Early Christians and the Charge of Atheism: a Note on the ἄθεοι ἄθυτοι of Porphyry’s De Abstinentia 2.7.3

A recurring claim found in early Christian apologetic and other protreptic literature alleges that Roman polytheists accused Christians of being atheists. In recent years, the historicity of this claim has come to be doubted, and in a 2017 study, Tim Whitmarsh concluded that the charge, attested only in Christian sources and discussed in terms which are thoroughly Christianizing, must be owed to Christian invention. The present note argues against this conclusion on the basis of a neglected passage in Porphyry’s De abstinentia , which offers evidence of the term ἄθεος being associated in a distinctly non-Christian context with the omission of sacrifice. The likely derivation of this association from Theophrastus may further explain why a very similar association appears in the mid-second century Apology of Apuleius and offers further support for the thesis that Christians were likely accused of atheism by polytheist critics in the second and third centuries.