Indeed, according to Cyril, any truth that was in the Greek texts was there as a result of the Greeks having heard of the wisdom of Moses — even Plato supposedly was a great admirer of the Jewish lawgiver. His refutation was thus an attempt to prove that Julian's view of the Platonic tradition as superior to the Mosaic religious tradition was, in fact, the reverse of the truth, as it was the Greeks whose words were a shadow of the truth of Moses. Julian first criticizes the practice of the Galileans of denying the existence of the gods, and their practice, taken from the Greeks, of being lazy and superstitious (43A–52C). Julian claims that men inherently know of the existence of God without being taught of it and that all men have an inherent belief that the gods reside in the heavens and observe what occurs in the world. Further, all men, from looking at the stable nature of the heavenly bodies, have come to believe that the gods are eternal and unchanging (43A–52C). Julian goes on to discuss the creation myths of the Greeks and the Jews, citing the account of the Book of Genesis. He ridicules the idea of literally interpreting the Jewish account, claiming that it is not only logically impossible (75B) – he asks how the serpent was able to speak a human language (86A) – but that is also blasphemous and insulting to God (89B). A true God, he says, would not have withheld the knowledge of good and evil from men or have been jealous of men eating from the tree of life and living forever. Indeed, this behavior shows God to be evil and the serpent, giving man the enormously valuable gift of differentiating good and evil, to be good. Therefore, it must have a deeper meaning (94A). Julian also brings up questions from the account of how God created the world. Where, he asks, did the abyss, the darkness, and the waters come from that are mentioned (49C)? Where did angels come from, since they are not mentioned in the creation account? To Julian, the account of Genesis is not about a creator God, but about an inferior god who merely shaped the matter that had already been created (49E). He compares this to Plato's account of the creation in Timaeus, in which inferior gods shape the matter created by the creator God (58C), and concludes that the Genesis account cannot adequately explain who created the matter that the God of Moses shaped (49E).