynical philosopher, burned himself alive to show mankind that death was nothing to be feared, and was posthumously ridiculed by Lucian in a rather tasteless satire? And there is the first century BCE Epicurean doctor Asclepiades of Prusa, who raised a deceased person, and 'convinced almost the whole of mankind that he had been sent down from heaven' (Pliny the Elder, Natural history, 26.13).
Another example is the story by Cassius Dio about the so-called rain miracle: in the year 172, the twelfth legion of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, himself a philosopher, was besieged by barbarians and was under severe pressure from both thirst and heat, but an Egyptian magician in the emperor's staff, one Harnuphus, managed to create a violent rain shower. This suggests that the distinction between magicians and philosophers became blurred in the second half of the second century.
In short, at the end of the second century, most Greek and Romans were convinced that between there was a special group of 'divine men' between the eternal gods and the ordinary mortals, people who combined philosophy and magic and were able to cure ill persons. Pythagoreanism seems to have played an important role in the popularization of this idea; one of the central tenets of this philosophical school was that there were mortals, gods and 'beings like Pythagoras'.
The concept of the 'divine man' played an important role in the rise of Christianity. Like Jesus of Nazareth, the first Christians were Jews who believed that a Messiah was a teacher and/or a military leader who was to explain the Law of Moses correctly and was to restore Israel to its rightful first place among the nations. When Paul of Tarsus started to convert pagans, many of these converts believed that Jesus had been some kind of 'divine man'; where a Jewish messiah was still a mortal being, the 'Christ' of the (formerly pagan) Christians received divine attributes. At the same time, he was stripped of his political significance.
Since Jesus of Nazareth had become 'paganized', it became possible to compare him to the pagan 'divine men', as if he had not been a Jewish messiah. This opened a new way to attack Christianity, because the crucified carpenter could be presented as a failed 'divine man'. Sossianus Hierocles, a very important Roman official, used the LoA to write such an attack. He compared the badly written gospels and the miracles of the peasant Jesus to the beautiful Life of Apollonius and the acts of the Tyanean sage. A Christian author named Eusebius [note 13] felled compelled to write a response, in which he points to certain inconsistencies in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius....