After the controversy reincarnated again in the sixteenth century, and when the hypothesis of the “Devil” as the prime-mover in all “miracles” but those of the Church lost its hold with the progress of scientific thought, the nature of the wonders related in the Life of Apollonius was still so great a difficulty that it gave rise to a new hypothesis of plagiarism. The life of Apollonius was a Pagan plagiarism of the life of Jesus. But Eusebius and the Fathers who followed him had no suspicion of this; they lived in times when such an assertion could have been easily refuted. There is not a word in Philostratus to show he had any acquaintance with the life of Jesus, and fascinating as Baur’s “tendency-writing” theory is to many, we can only say that as a plagiarist of the Gospel story Philostratus is a conspicuous failure. Philostratus writes the history of a good and wise man, a man with a mission of teaching, clothed in the wonder stories preserved in the memory and embellished by the imagination of fond posterity, but not the drama of incarnate Deity as the fulfilment of world-prophecy. Lactantius, writing about 315, also attacked the treatise of Hierocles, who seems to have put forward some very pertinent criticisms; for the Church Father says that he enumerates so many of their Christian inner teachings (_intima_) that sometimes he would seem to have at one time undergone the same training (_disciplina_). But it is in vain, says Lactantius, that Hierocles endeavours to show that Apollonius performed similar or even greater deeds than Jesus, for Christians do not believe that Christ is God because he did wonderful things, but because all the things wrought in him were those which were announced by the prophets.[16] And in taking this ground Lactantius saw far more clearly than Eusebius the weakness of the proof from “miracle.” Arnobius, the teacher of Lactantius, however, writing at the end of the third century, before the controversy, in referring to Apollonius simply classes him among Magi, such as Zoroaster and others mentioned in the passage of Appuleius to which we have already referred.[17] But even after the controversy there is a wide difference of opinion among the Fathers, for although at the end of the fourth century John Chrysostom with great bitterness calls Apollonius a deceiver and evil-doer, and declares that the whole of the incidents in his life are unqualified fiction,[18] Jerome, on the contrary, at the very same date, takes almost a favourable view, for, after perusing Philostratus, he writes that Apollonius found everywhere something to learn and something whereby he might become a better man.[19] At the beginning of the fifth century also Augustine, while ridiculing any attempt at comparison between Apollonius and Jesus, says that the character of the Tyanean was “far superior” to that ascribed to Jove, in respect of virtue.[20]