Christianity's Critics: The Romans Meet Jesus

Christianitys Critics:
The Romans Meet Jesus

Extended and Revised, 02/2016
Robert Conner
Roman authors such as Celsus, Porphyry, Julian, and Lucian of Samosata

argued that Christianity is a farce and a fraud. In fact, many of their insights
into the new cult, which anticipated the findings of 20th century religious
scholars by 18 centuries, are easily confirmed by the writings of the earliest
Christians themselves. This essay examines some of the charges made by early
Roman and Jewish critics and briefly interrogates documents from Christianitys first centuries that confirm their allegations. Although apologists dismiss
or at least attempt to minimize the force of the refutation of Roman intellectuals, it bears mention that writers such as Celsus, who wrote in the decade
between 170180, read gospels significantly older than any currently surviving copies1 and used real 2nd century Christians as sources, i.e., Celsus did
not make do with hypothetical gnostics based on extrapolations from a few
surviving texts as a basis for reconstructing early Christian beliefCelsus had
access to the real thing.
Until the middle of the 2nd century Christianity barely registered on the social
consciousness of Roman intellectuals and even then they dismissed it as a
close-knit Judaistic sect, and an increasingly noxious one,2 at that. As counter-intuitive as it seems to us, living in a world in which some two billion
people claim to believe in one of the 40,000 or so permutations of Christianity, in the mid-1st century many converts to the cult of Jesus could barely distinguish themselves from Jews if, indeed, they even cared to make such a distinction. That Christianity might eventually emerge victorious from the welter of competing mystery cults, regional and national religions and various
Jewish sects may appear self-evident in retrospect, but in the 1st century it
probably appeared, even to the most ardent Christians, a most unlikely ascendency.3 The most plausible explanation for the triumph of Christianity,
it seems to me, was proposed by Walter Bauer: although the sum total of
consciously orthodox and anti-heretical Christians was numerically inferior
to that of the heterodox, by the early 4th century the Roman government
finally came to recognize that the Christianity ecclesiastically organized from

1
The oldest manuscripts of the New Testament that preserve any substantial
amount of text are tentatively dated from the late 2nd to early 3rd centuries. P52,
the famous Rylands fragment of John, which preserves a mere 114 letters on a
piece of papyrus the size of a credit card, has been optimistically dated to the early
2nd century based on its Hadrianic script, but it may come from the late 2nd century. The terminus post quem of Codex Sinaiticus, which contains the earliest
complete copy of the New Testament, is 325 C.E.
2
Frend, The Rise of Christianity, 163.
To date, no mention of Jesus of Nazareth has been located in a pagan source
written prior to the year 112 C.E...In the earliest years of the Christian movement, the Roman attitude toward followers of Jesus appears to have been marked
by casual indifference. (Kannaday, Apologetic Discourse and the Scribal Tradition,
24, 199).
3
Johnson, Among the Gentiles, 172.
Rome was flesh of its flesh, came to unite with it, and thereby actually enabled it to achieve ultimate victory over unbelievers and heretics.4
In any case, as Hoffman has so perfectly stated it, the Christian movement
was Romes Vietnam, a slow war of attrition which had been fought to stop a
multiform enemy.5 Although he certainly does not claim to explain anything
so complicated or grandiose as the eventual triumph of ancient Christianity,
Pierces observation regarding the inroads made by Christian fundamentalists
into the American body politic is worth quoting in this context: Very often,
it was the cranks who provided the conflict by which the consensus changed.
They did so by working diligently on the margins until, subtly, without most of
the country noticing, those margins moved (emphasis added)...[Americas]
indolent tolerance of them causes the classic American crank to drift easily
into the mainstream, whereupon the cranks lose all of their charm and the
country loses another piece of its mind.6 The surreptitious infiltration of
Christians into the margins of Roman society must have been something very
much like what Pierce describes. The Roman Celsus noted, [Christians]
convince only the foolish, dishonorable, and stupid, and only slaves, women,
and little children...whenever they see adolescent boys and a crowd of slaves
and a company of fools [the Christians] push themselves in and show off.7
Christians, their critics charged, targeted what we today call low information
voters, and, like the Campus Crusade for Christ, they proselytized among
the impressionable, those whose youth and lack of sophistication or education rendered them vulnerable to the blandishments of missionaries.
Historians have treated Christianity with extreme deference. A combination
of theological, cultural, and historical factors has conspired to create a protected enclave for this particular religion. As a consequence, methods and
techniques that are taken for granted in the treatment of other religions have
been ignored or discarded in dealing with this onethe further assumption
has been made, with however much sophistication, that certain events in
early Christianity are not only historically distinctive but in some sense religiously unique8 ...dogmatic images of normative Christian origins are not
only reinforced every Sunday during worship but are also subconsciously
lodged in the minds of scholars.9
McKechnie provides an easy example of a scholar so entranced: Jesus was
literate, and read Isaiah aloud in the synagogue (Luke 4:16-20). He, there
4
Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, 231-232.

Hoffmen, Porphyrys Against the Christians, 14.
6
Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, 31, 33.
7
Chadwick, Contra Celsum, 162 (III, 49-50).
8
Gager, Kingdom and Community, xi, 3.
9
Ldemann, Paul, 240.
5
fore, knew biblical Hebrew as well as Aramaic which was the spoken language
of Judea.10 While credulously accepting the testimony of Luke, who was no
historian,11 McKechnie ignores the reported opinion of Jesus contemporaries: The Jews therefore marveled, saying, How knoweth this man letters,
having never learned?12 According to Luke,13 when Jesus was crucified the
sun was eclipsed (eklipontoj)an astronomical impossibility...since Passovers occur at full moon and solar eclipses occur only at new moon...By way
of defense [the apologist] Origen insisted that secret enemies of the church
had introduced the notion of an eclipse into the text to make it vulnerable to
a show of reason.14 As the historian Luke ably demonstrates, the incompetence of the authors of the gospels made secret enemies utterly superfluous.
At this point one might well askrhetorically, of courseas does Paula
Fredriksen, Why, then, in a field generally so cautious and self-consciously
critical, do New Testament scholars routinely confuse historical reality with
theological polemic, and in the name of pursuing the former reproduce the
latter?15
As will be pointed out in this essay, Jesus came from an insignificant village
and avoided urban areas. Although it is nearly impossible to know anything
certain about Jesus biography, a void that extends even to the dates of his
birth and death, it is well established that ancient literacy was tightly connected to city life and that in areas where agriculture predominated, literacy rates
were very low.16 It is quite likely that Jesus himself was illiterate. Regarding
the quest for the historical Jesus Gager observed, On no other issue have
such prodigious efforts led to more inconclusive results.17 Those decades of
aimless wandering in the scholarly wilderness is due almost entirely to theological commitment and a maidenly unwillingness to offend the gossamer
sensibilities of believers, and not to lack of historical evidence. There were, as
Celsus pointed out, many holy men of Jesus type gadding about the Roman
world.

10
McKechnie, The First Christian Centuries, 27.

After a long discussion of Lukes infancy narrative, a respected classical historian
concludes, Lukes story is historically impossible and internally incoherent. It
clashes with his own date for the Annunciation (which he places under Herod) and
with Matthews long story of the Nativity which also presupposes Herod the Great
as king. It is, therefore, false. (Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version, 27-31).
12
John 7:15, ASV.
13
Luke 23:45.
14
Kannaday, Apologetic Discourse and the Scribal Tradition, 97.
15
Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, 103.
16
Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, 35.
17
Gager, Kingdom and Community, 7.
11
It has only recently been emphasized that magic, pagan, heresy, and
orthodoxy are examples of Christianity supplying the categories of analysis
so that the discussion of Greco-Roman religion and Christianity was left to
passionate amateurs whose main interest was scoring points for their version
of authentic Christianitythe last 40 years have seen a dramatic displacement of Christian schools of theology by university departments of religious
studies as the center for serious conversation about religion.18 In point of
fact, in the era under discussion, there was no organized religion, but rather
a broad spectrum of state and local, native and foreign cults, none of which
(with the exception of Judaism) made an exclusive claim to truth. Indeed, the
typical member of Greco-Roman society considered Christians to be atheists
due to their denial of the gods of polytheism. Pagan was a pejorative term
adopted by the Christians of late antiquity to falsely characterize their opponents: The pagans did not know they were pagans until the Christians
told them they were. The very concept of paganism is a Jewish-Christian
construct...It is a lump word, a Christian category imposed on all non-monotheists to describe the unbaptized civilian or non-combatant whom they
hoped to enlist in Christs army...19
It is instructive to reframe the history of early Christianity by looking at it
through the lens of its Roman critics who charged that both believers and
the scriptures they read and trusted lacked intellectual integrity...Constituting
a third facet of this literary barrage, followers of Jesus were ridiculed as
ignorant, gullible fools, and for mainly consisting of women and fanatics.20
This essay dispenses entirely with affable, theologically based assumptions
about Jesus and Christianity and utterly rejects the question begging and special pleading that infests much of the literature on early Christianity. To the
surprise of many readers and the dismay of others, it can be rather easily
demonstrated that the harshest denunciations of Jewish and Roman detractors aimed at Jesus and his followers can be verified from early Christian
writings and the actions of Christians themselves. However, apologetic
scholarship has raised a serious barrier to understanding the founding documents of ChristianityThe rationalizing instinct not infrequently appears
in the service of faith with an apologetic function.21 Nor is this a new ploy.
Roman critics frequently charged Christians with practicing magic; Christian
apologists who attempted a rebuttal followed a well-worn path: Jewish authors from [the Second Temple] period take pains to distinguish extraordinary events taking place in their midst from magical practices, especially in
cases that require the employment of certain objects and rituals. The most

18
Johnson, Among the Gentiles, 14, 16.

Chadwick, History, Society and the Churches, 9.
20
21
Moberly, The Cambridge Companion to Miracles, 66.
19
common strategy was to ascribe miracles to Gods power and magic to human agency.22
To regard the triumph of Christianity as merely the victory of one religion
over others is to completely miss the significance of the new intellectual regime that would dominate the western world for the next fifteen centuries.
Far more than a set of religious doctrines, Christianity became the framework
around which an enduring social order arose, a distorting prism through
which a culture perceived the natural world, and a totalitarian ethos that
sought out and destroyed all who challenged it. Christianity did much more
than bury the gods of the Greco-Roman world under the rubble of their vandalized templesits intensely anti-intellectual impulse smothered the voices
of generations of genius. As Murdock noted, [Constantine] let loose a philosophy that was to pervade every aspect of political, social, cultural, and, of
course, religious life right up to modern times.23 Given all that Christian
zealots erased, that we know anything at all about the amazing accomplishments of the world before Christianity is due in most cases to pure happenstance.
An obvious example is the recent rescue of a portion of the text of the Archimedes Codex, a collection of works by the greatest known mathematical genius of the pre-Christian era. In this particular case, the original writing of
Archimedes text was scraped off the parchment on which it had been copied,
the codex cut into pieces, and the resulting pages used to create a prayer
book. The first piece of parchment in [the Christian scribes] new codex
contained On Floating Bodies.24 He covered it with a blessing for loaves for
Easter. Further into the codex, he wrote over a different section with a prayer
for repentance.25 The monk who repurposed the parchment of Archimedes
text to make a prayer book was either too ignorant to know he was erasing a
foundational work on mathematics or knew and didnt care.
This essay focuses on two Roman writers in particular, Lucian of Samosata,
whose extensive works have survived remarkably intact despite his characterization of Jesus as that crucified sophist,26 and a little known philosopher
named Celsus, whose work comes down to us in the form of quotations in
the Christian apologist Origens magnum opus, Contra CelsumThat [Contra Celsum] still needed refutation seventy years after it was written is an in
22
Twelftree, The Cambridge Companion to Miracles, 5.

Murdoch, The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate, 4.
24
The first known work on hydrostatics, or in laymans terms, what makes an iron
ship float and an iron bar sink.
25
Netz & Noel, The Archimedes Codex, 124-125.
26
Lucian, The Passing of Peregrinus, 13.
23
dication of how seriously Christians took its arguments.27 We know about

these anti-Christian texts because they were quoted (selectively) and paraphrased (tendentiously) by Christian authors: Origen, Against Celsus (Contra
Celsum),28 Eusebius, Against Hierocles, and Cyril of Alexandria, Against Julian.29
The case of Flavius Claudius JulianusJulian the Apostatedeserves some
extended comment. Born into a Christian family, he converted to a theurgic
form of Neo-Platonism, a conversion probably hastened by the murder of his
father and eight of his relatives by his uncle, the Christian Constantius. The
savagery of what happened, in a Christian court, had a searing effect on the
six-year-old boy...Libanius marked the murders as the major event of Julians
infancy.30 While Julian was still in his teens, Constantius had the future emperors half-brother Gallus, a committed Christian, murdered as well.
As a child, Julian was thoroughly indoctrinated in the tenets of Christianity,
and although he came to loath the religion, he feigned belief until declared
Augustus, consensu militum, at Paris in 360. Shortly after, Julian openly embraced the ancient Roman religions. Julians criticismsto the extent they
have survivedare of particular interest therefore, coming as they do from
the pen of an intelligent, indeed bookish, insider who repaid his Christian
instructors with interest for the enforced studies of his boyhood.31 His most
direct attack on the Church, Against the Galileans, is, unfortunately, preserved only in fragments.
[Julians Against the Galileans] appears rather disjointed. What remains is
disappointing, and it is not just because only around a third has survived.
The passages we have are those garnered from an extensive refutation of the
work by Cyril of Alexandria in the early 440s. By definition it is the weakest
passages that have survived. Not only are the passages Cyril excerpted naturally enough the ones he disagreed with, but also they are the one he felt he
could refute.32 Cyril is widely acknowledged to have fomented murderous
violence, not only against pagans, but also against other Christians; regarding
the tyrant-bishop epitomized by Cyril, Gaddis notes, The tyrant-bishops
lust for power drove him to overstep the normal boundaries of his episcopal
authority and interfere in the business of other dioceses and provinces...The

27
Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 2nd edition, xvi.
[Origens] Against Celsus was a sustained piece of theological writing even though
hardly relevant to Celsus charges made seventy years before. (Frend, The Rise of
Christianity, 373).
29
Clark, Christianity and Roman Society, 17.
30
Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 23.
31
Wright, The Works of the Emperor Julian, III, 315 (Loeb).
32
28
tyrant-bishops greed betrayed itself in his love of luxury and pursuit of secular ostentation...Tyrant-bishops resorted to violence, legal or otherwise, in
order to satisfy their greed and ambition.33 Cyril went so far as to maintain a
private army of thugs, the Nitrian monks, one of whom attached the Alexandrian prefect Orestes who had the monk tortured to death.
Julians sense of irony is revealed by his decision to call the Christians Galileans, a choice that reflected the gospel saying, out of Galilee ariseth no
prophet.34 Nevertheless, Julians lifelong inclination toward mysticism, his
ascetic personal habits, as well as his inflexibility may betray the aftereffects of
early Christian indoctrination on a susceptible mind.
Julians pushback against the Church also took the form of cleverly crafted
legal movessince the days of Constantine orthodoxy had been associated
with tax exemptions for clergy as well as access to wealth and patronage and
the high status enjoyed by the state church.35 Julian turned the tax code
against the Church in the same way the Church had used it against the heretics. He cancelled tax exemptions for the clergy: Julian proclaimed that no
one could henceforth claim exemption from service as a decurion (councillor)
on the grounds of being a Christian. Since only the clergy had been entitled
to seek this exemption, the measure was accordingly directed at them.36
With the withdrawal of their lucrative tax exemptions,37 Julian struck a deft
blow at the claim of Christian disdain for materialism. In addition, he passed
a law that banned [Christians] from teaching the three pillars of Roman
education: grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy...In one fell swoop, Julian cut
Christians off from potential converts and from the classical tradition...Julian
had marginalized Christianity to the point where it could potentially have
vanished within a generation or two, and without the need for physical
coercion.38 [Julian] did his best to avoid direct, violent persecution in the
manner of Diocletianhe did not wish to give the Christians more martyrs
around which they could rally opposition...Julian relied on economic sanctions, job discrimination, confiscation of church property, and other more
indirect measures...39
Julians attack on the cult was that of an intelligent insider who was literally
well versed; it is little wonder that Christians reacted with glee to his death in
battle in June, 363. In fact, later Christian legend claimed that the martyr

33
Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ, 220-221, 274-275.
John 7:52 (KJV).
35
Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind, 194.
36
Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 73-74.
37
Freeman, 185.
38
Murdoch, The Last Pagan, 138-139.
39
Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ, 90-91.
34
Mercurius had returned from the dead to assassinate Julian on the orders of
Christ himself.
Porphyry of Tyre (c. 234-c. 305 C.E.), a polymath and philosopher, wrote a
work titled Against the Christians, a great book of fifteen volumes, a scourge
of the Christians,40 so feared by the Church that in 448 Theodosius II ordered any copies still in existence burned. Not only were Porphyrys books
destroyed, but many of the works of Christian writers incorporating sections
of Porphyrys polemic were burned in order to eliminate what one critic, the
bishop Apollinarius, called the poison of his thought.41 In fact, it is no
longer certain which fragments attributed to Porphyry are genuine; for the
sake of simplicity, and because this is an essay, not a dissertation, I have elected to follow Hoffmans reconstruction. In any case, Porphyrys insights into
the new Jewish sect anticipated the conclusions of modern scholars: Centuries before the advent of modern biblical criticism, Porphyry already knew
that the book of Daniel was a Maccabean pseudepigraph,42 i.e., a faked prophecy. Porphyry contentiously reported that the oracle ascribed to Isaiah in
Mark 1:2 was in fact a conflation between Isaiah and Malachi (to be exact,
Mal 3:1 and Isa 40:3). Similarly, he flagged Matthew 13:35, which wrongly
assigns a passage from Psalm 78:2 to Isaiah...Porphyry in fact represented the
contradictions and errors in these revered writings as the natural product of
rustic and unsophisticated followers of Jesus...Attentive readers...noted within
the gospels glaring factual errors, Old Testament citations wrongly attributed, and inconsistencies in the details reported by the separate evangelical accounts.43 Later Christian scribes altered the text of Mark, which mistakenly
attributed a quote to Isaiah the prophet,44 to read in the prophets in a belated attempt to derail further criticism of the supposedly inerrant gospels
multiple inaccuracies.
At least a generation passed between the appearance of the first Roman critiques of Christianity and the Christian apologetic response. Christian orthodoxy produced no leaders of the intellectual range and status of its opponents...Irenaeus possessed a robust common sense, a long memory, and flashes of theological insight, but between the memorable phrases his writing is
prolix and tedious, and his ideas inflexible. Like his colleagues, he was encumbered with a millenarian legacy...There could be no accommodation
with the thought of the Greco-Roman world so long as millenarianism prevailed.45

40

Hoffman, Porphyrys Against the Christians, 164-165.
42
Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 138.
43
Kannaday, Apologetic Discourse and the Scribal Tradition, 65, 68, 82.
44
Mark 1:2.
45
41
That any trace of these criticisms survivesand even then only in quotation
is evidence of the acute anxiety they caused the early Church. Celsus in
particular was a fearsome opponent: He was a man who relied not on rumors and hearsay evidence but on personal observation and careful study. Because he had read both the Old and New Testaments and was familiar with
Jewish and Christian literature, he knew the difference between Gnostic and
orthodox theologies, and his book is on the whole free of mistakes and misconceptions, excepting those that reflect the generally held superstitions of
the second century. It contains none of the popular pagan antagonism against
Christians and makes no unsubstantiated charges.46 Indeed, Celsus accuracy
is widely acknowledged: Celsus technical impartiality in the disputes he refers to is helpfulhe had no interest in making the Christians seem better or
more numerous than they were (exactly the reverse), so he has a good claim
to be believed.47 Origens refutation of the Celsus True Doctrine did not appear until some 70 years after its composition and even then Origen may
have deleted the most damaging parts.48
The Roman intelligentsia took an extremely dim view of Christianitythey
regarded it with the same mixture of disgust and incomprehension that Westerners reserve for Muslim suicide bomberslike modern Islamic extremists
imbued with a martyr complex, the Christian assailants who vandalized
pagan and Jewish religious buildings seem to have planned their attack in
the full expectation and hope of being killed for it, and thus attaining the
crown of martyrdom...This aggressive paradigm of martyrdom pointed the
way toward the more notorious, violent attacks on pagan temples and Jewish
synagogues carried out by Christian holy men in the late fourth and fifth centuries.49
The three Roman historians whose writings we have investigated were
all contemporaries, and all reflected the aristocratic, well-bred Romans judgment that Christianity was one of a multitude of degraded
foreign cultsatrocious and shameful things as Tacitus put it
that infested Rome... Romans of higher social classes believed that
these oriental superstitions polluted Roman life and that they attacked the very fiber of society like a debilitating disease...Some of the
liturgical practices of Christians, notably glossolalia, confessions of
sins, prophecies, sacraments, and the sexual aberrations of fringe

46
Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians, 148.

48
Benko, 156.
49
Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ, 94.
47
10
groups, may have contributed to a distorted picture of this oriental

superstition.50
Julian saw Christianity as a sickness infecting the Roman Empire51 and not
without justification: Christian zealots, convinced that Julian was a persecutor no different from Diocletian, sought by provocative acts to force his
hand, to strip away his pretended tolerance, and to galvanize broader Christian opposition...it seems the majority [of martyrs] were actually killed by
pagan mobs or by the secular authorities in retaliation for their provocative
attacks against paganismsmashing idols, destroying temples, disrupting
rituals. This fact is not only admitted but even celebrated by Christian
sources, who without exception refer to the slain Christians as martyrs.52
Christian book burning began early,53 even before the composition of those
most Christian of books, the gospels. The burning of books was part of the
advent and imposition of Christianity.54 [Christianitys] more extreme proponents equated pre-Christian learning with paganismin finding a home in
a pagan building the books themselves became tarred with the brush of paganism. Knowledge has always been the enemy of extremism, and for the
most radical elements among Alexandrias Christians, the books in the Serapeum were a threat. So they simply destroyed them.55 The Council of Ephesus (431) decreed that Porphyrys books be burned, and the Christian emperor Justinian (529) likewise decreed that anti-Christian books were to be
consigned to the flames.
As mentioned, Julians Against the Galileans survives only in the form of partial quotations in a refutation written by Cyril of Alexandria (429-441)
Cyril is infamous for his connection with the civic disturbances that led to
the murder and dismemberment of Hypatia, the Alexandrian mathematician
and astronomer, at the hands of a Christian mob as well as his support for
violent confrontations between Alexandrias Christians and Jews that eventually led to the expulsion of the Jews. Concerning Julians much longer original, [Cyril] says that he omitted invectives against Christ and such matter
as might contaminate the minds of Christians.56
Lucretius De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), a celebrated poem
that advanced the dangerous ideas that the universe ran without the inter
50
Benko, 21, 23.

52
53
Acts 19:19.
54 Canfora, The Vanished Library, 192.
55 Pollard & Reid, The Rise and Fall of Alexandria, 282.
56
Wright, Julian, III, 314.
51
11
vention of gods and that religion actually posed a danger to human life survived forgotten in the library of a German monastery until rediscovered in
1417. When human life, all too conspicuous, lay foully groveling on earth,
weighed down by grim religion looming from the skies, horribly threatening
mortal men, a man, a Greek, first raised his mortal eyes bravely against this
menace...Religion, so, is trampled underfoot, and by his victory we reach the
stars.57 The Greek, of course, was Epicurus, author of the famous paradox: If
God is willing to prevent evil, but is unable, he is not omnipotent. If he is
able, but unwilling, he is malevolent. If he is both able and willing, then from
whence comes evil? If he is neither able nor willing, then why call him God?
What early critics had to say about the Christianity of their era has been of
interest primarily to historians, but I will argue first that their criticisms were
remarkably accurate, prescient in fact, and second that the first Romans to
investigate the new religion identified fundamental flaws that broadly characterize much of Christianity in its present form. Early Christian writers often provided unwitting support for Celsus appraisal of the fledgling faith and
the observations of Lucian. Celsus and others accurately anticipated many
modern scholarly insights into early Christianity as well as religious scandals
of our own day.
Relevant terms are sometimes cited in Greek for those interested in the exact
text of primary sources, but the essay has been written in a manner that hopefully makes it easily accessible to the interested layman. Unless otherwise
noted, the translations from Greek are my own. That said, lets turn to the
specific claims of ancient critics.
Jesus and Paul were false prophets.

Radical apocalypticism was the foundation of the earliest form of Christianity. Jesus imagined the kingdom to be coming soonvery soonin the very
generation that heard his preaching.
The High Priest was standing in their midst and he asked Jesus,
Have you nothing to say in response? What are these men testifying
against you?
But he kept silent and made no reply.

57
Humphries, Lucretius: The Way Things Are, 21.
12
Again the High Priest asked him, Are you the Christ, the son of
the Blessed One?
Jesus said to him, I am. And you will see the Son of Man seated at
the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven!58
The High Priest himself will witness the coming of the Son of Man and Jesus
own generationTruly I tell you, by no means will this generation disappear
until all these things happen59this generation, will not pass away until
all these things happen. These two predictions of Jesus [Mark 9:1 and
13:28-31] are related in that they do not simply announce the somewhat
vague imminence of the kingdom of God, but they announce its arrival prior
to the end of the generation to whom Jesus was speaking...the community
which produced the Gospel of Mark [was] an apocalyptic millenarian community living in the imminent expectation of the end of the age.60
The disciples will not even complete their circuit of the towns of Palestine
before the coming of the Son of Man: But when they run you out of one
town, flee to another, for truly I tell you, by no means will you finish going
through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man arrives!61 The end is
fast approaching: Truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will
by no means taste death until they see the kingdom of God already arrived in
power.62
If Jesus really believed that the religious and political order was soon to end,
we would expect to hear that belief reflected in his preaching and we do. The
disciples are not to imagine that Jesus has come to bring peacefamily members will turn on one another, becoming bitter enemies63 and those who expect to follow Jesus into the kingdom must not even stop to say farewell to
those left behind.64 A man must not linger to gather possessions, nor stop
even to pick up his cloak.65 The urgency of the situation abrogates even the
most basic filial responsibilities:
Another of his disciples said to him, Lord, first allow me to go and
bury my father. But Jesus said to him, Follow me and let the dead
bury their dead.66

58
Mark 14:60-62.
Mark 13:30.
60
Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity, 172, 194.
61
Matthew 10:23.
62
Mark 9:1.
63
Matthew 10:34-37; Luke 12:49-53.
64
Luke 9: 61-62.
65
Matthew 24:17-18.
66
Matthew 8: 21-22.
59
13
For those hoping to inherit the kingdom the costs will be steep. The disciple
must hate his own father, mother, brothers and sisters, wife and children.67
Moreover, he must sell all he has and give the proceeds to the poor.68 So
complete is the renunciation of the present age that those who can must become eunuchsthere are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for
the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.69
However, one set of familiar texts has repeatedly failed to draw the
detailed attention of the Jesus questers: the beatitudes for childless
and barren women (Lk 23:29; Gos[pel of] Thom[as] 79b) and the
warnings to pregnant women and mothers (Mk 13:17-19; Lk 23:28,
30-31)...when the beatitudes and woes to women are understood in
the context of Jewish apocalyptic eschatology, they function together
as an injunction against procreation...[Jesus] message of renouncing
reproduction in light of imminent tribulation stands firmly in the tradition of an ancient prophetic predecessor (Jer. 16:1-9)...Jesus words
of renunciation are congruent with his negative response to an unnamed woman who blesses the womb that bore him and the breasts
that nursed him (Lk 11:27-28; Gos. Thom. 79a)...His retort, Blessed
rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it! makes a good
deal of sense if, as we have seen, part of his message was to warn women against bearing children.70
Nothing must distract the disciple from the nearness of the End, neither selfregardunless you change and become like little children, you will never
enter the kingdom of heaven71nor standing in the communityI swear
to you that the tax men and the whores are going ahead of you into the kingdom of God!72 As Fredriksen points out, anger becomes equivalent to murder73 in Jesus ethics, and lust to adultery,74 and notes that such intensification of ethical norms...is a phenomenon typical within communities committed to the belief that time is rapidly drawing to a close. Passivity in the face
of evil75 and a refusal to judge76 would simply lead to the exploitation of

67
Luke 14:26.
Luke 18:22.
69
Matthew 19:12.
70
Pitre, Journal for the Study of the New Testament 81 (2001): 60, 78.
71
Matthew 18:3, NIV.
72
Matthew 21:31.
73
Matthew 5:22.
74
Matthew 5:28.
75
Matthew 5:38-48.
76
Matthew 7:1-2.
68
14
those abiding by such rules by those who did not. This impracticality in turn
allows us to glimpse the intensity of expectation that motivated Jesus mission
and the community that formed around him: the Kingdom was at hand.77
Thus the complexities of moral judgments that typify a complex society are
resolved into a series of binary opposites: poor-rich, good-evil, pious-hypocrite, elect-damned. And a final reckoning is proclaimed for the near future.78 Aune remarks on the eschatological polarity of Jesus ethical teaching and concludes, The teachings of Jesus, therefore, show a strong tendency
to use eschatological expectation as the basis for a hortatory or parenetic purpose.79
Among the first generation expectations of Jesus quick return ran so high
that those with property sold off what they had and Jesus followers lived
communally.80 Writing to the newly converted, Paul advised slaves to remain
slaves and the virgins and unmarried to remain single. Married men were to
act as if they had no wife, for the time allotted has become short.81 It is
likely that contempt for Christianity among the common people arose in part
from believers divorcing their mates or denying them conjugal relations. The
asceticism provoked by the impending End resulted in a household of
brothers and sisters rather than husbands and wives, fathers and mothers.82
According to the historian Eusebius, Origen, the church father of the 2nd
century went so far as to castrate himself as a teenager, the action of an immature mind (frenoj...atelouj), yet praised as an act of faith and selfcontrol (pistewj...kai swfrosunhj). 83 Justin Martyr applauded a young
Alexandrian convert who petitioned the Roman governor to give a surgeon
permission to castrate him.84 Although permission was refused, Justins apologetic use and evident approval of the effort itself are striking.85
Like many apocalyptic movements since, early Christianity exemplified sexual psychopathology and extremism. Origen, who took Matthew 19:12
rather too seriously, urged fellow Christians in his Exhortation to Martyrdom,
Therefore, hate your souls because of eternal life,86 persuaded that the hatred

77

79
Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity, 166.
80
Acts 4:34-35.
81
1 Corinthians 7:21-31.
82
Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, 108.
83
Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History VI, 8.
84
Justin Martyr, Apology 29:1-2.
85
Caner, Vigiliae Christianae 51 (1997), 396.
86
John 12:25.
78
15
Jesus teaches is noble and useful.87 Little wonder that the Stoic Marcus Aurelius despised the Christians, calling their preaching the claims of the miracle-mongers and sorcerers (twn terateuomenwn kai gohtwn) about incantations
and casting out devils (daimonwn apopomphj), and characterized their fascination with martyrdom as originating not in personal acts of judgment but
from dissent unsupported by evidence (kata yilhn parataxin), 88 from
mere obstinacy based on irrational ideas.89 If Marcus despised the Christians, the Christians despised him right back; his magnificent bronze equestrian statue remained intact only because it was mistakenly believed to be of
Constantine.90
Of course Jesus did not return in the lifetime of the High Priest or in the lifetime of those of this generation. As believers began to die awaiting the
Coming of the Son of Man, anxiety reached a peak. Pauls letter to the house
church in Thessalonica, widely regarded as the oldest surviving Christian
document, likely written as early as 52 C.E., offered the following false assurance to the flock:
Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall
asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will
bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to
the Lord's own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are
left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who
have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven,
with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the
trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that,
we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with
them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be
with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage each other with these
words.91
Paul obviously believed that some would survive until the return of the
Lordwe who are still alive and are leftand that at least some of the
believers who read his letter would be physically, corporeally, alive when
Jesus returnedmay your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless until our Lord Jesus Christ comes again.92 ...the Second Coming of
Jesus will occur in the immediate future...the hope that the vast majority

87
Greer, Origen: An Exhortation to Martyrdom, 3, 69.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations I, 6; XI, 3.
89
90
91
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, NIV.
92
1 Thessalonians 5:23.
88
16
of Christians would be living witnesses to Christs return from heaven

points to the likelihood of composition in the first decade of the Christian movement. 93 But Pauls ecstatic house churches contained the seeds
of their own destruction: Paul had opened a Pandoras box among the
Jews and God-fearers wherever he established Christian communities.
His first letter to the Corinthians indicates that the proclamation of freedom from the Law through the love of Christ and the approaching end
led to wild revivalist prophesying in which men and women participated, to claims of possession of knowledge (that is, esoteric knowledge
of the beyond)...94 As time would tell, defeated expectations of the End,
as well as unrestrained individualism, would eventually be suppressed by
the rise of the Church and so began the centuries long drama of The
Church versus the churches, the magisterium versus the mob.
Aune notes the rapidly diminishing sense of immediacy in later writings:
...the Christians of the Macedonian community lived in the fervent expectation of Jesus return to save them and judge their enemies. In contrast, Luke-Acts does not convey the notion that early Christians lived in
imminent expectation of the end of the age. Lukes more relaxed attitude
toward the parousia of Jesus is due in part to the fact that he wrote his
two-volume treatise more than a generation after 1 Thessalonians. 95
Looking back from our vantage point we can identify several Jewish apocalyptic movements from the era, and, based on the testimony of writers
like Josephus and the Essene evidence, conclude that early converts did
not represent the established sectors of Jewish society; we are thus able
to locate [earliest Christianity] within the tradition of apocalyptic
Judaism, which in itself represents a paradigm case of great expectations
followed by repeated disappointments. 96 The figure of the prophet
was the object of widespread eschatological fantasy in first-century Palestine. This nostalgic emphasis on prophets of the past was partially motivated by the desire to replace the dismal realities of the present with the
idealized glories of Israels past.97
Josephus, a near contemporary of Jesus, describes the destabilizing role
wonder-working apocalyptic prophets played in Roman-occupied Palestine. Among them were Theudas, who Josephus calls a gohj (gos), sorcerer or imposter, and a profhthj (prophts), prophet. At Theudas command the Jordan River was supposed to part so the rabble that followed

Ldemann, Paul, 14, 49.

95
Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity, 192.
96
Gager, Kingdom and Community, 26-27.
97
Aune, 154.
93
94
17
him could cross on dry land. 98 Notwithstanding Theudas sticky end,

Josephus also tells of those deceived by a certain man, a magician (tinoj
anqrwpou gohtoj), who proclaimed salvation and an end to their
troubles if they chose to follow him into the wilderness.99 Like Theudas, the Roman authorities promptly dispatched this man and his followers. Josephus also describes the Egyptian false prophet: A man appeared in the countryside, a magician, who established a reputation as a
prophet (anqrwpoj gohj kai profhtou pistin epiqeij)... 100 The Egyptian
prophet led 30,000 into the desert and attacked Jerusalem but was repulsed and escaped. According to Acts, Paul was once mistaken for the
Egyptian. 101
The apologist Origen acknowledged several prophetic figures Celsus
compared to Jesus: Theudas and a certain Judas of Galilee who the Romans executed, as well as Dositheus, a Samaritan, supposedly the one
prophesied by Moses (o profhteumenoj upo Mwusewj), and (naturally)
Simon the Samaritan magician (Simwn o Samareuj magoj). Celsus perceptively noted these and many other deceivers of Jesus type (opoioj hn o
Ihsouj)102it is clear that Celsus recognized Jesus as belonging to a category
familiar to the Romans: the apocalyptic prophet who established his bona
fides by magical wonder working. Stanton notes that the most widely attested ancient criticism of Jesus is that he was a magician and false prophet...accusations of magic and false prophecy are very closely related to
one another.103
By the time Paul wrote his letter to the Corinthians around 55-56 C.E.,
significant numbers of the first generation Christians had fallen asleep.
Yet Pauls letter assures the survivors, Behold, I tell you a mystery. We
shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed during the last trumpet.104
Paul clearly seems to indicate that not all shall die though the majority
will. In 1 Corinthians, that is, survival represents the exception, whereas
in 1 Thessalonians it is the rule...the fate of members of the community
who have already died is becoming a divisive issue. The death of some
members of the community obviously led to hopelessness and mourning

98
Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, XX, 97.

Theudas fate is noted in Acts 5:36.
99
Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, XX, 188.
100
Josephus, Jewish War, II, 259.
101
Acts 21:38.
102
Origen, Contra Celsum, I, 57; II, 8.
103
Stanton, Jesus of Nazareth, Lord and Christ, 166-167.
104
1 Corinthians 15:51.
18
in the communityprobably because the notion of the resurrection of

Christians was unknown in Thessalonica.105
But what exactly will happen on the Day of the Lord? And when
will it occur? Here Pauls teaching is uncharacteristically clear and
consistent throughout his letters. Believers whether living or dead
will receive a new, glorious body, like Christs at his resurrectionand this will happen very, very soon. Christs resurrection itself
proves the nearness of the End of all things: it is a sign, for Paul, that
the final days are not merely at hand, but have already arrived. It is
upon us, he informs his Corinthian community, that the end of the
ages has come106...Paul expects to live to see the Last Days. He speaks
of his hope for the transformation of his present body before death (2
Cor 5:1-5)...So near is the End that both Paul and his communities
are troubled by the death of believers before Christs Second Coming:
they did not expect this and do not know what to make of it (1 Thes
4:13).107
For Mark, writing a generation after Paul, the destruction of the Temple in
70 C.E. was the latest sign of the times. When is the End? Soon, Mark argues; very, very soon. The Temples recent destruction clearly marks the
beginning of that period that will terminate with the Second Coming of the
Son of Man. In fact, the Lord has already shortened the days before the consummation for the sake of his elect (13:14): the Parousia108 could occur at
any time, certainly within the lifetime of Marks community...By the time
Matthew and Luke write, the destruction of the Temple as well in the past,
and things had continued much as before. It could not, therefore, have been
the signal for the beginning of the End. But Mark, writing shortly after 70,
could not have known this and for him the destruction of the Temple announced the nearness of the Parousia...Christian tradition in various ways
continually adjusted itself to successthat is, to its own vigorous existence
as its central prophecy failed.109 For early Christians, the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 was a signWhen you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies,
you will know that its desolation has approached.110just as the founding
of the state of Israel in 1948 was a sign for present day Armageddonists.

Ldemann, Paul, 51, 206.

...on whom the culmination of the ages has come. (1 Corinthians 10:11)
107
108
The term parousia, parousia, means arrival or presence as at 1 Thessalonians 2:19
(NIV): For what is our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory in the
presence (parousia) of our Lord Jesus when he comes? Is it not you?
109
Fredricksen, 50-51, 135.
110
Luke 21:20.
105
106
19
Unfortunately for the prophets, past and present, for something to count as a
sign of the End, at some point the End has to actually occur.
While the believers sat up nights waiting for Jesus return, their private banquets in Christian households, beyond the pale of synagogue surveillance,
centered on the belief that the Lord was soon coming to finish what the Roman legions had started...For the expectant community, their attention
riveted on the heavens for some sign of the reappearance of their savior, the
eucharist was the interim realization of his presence...As often as you eat the
bread and drink the cup, you are proclaiming the death of the Lord before he
comes (1 Cor. 11.26)...Later Christians seem to have advanced a variety of
inconsistent rationales for the delay...We must see all these rationales, strictly
speaking, as the defensive posture of a community challenged to provide
evidence of its beliefs.111 As Pauls words to the Corinthians imply, With
the collapse of the eschatological hope for the speedy return of Jesus the
spiritual and sacramental presence of Jesus was all that remained.112
By the time the pseudepigraphical letter attributed to Peter was composed in the early 2nd century, disbelief in the Second Coming had become open
and probably common, not surprising given Jesus repeated failures to appear
as foretold:
They will say, Where is this coming he promised? Ever since our
ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of
creation.113
The disillusioned (former?) Christians who posed the question, Where is
this Coming he promised? had arrived at an inescapable conclusion: both
the prophesy of Jesus and the assurances of Paul were belied by the passing of
time. Jesus and Paul had proven to be false prophets, and not just around the
edges. No sane person could take their words in context and honestly claim to
believe them. That doubt about the Second Coming had become widespread
is evident from the letter of First Clement to Christians in Corinth, written
in the late 1st century, probably about the same time as Revelation: Those
who are uncertain are miserable, those who doubt in their soul, who say, We
have heard these things since our fathers time and look! We have grown old
and none of these things has happened! The writer of the letter insists, You
have peered into the scriptures, and assures his listeners, that nothing mistaken nor anything falsified has been written in them.114

111
Hoffman, Celsus On the True Doctrine, 9-11.

Hoffman, Porphyrys Against the Christians, 138.
113
2 Peter 3:4, NIV.
114
1 Clement 23:3; 45:2-3.
112
20
Those who were disabused among the Christians were hardly the only ones
to notice the failure of Christian predictions. Porphyry declared, And there
is more to Pauls lying: He very clearly says, We who are alive.115 For it is
now three hundred years since he said this and nobodynot Paul and not
anyone elsehas been caught up in the air.116 Porphyry knewover sixteen
centuries agothat Jesus of Nazareth was no more than a thimbleful of dust
and his Kingdomwith its hundredfold houses and fields 117 an empty
sack. Indeed, Julian makes clear that Romans regarded Christianity as nothing more than the veneration of a corpse: those who follow after you abandoned the immortal gods and changed over to the [worship of the] cadaver of
the Jew (epi ton Ioudaiwn metabhnai nekron).118
At the end of the 1st century at least some still clung for dear life to the illusion of the Parousia. The Didache (Teaching), a tract written around the end
of the century, cautioned its listeners, Dont let your lamps go out, nor your
loins be ungirded!...The Lord will come with all his saints. Then the world
will see the Lord coming on the clouds of heaven!119 The faithful waited,
loins girded and lamps ablaze, scanning the clouds in vain while the indifferent world continued to turn.
More than any other scholar, Albert Schweitzer exposed this lie that is the
bedrock of primitive Christianitythe radical apocalyptic belief of Jesus of
Nazareth120and by so doing uncovered the scandal at the heart of apologetic scholarship. Commenting on the significance of Schweitzers landmark
study, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Kmmel notes,
Only when Schweitzer, at the end of an account of the Geschichte der
Leben-Jesu-Forchung [The Quest of the Historical Jesus], presented
consistent eschatology as the right solution of the question concerning the historical Jesus did there emerge a really dangerous opponent
of the picture of Jesus that had hitherto been accepted...The proclamation of Jesus as wholly dominated by the expectation of the imminent supernatural kingdom of God, Schweitzer had presented as

115
117
Mark 10:30.
118
Julian, Against the Galileans, 194D.
119
Didache 16:1, 7-8.
120
Schweitzer regarded Matt. 10:23 as an authentic apocalyptic prediction of Jesus,
who expected the present age to close and the future age to dawn before the mission of the Twelve was completed. According to Schweitzer, when this expectation
failed to materialize, Jesus experienced his first crisis, which led him to attempt to
force the coming of the kingdom by going to Jerusalem. (Aune, Prophecy in Early
Christianity, 183).
116
21
the answer to all debatable questions of previous life-of-Jesus research,

and had accordingly characterized as entirely demolished the liberal
picture of Jesus...First of all there is the question of the expectation of
the End in early Christian thought and its permanent significance.
Bultmann, Lohmeyer, and Dibelius had acknowledged without qualification the central importance of the expectation of the End for the
thought of Jesus and early Christianity, but in their effort to interpret
this early Christian faith for men of today they in various ways incurred the danger of imposing concepts taken from a modern philosophical system on the primitive Christian belief in the End...the
fundamental faith of early Christianity is to be found precisely in the
strictly temporal expectation of an imminent end of the world, a view
that obviously soon proved to be false and by so doing compelled the
early church to put something else in its place.121
In a recent survey of the New Testament evidence regarding the end-of-theworld beliefs of Jesus and the primitive church and the modern theological
response, Allison concluded, I myself do not know what to make of the eschatological Jesus. I am, for theological reasons, unedified by the thought
that, in a matter so seemingly crucial, a lie has been walking around for two
thousand years while the truth has only recently put on its shoes. But there it
is.122
Behold, I come quickly!123 was, is, and always will be a lielittle wonder
that for centuries in the orthodox churches the apocalypse has been an embarrassment and little preached. Any cult that survives the failure of its initial prophecy must necessarily modify or scrap its beliefs about the future...by
definition no millenarian cult can long survive in its original form...The one
undeniable fact is that the attention of the community, and thus of its
worship, was entirely on the imminent End. The time is near [Revelation
1:3] and Amen, come Lord Jesus [22:20] frame the [Revelation] as a whole
as much as they express the mood of its hearers.124
Fredriksens trenchant observation about the apocalyptic worldview is worth
quoting at some length:
Happy people do not write apocalypses. The apocalyptic description
of the joyful future that awaitsthat is in fact imminentis the
mirror image of the perception of present times, which are seen as

121
Kmmel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of Its Problems, 238,
241, 283-284.
122
Allison, Journal of Biblical Literature 113 (1994): 668.
123
Revelation 22:12.
124
Gager, Kingdom and Community, 21, 56.
22
ultimately, indeed terminally, terrible...But apocalyptic symbolism provided more than just protective camouflage for potentially
dangerous political statements. It also enhanced the prestige and
mystique of these writings and gave them almost unlimited interpretive elasticity. The more obscure the symbolism, the more
privileged the reader who understood it and the more elevated the
revelation.125
It has been remarked that Jesus expected the coming of the Kingdom of God
but the Church arrived instead. Evangelical Christians, particularly Americans who ever alert to commercial possibilities, have dubbed the sky fantasy
described by Paul as the Rapturewe who are still alive and are left will
be caught up together with [the dead] in the clouds to meet the Lord in the
airand have turned it into a highly successful business model, playing on
both the evangelical dissatisfaction with the liberalizing present and the selfaggrandizing figment that fundamentalists are vouchsafed unique insight into
world events through their parsing of biblical jabberwocky. Despite the fact
that each and every one of the hundreds of predictions of Judgment Day by
Armageddonists past and present has proven false, non-prophet preachers
continue to foretell divine wrath on a nearly weekly basis with no apparent
concern that their credulous followers will awaken to the obvious.
Significantly, the test of scientific theory is prediction and falsification. Einsteinian physics has been repeatedly verified in its details by the accuracy of
his predictions, a process that continued long after his death. If observation
failed to confirm Einsteins predictions, then some elements of his theory
would be falsified and discarded. The predictions of Jesus and his followers,
however, have been falsified hundreds of times over but never discarded, and
that is the difference between Einstein and Jesus.
However, one of the signs of the End has been completely and indubitably
fulfilled: In their greed these teachers will exploit you with fabricated
stories. 126 Or as the King James Version renders it, And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you (umaj emporeusontai). The verb in question means to make a profit from, or exploit for
gain. Christian false prophets were quick to monetize the hopes of the gullible; the Didache, composed in the late 1st century, warned early believers,
But if [a man claiming to be a prophet] has no trade, according to your
understanding, see to it that, as a Christian, he shall not live with you idle.
But if he wills not to do it, he is a Christ-monger (cristemporoj). Watch that

125
126
Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, 82-83.

2 Peter 2:3, NIV.
23
you keep away from such.127 The christemporos, or Christ-monger, was an

early forebear of modern-day salesmen of the apocalypse.
Lucian describes the Christian career of the religious grifter Peregrinus:
It was then that he learned the wondrous lore of the Christians, by
associating with their priests and scribes in Palestine...in a trice he
made them all look like children; for he was prophet, cult-leader,
head of a synagogue (xunagwgeuj), and everything, all by himself. He
interpreted and explained some of their books and even composed
many...Then at length Proteus was apprehended for this and thrown
into prison, which itself gave him no little reputation as an asset for
his future career and charlatanism and notoriety-seeking he was
enamored of...Indeed, people came even from the cities in Asia, sent
by the Christians at their common expense, to succor and defend and
encourage the hero...So if any charlatan and trickster, able to profit
by occasions, comes among them, he quickly acquires sudden wealth
by imposing on simple folk.128
Christians were an easy target for the racketeers of the Roman Empire.129
As they are for the hucksters of the modern eraLucians [Peregrinus] is a
shysterthe first example in literature of an anything-for-profit evangelist
who bilks his congregations.130 As Kannaday points out, it was not merely
the widows and orphans who were easy marks for shysters like Peregrinus.
Even those members of the cult who were viewed as persons of means are
portrayed [in The Passing of Peregrinus] as fools who will soon be parted from
their money. The bigwigs of the sect, as he calls them, come across as impulsive, even whimsical, as they bribe guards for the privilege of sleeping inside
the cell with Peregrinus. Lucians satire, therefore, leaves the impression that
Christians are not so much generous as they are gullible, and not so much
faithful as they are foolish.131

127
Didache, 12:5.
Harmon, Lucian, V, 13-15.
...there is significant evidence to suggest that we have here a fairly accurate picture of historical events. In particular the mention of widows visiting Peregrinus is
striking...The visibility of widows in the story of Peregrinus will come as no surprise to anyone who has even the most basic knowledge of the involvement of women in early Christianity. (MacDonald, Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion, 74-75).
129
130
131
Kannaday, Apologetic Discourse and the Scribal Tradition, 144-145.
128
24
Hundreds of modern examples might be cited to support Lucians observation about Christian bred-in-the-bone credulityfrom faith healer Kenneth Copelands $20 million Cessna Citation bought with donor funds to
Joel Osteen, known for his cotton-candy, feel-good, self-help style of
preaching, who moved his 40,000 member church to a Houston sports
arena after performing a $75 million renovation to the facility. As Posner
noted, despite revelations of their flamboyance, secrecy about money, and
apocalyptic world view...lavish spending, or bizarre policy prescriptions,132
not to mention continuous exposs of questionable finances, sexual scandal
and outlandish pronouncements, the carny world of Christian Armageddonism continues to be a billion dollar enterprise.
In 1970, The Late Great Planet Earth, which sold something on the order of
30 million copies, predicted that Armageddon would occur one generation
after the establishment of the nation of Israel. The Left Behind business,
which to date has spawned sixteen novels and several low-budget movies
as well as a graphic video game in which teenagers can blow away nonbelievers and the army of the Antichrist on the streets of New York133has
garnered an estimated 75 million customers for its books alone. The dispensationalist dreck dispensed by the evangelical Left Behind fantasies appropriately includes a Catholic cardinal among the Antichrists inner circle.134
The co-author of the Left Behind nonsense, Timothy LaHaye, is a Southern
Baptist preacher man, who before becoming the champion of Christian
America and the apocalypse...made his living as a fortune teller.135
Among Christians in the mainstream sects, the solution to the failure of Jesus prophesy has been to simply ignore it and all that it implies, essentially
the imposition of a species of institutional senile dementia that has, most
conveniently, erased the memory of Christian origins from millions of Christian minds. Among evangelicals, the specter of a planetary holocaust, from
which they alone will be saved, is a source of selfish satisfactionto say nothing of the endless mercenary possibilities for the End Times business empire.
After the Eurcharist, the Parousia is Christianitys most lucrative product
being an illusion it costs nothing to manufacture and because it will never
arrive costs nothing to shipand its vast earning potential has been extended
indefinitely through the application of the economic theory called dispensationalism.

132
Posner, Gods Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters,
21, 113, 172-173.
133
Hedges, American Fascists, 186.
134
Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, 70.
135
Hedges, American Fascists, 187-188.
25
The creature of John Darby (d. 1882), who, like the apostle Paul, received
his revelation after falling off a horse, dispensationalism depends on an illiterate reading of scripture that encourages amateur Bible bricoleurs to select
suggestive bits of text and cobble them together into oracular utterances only
they can interpret. Darby, who believed the invention of the telegraph was a
sign of impending Armageddon, invented a prophecy-generating device that
any Bible-toting fool with a grade school education could easily operate.
Biblical literalists from Jehovahs Witnesses to Southern Baptists assiduously
applied themselves to the task, cranking out an endless series of failed predictions. The Jehovahs Witnesses, for example, foretold that Armageddon
would occur in 1975 and when 1975 came and went with nothing spectacular having happened membership in the cult dipped. Strangely, many
Witnesses, particularly those in responsible positions, seemed to suffer from
some sort of collective amnesia which caused them to act as though the year
1975 had never held any particular importance to them at all.136
It has been estimated that as many as 40 million people in the United States
alone subscribe to some version of dispensationalism. To its Roman critics,
who regarded Christianity as inherently irrational, an epidemic of religious
psychosis, a folie plusieurs, none of this would have come as any surprise:
One ought first to follow reason as a guide before accepting any belief, since
anyone who believes without first testing a doctrine is certain to be deceived
...Just as the charlatans of the cults take advantage of a simpletons lack of
education and lead him around by the nose, so too with the Christian teachers: they do not want to give or receive reasons for what they believe.137
Despite failures beyond counting of End Times predictions, there is little
hope that endless disconfirmation will stop the prophecy scam in modern
times any more than it did so in the first Christian centuries. Hoffman notes
that the Jewish apocalyptic tradition to which Jesus belonged had been mystically vague, studiously mysterious regarding the timing of apocalyptic
events, and concludes, Christianity did not so much invent its imprecision
as use it to advantage, having mimicked the style of its Jewish prototype...the
belief that unfulfilled prophecies had been misread prophecies, provided
some consolation to the beleaguered community.138
However, I suspect that the evangelical fascination with End Times whackadoodle springs from a darker needDarbys End Times head-trip was a
nihilistic vision expressive of the modern death wish. Christians imagined the
final extinction of modern society in obsessive detail, yearning morbidly toward it...Premillennialism was a fantasy of revenge: the elect imagined them
136
Penton, Apocalypse Delayed: The Story of Jehovahs Witnesses, 99-100.

Hoffman, Celsus on the True Doctrine, 54.
138
137
26
selves gazing down upon the sufferings of those who had jeered at their beliefs, ignored, ridiculed, and marginalized their faith, and now, too late,
realized their error...the reality it purports to present is cruel, divisive, and
tragic.139 As one of the most effective modern critics of funtamentalist Christianity noted, Religion looks forward to the destruction of the world. By this
I do not mean looks forward in the purely eschatological sense of anticipating the end. I mean, rather, that it openly or covertly wishes that end to
occur.140
Like the Christians who gloated over the destruction of Jerusalem and interpreted it as retribution for the Jewish rejection of Jesus, evangelicals itch to
see the secular world that dismisses their literalist belief go down in a sea of
flame. The Seventh-Day Adventists, who gathered on the hilltops on October 22, 1844, to watch the world end, called the date The Great Disappointment after the world continued to turn. What, one wonders, could be
more purely evil, or more completely demented, than to wish the destruction
of a planet and its life? What hope could one hold out for a planet populated
by such moral degenerates?
The imminent Kingdom turned out to be a mirage. As believers imagined
themselves to be rapidly approaching it, the Kingdom steadily receded, leaving them to die, one by one, generation after generation, forever. Events
proved Jesus to be a false prophet and Paul a peddler of delusionBehold, I
tell you a mystery!141 is the mere cant of a carny barker. Apocalypticism, the
bedrock of Christianitys original theology, is a laughable piece of Levantine
folklore and its adherents, now as in the days of Lucian, eminently suitable
objects of derision.
Christianity is a Jewish heresy.

The Jesus of primitive tradition cares not a whit for GentilesGo nowhere
among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go instead to
the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news: the
kingdom of heaven is almost here.142 Jesus traveled through the small, often
anonymous towns of Galilee, seemingly avoiding the major cities. Citizens of
Sepphoris, Tiberius, the coastal plain and the Decapolis heard none of his

139
Armstrong, The Battle for God, 138-139.

Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, 56.
141
142
Matthew 10:5-7.
140
27
sermons. When Jesus did enter the territory of cities in the Decapolis, he remained outside the walls (Mk 5:1; 7:31; 8:27).143 Jesus preaching reflects
the village144Jesus parables accordingly speak of sowers and fields,145 shepherds and flocks,146 and birds and flowers.147 Before his fateful trip to Jerusalem, it appears Jesus had little to do with any major city.
Jesus attitude reflected the history of the region, in particular the aftermath
of the Maccabean revolt (167-160 B.C.E.), the first religious war in the history of humankind from which the Jewish nation that emerged was selfconscious and intolerant towards all Gentiles whether friendly or unfriendly.148 Romans regarded the Jews as a people who were true only to each
other[they were] regarded as misanthropesby the vast majority of Romans, and they had a long history of conflict with the authorities in
Rome,149 a simmering animosity that exploded into a series of disastrous
wars in 66 C.E. Writing to Jewish believers in Rome, Paul said, The name
of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you,150 possibly in
reference to such bias. The dogma of a chosen people, while at least implicit in most faiths, achieved a stridence in Judaism that was unknown in the
ancient world. Among cultures that worshipped a plurality of Gods, the later
monotheism of the Jews proved indigestible.151
Despite occasional encounters with Gentiles, Jesus attitude toward them
appears to have been openly antagonistic. Jesus refers to Gentiles as dogs
he tells the Canaanite woman whose daughter he eventually heals, It is not
right to take the childrens bread and throw it to the curs.152 Some commentators have interpreted Jesus use of kunarion (kunarion), the diminutive of
kuwn (kun), dog, as ironic or even affectionate,153 but as corrected by Grant,
the diminutive form rather expresses contempt and distaste.154 Jesus intended to draw the strongest possible distinction between the Jews, to whom
alone he has been sentI was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of
Israel 155 and the Gentile mongrelsDo not give what is holy to

143
Jeffers, The Greco-Roman World of the New Testament Era, 67.

Ldemann, Heretics, 63.
145
Mark 4:3-8.
146
Mark 6:34.
147
Matthew 6:26-28.
148
149
Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians, 16-19.
150
Romans 2:24.
151
Harris, The End of Faith, 93.
152
Mark 7:27.
153
Connolly, New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity, 158.
154
Grant, Jesus, 122.
155
Matthew 15:24.
Compare Matthew 23:37: Jerusalem, Jerusalemhow often I wanted to gather
144
28
dogs156 which he generally avoids.157 The Jesus movement...did not show

any inclination to reach out to Gentiles. The life of Jesus and the history of
the Jerusalem church illustrate this.158 It is quite clear from the hesitations
of the Apostles in the first chapters of Acts that there was a firm tradition that
Jesus had not ordered a mission to the Gentiles.159 Jews even regarded the
Samaritans, who claimed descent from the Israelite tribes of Ephraim and
Manasseh, as racially impure on the grounds that the Samaritans had intermarried with heathen peoples.160 Outside the archipelago of fundamentalist
Bible colleges this understanding of Jesus mission has now become common:
There is no evidence whatsoever, apart from the tendentious writings of the
later church, that Jesus ever conceived of himself as anything other than a Jew
among Jews, seeking the fulfillment of Judaismand, likely, the return of
Jewish sovereignty in a Roman world.161
Christian scholarship long ago parted company from the Jewish Jesus, establishing a self-conscious Christian tradition that deliberately distanced itself
from the historical Jewish context in which Jesus had lived and died...[Christians] had to explain to themselves, to potential converts, and, should they be
so challenged, to skeptical Jews, how it was that the Jewish understanding of
Jewish history and religion was false, and why those who had heard this
Christian revelation most directlyJesus Jewish audience in Palestine
should have so completely failed to receive it.162 Nevertheless, Christianity
could never have spread into the Greco-Roman world without the internationally distributed Jewish enclavesthe Dispersion communities were the
magnet which drew [Christian missionaries] beyond the boundaries of Palestine.163 As late as the end of the 1st century the Christian communities were
still conceived in terms of the Jewish DiasporaJames, a servant of God
and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes which are of the Dispersion,
greeting.164
As Christianity gained political power, violence against Jews increased. In
388, zealous Christians burned down the synagogue in Callinicum apparently at the instigation of the local bishop. Initially the civil authorities treated the matter as a breach of law and order and commanded the bishop to pay

your children together
Matthew 7:6.
157
Matthew 10:5.
158
Ldemann, Paul, 221.
159
Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version, 285.
160
161
162
Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, vii, 211.
163
164
James 1:1.
156
29
for the rebuilding of the synagogue. At this point, Ambrose, the bishop of
Milan, intervened by asserting that if the Christian emperor, Theodosius, applied the letter of the law he would effectively be siding with the Jews. Theodosius backed down. Ambrose upended the normal paradigm of law and order and redefined the situation in terms of a new emphasis on religious identity that transcended all other considerations...not only could martyrdom
now encompass aggressive and provocative violence against non-Christians,
but any apology or restitution conceded to the victims would apparently constitute apostasy, a denial of Christ165one need only note the freedom of
religion ordinances advancing in the neo-Confederate states of America in
response to the Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) decision that recognized same-sex
marriage to see a modern example of the emphasis on Christian religious
identity that transcends all other considerations.
The theological divorce between Jews and Christians has translated into realworld horror on numerous occasions but never more so than in Germany in
the 1930s in the setting of die Endlsung der Judenfrage, the The Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Gerhard Kittel, the editor of the Theologisches
Wrterbuch zum Neuen Testament, the German work translated into English
as the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, a work much admired by
many scholars,
...produced a body of work between 1933 and 1944 filled with hatred
and slander towards Jews and warmly supportive of National Socialist
anti-Jewish policies...Kittel admits he was a good Nazi. He had not
joined the Party under pressure or for pragmatic reasons; rather he
thought, as did countless people in Germany, that the Nazi phenomenon was a vlkisch renewal movement on a Christian, moral foundation...[Kittel] set German, Christian, social and vlkisch unity
against the Enlightenment, modern secularism and liberal democracy
...Some scholars, e.g., the liberal theologian, Adolf von Harnack, had
maintained that Christianity was totally unique from Judaism and
that the Old Testament should be removed from the Bible...the conclusion he reached coincided with the antisemitic prejudice that Judaism was necessarily inferior and unworthy to be considered the source
of Christianity...The clinching assurance for [Emanuel] Hirsch in his
encouragement of a Volks church was his conviction that Hitler was a
heaven-sent Christian leader...[Kittel] created a theological foundation for Nazi oppression of Jews, yet he somehow was able to reconcile his work with his Christian and academic values...Kittel, Althaus
and Hirsch were not isolated or eccentric individuals...These three

165
30
theologians saw themselves and were seen by others as genuine Christians acting upon genuine Christian impulses.166
In his magisterial work on the Catholic origins of anti-Semitism, Carroll remarks on the depth of Christianitys antipathy: Without this strain in Europes past [the Crusades, the Inquisition...the intermingling of antimodernism and antisemitism] a fascist movement organized around Jew hatred,
would not have occurred...[Hitler] was a much a creature of the racist, secular, colonizing empire builder who preceded him on the world stage as he was
of the religion into which he was born, and which he parodied. But in truth,
the racist colonizers, before advancing behind the standards of nations and
companies, had marched behind the cross...However modern Nazism was, it
planted its roots in the soil of age-old Church attitudes and a nearly unbroken chain of Church-sponsored acts of Jew hatred. However pagan Nazism
was, it drew its sustenance from groundwater poisoned by the Churchs most
solemnly held ideologyits theology.167
Paul, heretic and founder of Christianity.

In Antioch Paul and Barnabas preached in the synagogue to Jews, descendants of Abrahams race, and God fearing proselytes to whom the word of
salvation had been sent. The next Sabbath they appeared again to address the
Jews and [God] fearing proselytes168 but met resistance that culminated in a
shocking announcement.
The coming Sabbath nearly the entire city assembled to hear the
word of the Lord, but when the Jews saw the crowds they were filled
with rivalry and they began to speak out against what Paul was saying, blaspheming.
Speaking freely, Paul and Barnabas said, It was compulsory that
the word of God be spoken first to you. Seeing that you have cast it
aside and do not judge yourselves worthy of everlasting life, listen!
We turn to the Gentiles! For the Lord has commanded us as follows:
I have placed you as a light to the Gentiles to spread salvation to the
ends of the earth.169

166
Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel
Hirsch, 30, 31, 35, 50, 148, 198-199.
167
Carroll, Constantines Sword: The Church and the Jews, 475-476.
168
[God] fearing proselytesebomenoj proshlutojis a fixed expression for Gentiles converted to Judaism.
169
Isaiah 49:6.
The context reveals that the restoration of Israel is being predicted (Isaiah 49:5-7).
31
When the Gentiles heard this they began to celebrate and praise the
word of the Lord and as many as were destined for everlasting life believed. The word of the Lord spread throughout the region, but the
Jews incited the devout women of noble rank and the principle men
of the city and stirred up trouble for Paul and Barnabas and drove
them out of the [city] limits. So they shook the dust off their feet [as
a curse] against them and left for Iconium and the disciples were filled with joy and holy spirit.170
Lukethe true identity of the gospel writers was a matter of conjecture even
in the 2nd century, but following convention well call the author Luke
the only Gentile author among the gospel writers,171 composed Luke-Acts,
the first, and greatest, of Christian apologies to be addressed to highly placed
pagans,172 sometime after 80 C.E. Luke-Acts pretends that the mission to
the Gentiles resulted from a divine revelation. In the coastal town of Caesarea
lived a certain Cornelius, a centurion, a devout man who feared God. An
angel instructed Cornelius to summon Peter who by happy coincidence fell
into an ecstatic trance and saw a vision of unclean animals he was commanded to kill and eat. While still pondering the meaning of the vision, the
spirit told Peter that men were asking for him at the gate. Peter, invited to
the home of an unclean Gentile, concluded, In truth I am convinced that
God is not one who judges by appearances. With the conversion of Cornelius and his household, the faithful of the circumcision who accompanied
Peter were amazedthat the gift of the holy spirit had been poured out on
the Gentiles.173
One who judges by appearances more or less captures the sense of proswpolhmpthj (prospolmpts)one who receives [an impression] by the face
but the notion that the God of Israel didnt judge people by appearances
would have been news to Jesus who, in addition to being circumcised,174
wore magical tassels that healed those who touched them, 175 tassels (tycyc,
tsitsith) that all pious Jews wore in obedience to the law of Moses.176 Longer
tassels were the mark of greater holiness.177 Strict observance of the Torah
also forbid the cutting of the forelocks or corners (twap peot), the hair

170
Acts 13:26, 43, 44-52 (my translation).

Pagels, The Origen of Satan, 89.
172
Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, 430.
173
Acts 10:1-6, 9-17, 34, 45.
174
Luke 2:21.
175
Mark 6:56; Matthew 9:20-21; Luke 8:44.
176
Numbers 15:37-41.
177
Matthew 23:5.
171
32
growing in front of the ears.178 Jews were obviously meant to be different in

appearance from Gentiles, sanctification by segregation.179
The questionable history of Acts aside, it is clear from the letters of Paul, the
missionary-in-chief to the Gentiles, that inclusion of non-Jews provoked a
strong reaction from the leadership in Jerusalem. The letters of Paul, who was
executed in Rome around 64 C.E., predate the gospel accounts written after
the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. The gospels read the results of the war back
into the preaching of Jesus by having him predict the war as a judgment on
the Jews.180
Pauls push back is particularly notable in his letter to the Galatians, a circular letter to churches in Asia Minor. Paulan apostle neither from men
or by men, but from Jesus Christ and God the father181 confronts the
house churches that were breaking ranks and changing sides to a different
gospel and pronounces a curse on his competitorsagain I say, if someone
preaches a gospel to you different from what you received, a curse on him!182
The opposition to Paul comes not from pagan Romans, but from fellow Jews
as the context of the letter makes clear,183 false brothers,184 who have turned
against Paul due to the machinations of the so-called pillars (oi dokountej
stuloi)185 of the Jerusalem church, Peter, James and John. Paul reveals that
after a delegationcertain peoplecame from James, the brother of Jesus,186 in Jerusalem, Peter stopped eating with the Gentile Christians due to
fear of those of the circumcision and even Barnabas was led astray by their
hypocrisy.187
Pauls rejection of the Jerusalem leadership was absolutewe at no time acceded to a subordinate position in order that the truth of the gospel might
always endure among you. From those so-called [pillars]whatever they
were means nothing to meGod does not judge by human appearances (proswpon o qeoj anqrwpou ou lambanei). The so-called [pillars] contributed noth
178
Leviticus 19:27.
Ldemann, Heretics: The Other Side of Early Christianity, 65.
180
Luke 20:20-21, for example.
181
Galatians 1:1.
182
Galatians 1:6, 8, 9.
183
Galatians 4:10; 6:12.
184
Galatians 2:4.
185
Galatians 2:9.
The verb dokew (doke), to seem, carries strong implications of an appearance based on opinion, pretense, or conjecture.
186
Mark 6:3.
187
Galatians 2:9, 11-12.
179
33
ing to me!188 Not only does Paul have no intention of knuckling under to
the notables from Jerusalem, he follows up with a scandalous claim:
Listen! I, Paul, am telling you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you! Yet again I call every man who
submits to circumcision to witness that he is obliged to perform the
whole Law. You have been cut off from Christ! Whoever is justified
by law, you have fallen from grace!189
As other references from his letters make clear, Paul rejects circumcision as a
sign of election.190 His rejection of the rites and rituals of Judaism as a means
of salvation for Gentiles is absolute:
Watch out for the dogs (touj kunaj)! Watch out for the evil workmen!
Watch out for the mutilation (thn katatomhn)! For we are the circumcision (h peritomh), we who serve in the spirit of God and boast in
Christ Jesus and do not rely on the fleshalthough I also have reason
to rely on the flesh. If anyone else is confident in the flesh, I am
much more so: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel,
tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew [born] of Hebrews, a Pharisee in regards
to the Law, a zealous persecutor of the church, as for righteousness
according to the Law, blamelessI have lost everything and I regard
it as filth (hgoumai skubala)191 so I may gain Christ!192
In Pauls mind the reversal is completethe immediacy of prophetic charisma functions to neutralize traditional canons of authority. 193 Circumcision has become mutilationreal circumcision occurs through the spirits
effect on the heart.194 The dogs are no longer unclean Gentiles but the evil
workmen who insist on imposing Jewish ritual on Pauls Gentile house.195
This vision clearly contradicts the Jesus of the gospels: Anyone who breaks
one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same
will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and
teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.196

188
Galatians 2:5-6 (my translation).

Galatians 5:2-4 (my translation).
190
Romans 3:30; 1 Corinthians 7:19; Galatians 5:6.
191
The term skubalon (skubalon), means dung, manure, offal. It would barely be an
exaggeration to translate it as shit.
192
Philippians 3:2-9 (my translation).
193
194
Romans 2:29.
195
196
Matthew 5:19, NIV.
189
34
Indeed, Jesus tells a rich man he must keep the Law to gain eternal life197
If the same person approached Paul with the same question twenty years
later, what would he have said? Would he have told him to keep the Law?
His own writings give a clear answer: decidedly not (cf. Rom. 3:10; Gal.
2:15-16).198
Indeed, Pauls relationship to Jesus has provoked frequent comment. As
Frend notes, Paul made no recorded attempt to explain Jesus teaching, to
prove from his words and deeds that he was the Messiah...he made no reference to the virgin birth, the miracles, or any salient incident in Jesus ministry...The Lord Christ, the God-man to be known by faith, replaced the prophet from Nazareth experienced by the disciples. [Paul] was not the man to
feel compassion for crowds. In some ways, even his sense of the elite prepared
the way for a Gnostic system of salvation...Paul was an apocalypticist, believing that the end was rapidly approaching. He imagined himself carrying the
gospel as one of the messengers promised for the end times.199
Pauls inconsistency regarding the Mosaic law did not escape the notice of his
Roman detractorseven though he called circumcision mutilation,200 he
nevertheless circumcised a certain man named Timothy, as the Acts of the
Apostles201 instructs us...And as if to press the point and make it an offense
for anyone to heed the law he says, Those under the law are under a curse.
The same man who writes, The law is spiritual202 to the Romans, and The
law is holy and the commandment holy and just203 now puts a curse204 upon
those who obey what is holy!205 Celsus could argue that Christianity was
patently false because, contrary to its own claims, it had deserted Jewish ways.
Christians may have claimed to have the correct interpretation of the Jewish
Scriptures, but on those points which were clearly set forth in the Scriptures
such as circumcision and keeping of the Sabbath, the festivals, and the
food lawsChristians wantonly disregarded the meaning of the very books
they claimed as their own...Christianitys claimed relation to Judaism was
perceived as one of its most vulnerable points.206 Julian certainly did not
miss pointing out that the Christians were double apostates: Why is it that
you do not abide even by the traditions of the Hebrews or accept the law

197
Matthew 19:17.
Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 99.
199
Frend, The Rise of Christianity, 92-93, 97.
200
Galatians 5:12; Philippians 3:2.
201
Acts 16:3.
202
Romans 7:14.
203
Romans 7:12.
204
Galatians 3:10.
205
Hoffman, Porphyrys Against the Christians, 58, 62.
206
Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 116-117.
198
35
which God has given to them? Nay, you have forsaken their teachings even
more than ours, abandoning the religion of your forefathers and giving yourselves over to the predictions of the prophets.207
Oddly enough, Jesus had nothing incisive to say about the cutting issue of
circumcising of Gentiles: He never had to. His mission did not extend to
Gentiles.208
The whitewashing tendencies of Acts aside, it is apparent from Pauls letters
to his house churches that he did not go unchallenged by the Jerusalem dogs
who preached mutilation. Pauls followers are being seduced by another Jesusa different spirita different gospel preached by crackerjack apostles.209 Such men are false apostles, treacherous workers, disguised as apostles of Christ. In case there is the slightest doubt about just who these
minions of Satan are, Paul asks, Are they Hebrews? So am I! Are they Israelites? So am I! Are they the seed of Abraham? So am I! Are they ministers of
Christ? I speak like a man derangedI am even more so!210
For the Aramaic-speaking community which remained in Jerusalem, the
Torah was still valid. Anyone who was baptized in the name of Jesus
whether Jew or Gentilewas not free to dispense with the law.211 Theological merits aside, the circumstances of history were to seal the fate of the Jerusalem faction. Around the year 62 C.E. a mob inspired by the Jewish authorities murdered Jesus brother James. The Christian historian Eusebius, writing
many years after the fact, described James as having been entrusted with the
throne of the bishop (o thj episkophj qronoj) in Jerusalem212Eusebius history seeks to validate the hierarchical organization of a later age by superimposing it artificially on the early Jesus movement. Earliest Christianity consisted in a loosely associated collection of local assemblies that were each
sociologically marginal and powerless...leadership in the assembly is clearly
both local rather than general and intimately connected to the structure of
the household.213
A war added destruction and chaos to the loss of leadership in the mother
church when, in C.E. 67, Vespasian invaded Galilee in response to a Jewish
revolt. Roman troops entered Judea in 68 C.E. and sacked and burned Jerusalem two years later. While the Romans slaughtered, enslaved and scattered

207
Wright, Against the Galileans, The Works of the Emperor Julian, III, 389.
209
2 Corinthians 11:4-5 (my translation).
210
2 Corinthians 11:13-14, 22-23 (my translation).
211
Ldemann, Heretics, 40.
212
Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History II, 23.
213
Johnson, Among the Gentiles, 234-235.
208
36
Jews in Christianitys homeland, the new cult, profoundly changed in character, progressed apace among Gentiles. As a lasting result in this change in
fortunes, the New Testament canon, formed in the 3rd and 4th centuries,
over-represented the importance of Paul among his 1st century rivals
because he figures so prominently in the New Testament, Pauls significance
in early Christian history has tended to be grossly overrated.214
Significantly it was in Antioch following Pauls arrival that the disciples were
first called Christians 215 in short, a Jewish faction that followed Pauls
Christ just as some identified themselves by allegiance to particular preachers
as mentioned by Paul himself: What I mean is this: One of you says, I follow Paul; another, I follow Apollos; another, I follow Cephas; still another, I follow Christ.216 Antioch, a city infamous for its sense of humor,
did not mean Christian as a complimentit was the Antiochenes who dubbed the followers of Christ Christians or Christ-groupies.217
Seen from the standpoint of the founding family in Jerusalem, defeated as
much by demographics and the vicissitudes of history as by theology, Pauls
ethnophilic Christianity was the first of many heresies. Starting with Paul, the
trajectories of Judaism and Christianity radically diverged. Although [Christianity] has its roots in Judaism, those roots are both shallow and distributed
across a diverse and divided first-century Judaism that was itself deeply
marked by Greco-Roman culture.218 After C.E. 70 an invocation, the Birkat
ha-Minim (~ynymh tkrb), the Invocation Against the Heretics, was recited in
synagogues to distinguish Jews from Jewish Christians. This prayer seems to
be behind Justins assertions in the mid-second century that the Jews curse
Christ in the synagogues.219
By the end of the 1st century the Jesus faction that started as a Jewish splinter
group based in Jerusalem split into multiple quarreling factions, a process already evident during Pauls career. Within a few decades of Jesus death,
Christians were at war with one another, and consistent with their apocalyptic mindset, their internecine squabbles were portrayed in the truculent rhetoric of the final battle between Light and Darkness, God and Satan. in
the last times some will fall away from (aposthsontai) the faith, misled by
deceptive spirits and teachings of demonsfor some have already turned
away to follow Satanhaving a sick craving for controversies and fights

214

Acts 11:26.
216
1 Corinthians 1:12, NIV.
217
Murdock, The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate, 120.
218
219
215
37
about words.220 The one who sins is from the Devil because the Devil has
been sinning from the beginning. 221 Even as there were false prophets
among the people, so also there will be false teachers among you who will
introduce destructive heresies (aireseij).222 In the beginning the heresy wars
were largely a matter of Jews fighting with other Jews over how Jewish Christianity would be.
[The Christians] identified themselves with the ancient texts of Israel
The earliest Christian compositions can be regarded, in fact, as a
massive effort to reinterpret Torah in light of the distinctive Christian
experiences and convictions connected with Jesusthere is a great
distance between a tiny cult trying to find its way in the world in
competition with a more ancient and impressive rival, and an imperial church that had (and was willing to use) the power to extirpate
its ancient foeHowever important Jewish Christianity may have
been in earlier generations, it diminishes to the point of disappearance by the mid-second century.223
By the late 1st century the rift between Judaism and Christianity had widened
to a chasm. The text of the later gospels reflects the internecine struggle between Jesus earliest disciples based in Jerusalem and the victorious Pauline
ethnophiles. Anachronistically reading this conflict back into Jesus preaching, his disciples are warned, They will hand you over to Sanhedrins (sunedria) and they will scourge you in their synagogues (en taij sunagwgaij).224
According to Matthew (composed around 80-90 C.E.), the Son of Man,
now identified with the risen Jesus, will gather all the [Gentile] nations225
before his throne of judgment and in anticipation of this grand finale to
history the disciples are commanded to convert all the nations, baptizing
them most unjewishly in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy
Spirit.226
According to Matthew, all the chief priests and Jewish elders took counsel
to plot some means of killing Jesus and having turned him over to Pilate for
execution, the mob threatens to riot if Jesus is released. After Pilate dramatically washes his hands before the crowd, the whole people reply, His blood
on us and on our children!227

220
1 Timothy 4:1, 5:15, 6:4.

1 John 3:8.
222
2 Peter 2:1.
223
Johnson, Among the Gentiles, 1-2, 173.
224
Matthew 10:17.
225
Matthew 25:32.
226
Matthew 28:19.
227
Matthew 27: 1-2, 24-25.
221
38
The two-volume apologetic we know as Luke-Acts addresses a theological

embarrassment and source of intense Christian anxiety: how did the Jewish
Messiah come to be roundly rejected by the Jewish people? The gospel of
Luke, written at least ten years after the fall of Jerusalem in C.E. 70, puts a
prophetic parable of condemnation into Jesus mouth as he enters the city: a
nobleman goes to a distant country to obtain kingly power, but on his return is rejected by the citizens who hate him, prompting his command,
Bring them here and slaughter them before me!228 In Lukes version of subsequent events, Peter, who died around C.E. 64, speaks to the men of Judea and all those who live in Jerusalem. In this retelling, written at least a
decade after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, Israelite men betrayed Jesus and you nailed him up by the hands of lawless men.229 The
wholesale destruction of the city and its people, which took place a generation after the generation that Jesus promised would witness the End, is reinterpreted as a sign of the ever impending but never arriving End.230
By the time the gospel of John was composed (after 90 C.E.) the break with
Judaism was complete: Abraham is our father is answered by You are from
your father the Devil and you are inclined to do your fathers desires.231
Those of the synagogue of Satan, who claim they themselves are Jews but
are liars, will be forced by Jesus to their knees before the feet of Christians in
order to know that I loved you.232 Christians have replaced the Jews as
Gods electthe Christians are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, Gods own people.233 The Jews, on the other hand, have become the
symbol of everything evil; the gospel of John, seeking to ingratiate Christians
with Roman authority, suppresses all traces of Roman initiative in Jesus
execution.234 As Carroll points out, once the embattled Jewish sect morphed into the Gentile Church, the structure of the foundational story was set,
the ground of Christian memory, the longest lie.235
If you, being a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how then do you
demand the Gentiles live as Jews (Ioudaizein)?236 Based on this verse, subsequent generations of Christians characterized the advocates of Jewish practice
as Judaizersfrom Ioudaizein (Ioudaizein), to live according to Jewish cus
228
Luke 19:11-12, 27.

Acts 2:14, 22-23.
230
Luke 21:20.
231
John 8:39, 44.
232
Revelation 3:9.
233
1 Peter 2:9.
234
Pagels, The Origin of Satan, 104-105, 106.
235
Carroll, Constantines Sword, 91.
236
Galatians 2:14.
229
39
toms. Christians who believed the destruction of Jerusalem was punishment

since [the Jews] killed the prophesied Christ237 clearly did not share Pauls
belief that all Israel will be saved.238
The internal scrimmage initiated by Paul, a Jew born of Jews, in the Jewish
splinter group that would become Christianity became the theological justification for two millennia of horror by setting a grim precedent, to confirm
for Christians their own identification with God and to demonize their opponentsfirst other Jews, then pagans, and later dissident Christians called
heretics.239 Well before the closure of the New Testament canon apostasy
(apostasia), 240 heresy (airesij) 241 and heretical (airetikoj) 242 entered the
Christian vocabulary, sealing the fate of countless future lives. As pointed out
by Brakke, heresy is an invention created through practices such as excommunication, ritualized condemnation, and silencing of texts243 to say nothing of being tried sub rosa, tortured with thumb screws, racked, water boarded or burned alive at the stake.
The triumph of Pauline Christianity marked a stunning reversal: the earliest
tradition among Jesus followers became Judaizing, and the most primitive
form of Christianity, its original form, became its first heresy.
...beyond question, in some areas what was later called heresy preceded orthodoxy. This insight of Bauers proves itself in particular in
connection with the earlier Jewish Christian community in Jerusalem, the descendants of which were called heretics. But it may also
apply to other Christian groups[the] historical picture of orthodoxy always preceding heresy misled Christian theology for almost
two thousand years, deterring critical scholarship from reconstructing
Christian origins as they really were.244
In his 20th century classic, Walter Bauer identified this reversal.
It could be said that the Jewish Christians in their opposition to Paul
introduced the notion of heresy into the Christian consciousness.
The arrow quickly flew back at the archer. Because of their inability
to relate to a development that took place on hellenized gentile soil,

237
Origen, Contra Celsum I, 47.

Romans 11:26.
239
Pagels, The Origin of Satan, xvi.
240
241
242
Titus 3:10.
243
Brakke, The Gnostics, 15.
244
Ldemann, Heretics: The Other Side of Christianity, 11-12.
238
40
the Judaists soon became a heresy, rejected with conviction by the

gentile Christians. Basically, they probably remained what they had
been in the time of James the JustThus the Judaists become an
instructive example of how even one who preserves the old position
can become a heretic if the development moves sufficiently far beyond him.245
The importance of this point should not be overlooked. the priority of
orthodoxy and the subsequent nature of heresy is a lie, the invention of the
sect that finally emerged victorious. Following the analogy of the church historian Rousseau, Brakke likens the emergence of orthodox Christianity to a
horse race: In this model, we cannot really see the starting gate, but around
the year 100 CE, numerous independent Christian communities come into
view246 and it is only near the end of the 3rd century that the eventual winner
often called proto-orthodoxyis revealed.
Similarly, the churches of Marcion, the first Christian to attempt to define a
canon of Scripture, filled the whole world according to Tertullian; besides
Rome and Carthage, they are documented in various cities of Asia Minor and
in Syria, including Antioch, but in the end, Marcions church took permanent root only in parts of Syria and towards the Euphrates frontier.247
In 451 C.E. the church council at Chalcedon ruled against the Monophysites
from monoj (monos), single, and fusij (phusis), natureChristians who
believed that Jesus had a single divine nature. After 451 the Christians of the
west declared that Jesus had two natures, one divine and one human, made
known in two natures without confusion, without change, without division,
without separation. With Chalcedon the Church took another long step
away from the historical JesusNot only were Monophysites numerous
and influential, but they dominated much of the Christian world and the
Roman Empire long after Chalcedon...The heirs of the very oldest churches,
the ones with the most direct and authentic ties to the apostolic age, found
their distinctive interpretation of Christ ruled as heretical...Each side persecuted its rivals when it had the opportunity to do so, and tens of thousandsat leastperished. Christs nature was a cause for which people were
prepared to kill and die, to persecute or to suffer martyrdom.248 A few Chris
245
Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, 236.

Brakke, The Gnostics, 6,7.
The reader interested in more detail is referred to Ehrmans Lost Christianities:
The Battles for Scriptures and the Faiths We Never Knew, particularly pages 95134, 159-180.
247
Frend, The Rise of Christianity, 215, 217.
248
Jenkins, Jesus Wars, xi.
Mussolini even gave, as one of his justifications for the use of poison gas and
246
41
tian sects, notably the Copts and the Syriac Orthodox Church, still retain the
Monophysite creed.
We can identify a further cause of animosity between Christians and Jews:
under Julius Caesar the Jews were recognized as a religio licita, a policy continued under Augustus, Caligula, Nero and even Vespasian.249 Besides being
protected by imperial decree, Judaism was respected for its antiquitynothing was older or more venerable than Jewish cult, synagogues were wellknown buildings in many Roman cities and the upper-class Jewish priesthood had a strong history of support for Rome.250 The protections afforded
by official recognition of Judaism did not, however, extend to Christians who
the Romans eventually recognized as a Jewish heresy, a process hastened by
the new sects anti-Jewish polemic. ...new religions do not come into being
ex nihilo, but are in some sense always heretical or revitalization movements
...the new group draws a tight circle around itself and insists that it has
broken radically with the corruption of the previous order.251
Which leads us to another insight first advanced by pagan critics, namely
that
there was never a single Christianity.

Early Roman critics were well aware of the internecine skirmishing between
the Jewish majority and the Jewish followers of Christ and early Christian
documents reflect that fact. When the Jews accused Paul of fomenting a form
of worship against the law, the proconsul Gallio refused to involve himself
in the controversy, a dispute about semantics and names, and dismissed the
case with an abrupt, See to it yourselves.252 Gallio treated the problem as
an internal affair of the Jews (which it was then)...253
In a stinging characterization, Celsus dismissed the quarrels between Christians and Jews as a proverbial fight about the shadow of an ass.254 Celsus

other gruesome measures in Abyssinia, the persistence of its inhabitants in the
heresy of Monophysitism... (Hitchens, God is Not Great, 236).
249
Berchman, Porphyry Against the Christians, 25.
250
Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, 428-429.
251
252
Acts 18:15.
253
254
Origen, Contra Celsum III, 1, 4.
42
correctly noted that as Christians increased in number they are divided and
form factions (scizontai) and each wants his own sect and concluded, they
still have one thing in common, so to speak, if indeed they have that in
commonthe name [Christian].255 Celsus employs the verb scizw (schiz),
from whence our schism as in the Great Schism of 1054, the separation of
Eastern and Western orthodox churches over the procession of the Holy
Spirit. The schism of 1054 reached its culmination when the Pope of Rome
and the Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated each otherPope and
Patriarch eventually patched up their differences in 1965. A second Great
Schism, resulting from an argument about papal succession, resulted in two
competing popes ruling in the West from 1378 to 1417, one from Rome and
the other from Avignon.
By the 4th century, Epiphanius, the bishop of Salamis, was able to list no less
than eighty heresies extending back over history (he was assured his total was
correct when he discovered exactly the same number of concubines in the
Song of Songs!), and Augustine in his old age came up with eighty-three.256
In the centuries that followed, Jesus followers would split into warring factions over every issue from slavery to gay rightsthe largest Protestant
denomination in America, the Southern Baptist Convention, split from their
northern brethren in 1845 when the northern Baptists refused to appoint
slave owners as missionaries.
The many-headed hydra of Gnosticism.

By the time Celsus wrote The True Doctrine (approximately 175 C.E.) Christianity still retained a fading Jewish contingent, the Ebionites, but the Jew
versus Gentile controversy had taken on a new and ominous twist. Some
Christian sects, broadly and problematically characterized 257 by recent
scholars as Gnostics, had utterly rejected Judaism and Jewish scripture. That
gnosticism was a grab bag of diversity, currently labeled hybriditymixing,
combining, and grafting of disparate cultural elements258 was recognized by
Hans Jonas over half a century ago: ...the salient feature [of Gnosticism]
seems to be the absence of a unifying character.259 The fundamental incoherence of the gnostic movement epitomized the interpretive chaos of primitive Christianity. Following the false lead of ancient Christian apologists, historians of religion once considered Gnosticism as a heretical offshoot of
orthodoxy, but as Brakke points out in a recent work, Gnosticism as tradi
255
Ibid, III, 10, 12.

257
258
259
Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, xvi.
256
43
tionally conceived, does not serve a useful purpose and does not accurately
identify an actual ancient religion...Gnosticism is an outstanding example of
a scholarly category that, thanks to the confusion about what it is supposed
to do, has lost its utility and must be either abandoned or reformed.260
Celsus, a remarkably well-informed opponent 261 of Christianity, learned
many details of the beliefs of various Christian factions: their members formed secret companies with each other262 that violated legal norms, some sects
rejected the Jewish God and the Jewish scriptures,263 and offered widely differing interpretations of the gospelsOrigen conceded the existence of Marcion, Valentinus, Lucian, the Ophites, Cainites, Simonians, Marcellians,
Harpocratians, Sibyllists, Ebionites and Encratites 264 some even rejecting
the doctrine of the resurrection according to scripture (to peri anastasewj
kata taj grafaj dogma)265 and worshipping a god above heaven who transcends the heaven of the Jews, (ton uperouranion qeon uperanabainontaj tou
Ioudaiwn ouranon)266 the facts adduced by Celsus forced Origen to admit
there are some among us who do not say that God is the same as the God of
the Jews.267 The god above heaven had magical significance; Kotansky has
published a spell that begins, I invoke you, the One above heaven... (ton
epanw tou ouranou).268 Accusations of sorcery and Satanism would become
standard charges directed by Christians against their opponents, Jews as well
as fellow Christians, a practice that goes back to the New Testamentfor
some have already turned aside to follow Satan.269
Celsus obviously knew Christianity at first hand, and as a skilled polemicist
his portrait of the Christian movement is detailed and complete.270 Because
in the eyes of pagans Christianity had become not one thing but a manyheaded monster with rival claims, Origen must constantly bear in mind that
the heretics also have their interpretations of scripture...Origen needed to
keep adjusting his position while standing on shifting sands.271
Although some gnosticizing sects rejected the Hebrew bible, Pearson is almost certainly correct when he states, it becomes abundantly clear that the

260
Brakke, The Gnostics, x, 19.

Chadwick, Origen: Contra Celsum, ix.
262
263
Ibid, II, 3; IV, 2.
264
Ibid, II, 27; III, 10, 13; V, 61-62, 64-65; VI, 19.
265
Ibid V, 12.
266
Ibid VI, 19. (Compare VI, 61; VI, 21; VIII, 15).
267
Origen, Contra Celsum V, 61.
268
Kotansky, Greek Magical Amulets, I, 276, 280.
269
1 Timothy 5:15 (NASV).
270
271
261
44
essential building blocks of Gnostic mythology are reinterpretations of Jewish

scriptures, Jewish scriptural interpretation and Jewish traditions.272 Another
expert has suggested that [Gnosticism] begins roughly in a movement in the
fringes of Judaism mainly among a disenfranchised priestly component.273
During a period when Judeo-Christian sects were multiplying like rabbits, in
a rather bizarre twist some factions co-opted the quintessentially Jewish Jesus
who criticized the Pharisees for not observing the Mosaic Law closely enough274
while writing both the Jewish law and the Jewish God out of their version of
Christianity. However, as we have seen, these gnostic sects would not be the
last to try to isolate Jesus from his Jewish past, a project repeatedly carried to
extremes by various Christians and Christian groups.
In point of fact, gnostic traits are already apparent in the New Testament
documents. The Marcionite movement, begun around C.E. 144, which prohibited sexual intercourse and marriage, doubtless took some comfort from
the words of Paul, Now to the unmarried and widows I say it is good for
them to stay unmarried, as I do.275 The rejection of the material world, in
embryo in the writings of Paulthe world is dead to me and I am dead to
the world276reaches its logical extreme in some gnostic sects as well as the
writings of Tertullian where marriage is disparaged as obscenity (spurcitiae).277 Whereas Paul discouraged marriage due to apocalyptic fervorThis
is what I mean, brothers: the appointed time has grown very short. From
now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none278 the
gnostic movement sought to cease populating the world of the lesser god, the
Demiurge, due to an unequivocally negative evaluation of the visible world
together with its creator; it ranks as a kingdom of evil and darkness...The
world is the product of a divine tragedy...a baleful destiny in which man is
entangled and from which he must be set free.279 No doubt, however, Gentiles found attractive the considerable similarity of Pauls Christianity to the
pagan mystery religions...His system is a syncretism formed by fitting Jesus
(what little he knew of him) into the mystery-religion format. Same old story
with a new real, historical hero. It sold like hot cakes.280

272
Pearson, Voices of Gnosticism, 72.

Turner, Voices of Gnosticism, 90.
274
Matthew 5:20.
275
1 Corinthians 7:8. (Compare 1 Thessalonians 4:4).
276
Galatians 6:14.
277
Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 144-145.
278
1 Corinthians 7:29, ESV.
279
Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism, 60, 66.
280
Ldemann, Paul, 230.
273
45
We are again indebted to Bauer for the insight that heresy was the predominant form of Christianity during the first several centuries of its existence.
To Origen there also flocked countless heretics (EH 6.18.2)281 as
well as orthodox...Thus even into the third century, no separation between orthodoxy and heresy was accomplished in Egypt and the two
types of Christianity were not yet at all clearly differentiated from
each other...It is also highly significant that precisely [Ignatius] gnostic contemporaries and countrymen can without hindrance call themselves Christians, as Eusebius twice complains in utter disgust...
Polycarp fights against a docetic Gnosticism: Everyone who does not
confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is an antichrist...and
whoever perverts the words of the Lord...and says that there is neither
a resurrection nor a judgment, that man is the firstborn of Satan.
Immediately after this [Polycarp] adds: Therefore let us abandon the
foolishness of the great majority (mataiots tn polln) and the false
teachings...Each individual and each special group is fighting for its
Christ and against the Christ of the others, and is endeavoring to enlist tradition and theological inference in his service...for a long time
after the close of the post-apostolic age the sum total of the consciously orthodox and anti-heretical Christians was numerically inferior to that of the heretics.282
Thanks to its esotericism and consequent lack of formal restraints, all Gnosticism tended to be anarchically speculative; and Christian Gnosticism was
worst of all, a many-headed hydra, as the heresiologists put it, likely to devour and regurgitate, often in virtually unrecognizable form, any idea that
came into view.283 The Christian factions generally considered gnostic had
an underlying structure of themes, but these were just a bedrock to build cities of theosophical inquiry without much legalistic zoning. 284 Consistent
with the rejection of the Old Testament by some gnosticizing groups, Celsus
noted, Christians say the Creator (dhmiougon, dmiourgon) is an accursed
god because he cursed the serpent (ofij, ophis) that revealed the knowledge
(gnwsij, gnsis) of good and evil.285 Gnostic sects that demoted Yahweh
the Demiurge (dhmiourgoj, dmiourgos), craftsman or creatorto the position
of a lesser god were called Ophites, snake worshippers, by early apologists.286

281
Eusebius Ecclesiastical History.

Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, 59, 67, 72, 202, 231.
283
Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes, 113.
284
Conner, Voices of Gnosticism, 3.
285
Origen, Contra Celsum VI, 28.
286
Ibid, III, 13.
282
46
Celsus also knew of a Christian diagram illustrating ten heavens represented

as circles guarded by theriocephalic angels287 a form of the diagram still
existed in Origens day. Celsus compared the multiple squabbling JudeoChristian sects to a flight of bats or a swarm of ants.288 However, Celsus
comparison is hardly fair to ants and bats that, despite the appearance of confusion, know where theyre going and very rarely collide with each other.
Multiplying gospels.
Irenaeus complained, [The heretics] adduce an untold multitude of apocryphal and spurious writings which they have composed to bewilder foolish
menthe more modern endeavor to excogitate something new every day and
to produce something no one has ever thought of289 during the series of
violent clashes between Catholics and Calvinists or Huguenots (1562-1598),
during which an estimated 4 million Europeans were murdered, Irenaeus
remains were disinterred by the Calvinist faction and thrown into the river
Loire during an orgy of vandalism that included the destruction of monasteries and manuscripts.
By the end of the 2nd century Christianity had acquired a permanent siege
mentality. Assailed from without by a hostile Greco-Roman society, threatened from within by a waning Jewish faction and a burgeoning gnostic movement, the borders of Christian orthodoxy required constant surveillance, an
incessant policing of difference. As the emerging church struggled to gain
control over its founding narrativeorthodoxy marching to an inevitable
triumph over heresy290 upholding this story required the suppression of
competing gospel stories and the crushing of dissent.
Early Christian apologists and historians such as Irenaeus and Eusebius concocted a falsified narrative, an apostolic fiction, in which Jesus transmits a
coherent, if secretive, body of teaching to his apostles who in turn transmit
the doctrines to a succession of bishopsin fact, it was not until 367 that
Athanasius, in his 39th Easter letter, declared the 27 books currently in the
New Testament to be authoritative within his jurisdiction. By the 4th century
the invention of a unified Church with an official canon universally accepted
had been set in place and generations of scholars would repeat this fiction in
outline even as they questioned the veracity of its details.

287
Origen, Contra Celsum, VI, 21, 24-32.

Ibid, IV, 33.
289
Irenaeus, Against the Heresies I, 20.1; 21.5.
290
288
47
That the Christians were cooking their books did not escape the notice of
their Roman critics: After this [Celsus] says that some believers, as though
from a drinking bout, go so far as to oppose themselves and alter the original text
of the gospel three or four or several times over, and they change its character to
enable them to deny difficulties in the face of criticism. I do not know of people
who have altered the gospel apart from the Marcionites and Valentinians,
and I think also the followers of Lucan. As is his wont, Origen deftly ignores
the point of Celsus accusation: But this statement is not a criticism of
Christianity, but only of those who have dared lightly to falsify the gospels.291
In point of fact, Julian opens Against the Galileans with some choice words
about the Christian gospel: the fabrication (h skeuwria) of the Galileans is a
forgery (plasma) of men constructed by fraud (upo kakourgiaj).292 It is worth
the effort to briefly unpack Julians terms: skeuwria (skeuria), fabrication,
carries the added connotation of plagiarism. Julian was well aware that the
Christians had ransacked the Jewish scriptures, cherry picking passages they
could misconstrue as applying to Jesus. The preaching of the Christians was
therefore a plasma (plasma), a fiction, a counterfeit, or forgery, a contrivance
fudged together from disparate elements upo kakourgiaj (hupo kakourgias), by
malice, in order to defraud. Julian promised a detailed examination of the
miracle mongering and fabrications of the gospels (thj twn euaggeliwn
teratourgiaj kai skeuwriaj), but it appears that Cyril excised that part of his
polemic. Neither the vast majority of Jews nor educated Romans had been
deceived by this imposture, but it would take religious scholars working within the Christian intellectual regime fifteen centuries to slowly work their way
back to where Julians criticism began.
The Epistle of Barnabas (late 1st century or early 2nd) illustrates the extremity
to which Christians would go in raiding the Jewish scriptures, which they read
in Greek, not Hebrew, for proof texts: For it says, From his household Abraham circumcised eighteen men and three hundred (andraj dekaoktw kai triakosiouj) 293 ...The eighteen first, and pausing, he says three hundred. The
eighteen is I and Hyou have Jesus! (eceij Ihsoun).294 The Greeks used the
letter iota (I) to stand for ten, the letter eta (H) stood for eightthus iota plus
eta, and voil, the first two letters of IHSOUS (Jesus)! According to the
author of Barnabas, the Hebrew prophets were Jesus disciples, and when
Jesus finally came he raised them from the dead, likely an claim derived from
MatthewThe tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had
fallen asleep were raised; and coming out of the tombs after His resurrection

291
Chadwick, Origen: Contra Celsum, 90-91 (II, 27).

Julian, Against the Galileans, 39A.
293
Genesis 17:23.
294
Barnabas 9:2, 8.
292
48
they entered the holy city and appeared to many.295 The writer, basing his
fatuous numerology on a Greek translation of a Hebrew text, conveniently
overlooked the fact that the Old Testament prophets had not written in
Greek. Little wonder Romans found Christian preachments so simple to
refute.
Textual criticism since Westcott and Hort (1881) has clearly shown that
Christian scribes were not merely passive (or even accurate) transmitters of
textit has even been shown that a copyist could presumably reproduce a
text even when he could not read or understand it. Sometimes, however,
scribes took on the unsupervised role of creative consultant...the scribes pen
was mightier than the evangelists word...an intentional variant, it may be
argued, is no longer the act of a scribe but an author.296 Given this reading
of the abundant evidence of textual manipulation, one could affirm that the
New Testament had, in fact, a multiplicity of authors, nearly all of them unacknowledged.297 In the majority of cases the copyists, as users of the text,
had a vested interest in its meaning: Their ability to write meant they could
correct, clarify, buttress, or interpret a text, and, in so doing, impose with
enduring effect their own ideas into their exemplars and, in turn, those controversies that sought out authority or information...Christian scribes engaged in the act of transmitting the text of the New Testament occasionally
changed their exemplar in order to produce a text that resonated with the
tuning fork of the copyists own ideology.298 Noted textual scholar Eldon
Epp has proposed no less than four classifications of texts: (1) an autographic text-form, i.e., the text as originally composed, (2) a predecessor textform, the form(s) of the text discernible behind the form we now possess, a
canonical text-form, the text at the time it was declared authoritative by the
Church, and (4) an interpretive text-form, the form the text acquired
during any and each interpretive iteration...as it was used in the life, worship, and teaching of the church.299
Irenaeus also admitted that Christian factions were altering the gospel texts to
suit their theological ends: [Marcion] mutilated the Gospel according to
Luke, discarding all that is written about the birth of the Lord Irenaeus
also informs us about a fiction [the Cainites] adduce, and call it the Gospel
of Judas.300 As a matter of fact the Pastoral Epistles may contain an allu
295
Matthew 27:52-53.
Kannaday, Apologetic Discourse and the Scribal Tradition, 9, 14.
297
The interested reader is referred to Ehrmans The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (1993, Oxford University Press) for a compelling discussion of the effects of
christological controversy on the text of the New Testament.
298
Ibid, 22-23.
299
Epp, Harvard Theological Review 92 (1999): 276-277.
300
Irenaeus, Against the Heresies I, 27.2; I, 31.1.
296
49
sion to something like Marcions revision of Christian scripture: Timothy,

guard what God has entrusted to you. Avoid godless, foolish debates with
those who oppose you with their falsely-called knowledge (yeudonumou gnwsewj)301
It seems quite clear that by the end of the 1st century a bitter debate raged
over true and false gnosis and gospels were being composed or revised to
provide ammunition for the opposing sides. The Christians of the first centuries were not writing scripture as currently defined. Different writers felt
free to rearrange and alter the information they inheriteda simple comparison of the first three canonical gospels reveals thisbecause they did not
see themselves as writing scripture...The four gospels collectively stand as the
survivors of a process whose principles of selection had more to do with
competition between different Christian groups than with a disinterested
concern for history.302 It has been suggested that the earliest gospel, Mark,
is the synthesis of several stages of composition and written, plausibly, in
different locations.303 In Alexandria a Carpocratian lite among the Christians may have used a secret Gospel, perhaps the original form of Mark.304
The first century was likely marked by a profusion of gospelsmany have
undertaken to compile a narrative of the events that have been fulfilled
among us.305 In the course of time, the traditional material had not only
swollen greatly, but it provided quite diverse pictures. Alongside the synoptic
type of picture, there came John; alongside the canonical gospels were many
apocryphal gospels which were often pronouncedly heretical.306 Nearly every
Roman critic familiar with the gospels seems to have noted their inconsistencies and contradictions. Julian again: For Matthew and Luke are refuted by
the fact that they disagree concerning [Jesus] genealogy.307
In addition to the problem of forged apostolic letters and heretical gospels,
the house churches swarmed with prophets who at any moment might
blurt out some extraordinary nonsense. The faithful are not to become easily
unsettled or alarmed by the teaching allegedly from uswhether by a prophecy or by word of mouth or by letterasserting that the day of the Lord has

301
1 Timothy 6:20.
Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, ix, 6.
303
Humphrey, From Q to Secret Mark, 25.
304
For a recent discussion of the Secret Gospel of Mark and the controversy attending it, see Conner, The Secret Gospel of Mark: Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and Four Decades of Academic Burlesque (2015) Mandrake of Oxford.
305
Luke 1:1.
306
Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, 183.
307
302
50
already come.308 Late in the 1st century the Christian message was still subject to the whims of soothsayers who could claim divine inspiration: You
tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet. By her teaching she
misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed
to idols...And I solemnly declare to everyone who hears the words of prophecy written in this book: If anyone adds anything to what is written here,
God will add to that person the plagues described in this book. And if
anyone takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away
from that person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which are
described in this scroll.309 Many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord,
did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and
in your name perform many miracles?310 It takes no great imagination to
picture a loosely organized ecstatic sect in which any attention seeker or any
person who was mentally unbalanced could claim a personal revelation, thus
sowing further chaos in the ranks.
The documents of the New Testament attest to exactly such doctrinal bedlam: Children, it is the last hour; and just as you heard that antichrist is
coming, even now many antichrists have appeared; from this we know that it
is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not really of us...311 The
churches are beset by deceivers and antichrists,312 false prophets,313 who
in the Last Times will spread the teachings of demons314 and empty deceit.315 Therefore not many Christians should become teachers since they
will be judged harshly.316 The early Christian practice of speaking by the
spirit317 authenticated private revelation and unleashed a firestorm within
the house churches, an idiosyncratic tempest that resulted in corruption of
gospel texts, the emergence of ecstatic sects such as the Montanists of the late
2nd century, and the eventual suppression of gospels and sects that conflicted
with proto-orthodox teaching.
Eusebius provides an additional witness to the adjustments made to Christian
scripture as well as to the inadequacy of transmission:

308
2 Thessalonians 2:2, NIV.

Revelation 2:20; 22:18-19, NIV.
310
Matthew 7:22, NIV.
311
1 John 2:18-19.
312
2 John 1:7.
313
2 Peter 2:1-3; 1 John 4:1.
314
1 Timothy 4:1-5.
315
Colossians 2:8.
316
James 3:1.
317
Matthew 10:20; 1 Corinthians 12:3.
309
51
For this reason [confidence in the techniques of unbelievers] they

fearlessly put their hands on the divine scriptures, purporting to have
corrected them and that I make no false allegation against them anyone who wishes can learn, for if any man so desire, collect the copies
to closely compare each with the other. He would find many discrepancies and variances between those of Asklepiades and Theodotus
and it is possible to acquire an abundance of them since their disciples have copied them diligently, set aright as they call it, but in
fact corrupted.
Again, the copies of Hermophilus do not agree with these, nor do
those of Apollonides even agree with one another, for the copies they
produced first can be compared to those which later on they even further corrupted and they will be discovered to differ greatly.318
Even as Christians were busy tweaking the text of the gospels, the theology of
their falsified biographies also changed. Exorcisms, which litter the text of
Mark, lose the more lurid details in Matthew and Luke and disappear entirely
from the gospel of John. As Fredriksen points out, such key synoptic terms
as righteousness, power, and good news all fail to appear in John; Kingdom (as
in Kingdom of God), used more than 120 times in the first three gospels, occurs in John twice (3:3, 5; cf. 18:36). Conversely, the synoptics use truth 10
times to Johns 46; world (kosmos) 13 times to 78; and Jews 16 times to
Johns 67.319
Today some 5000 manuscripts of the New Testament books, produced before the advent of the printing press, are known. To the extent they have
been compared one to another they are known to contain at least 300,000
variant readingsthere are 138,000 words, more or less, in the New Testament. As textual scholar Bart Ehrman notes, the earliest copyists appear to
have been untrained and relatively unsuited to the tasks [of producing accurate copies].320 Besides the problem posed by untrained copyists, the gospels
and occasional letters of Paul were being used in fierce doctrinal disputes,
referenced obliquely in the New Testament books themselves[Paul] writes
the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters
contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.321 Since we have no preserved text of any length of any New Testament
document before the early 3rd century, we can only guess how editing or
other forms of meddling may have changed them,322 but the words of textual

318
Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History V, 28, 17-18 (my translation).

320
Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 49.
321
2 Peter 3:16.
322
The interested reader is referred to Ehrmans The Orthodox Corruption of Scrip319
52
scholar Helmut Koester are certainly worth bearing in mind: Textual critics
of classical texts know that the first century of their transmission is the period
in which the most serious corruptions occur. Textual critics of the New
Testament have been surprisingly nave in this respect.323
One might expect that after several centuries of the textual study of thousands of manuscripts the authentic text of the New Testament would be
firmly established. But in that case one would be gravely mistaken. Commenting on the critical edition of the United Bible Societies, Lane Fox
observed, Their committee considered that there were two thousand places
[in 1966] where alternative readings of any significance survived in good
manuscripts...by 1975 their Greek text had had to be revised twice because
no revision has yet proved free from error and improvement. The very aim, a
standard version, is misleading and unrealistic...There are scriptures but no
exact scripture within the range of our surviving knowledge...324
Developments, or rather the lack of them, also left a mark on the gospel texts:
...the failure of the End to precede the death of the beloved disciple caused a
further chapter to be added to his Gospel (John 21). Those who had predicted it in the plainest terms were wrong.325
Christianity appeals to the ignorant and

foolish.
The ancient world was a world in submission, the masses to the ruling class,
youths to adults, women to men, soldiers to their commanders, slaves to their
masters, and households to the whims and caprice of the paterfamilias. Jesus
own preaching assumes as muchJesus often refers to the master of the
house, the oikodespothj (oikodespots)326 or house despot, a title redolent
with hegemonic assumptions about masculine identity.327 The lord and master of the house can do as he pleases with what belongs to him328 and the

ture for an accessible, intelligent discussion.
Koester, Gospel Traditions in the Second Century, 19.
324
Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version, 156, 157.
325
Ibid, 346.
326
The term occurs at Matthew 13:52; 20:1; 21:33; Mark 14:14; Luke 12:39;
13:25; 14:21; 22:11, for example.
327
Anderson, New Testament Masculinities, 79, 102.
328
Matthew 20:15.
323
53
rulers of the Gentiles lord it over their subjects and the great among them
exercise dominion. 329 We can scarcely imagine the festering resentment
among the immiserated Jewish peasantry in Roman occupied Palestine, a fury
so intense that it contributed to no less than three wars between the Jews and
Romans.330
Roman law and governance discouraged arrivistes who sought to advance to
positions of controlIt was out of the question for a poor man to serve. For
a start, he could not have afforded the entry fee.331 Rome was effectively a
slave society in which sons followed the trade of their fathers as in the case of
Jesus himself. The villagers of Nazareth ask, Isnt this the laborer, the son of
Mary (Ouc outoj estin o tektwn, o uioj thj Mariaj) and the brother of James
and Joses and Judas and Simon, and arent his sisters here among us?332
Matthew rephrases the question to avoid making Jesus out to be a mere
laborer: Isnt this the son of the laborer? (Ouc outoj estin o tou tektonoj
uioj).333 The gospel writers were clearly anxious to buff Jesus thin rsum.
That Jesus cast his teachingsthat so far as we know were strictly oral, never
writtenin the form of parables points to a lack of formal education: For
centuries, the Jews had no schools or higher education: significantly, proverbs
had flourished, the symptom of societies where limited education imposes the
traditional and conventional expression of opinion, wisdom and sentiment
...By most people the words of the holy law were still heard but not seen
...Among the rabbis, we find that parables tend to begin from a biblical text:
in the Gospels Jesus never begins a parable from quoted scripture.334
The Jewish religious leadership, headquartered in Jerusalem, represented the
outlook of the elite; Jesus teaching, however, like that of John [the Baptist],
was directed to the Palestinian countryside and his main support came from
the crowds, that is, unlettered country folk.335 Have any of the rulers or

329
Mark 10:42, Matthew 20:25.

The First Jewish War (66-73 C.E.) resulted in the destruction of the Second
Temple (70 C.E.), ending with the siege of the stronghold at Masada. The Kitos
War (Kitos is a corruption of Quietus, the name of a Roman general) was a
widespread ethnic and religious conflict (115-117 C.E.), followed by the catastrophic Bar-Kokhba revolt (132-135 C.E.) that resulted in the expulsion of Jews
from Jerusalem and the founding of a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, on the
ruins of the former Jewish city.
331
332
Mark 6:3.
333
Matthew 13:55.
334
Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version, 106, 119.
335
330
54
the Pharisees believed in him? No! But this mob that knows nothing of the
lawthere is a curse on them.336
As Christianity progressed, Roman society regressed, becoming increasingly
calcified with the result that a mass of the permanently poor lived far below
the upper crust of the immensely rich. Though the ruling class dismissed the
new cult and its membership as yet another oriental import beneath contempt, the stratification of Roman society and the hopelessness that resulted
provided the perfect environment for Christianity to flourish and spread its
dominion. The poverty of the masses proved an environment in which religion generally flourishedas Marx said, Religious distress is at the same
time the expression of real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people...The demand to give up the illusions
about [the peoples] condition is the demand to give up a condition that
needs illusions.337 However, given the florid blood-and-guts apocalypticism
of American fundamentalists, we might consider revising Marxs statement to
read, Religion is the peyote trip of the particularly dim.
It has been estimated that about 90% of the population in the first century
was completely illiterate338 and the New Testament specifically states of Peter
and John that they were agrammatoj (agrammatos), without letters, 339
unable to read or writePeter even betrays himself to the Judean authorities
by his rustic Galilean accent.340 Since Jesus closest disciples were predominantly men who worked with their hands, an inability to read and write
would have been completely in keeping with their circumstances, a point
conceded by the Christian apologist Origen who admitted, they had not
received even the rudiments of learning (mhde ta prwta grammata memaqhkotaj) even as the gospel records about them.341 Origen also reports Celsus
charge that Christians were known their utter lack of education (amaqestatouj) and abysmal ignorance (apaideutotatouj), and that they gained
converts by misdirection: they set traps for complete yokels (paleuomen de
touj agroikoterouj).342
Both Celsus and Galen observed that Christians relied on faith without
proof. This was indeed the case. The uneducated were attracted in great

336
John 7:48, 49 (NIV).

Hitchens, God is Not Great, 9. The quote comes from Marxs Contribution to the
Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right.
338
Harris, Ancient Literacy, 147-175.
339
Acts 4:13.
340
Matthew 27:73.
341
342
Ibid, VI, 14.
337
55
numbers to the church, and they were assured that the foolishness of God is
wiser than men.343 It has been posited that there were as few as 420 literate
Christians at the beginning of the 2nd century, and as few as 42 fluent and
skilled literates in Christian communities empire-wide,344 which would go
some way toward explaining why Christian apologetic works appear so late. It
is also likely that the majority of Christians in the early church were illiterate
as evidenced by the custom of reading texts aloud.345 Even in cities, literacy
could not be assumed: It was possible to be a town councillor, a curialis, in a
major city and yet to be illiterate.346
Early Christian converts were mostly laborers, slaves and women, members of
groups with very low rates of literacy. Making a virtue of necessity, Paul
openly acknowledged that proclaiming Christ crucified, a scandal to Jews
and foolishness to Gentiles,347 opened Christians to charges that they were
dullards and dupes, an uncultured nullity.
Consider your own calling, brothers, that not many are wise in accordance with the flesh, or many powerful, or many well-born, but
God chose the worlds fools to shame the wise, and God chose the
worlds weak to shame the strong, and God chose the worlds lowborn and contemptible, the nobodies (ta mh onta), so that he might
overthrow the somebodies (ta onta).348
Not many in this case evidently meant precious few. Early Roman critics
such as Celsus clearly considered gullibility and ignorance to be notable
Christian attributes, to believe without reason.349 In his biography of the
religious huckster Peregrinus, the satirist Lucian described the Christians as
idiwtaij anqrwpoij (iditais anthrpois), ill-informed men,350 impressionable
rubes eager to believe and easily misledHe does not scrupleto call the
Christians iditai, a word which was then applied by the philosophers to
those whom they regarded as incapable of elevated thought.351 Lucian mocked the half-baked philosophers drawn from cobblers and carpenters (autoscedioi filosofoi ek skutotomwn h tektonwn)352 possibly a gibe aimed at Jesus

343

345
Compare Revelation 1:3; Colossians 4:16; 1 Thessalonians 5:27.
346
Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, 37.
347
1 Corinthians 1:23.
348
1 Corinthians 1:26-28. Ta mh onta, literally, the things that are not, versus ta
onta, literally, the things that are.
349
350
Lucian, On the Death of Peregrinus, 13.
351
Edwards, Christians, Gnostics and Philosophers in Late Antiquity, 95.
352
Lucian, The Double Indictment, 6 (my translation).
344
56
himself. Gathered in private homes, often supported by women, wool carders and cobblers and fullers (skutotomouj kai knafeij) and the most uneducated and biggest gaggle of yokels353 constituted the Christian mob. In essence,
Christianity redefined truth. Or in the words of Charles Pierce, discussing the
fundamentalist fascination with creationism, Fact is merely what enough
people believe, and truth lies only in how fervently they believe it.354
The house churches established by Paul can be characterized as a spirit-possession cult. Paul establishes communities of those possessed by the spirit of
Jesus.355 The worshippers and the attending spirits form a double assembly
356 Paul, addressing the Corinthians, declares, because you are zealous devotees of spirits... (umeij epei zhlwtai este pneumatwn).357 Regarding Pauls
version of Christianity, Ldemann observed, Its orientation is supernatural;
it calls for unquestionable subjection to authority and surrender to divine
guidance; its ultimate appeal is not to the intellect, but to the emotions; and
its final goal is to be seized by the Spirit. For this reason, spiritual enthusiasts
(pneumatics) are elevated high above people of a more everyday mind (psychics), because to them alone is disclosed the vision of the mysterious truth
which can never be grasped by reasonreligious enthusiasm had taken precedence over reason.358
It should be pointed out that Ldemann is using enthusiasm in its technical sense, not merely as a synonym for eagerness. The Greek enqousiasmoj
(enthousiasmos) referred to possession by a god, particularly by Dionysos, and
basically meant frenzy. The enqousiasthj (enthousiasts) was accordingly a
worshipper in the throes of religious possession. Christianity, especially
when under Pauline influence, was, after all, deeply anti-intellectual and
passionately concerned to establish the rights of irrationality in controllable
form.359 As Driver notes in his discussion of the role of ritual, Jesus said
that the wind (spirit) blows where it will.360 So also the spirits summoned by
shamanism arrive when, where, and how they will...In the New Testament,
especially in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus is portrayed more like a shaman than a priest. Probably the earliest Christian rituals were of the shamanic
type, occasions invoked the spirit of the crucified Jesus and became ecstatically possessed by him.361 The word pneuma (pneuma), wind or spirit, is a

353
Origen, quoting Celsus, Contra Celsum III, 55.

Pierce, Idiot America, 49.
355
Mount, Journal of Biblical Literature 124 (2005), 316.
356
Thee, Julius Africanus and the Early Christian View of Magic, 382.
357
1 Corinthians 12:3.
358
Ldemann, Paul: The Founder of Christianity, 128, 130.
359
Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe, 50.
360
John 3:8.
361
Driver, Liberating Rites, 74.
354
57
double entendre: to pneuma opou qelei pnei could be understood to mean the
wind blows where it wants or personified, mean, the Spirit blows where he
wants...
It is clear that the Pauline Christians conflated the spirit of God with the
spirit of the risen JesusPaul and his companions traveled throughout the
region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from
preaching the word in the province of Asia. When they came to the border
of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow
them to.362 and the author of 1 Peter even attributes the predictions of the
Old Testament prophets to the spirit of Christ in them.363 A pagan entering a house church would encounter a pandemonium of the spirit possessedif the whole church comes together and all speak in tongues and strangers or unbelievers enter, will they not say you are possessed (mainesqe)?364
Pauls Gentile converts would have been quite familiar with mania (mania),
frenzy, as a religious phenomenonthat religious trances and ecstasy were
the manifestations of possession by a god was one of wide currency in Greek
and Eastern religions. 365 Then the frenzy arrives (hdh h mania apikneetai)...,366 Lucian observed, and the transported male devotees of the Syrian
goddess Atargatis took up knives and castrated themselves.
The early Christian cult of possession had many points in common with
other ecstatic religions. Dionysus, the Son of Zeus, was born from a mortal
woman Semele as Jesus, Son of God, was born from the mortal woman
Mary. Dionysus is borne to Earth in a fiery bolt of lightening (astraphforw puri)367 much as Mary conceives because, The Holy Spirit will come
upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you368the
Holy Spirit will come upon you (epeleusetai epi se). The verb epercomai,
(eperchomai) is a power verb used in the papyri for magical attacks: defend
me from all troubles coming upon me (epercomenou mou)...369
Dionysus exchanged [his] divine form for a mortal one (morfhn d ameiyaj
ek qeou brothsian)370 just as Jesus, who existed in the form of God (oj en

362
Acts 16:6-7, NIV. Compare Romans 8:9.

1 Peter 1:11.
364
The verbal form of mania (mania), frenzy or possession.
365
Esler, The First Christians in Their Social Worlds, 46.
366
Lucian, De Dea Syria, 51.
367
Euripedes, Bacchae, 3.
368
Luke 1:35, NIV.
369
Preisendanz, Papyri Graecae Magicae, XXXVI, 176.
370
Euripedes, Bacchae, 4.
363
58
morfh qeou uparcwn), assumed human likeness and was found in the appearance of a man (en omoiwmati anqrwpwn genomenoj kai schmati eureqeij
wj anqrwpoj). 371 Euripedes Dionysus assumes human form, a grim predecessor of Christ.372 It is worth pointing out that the double nature of Jesus
celebrated in Philippians almost certainly derives verbatim from an early
Christian doxology, a hymn that, with no theological modification, could
have been addressed to Dionysus or any one of several other Greco-Roman
deities.
Paul clearly attempted to rein in the cacophony of the jabbering Christians
The one speaking in tongues speaks not to men, but to God. No one understands for he is speaking mysteries by the spiritif anyone speaks in a tongue, do so two at a time, or three at most, and in turns373 Ancient authors
noted the correlation between mindlessness and spirit possession:
Whenever [the light of the mind] dims, ecstasy and possession naturally assail us, divine seizure and madness (katokwch te kai mania).
For whenever the light of God shines upon us, human light is extinguished and when the divine sun sets, the human dawns and rises.
This is what is apt to happen to the guild of the prophets. At the arrival of the divine spirit, our mind is evicted. When the spirit departs,
the wandering mind returns home, for it is well established that that
which is subject to death may not share a home with that which is
deathless. Therefore the eclipse of the power of reason and the darkness that envelops it begets ecstasy and inspired madness (ekstasin kai
qeoforhton manian egennhse).374
Though generally beneath the notice of the Roman social lite, the three
Roman writers who mention Christianity at the beginning of the second century agree in calling the new movement a superstitioThe superstitious person engaged in religious practices that neither honored the gods nor benefitted men and women.375 Christians, on the other hand, saw their revelation
in a different light: It was a commonplace of Christian polemic that the
church had brought to the Roman world a wisdom and a moral code that
had previously been the fragile acquisition of, at best, a few great minds. In
the words of Augustine, in his City of God, any old woman, as a baptized
Christian, now knew more about the true nature of the invisible world of an-

371
Philippians 2:6-8.
Rutherford, Classical Literature: A Concise History, 61.
373
1 Corinthians 14:2, 27.
374
Philo, Quis rerum divinarum heres, Philo, IV (Loeb), 264-265.
375
Rutherford, 50, 60.
372
59
gels and demons than did Porphyry, the most learned of near-contemporary
philosophers.376
Wherever available, the data from the New Testament tend to support the
assessments of Roman critics. For example, Peter stays at the home of Simon
the tanner in his house by the sea.377 The shore was a nearly inevitable location for Simons enterprise given the need for water and the stench that accompanied the processing of hides. The Christian fullers (knafeuj) ridiculed
by Celsus were typically slaves employed in fulleries (fullonicae) who rhythmically stomped woolen clothing as it soaked in tubs of human and animal
urine that bleached the cloth and removed soilbacterial action on the nitrates in urine produces ammonia. The reek of such ancient laundries obliged
that they be located outside upmarket residential areas; the disastrous health
effects on the workers can easily be imagined.
Paul worked as a tentmaker as did his companions Aquila and Priscilla.378 Reflecting on early Christianitys ethic of poverty, Gager remarks, early
believers came from disadvantaged groups andin return they were rewarded with the promise that poverty, not wealth, was the key to the kingdom
wealthis rejected as a measure of human worth.379 Paul attests to the
relative destitution of the Corinthian Christians, to their utter poverty (h
kata baqouj ptwceia autwn) 380 ptwcoj (ptchos) means beggar. Jewish
Christians who continued to observe the Mosaic law were known as Ebionites381 from the Hebrew ~ynyba (ebyonim), poor or destitute. Given their belief
that they were living at the end of history,382 the Christians of the mother
church in Jerusalem sold their belongings and lived communally383 a factor
that likely contributed to their destitution. During the career of Paul, the
Gentile house churches were collecting money for the poor among the holy
ones in Jerusalem.384 Paul implies that the pillars of the Jerusalem church
required only that we [Gentiles] remember the poor.385 Remembering the
poor meant that Paul spent as much of his time between 52-57 C.E. col
376
Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, 73-74.

Acts 9:43; 10:6, 32.
378
Acts 9:43. Compare 1 Corinthians 4:12: we work hard with our own hands.
379
Gager, Kingdom and Community, 24, 34.
A number of ethical maxims justifying poverty, possibly interpolated ex post
facto and attributed to Jesus (Gager, 9) can be cited: Mark 10:25, Matthew 5:3
(Blessed are you poor), James 5:1-3, etc.
380
2 Corinthians 8:2.
381
Jews who have accepted Jesus as the Christ are called Ebionites. Origen,
Contra Celsum II, 1.
382
Acts 1:6, 2:17-21.
383
Acts 2:44-45, 4:32-34.
384
Romans 15:26.
385
Galatians 2:10.
377
60
lecting funds from his churches in Asia for the saints back in the Jerusalem
mother church as he did preaching. 386 Indeed, he shamelessly used the
generosity of some to spur others to make ever-larger contributions.387
The low social status of the early Christians reflected a bitter reality of the ancient world. The social pyramid tapered much more steeply than we might
now imagine when first surveying the monuments and extent of the major
surviving cities. As pointed out by Lane Fox, specialized ability in a craft
was not a source of upward mobility since craftsmen were either slaves or
free men in competition with slave labor.388 Given the plight of the lower
class and of women whose ranks were thinned by exposure of female infants
and by death in childbirth, the empowerment promised by Christian preaching must have been intoxicating. Christian converts are Gods beloved,389
Gods children, 390 beloved children, 391 Gods chosen, 392 a chosen
race.393
There can be little doubt that elevation from societys dregs to Gods elect
encouraged a certain religious megalomania among believers, an attitude the
Roman authorities interpreted as obstinacy. Celsus ridiculed the Christians
egocentrism: God shows and proclaims everything to us beforehand, and He
has even deserted the whole world and the motion of the heavens, and disregarded the vast earth to give attention to us alone; and He sends messengers to us alone and never stops sending them and seeking that we may be
with Him forever.394 Plotinus remarked on the conceit of Christians: A
common man (idiwthj anhr), if he hears, You are a child of God (Su ei qeou
paij) but the others you once admired are not [his] children, nor are the
objects of their veneration according to the tradition of their fathers; you are
even better than heaven despite having done nothing...395 Or as a much later
critic phrased it, Life itself is a poor thing: an interval in which to prepare
for the hereafter or the comingor second comingof the Messiah. On the
other hand, as if by compensation, religion teaches people to be extremely
self-centered and conceited. It assures them that god cares for them individ-

386
2 Corinthians 8-9.
388
389
Romans 1:7, Jude 1:3.
390
Ephesians 1:5, Philippians 2:14-15, 1 John 3:2.
391
Ephesians 5:1.
392
Romans 8:28, Ephesians 1:4, Colossians 3:12.
393
1 Peter 2:9.
394
Chadwick, Contra Celsum, 199.
395
Plotinus, Against the Gnostics, Ennead II, 9.55.
387
61
ually, and it claims that the cosmos was created with them specifically in
mind.396
Although Christianity made significant inroads among the poor and uneducated, it was not until the 4th century that the Church gained the economic
traction that would propel it into its position as the leading social institution
of the Middle Ages. This transition occurred when the sons of notable Roman families began to find positions within the Church considered suitable
to their elevated station. By that time, a revolving door between official service in the Roman state and positions of authority in the Church developed.
By the late 4th century, the lateral career movement of members of the senatorial class such as Ambrose and Nectarius, who...traded his career within
the imperial system for a position of honor in the church,397 began to blur
the distinction between Church and State, a distinction that, for all practical
purposes, would disappear for over a thousand years.
Women featured prominently in the Gentile churches established by Paul,
although probably much less so in the Jerusalem church. Our sister Phoebe
is described as being a minister of the church (ousan diakonon thj ekklhsiaj)
in Cenchreae,398the participial construction should probably be taken to
mean serving [continuously] as a minister. The term diakonoj (diakonos),
from whence the English deacon, means servant or minister, a term Paul uses
to describe himself.399 Phoebe is also called a prostatij (prostatis),400 the feminine form of prostathj (prostats), a leader, presiding officer or guardian, patron. Her recognition by Paul almost certainly indicates that she served in
some official capacity.
Paul also mentions Andronicus and Junia, notable among the apostles
(epishmoi en toij apostoloij). It is not entirely clear in what sense Junia, a
woman, was notable or prominent among the apostlesthe precise connotation of epishmoj (epismos) is disputed and the term apostoloj (apostolos),
messenger or emissary, could be applied to people not numbered among the
traditional twelve apostles. Apollos was considered an apostle401 and Paul
refers to Epaphroditus specifically as as your apostle and minister (umwn de
apostolon kai leitourgon) to my needs.402 In any case, Epp (among others)

396
Hitchens, God is Not Great, 74.

Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 181.
398
Romans 16:1.
399
1 Corinthians 3:5, 2 Corinthians 3:6, 6:4, 11:23.
400
Romans 16:2.
401
1 Corinthians 4:6, 9.
402
Philippians 2:25.
397
62
makes a strongly argued case that Junia was, in fact, considered an apostle by
the early church and that her status was subsequently suppressed.403
One of the first non-Christian mentions of Christianity, the letter of Pliny
the Younger,404 the governor of Pontus (111-113 C.E.), to the emperor Trajan, describes two female slaves (ancilla) as deacons or ministers (ministra). Commenting on how these deacons came to attention of the Roman
authorities, MacDonald notes, The fact that these women had a prominent
ministerial role in the Christian communitya ministry apparently not
hampered by their status as slaveswas in all likelihood a significant factor in
their visibility and subsequent arrest.405 Christianity, like the cult of Dionysus, proved attractive to sequestered women, but female participation in
both raised the suspicions of Roman authorities. Julian identified a second
role of women in the early Church in Antioch: every one of you allows his
wife to carry everything out of the house to the Galilaeans, and when your
wives feed the poor at your expense they inspire a great admiration for
godlessness in those who are in need.406 The women dispensed charity, basically bribing the needy into accepting the Christian faith.
Jesus radical apocalypticism reversed social boundariesthe tax collectors
and whores would enter the kingdom ahead of the conventionally religious.407 However, the initial egalitarianism was contingent on the imminence
of the End, and when the Final Judgment failed to materialize, the Christians
quickly reverted to the Greco-Roman status quo. By the end of the 1st century the new libertywhere the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,408
and Christ has set us free,409has been replaced by the traditional stricturesI do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a
man410 and the women must keep silent in the churches.411 Jane Schaberg,
a feminist New Testament scholar, has suggested that men in the early
church were discomfited by women in authority, particularly if that authority
had been passed down from woman to woman.412

403
Epp, Junia: The First Woman Apostle.

Pliny, Letters, 10.96-97.
405
MacDonald, Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion, 52.
These references hardly exhaust the evidence for the prominence of women in the
early churches. See, for example, Acts 16:1, 12-15, 40; 17:4, 12; 18:2-3; 24:24;
25:13; 26:30; Philippians 4:2-3; Colossians 4:15; 1 Corinthians 1:11; 16:19; 2
John.
406
Wright, The Works of the Emperor Julian, II, 491 (Misopogon, 363, A).
407
Matthew 21:31.
408
2 Corinthians 3:17, Romans 8:1-4, John 8:36.
409
Galatians 5:1.
410
1 Timothy 2:12.
411
412
Schaberg, Voices of Gnosticism, 170.
404
63
The suppression of female participation likely served an apologetic purpose as

well. Female believers were expressly targeted as unreliable witnesses, possessed, fanatical, sexual libertines, domineering of or rebellious toward their
husbands, and, in the familiar rhetoric of Celsus, hysterical.413 Evidence
from the extra-canonical gospels suggests that there were some Christians
who were following the [Gospel of Mary] and took their apostolic authority
from MaryMary is portrayed in many of these newly discovered texts as an
important disciple of Jesus, and even as an apostle414
Classical scholar Catherine Kroeger addresses the issue from the vantage
point of the socio-religious world of [Greco-Roman] women.415 It is particularly relevant to note that Pauls congregations in Asia Minor, particularly
in Antioch, lay in the very heart of Anatolia, where religious expression
particularly that of womentook on an extremely noisy, wild and orgiastic
aspectAncient women, as disadvantaged, neglected and repressed members
of society, often turned to religion as a release and escape. In it they vented
violent emotions that were not able to be expressed through any other
channelNeither is it surprising that women who lacked any sort of formal
education flocked to cults that were despised by the intellectuals.416 In Greek
sacrificial rites animals were killed to the piercing cry of female spectators.417
It is almost treacherous that when in 1 Corinthians Paul repeats the
baptismal tradition of Gal. 3:28 he omits the pair male-female.
Now it simply runs: For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one
bodyJews or Greeks, slaves or freeand all were made to drink of
the same Spirit (1 Cor. 12:13).418
The prominence of women in the ecstatic cult of Dionysus is well known,
but the similarities between spirit possession during Bacchic and Christian
ritual are worth pointing outthose similarities extended beyond the mere
mechanics of ecstatic ritual to the theology of both religions. Euripedes
Bacchae is our earliest substantial witness419 to the mania that accompanied
Dionysian ritual; 1 Corinthians is the earliest witness to Christian spirit possession. Just as Christians gathered for worship in an ekklhsia, (ekklsia),

413

King, Voices of Gnosticism, 157.
415
Kroeger, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 30/1, 25.
416
Ibid, 26, 28.
417
418
Ldeman, Paul, 146.
419
Kovacs, Euripides, 2.
414
64
assembly or congregation, worshippers of Bacchus gathered in a qiasoj, (thiasos), a guild or company.

As previously mentioned, it was said of Dionysus, I have exchanged my divine form (morfhn...ek qeou) for a mortal oneand changed my appearance to
that of a man (eij androj fusin).420 Of Jesus it was said, Who existing in the
form of God (en morfh qeou)emptied himself, taking the form of a servant,
born in the likeness of men (en omoiwmati anqrwpwn).421 As noted by Julian,
the healing god Asclepius also appeared in the form of a man (en anqrwpou
morfh). 422 Dionysus is the son of god (paidaqeou). 423 Jesus is the son of
God.424 The maenads of Dionysus take up snakes.425 Early Christians were
promised they would pick up serpents without harm.426 Bacchus causes the
ground to run with wine (rei d oinw).427 Jesus turns water into wine as the
first of his miracles. 428 Dionysus enemies berate him, claiming, some
stranger has come in, a sorcerer, a spell caster (tij eiselhluqe xenoj, gohj
epwdoj). 429 Jesus opponents accused him of black magic, an accusation
which stands as one of the most firmly established facts of the Gospel Tradition.430 Dionysus opponents consider him a new divinity.431 Jesus introduces a new teaching, with authority.432 Of Dionysus it is said, The god is
a prophet (mantij d o daimwn)he makes those possessed foretell the future.433 Jesus is also a god434 as well as a prophet;435 Phillip the evangelist had
no less than four virgin daughters who prophesied.436 Without endlessly prolonging this list of comparisons, it might fairly be asked why women with

420
Bacchae, 4, 54.
Philippians 2:6-7.
422
Julian, Against the Galileans, 200A.
423
Bacchae, 84.
424
John 3:16.
425
Bacchae, 103-104.
426
Mark 16:18.
427
Bacchae, 142.
Compare the fountains of milk and wine that were supposedly produced
during bacchic rites. (Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius VI, 11).
428
John 2:9-11.
429
Bacchae, 233-234.
430
Plumer, Biblica 78 (1997), 357.
Compare Mark 3:22, for example: He is possessed by Beelzebul! By the
prince of demons he is driving out demons.
431
Bacchae, 273.
432
Mark 1:27.
433
Bacchae, 300-301.
434
John 1:1, 20:28.
435
Matthew 21:11.
436
Acts 21:9.
421
65
little education, once enslaved to those who by nature are not gods,437
women who regarded an altered state of consciousness as a gift from Dionysos,438 would not naturally bring their understanding of religious ecstasy
to their new faith, particularly given the many similarities between Christ and
Bacchus.
After noting the likelihood that woman were a clear majority in the churches of the third century, Lane Fox goes on to observe, It was a well-established theme in [the writings of pagan moralists] that strange teachings appealed
to leisured women who had just enough culture to admire it and not enough
education to exclude it.439 Ardent credulity was presented as a weakness
characteristic of the [female] sex, pagan or Christian.440
Pauls encounter with debaters in Athens441 didnt go well. His interlocutors
dismissed him as a spermologoj (spermologos),442 a intellectual bricoleur who
gathers up scraps of information, like a bird randomly gathering seeds, and
fudges the results together without much regard for coherence. In Pauls letters we are reading an author who is capable of alluding at second hand to
themes of the pagan schools but who remains essentially an outsider with no
grasp of their literary style or contenthe has no great acquaintance with
literary style, and when he tries to give a speech to a trained pagan orator, he
falls away into clumsiness after a few good phrases.443 Aware of the shallowness of Christian erudition, Julian shot back, If the reading of your own
scriptures is sufficient for you, why do you nibble at the learning of the Hellenes?444
Christianitys lowly origins, lack of successful engagement with the learned
culture of its day, and its appeal to emotion and blind faithI do not know
in what rank to place [a Christian believer] who has need of arguments written in books445set Christianity on an anti-intellectual trajectory. The absurdity of Christian beliefs became an object of derision to their Roman critics. Porphyry ridiculed the teaching of the resurrection of the body:
Or let us take an example to test this little doctrine [the resurrection
of the dead], so innocently put forward [by the Christians]: A cer
437
Galatians 4:8.
Kroeger, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 33.
439
440
MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (AD 100-400), 39.
441
Acts 17:16-34.
442
Acts 17:18.
443
444
445
438
66
tain man was shipwrecked. The hungry fish had his body for a feast.
But the fish were caught and cooked and eaten by some fishermen,
who had the misfortune to run afoul of some ravenous dogs, who
killed and ate them. When the dogs died, the vultures came and
made a feast of them. How will the body of the shipwrecked man be
reassembled, considering it has been absorbed by other bodies of various kinds?446
Regarding the connection between 18th century revivalist jabberwocky and
contempt for education, Hofstadter remarked of backcountry American Protestantism:
it became more primitive, more emotional, more given to ecstatic manifestations. The preachers were less educated, less inclined
to restrain physical responses to an instrument of conversion; and the
groveling, jerkings, howlings, and barkings increasedOf the revivalist or New Light faction among the Baptists [Woodmason] reported a
few years later that they were altogether opposed to authority and,
having made successful assaults upon the established church, were
trying to destroy the state.447
Modern fundamentalist Christianity continues the ancient legacy of hostility
to intellectual culture and personal freedom, a blind obedience to a male
hierarchy that often claims to speak for God, intolerance toward nonbelievers, and a disdain for rational, intellectual inquiry.448
Celsus too zeroed in on the irrational, emotionally driven nature of Christian
belief:
While [Jesus] was alive he did not help himself, but after death he
rose again and showed the marks of his punishment and how his
hands had been pierced. But who saw this? A hysterical female (gunh
paroistroj), as you say, and perhaps some other one of those who
were deluded by the same sorcery (thj authj gohteiaj), who either
dreamt in a certain state of mind and through wishful thinking had a
hallucination (fantasiwqeij) due to some mistaken notion (an experience which has happened to thousands), or, which is more likely,
wanted to impress the others by telling this fantastic tale, and so by
this cock-and-bull story to provide a chance for other beggars.449

446

Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 74-75.
448
Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, 13.
449
Chadwick, Origen: Contra Celsum, 109 (II, 55).
447
67
Celsus raises several points that deserve some comment. By describing the
woman who was the primary witnesses of Jesus resurrection as hysterical (paroistroj, paroistros), Celsus at least implies a sexual component to her attraction. A related verb, oistraw (oistra), is used by Lucian to describe a man
turned to a donkey by magic as acting, like a man mad with lust (oistroumenoj) for women and boys.450 The hysterical female, Mary Magdalene, fits
the image of the woman susceptible to bizarre religious impulses that emerges
from ancient literature. Yet, she is by no means a silent victim of Jesus magic. Although she is deluded by sorcery, Mary Magdalene also becomes one
of the main perpetrators. She is an active witness, a creator of the Christian
belief in the resurrection.451
The susceptibility of women to transports of religious delusion would be
familiar to any educated person of the eraI have seen the wild bacchant
women, who ran from this city in madness (oistroisi)...452 It may be that
Celsus said more about Mary Magdalene and women followers of Jesus than
Origen discloses. For example, one wonders if Celsus had discussed Mary as
on from whom seven demons had gone out (Luke 8.2)...It is easy to imagine
that such possessed women became obvious targets for Celsus criticism, and
that he portrayed them as willing compatriots for a sorcerer who cast out
demons by the prince of demons.453
It may be pointed out, with no small degree of amusement, that Celsus
charges that women were congenitally prone to foolishness simply repeated
the churchs own estimation of its female membership: For among them are
those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with
sins and led astray by various passions...454 No widow may be put on the
list of widows unless she is over sixty, has been faithful to her husband, and is
well known for her good deeds, such as bringing up children, showing hospitality, washing the feet of the saints, helping those in trouble and devoting
herself to all kinds of good deeds. As for younger widows, do not put them
on such a list. For when their sensual desires overcome their dedication to
Christ, they want to marry. Thus they bring judgment on themselves, because they have broken their first pledge. Besides, they get into the habit of
being idle and going about from house to house. And not only do they become idlers, but also gossips and busybodies, saying things they ought not to.

450
Lucian, The Ass, 33.

MacDonald, Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion, 124.
452
Euripides, The Bacchae, 665.
453
MacDonald, 109.
The reference is to Matthew 12:24 (NIV): But when the Pharisees heard this,
they said, It is only by Beelzebul, the prince of demons, that this fellow drives
out demons.
454
2 Timothy 3:6, ESV.
451
68
So I counsel younger widows to marry, to have children, to manage their

homes and to give the enemy no opportunity for slander. Some have in fact
already turned away to follow Satan.455 ...pagan opinion concerning the vulnerability of women to conversion to Christianity is reworked within a
church context into the vulnerability of women to allegedly heretical teaching.456
In addition to its appeal to the credulous, other elements of Christian preaching struck its critics as counterintuitive, in particular the claim to be a universal, catholic, religion, a claim that provoked this pungent rebuttal:
But that from the beginning God cared only for the Jews and that he
chose them out as his portion has been clearly asserted not only by
Moses and Jesus but by Paul as well...Therefore it is fair to ask of Paul
why God, if he was not the God of the Jews only but also of the
Gentiles, sent the blessed gift of prophecy to the Jews in abundance
and gave them Moses and the oil of anointing, and the prophets and
the law...and finally God sent unto them Jesus also, but unto us no
prophet, no oil of anointing, no teacher, no herald to announce his
love for man which should one day, though late, reach even unto us
also. Nay he even looked on for myriads, or if you prefer, for thousands of years, while men in extreme ignorance served idols, as you
call them...save only that little tribe which less than two thousand
years before had settled in one part of Palestine. For if he is the God
of all of us alike, and the creator of all, why did he neglect us?457
A further difficulty is the apparent tendency of the Almighty to reveal himself only to unlettered and quasi-historical individuals, in regions of Middle
Eastern wasteland that were long the home of idol worship and superstition,
and in many instances already littered with existing prophecies.458 Indeed, a
skeptic might question why the Prince of Peace459 delayed his Return while
tens of millions perished in two world wars and innumerable lesser conflicts,
epidemics ravaged entire populations, the Soviet Union crushed Eastern Europe, and atomic weapons were invented and used to vaporize thousands as
well as threaten humanity generally with annihilation.
Porphyry, ever alert to the incongruous and the bizarre in Christian preaching, asked why Jesus had not appeared post mortem to Pilate, to Herod, or to

455
1 Timothy 5:9-15, NIV.

MacDonald, 63.
457
Wright, The Works of the Emperor Julian, III, 343-345 (Against the Galileans,
106C-D).
458
459
Isaiah 9:6-7.
456
69
the Jewish authorities who condemned him, given that he had promised the
High Priest that he would see the Son of Man coming with glory.460 Instead
he appeared to Mary Magdalene, a prostitute who came from some horrible
little village and has been possessed by seven demons, and another Mary,
equally unknown, probably a peasant woman, and others who were of no account...Had he shown himself to people who could be believed, then others
would have believed through them...461
God, who according to the Christians loved the world so much he gave up
his only Son,462 was obviously content to let humanity fester for untold millennia in religious error, to live without hope463 in spiritual darkness, reserving his boundless love for a tiny portion of humanity, revealing his divine will
selectively to the inhabitants of a provincial boondocksBut now, once for
all time, [Jesus] has appeared at the end of the age to remove sin by his own
death as a sacrifice.464 Christianitys claim of universality was, by any rational
reckoning, simply absurd.
The new spiritual regime and its revelation of transcendent morality did not
do much to address evil in practice either. The emerging Church commanded believers, Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and
with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.465 That slaves might
very well be prostituted or even murdered by their masters appears to have
been of little concern and it would seem, based on the clear teaching of the
New Testament, that the American South prior to the Civil War represented
a culture completely in step with the values of the early church. That is, at
least, what the Southern Baptist slaveholders vigorously argued.
The claim that Christians are people of the book would have provoked a
round of contemptuous laughter from Roman intellectuals, laughter that
would have turned to outrage had they lived long enough to witness the centuries-long rampage of book burning that followed the ascendency of Christianity. Indeed, the centuries to come confirmed that Christians who were
mortally offended by words and phrases were quite at ease with torture and
murder.

460
Mark 14:62; Matthew 26:64.

462
John 3:16.
463
464
Hebrews 9:26.
465
Ephesians 6:5. Compare Colossians 3:22, 1 Peter 2:18.
461
70
Pick up your cot and walkChristianity

is basically magic.
The gospel of Mark, widely regarded as the earliest of the gospels, records this
remarkable account of a miraculous healing:
And when he came back to Capernaum after some days, it was
reported, Hes at home, and so many gathered that it was no longer
possible to get to the door and he spoke the word to them. And four
men come to him bearing a paralytic, but unable to approach him
because of the crowd, they made a hole in the roof where he was and
after digging through [the roof], they lower the cot where the paralytic lay. And Jesus, seeing their faith, says to the paralytic, Child,
your sins are forgiven.
But there were some of the scribes sitting there and they are questioning in their hearts, Why is this man speaking this way? Hes
blaspheming! Who is able to forgive sins except God alone? And at
once perceiving in his spirit that they are reasoning this way in themselves, Jesus says to them, What things are you pondering in your
hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, Your sins are forgiven, or to say, Stand, pick up your cot and walk? But in order
that you may know that the son of man466 has the authority to forgive
sins on the earth, he says to the paralytic, I tell you, Stand, take your
cot (aron ton krabatton) and go home. And he stood up and immediately (euquj) took his cot and walked out in front of everyone so that
they are all astonished and praising God saying, We never saw
anything like this!467
The story is repeated by Matthew,468 who characteristically omits the more
dramatic details such as breaking a hole in the roof, and by Luke.469 John

466
Assuming Marks original source was Aramaic, the expression son of man bar
enosh (vna rb) in Mark 2:10 possibly functioned as no more than a common
circumlocution meaning, I have the power to forgive sins. Son of man (o uioj
tou anqrwpou) became an apocalyptic christological title due to the Christian
interprettation of the Greek version of Daniel 7:13-14. It is debatable whether
Jesus would have understood son of man as anything more than a simple reference to an individual.
467
Mark 2:1-12.
To the extent possible my translation preserves the tenses and phrasing of the
Greek text.
468
Matthew 9:2-7.
469
Luke 5:17-26.
71
recounts a similar Stand up, take your cot and walk healing at the pool of
Bethzatha.470
Pick up your cot and walkfollowed by immediate complianceappears
to have become a trademark of Christian miracle. Peter commands Aeneas, a
paralytic who has lain for eight years on a cot (epi krabattou), Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you! Arise and make your bed! and immediately he stood
up (euqewj anesth).471 Other, very similar, accounts are found: a man, lame
from birth, who must be carried to the gate of the Temple, is healed by
Peters command to stand up and walk.472 A similar miracle performed by
Paul is also reported.473 It is unlikely that any Roman conversant with the
Christian movement could remain unaware of such popular stories.
Lucian soon turned the trope to comic effect in his story of the snake blaster
in The Lover of Lies. A certain unlucky Midas, a vinedresser, is bitten by a
viper and carried in extremis from the field on a stretcher (epi skimpodoj).
At the suggestion of a bystander, a Babyloniana widely used synonym for
magicianis hastily summoned and he raised (anesthse) Midas with some
spell (epwdh tini)Midas himself, picking up the stretcher (aramenoj ton
skimpodoa) on which he had been carried, immediately heads back to work
on the farm for of such power was the spell (h epwdh).474 In a thorough analysis of Lucians Lover of Lies, Ogden proposed that Lucian may be consciously playing with Christian imagerywhich graphically expresses the
speed and completeness of the recovery and noted that no pre-Christian examples of the [pick-up-your-cot-and-walk] motif are known.475 In his attempted rebuttal of Celsus, Origen said of Christian doctrines, they are just
like spells (wsperei epwdaj) that have been filled with power (dunamewj peplhrwmenouj).476 We will get to the significance of the word dunamij (dunamis),
power, in a bit. Lucian appears to have been quite familiar with Christian
preaching and may have read at least one of the gospels. It is easy to suppose
that he would find the pick up your cot and walk tales an irresistible target
for parody.

470
John 5:2-11.
Acts 9:32-34.
The similarities in vocabulary might suggest to a skeptic that the account is the reworking of the familiar gospel story.
472
Acts 3:2,6.
473
Acts 14:8-10.
474
Lucian, The Lover of Lies, 11.
475
Ogden, In Search of the Sorcerers Apprentice, 67.
476
Origen, Contra Celsum III, 68.
471
72
That Lucian used Christian miracle stories as fodder for satire is further suggested by his references to walking on water and raising rotting corpses.477
However, Lucian likely had Jesus specifically in mind when he composed his
story of the Syrian exorcist.
Everyone knows of the Syrian from Palestine, the master of his art,
and how he receives many struck down by the moon (katapiptontaj
proj thn selhnhn), 478 frothing at the mouth (afrou pimplamenouj to
stoma)479 and eyes rolling, and he sets them aright and sends them
away sound of mindstanding beside them as they lie there, he asks
from whence [the demons] have come into the body. The madman
himself is silent, but the demon answers in Greek or a barbarian [tongue]480 from whence and how he entered the man. By adjuring, or if
the spirit does not obey, threatening,481 he drives the demon out.482
The Syrian from Palestine is clearly a Jewish exorcist483 and given the several close parallels in vocabulary and imagery between Lucians story and the
stories in the gospels, it is no great leap of the imagination to suppose Lucian
had Jesus specifically in mind, a possibility conceded by Morton Smith: It is
possible that this parody was inspired by some gospel story like Mk 5.1-19
484 Jesus had such fame as an exorcist that other exorcists used his name
both during his lifetime485 and after his death.486 Gager comments on the appearance of Jesus, who was known independently in Jewish tradition as a
sorcerer, that is, as one who exercised power over spirits,487 in ancient spells.
Christians of Origens era bragged about the power (dunamij, dunamis) of Jesus name: Of course the name of Jesus is of such great power (dunatai)
against the demons that sometimes even unworthy men accomplish [exorcisms] by pronouncing his name just as Jesus taught when he said, Many will

477

Compare Matthew 14:22-23, John 11:39.
478
Compare Matthew 4:24: possessed by demons and moonstruck (daimonizomenouj
kai selnhiazomenouj) and Matthew 17:15: have mercy on my son because
hes moonstruck (selhniazetai) and suffers terribly, for he often falls into the fire
(piptei eij to pur) and often into the water
479
Compare Mark 9:18: the spiritthrows him down and he foams (afrizei) [at
the mouth] and grinds his teeth
480
Compare Mark 5:9: Our name is Legion
481
Compare Mark 5:7: I beg you, do not torture me
482
483
Ogden, In Search of the Sorcerers Apprentice, 133.
484
Smith, Jesus the Magician, 57.
485
Mark 9:38-40.
486
Acts 9:13.
487
Gager, Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World, 230.
73
say to me in that day, we cast out demons in your name and performed works
of power (dunameij epoihsamen)488 Chadwick noted that narratives from
the gospels are found used as spells in the magical papyri.489
Celsus clearly regarded Jesus as a magician: After being brought up in obscurity he hired himself out in Egypt and having become proficient in certain magical arts (dunamewn tinwn), he made his way back and on account of
those powers proclaimed himself a god.490 Celsus concluded that Jesus was
merely some worthless sorcerer, hated by God (qeomisouj hn tinoj kai mocqhrou gohtoj), and Origen acknowledged Celsus claim that he has seen
among certain [Christian] elders who were of our opinion books containing
barbarous names of demons (biblia barbara daimonwn) and magical formulas
(terateiaj).491 Those who accused Jesus of being a magician (they were not
few among the pagans) argued that he, after all, had spent part of his youth
in the homeland of magic, after the escape from Palestine...492
Celsus is the first critic to call Jesus a magician and charge the Christians
with practicing magic. It may be that this view was already adumbrated in
Suetonius, who spoke of Christianity as a new and criminal (maleficus)
superstition. The term maleficus can mean magical, and used as a noun it
designated a magician. If so, Suetonius foreshadows what later became a
common charge.493 Flint notes magic was linked with mystery and secrecy
...and secrecy with almost certain treason. Magic, accordingly, came increasingly to be represented by the word maleficum.494 The Theodosian Code, a
compilation of laws published in 439, declared all forms of divination illegal.
Morton Smith on magic in the New Testament: Unfortunately for wouldbe apologists, not only the minor traits of the Gospel stories, but also the essential content of most of them come from the world of magic. Smith then
lists the parallels between the stories of the gospels and the spells of ancient
magical texts: (1) the power to make anyone he wanted follow him, (2-3)
exorcism, including exorcism at a distance, remote control of spirits, and
the power to order them about, (4) miraculous cures, (5) stilling storms, (6)
raising the dead, (7) giving his disciples power over demons, (8) miraculous

488

Chadwick, Origen: Contra Celsum, 10 (footnote 1).
490
Origen, Contra Celsum I, 38; VI, 40.
Chadwicks translation, which I have followed with minor revisions, is probably
correct to render terateiaj as magical formulas. The word group basically refers to prodigies of nature, and could be read as simply, fairy tales.
491
Ibid, I, 71.
492
Graf, Envisioning Magic: A Princeton Seminar and Symposium, 94-95.
493
494
Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe, 17.
489
74
provision of food, (9) walking on water, (10) miraculous escapes (his body
could not be seized), (11) making himself invisible, (12) possession of the
keys of the kingdom, (13) foreknowledge, including foreknowledge of his
own fate...of the disasters coming on cities, (14) knowledge of others
thoughts, (15) metamorphosis, (16) revealing supernatural beings to his disciples, (17) prescribing reforms of temple practices, (18) introducing a new
rite, (19) claiming to be united with his disciples, so that he is in them and
they in him, (20) claiming to be a god or son of a god, and then concludes,
This list by no means exhausts the material. There are many other traits in
the Gospels picture of Jesusparticularly, but by no means exclusively, in
the Johannine picturewhich are common in magical material...the stories
of the Gospels are mostly stories about things a magician would do. They are
not mostly stories about things the Messiah would do. (Who ever heard of
the Messiahs being an exorcistlet alone being eaten?) 495 On the other
hand, the healing god Asclepius, like Jesus, cures blindness, dumbness, paralysis, lameness...[but] we rarely hear of him casting out devils, since for the
most part these did not trouble the classical imagination.496
The findings of many other modern scholars497 support Celsus claim: the
powers and authority Jesus claimed derived not from the main bodies of
power of his timethe Temple, the priesthood, even the Torah and its
studybut from the charismatic fringe. Leaders who emerged from this
fringe claimed authority through direct contact with supernatural powers
rather than through exalted birth or knowledge of scriptures.498 The spread
of Christianity came to depend largely on widely disseminated reports of
miracles that were performed either by Jesus himself or in Jesus name.499
The title magician is not used here [of Jesus] as a pejorative word but describes one who can make divine power present directly through personal
miracle rather than indirectly through communal ritual...if, in the end, the title
magician offends, simply substitute thaumaturge, miracle worker, charisma
495
Smith, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, 224-227.

For the sake of space and simplicity I have omitted the scores of parallels Smith
produces in his text.
496
Garland, The Cambridge Companion to Miracles, 81.
497
Such as Hull, Hellenistic Magic and the Synoptic Tradition (1974), Smith, Jesus the
Magician (1978), Arnold, Ephesians: Power and Magic (1989), Klauck, Magic and
Paganism in Early Christianity (1996), Janowitz, Magic in the Roman World: Pagans, Jews, and Christians (2001), Strelan, Strange Acts: Studies in the Cultural
World of the Acts of the Apostles (2004), Aune, Apocalypticism, Prophecy, and Magic
in Early Christianity (2006), Thomas, Magical Motifs in the Book of Revelation
(2010), Conner, Magic in the New Testament (2010), Jacobus, et al., Studies on
Magic and Divination in the Biblical World (2013), Conner, Magic in Christianity (2014), to name but a few of the book length works.
498
Ilan, The Beginnings of Christianity, 172.
499
Garland, The Cambridge Companion to Miracles, 89.
75
tic, holy one, or whatever pleases, but know that we speak of exactly the same
activity in any case...500
One of the greatest figures of antiquity, a man of incalculable influence on the thought and history of the western world, himself claimed to be possessed by, and identified with, the spirit of an executed
criminal, and to do whatever he did by the power of this indwelling
spirit. By its power he could even hand over his opponents to Satan.
This man and his claims are known from his own correspondence
he is Saint Paul, who asserted, I live no longer I, but Christ lives in
me (Gal. 2.20) and I dare speak of nothing save those things which
Christ has done through me, by word and deed, by the power of signs
and miracles, by the power of (his) spirit, to make the gentiles obedient (Rom. 15.19). He wrote the Corinthians about a member of
their church that, Being absent in body, but present in spirit, I have
already judged (the offender)...uniting you and my spirit with the
power of our Lord Jesus, to give this fellow over to Satan for the destruction of his flesh (1 Cor. 5.3ff).501
Irenaeus and other early writers accused their Christian opponents of magical
practice: The mystic priests of [the Simonians] live licentious lives and practice magic, each one in whatever way he can. They make use of exorcisms
and incantations, love potions too and philters, and the so-called familiars
and dream-senders. They diligently practice whatever other magic arts there
may be[the Carpocratians], too, practice magic and make use of incantations, philtres, spells, familiars, dream-senders, and the rest of the evil magic.502 In a discussion that documents the similarities between Christian rite
and magical practice, Benko concluded, that too often Christian authors
talked like magicians; they boasted of their ability to summon powers from
another world...After the patristic period we find the church increasingly absorbed and sanctified pagan magical practices; the veneration of relics and the
use of incense, charms, and bells were integrated into the life of the
church.503
Perhaps no single text better captures the fuzzy boundary between Christian
sacrament and magic than Ignatius well-known reference to the bread of the
Eucharist as the medicine (farmakon) of immortality, the antidote (antidotoj)
that [we] not die, but live forever in Jesus Christ.504 The term farmakon
(pharmakon) is a loaded word; it could mean either remedy or poison, but re
500
Crossan, The Historical Jesus, 138.

Smith, Jesus the Magician, 35.
502
Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, I, 23.4; I, 25.3.
503
Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians, 131-132.
504
Ignatius, Ephesians 20.
501
76
tained a strong connotation of malevolent sorcery; the related term farmakeuj (pharmakeus) means poisoner or sorcerer, and farmakeia (pharmakeia),
the obvious source of our word pharmacy, refers to the compounding of potions, including abortifacients, and the casting of spells. The magical papyri
include a spell that begins, I am Thoth, the Discoverer and Patron of spells
and writing (farmakwn kai grammatwn).505
The poems and novels of Roman authors contained lurid stories of witches
witchcraft gone horribly wrong is the subject of the Metamorphosis, our only
complete novel from the eraand Lucans Erictho is possibly the greatest
figure of horror in all of ancient literature. Erictho frequents battlegrounds
and scenes of execution, grubbing for body parts to use in malicious magic,
she mangled bodies as they hung, scraped clean the crosses...she has stolen
the iron [nails] driven into hands...and from a dying boy cuts off a lock of
hair.506 In The Lover of Lies, Lucian refers to the magical powers crucifixion
nails possessed: the Arab gave me the ring made of iron from crosses and
taught me the spell of many names (thn epwdhn edidaxen thn poluwnumon).507 It
is noteworthy that magicians used the name of the crucified Jesus to conjure
with both before508 and after his death.509
How then were Romans to construe Christians nighttime celebration of the
Eucharist when they ate the flesh and drank the blood of Jesus? That the
Church had come identify Jesus as (a) God is clear. The gospel of John510
uses qeoj (theos), god, of the pre-incarnation Christ and Titus, likely written
in the early 2nd century, speaks of the glory of our great God and Savior (tou
megalou qeou kai swthroj), Jesus Christ.511
Ignatius, who died in the early 2nd century, clearly considered Jesus to have
been God physically, although his metaphysics is murkyThere is one physician, fleshly and spiritual, begotten and unbegotten, God in man (en anqrwpw qeoj)...[son] of Mary and [son] of God.512 For Ignatius, Jesus divinity was corporealFor our God (qeoj hmwn), Jesus Christ, conceived by Mary
...513and Christians are revitalized by the blood of God (en aimati qeou).514

505
Preisendanz, Papyri Graecae Magicae: Die Griechischen Zauberpapyri, I, 190 (V,

249).
506
Lucan, Bellum Civile VI, 544, 546, 563.
Lucans poem is based on the battle of Pharsalus between Julius Caesar and
Pompey in 48 B.C.E.
507
508
Mark 9:38.
509
Acts 19:13-14.
510
John 1:1.
511
Titus 2:13.
512
Ignatius, Ephesians 7:2.
513
77
Besides asserting that God had blood, Ignatius believed that Jesus also truly
raised himself (kai alhqwj anesthsen eauton)515 from the dead. True Christians therefore confessed, that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior (thn eucaristian sarka einai tou swthroj hmwn) Jesus Christ 516 such language
offered Roman critics an easy charge: Christians confessed to eating the flesh
and drinking the blood of a crucified man who they imagined was God.
Christiansjust as if you were nailed to the cross of the Lord Jesus
Christ,517were admonished to keep one Eucharist, one flesh of our Lord
Jesus Christ, and one cup with respect to the unity with his blood, one altar
...518 Were it not for magical thinking it would be difficult to make sense of
the representations which people ascribe to their participation even in the
rituals of doctrinarian modes of religion such as, for example, the Eucharist
of the Roman Catholic mass or the Lords Supper as celebrated in the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Denmark.519
Small wonder that they were accused of cannibalism,520 a charge that highlighted the perception of Christians as intensely antisocial. McGown, in an
extensive discussion, concludes that while the correspondence of eucharistic
imagery with flesh and blood cannot be ruled out as a factor in the accusation [of cannibalism], it is difficult to demonstrate, but concedes that despite the secondary importance of the flesh and blood symbolism, the ritual
practice of early Christians may indeed have been of primary importance in
fitting them for the allegations.521 In any case, it is clear that the hoi polloi
considered both the cross and Eucharist magical; the Host was buried with
the dead, taken as a test of innocence or guilt, and used as an amulet or
protective talisman.522
Christianitys emphasis on death soon turned into something akin to necrophilia; the Christian cult of saints rapidly came to involve the digging up,
the moving, the dismembermentquite apart from much avid touching and
kissingof the bones of the dead...[Lucilla] had owned the bone of a martyr,
and had been in the habit of kissing it before she took the Eucharist.523 The
earliest record of Christians raiding the sites of executions to collect relics
comes from the Martyrdom of Polycarp (mid-2nd century): So [after his body

514
515
Ignatius, Smyrnaeans 2:1.

517
518
Ignatius, Philadelphians 4:1.
519
Petersen, Studies on Magic and Divination in the Biblical World, 198.
520
Origen, Contra Celsum VI, 27.
521
McGowan, Journal of Early Christian Studies 2/3 (1994), 422, 438.
522
Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe, 178, 214, 283, 285.
523
Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 4, 34.
516
78
had been burned] we collected his bones, more valuable than the most precious stones, more excellent than gold, and put them aside for ourselves in a
suitable place.524 The collection of relics from the ashes of Polycarp mirrors a
similar salvage operation directed toward the remains of Peregrinus whose
disciples hurried to see the actual spot and lay hold of some remains [left] by
the fire (ti leiyanon katalambanein tou pupoj).525 The only other figures in
the ancient world known to have collected body parts are necromancers and
witches.
Julian alluded to the practice of building churches over the tombs of the martyrs: pulling down the temples, they rebuilt tombs (mnhmata) [on sites] old
and new.526 Aggrieved worshippers of the traditional gods sometimes gave tit
for tat, retaliating in kind against Christian vandalism of sacred sitesDid
those citizens of Emesa long for Christ who set fire to the tombs (toij tafoij)
of the Galilaeans?527 the people of Emesa burned the churches and converted the only one they spared into a temple of Dionysus. Eunapius echoed
Julians complaint: [Antoninus] had foretold to all that the temples would
become tombs (ta iera tafouj genhsesqai).528 Regarding the despoliation of
the Great Church in Alexandria, a former temple, Haas remarks, The
memory of the [Great Churchs] former status as one of the citys preeminent
pagan sanctuaries was fresh in the minds of Alexandrian pagans, and it
evidently rankled to see this sacred precinct employed in the worship of a
condemned Galilean criminal. It was a natural target of their indignation.529
Julian obviously regarded the churches as nothing more than charnel houses
polluted by the remains of martyrs. The full weight of [Julians] religious abhorrence comes to bear on the relation between the living and the corpses of
the dead.530 To that ancient corpse [of Jesus] you bring in addition the
dead newly sacrificed. Who would not be disgusted? You have filled the
whole world with graves and tombs and yet nowhere is it found [written]
that you must loiter among the tombs and pay them respects.531 After citing
Jesus words to the PhariseesYou are like whitewashed tombs which on
the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men's bones and
all uncleanness,532 Julian, who knew his scriptures, made the connection
between graves and sorcery: Why do you frequent the tombs? Do you want

524
Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, II, (The Martyrdom of Polycarp, XVIII, 2).

Lucian, The Passing of Peregrinus, 39.
526
Julian, Orations, VII, 229C.
527
Wright, The Works of the Emperor Julian, II, 475 (Misopogon, 357C).
528
Wright, Lives of the Philosophers, 425.
529
Haas, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 32/3 (1991), 286.
530
Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 7.
531
Julian, Against the Galileans, 335B-335C (my translation).
532
Matthew 23:27, NASB.
525
79
to hear the reason? It is not I, but the prophet Isaiah who says, They sleep
among the tombs and in caves [to receive] oracles in dreams (koimwntai di
enupnia).533 You see then how ancient among the Jews was this work of magical art (thj magganeiaj), to sleep among tombs for the sake of dream visions
...[the apostles] performed their magical arts more skillfully than you and
publicly displayed (apodeixai dhmosia)...these disgusting works of magic (thj
magganeiaj tauthj)...You, though, practice what God from the very beginning abhorred...534 Julians allusion to the apostles as powerful magicians
whose arts were publicly displayed (apodeixai dhmosia) is nearly a quotation
of the boastful claim of Paul: My message and my preaching were not with
wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration (en apodeixei) of the
Spirits power.535
Julian also reports that in his day the tombs of Peter and Paul were worshipped536 and commented on the violent reaction of the faithful of Antioch to
his removal of the leftovers of the dead 537 Babylas, an eminent Antiochene martyr538 buried at Apollos oracle in Daphnean act that polluted
the site and caused the priests to abandon itat the order of Julians Christian brother, Gallus. Even the throne of Peter is built on a graveyard: The
Basilica of St. Peter was built to venerate the tomb of Peter; the original purpose of the building therefore was to commemorate a grave. Originally Vatican hill was a necropolis, and, although much of the necropolis was demolished when Constantine built his basilica there, a city of the dead remains
beneath the current structure of St. Peters.539
An important temple to Cybele, known to the Romans as Magna Mater or
Great Mother, which stood on the Palatine Hill also was knocked down to
make way for Saint Peters Cathedral which now stands on the temples
site.540 Cybele, whose priests, the galli, were self-castrated mendicants, was
supplanted by Jesus, whose priests were celibate mendicants. One could argue
based on Jesus observation that some made eunuchs of themselves (oitinej
eunoucisan eautouj) for the kingdom of heaven541that the gelded priests of
Cybele had been far better Christians than the Christians. Think of them
what one will, the devotion of the Great Mothers priests was hardly in ques
533
In reference to incubation, the practice of sleeping in temples to receive dreams

from the gods. The text of Isaiah clearly refers to this practice: Who sit among
graves and spend the night in secret places... (Isaiah 65:4, NASB).
534
Julian, Against the Galileans, 339E-343C (my translation).
535
1 Corinthians 2:4, NIV.
536
Ibid, 327B.
537
Julian, Misopogon, 361C.
538
Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 99.
539
Seely, Studia Antiqua 4/1 (2005): 69-70.
540
541
Matthew 19:12.
80
tion: At once taking up [the sword], he cuts himself (tamnei ewuton) and runs
through the city, bearing in his hand what he has cut off (cersi ferei ta
etamen).542
Eunapius likewise complained about the Christian violation of boundaries:
[The Christians] also settled these monks in Canobus, chaining humanity to the service of worthless slaves instead of the real gods. They
gathered up the bones and skulls of those apprehended for numerous
crimes, men the courts had condemned, and proclaimed them to be
gods, wallowed around their tombs, and declared that being defiled
by graves made them stronger. The dead were called martyrs, and
some kind of ministers, and ambassadors of the gods, these degraded slaves, eaten alive by whips, their ghosts carrying the wounds
of torture.543
The later Christian collection of the remains of martyrs bodies was suspiciously like magicians collection of the remains of bodies of executed criminals
(the martyrs were legally criminals) whose spirits they wished to control. We
have many ancient stories of thefts of dead bodies for magical purposes; the
practice was evidently common and may explain the disappearance of Jesus
body and the empty tomb. Be that as it may, the Christians frequent gathering around tombs and in catacombs must have seemed to most pagans an
indication of necromancy.544
When the emperors Valentinian and Valens initiated a series of reforms that
included measures against people suspected of practicing divination and
magic...a notorious sequence of treason trials that led to the execution of nine
Roman senators and the exile of three others in 369 resulted. More trials
and executions followed in 372. Both targeted Christians and pagans who
had engaged in practices that had long been illegal.545
Christianity is antisocial and totalitarian.

Christianity makes a clear claim to absolute truth: Jesus answered, I am the
way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through

542
Lucian, De Dea Syria, 52.

Wright, Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists, 473 (my translation).
544
Smith, Studies in the Cult of Yahweh, II, 211.
545
Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 136.
543
81
me.546 Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under
heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.547 The reaction of
their contemporaries to this claim, to the extent they bothered to react to it at
all, has been summarized by Wilken: non-Christians see the Christian community as a tiny, peculiar, antisocial, irreligious sect, drawing its adherents
from the lower strata of society...religious fanatics, self-righteous outsiders,
arrogant innovators, who thought only their beliefs were true.548 Christians
insisted on historical particularity; they pressed the unreasonable claim that
the divine had manifested itself uniquely through a specific person at a specific moment, and that not so long ago...It was intellectually embarrassing; it
was at once parochial and presumptuous; it was irreducibly odd.549 Harris
voices what must have been a very Roman conclusion:
We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is
no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common
we call them religious; otherwise they are likely to be called mad,
psychotic, or delusional...clearly there is sanity in numbers.550
Christians were constantly amazed to find themselves cast as enemies of the
Roman order, but in retrospect we must admit that it was the Romans who
had the more realistic insight...To Roman eyes, the obstinate and incomprehensible intolerance of Christians made them appear not only foolish but
treasonable.551 Every convert to this novel superstition added to a growing
number of persons intolerant of the beliefs of the majority and of those unwilling to adhere to the traditions that helped make the [Roman] empire
great and insure its ongoing stability.552 The insular nature of Christianity
put it on a collision course with Roman societys mos maiorum, the social
mores than included traditional piety and respect for ancestral customs and
family forebears, epitomized by the February festival of Parentaliato
undermine the authority of masters over slaves, and paterfamilias over his
household was about the most subversive attack that could be made on
established society.553
Once entrenched, Christian political influence sought to place Christian believers above the law. When the abbot Shenoute (d. 466) and his monks were
denounced as robbers after destroying the property of pagans, Shenoute

546
John 14:6, NIV.

Acts 4:12, NIV.
548
Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, xix, 63.
549
550
551
Gager, Kingdom and Community, 27-28, 124.
552
553
547
82
famously replied, There is no crime for those who have Christ. Indeed,
there is abundant historical evidence for warring gangs of Christian monks
that caused so much social disruption and violence that Christian rulers and
commoners alike turned on them and killed them in droves, resulting in a
general massacre of monks, or even of anyone who happened to look like a
monk.554
The nescience of Paul set the new standard for Christian thinking: For the
wisdom of this world is foolishness to God.555 The new Christian order,
contemptuous of the empirical evidence that threatened its claims, inaugurated an era of sanctified ignorance. The Athenian philosopher Proclus made
the last recorded astronomical observation in the ancient Greek world in
A.D. 475. It was not until the sixteenth century that Copernicusinspired
by the surviving works of Ptolemy but aware that they would make more
sense, and in fact would be simpler, if the sun was placed at the center of the
universeset in hand the renewal of the scientific tradition.556 The millennium of intellectual blight that transpired between Proclus and Copernicus
can be attributed entirely to the ascent of Christianity.
In defense of its own indefensible claims, Christianity made a basic mistake:
Theism pushes the quest for intelligibility outside the world. If God exists,
he is not part of the natural order but a free agent not governed by natural
laws.557 While this criticism captures the limits of transcendent Christian
theism, it does not apply to ancient forms of panentheist or pandeistic philosophies such as Pythagoreanism, or immanentist theologies that conceive of
the natural world as intrinsically both divine as well as conscious.
The Christian version of theism nearly erased centuries of inquiry that preceded it. Greek philosophers, not Christian theologians, set themselves the
task of observing and understanding the natural world and had made significant progress: Aristarchus, who grasped that the sun was much larger than
the earth, was the first to envisage a heliocentric solar system and Eratosthenes, the first geographer, became the first man to measure the circumference of the earth.558 Eratosthenes (276-194 B.C.E.) calculated the circumference of Earth to within 1.6% of its true value without leaving Egypt,
calculated the tilt of Earths axis, and developed an algorithm, the Sieve of
Eratosthenes, to determine prime numbers two centuries before the birth of
Jesus.

554

1 Corinthians 3:19.
556
Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind, xix.
557
Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 26.
558
Pollard & Reid, The Rise and Fall of Alexandria, xvii.
555
83
Greek anatomists in Alexandria made great strides in correlating structure

and function: Herophilus first described the linked functions of the brain,
spinal cord, and nervous system, rightly relocating the center of thought from
the heart to the brain...he established the heart as not the center of feeling but
the center of the circulatory system, thereby anticipating William Harveys
discovery of the circulation of the blood by nineteen hundred years.559 A
humanist who may have extended these Greek discoveries, the Spanish physician Michael Servetus, was slowly burned alive at the stake in 1553 at the
behest of John Calvin, a Christian famous for his discovery of predestination
and infant baptismServetus had the misfortune to question the doctrine of
the trinity as well as the theological justification for dunking babies. In a
treatise, Christianismi Restitutio, Servetus revealed the function of the pulmonary circulation, the first European to do so. Except for three survivors, all
other copies of Christianismi Restitutio were destroyed, including the copy
that burned along with its author, chained to his leg.560 Jesus followers had
obviously settled for a literal reading of his wordsIf you do not remain in
me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are
picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.561
A century before Jesus, the Roman Epicurean poet, Titus Lucretius Carus,
described a nave but basically accurate form of atomism based on logic and
intuition, insights that would wait fifteen centuries to be rediscovered:
And what of odors? We sense them, but we never see them coming
toward our nostrils; we do not look at heat, apprehend cold with our
eyes, we are not accustomed to witness voices. Yet all these things, by
nature, must be material, since they strike our senses. Nothing can
touch or be touched, excepting matter...many things have elements in
common, but differently combined...It is most important both with
what other elements they are joined, in what positions they are held
together, and their reciprocal movement. The same atoms constitute
ocean, sky, lands, rivers, sun, crops, bushes, animals; these atoms mingle and move in different ways and combinations...All things keep on,
in everlasting motion, out of the infinite come the particles speeding
above, below, in endless dance. By nature space is deep and space is
boundless, so that bright shafts of lightening could not cross it, given
eternal time...there is too much space...no limit to that infinite domain
...You look sometimes, you see the motes all dancing, as the sun
streams through the shutters into a dark room. Look!there they go,
like armies in maneuver...Oh, infinitely smaller, beyond your sight,

559
Ibid, 68.
For the story of Servetus, his murder, and his book, see Out of the Flames by
Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone.
561
John 15:6, NIV.
560
84
similar turbulence whirls...Those motes in the sunlight, by their restlessness, tell you theres motion, hidden and unseen, in what seems
solid matter...atoms have a finite number of differing shapes...Never
suppose the atoms had a plan, nor with a wise intelligence imposed an
order on themselves...No, it was all fortuitous; for years, for centuries,
for eons, all those motes in infinite varieties of ways have always moved,
since infinite time began...meet and combine, try every possible, every
conceivable pattern, till at length experiment culminates in that array
which makes great things begin: the earth, the sky, the ocean, and the
race of living creatures.562
The nascent sciences of Greco-Roman culture and the speculation they provoked during the Renaissance threatened to overturn the intense anthropocentrism of the Judeo-Christian mythos. Where myth had shown that human action was bound up with the essential meaning of life, the new science
had suddenly pushed men and women into a marginal position in the cosmos. They were no longer the center of things, but cast adrift on an undistinguished planet in a universe that no longer revolved around their
needs.563 The defeat of geocentrism and the vastly expanded vision of the
universe that resulted reduced Yahweh to the category of just another ancient
Canaanite storm godextol him who rides on the clouds564no more important than Baal, Asherah, or Moloch. The newly minted higher criticism
of the 19th century threatened to return Jesus to his historical context, lowering him to the status of a delusional apocalyptic false prophet who, through a
fluke of local circumstances, was transmogrified by a culture riddled with
magic and superstition into a god.
Certainly no one would claim that the Greco-Roman world before Christianity was an intellectual paradise or that the Roman Empire, bent on conquest
and consumed with defending its acquired territories, was much interested in
what we would call pure science. Nevertheless, the rise of Christianity did, in
fact, coincide with the violent end of a world, a loss only hinted at by discoveries such as the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient analog computer
ably described by Jo Marchant:
Its hard to overestimate the uniqueness of the find. Before the Antikythera mechanism, not one single gearwheel had ever been found
from antiquity, nor indeed any example of an accurate pointer or
scale. Apart from the Antikythera mechanism, they still havent...
Whoever turned the handle on the side of its wooden case became
master of the cosmos, winding forwards or backwards to see every
562
Humphries, The Way Things Are: The De Rerum Natura, 43, 48, 55, 65, 172.
Armstrong, The Battle for God, 68.
564
Psalm 68:4, for example.
563
85
thing about the sky at any chosen moment. Pointers on the front
showed the changing positions of the Sun, Moon and planets in the
zodiac, the date, as well as the phases of the Moon, while spiral dials
on the back showed the month and year according to a combined
lunar-solar calendar, and the timing of eclipses. Inscribed text around
the front dial revealed which star constellations were rising and setting at each moment, while the writing on the back gave details of the
characteristics and location of the predicted eclipses.565
By the 4th century, Christians had predictably turned from the pagan population to persecuting each other. Christian controversies mobilized individual
congregations of believers within each city, provoking, on occasions, major
riots, and frequent processions and counterprocessions. All over the empire,
Christian factionalism led to a perceptible increase in the climate of violence
...Ammianus Marcellinus understandably concluded that Christian groups
behaved to each other like wild beasts.566
Within Alexandria as well as the rest of Egypt, Christian monks functioned as
religious death squads. Referencing Libanius description of the destruction
of shrines, Frankfurter notes,
By the end of the fourth century such militant destruction of native
shrines and images had become epidemic around the Mediterranean
world. By the middle of the fifth century monastic leaders like Shenoute, Makarios of Thw, and Moses of Abydos were gaining a modest fame for burning temples, killing priests, and invading homes to
destroy private shrines. And indeed, the impetus for such havoc came
not from Roman edicts against paganism but from the whims and
machinations of bishops...And thus we find in the fourth and later
centuries that monks, the soldiers assisting them on scaffolds, and the
bishops in charge paid particular attention to the faces of gods in
their endeavors to neutralize temples. Indeed, if one visits Egyptian
temples today one finds scarcely a divinity that has not been meticulously hacked at...Christian leaders were evidently highly skilled at
such negative dramaturgy. And immediately behind them stood not
random passersby but Christian confraternities devoted to the leaders
authority and primed to respond to his charismatic displays, who
would gather, serve, chant, and riot by avocation. Whether in Alexandria or Panopolis, popular iconoclasm meant joining a pre-set
mob...A gang of monks could raze a local temple and its village, and
assassinate the inhabitants as well...567

565
Marchant, Decoding the Heavens, 40, 260.

Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, 90.
567
Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt, 278, 280, 282-283.
566
86
MacMullen observes that the role of the church leadership in exciting [religious mobs] is clear, and notes that under Justinian (527-565), a brutally
energetic or energetically brutal emperor who pursued the goal of religious
uniformity as no one before him, and his successor, Tiberius II (578-582),
the non-Christian population was subjected to mutilationmany who resisted he carved up, suspending their limbs in the main street of the town
as well as beheading, crucifixion and being burned alive.568 There is considerable evidence from a much broader range of sources, with a variety of
different agendas, that violent attacks on temples and synagogues, and other
clashes with Christians and non-Christians, did in fact happen on numerous
occasions and in nearly every corner of the Roman world, and that monks
and holy men were often involved...Archaeology, meanwhile, has unearthed a
massive accumulation of physical evidence for purposeful destruction of nonChristian cult objects and places of worship, and, in many cases, the construction of churches on their sites. Religious images were methodically hacked to pieces and thrown into wells, or mutilated by crosses carved into their
facespractices that can be understood in light of Christian beliefs about the
demons that supposedly dwelled in such objects.569
Julian adroitly exploited the mutual hatred of the Christian sects:
And in order to give more effect to his intentions, he ordered the
priests of the different Christian sects, with the adherents of each sect,
to be admitted into the palace, and in a constitutional spirit expressed
his wish that their dissensions being appeased, each without any hindrance might fearlessly follow the religion he preferred.
He did this the more resolutely because, as long license increased
their dissensions, he thought he should never have to fear the unanimity of the common people, having found by experience that no
wild beasts are so hostile to men as Christian sects in general are to
one another.570
William Tyndale, strangled and burned at the stake in 1536 for translating
the scriptures into English, could have attested to the truth of that observation, as could the last man to be hanged in England, in 1697, for denying the
Trinityin liberal Switzerland the last anti-trinitarian was strung up as late
as 1782. The Spanish Inquisition did not cease its persecution of heretics
until 1834 (the last auto-da-f took place in Mexico in 1850), about the time
Charles Darwin set sail on the Beagle and Michael Faraday discovered the re
568
MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, 13, 2728.
569
570
Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman History, V, 3,4.
87
lationship between electricity and magnetism.571 It was only in 1992 that the
Catholic Church belatedly concluded that Galileo had been wrongly convicted. In 1633 the astronomer, old and ailing, had been forced to kneel before the inquisitors and recant his theory that the Earth revolves around the
Sun in order to avoid being burned alive and spent the last eight years of his
life under house arrest.
Although it was claimed by Tertullian that the blood of the martyrs is the
seed of the Church,572 the enemies of the Church were its true nourishment.
Its enemies united it, inspired it, and enriched it. From the persecution of
heretics and apostates within its ranks, the Church turned again to pagans
as late as 580 the emperor Tiberius [II, my note], launching a persecution of
pagans, used the traditional Roman punishment of crucifixion (in the case of
one pagan governor, Anatolius, after he had first been thrown to the wild
beasts).573
Militancy was baked into Christianity well before the 4th and 5th centuries
when Church unleashed its dogs of war. The authentic writings of Paul contain the metaphors of war: Put on the full armor of God, so that you can
take your stand against the devils schemes. For our struggle is not against
flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the
powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of word God, so that when the
day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have
done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled
around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with
your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In
addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish
all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the
sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.574 Again, if the trumpet does
not sound a clear call, who will get ready for battle?575 In the centuries that
followed, millions would die by the sword as Christians spread their gospel
of peace. After crushing the open practice of the pagan religions and the
functional atheism of the atomists, the Church renewed its perennial persecution of Jews, which soon expanded to include witches, scientists, new heresies, Muslims, and Protestant reformerswho returned the favor by murdering Catholics.

571
Harris, The End of Faith, 85-86.

Tertullian, Apologeticus, 50.
573
Freeman, Egypt, Greece, and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean,
510.
574
Ephesians 6:11-17 (NIV).
575
1 Corinthians 14:8 (NIV).
572
88
Christianity is parasitic.
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is
nothing new under the sun. 576 Our Roman critics would certainly have
agreed with that world-weary assessment, particularly when it came to Christianity. Apocalypticism had been done before, and with greater panache, by
the author of the book of Daniel; Christian apocalyptic was a pale derivative.
Although the Christians boasted of their moral revelations, Celsus observed,
They have also a precept to this effectthat you must not resist a man who
insults you. Even, he says, if someone strikes you on one cheek, yet you
should offer the other one as well. This too is old stuff, and was better said
before them. But they expressed it in more vulgar terms. For Plato makes Socrates speak the following conversation in the Crito: Then we ought never to
do wrong. No, indeed. Not even ought we repay when wronged ourselves,
as most people think, since we ought not do wrong under any circumstances.
It appears not.577
Julian identified the dependency of Christian counter-polemic on GrecoRoman rhetoric and philosophy: In the words of the proverb, we are stricken with our arrows. For from our own writings [the Christians] take the weapons wherewith they engage in the war against us.578 Julian also noted that
Christianity brought nothing of substance into the world, neither original
philosophical insight nor any scientific discovery:
But has God granted to you to originate any science or any philosophical study? Why, what is it? For the theory of the heavenly bodies
was perfected among the Hellenes, after the first observations had
been made among the barbarians in Babylon. And the study of geometry took its rise in the measurement of the land of Egypt, and from
this grew to its present importance. Arithmetic began with the Phoenician merchants, and among the Hellenes in the course of time acquired the aspect of a regular science. These three the Hellenes combined with music into one science, for they connected astronomy
with geometry and adapted arithmetic to both, and perceived the
principle of harmony in it. Hence they laid down the rules for their

576
Ecclesiastes 1:9.
Chadwick, Contra Celsum 443 (VII, 58).
578
Wright, The Works of the Emperor Julian, III, 299.
577
89
music.579
Concerning the library in Alexandria, Greenblatt notes, Euclid developed
his geometry in Alexandria; Archimedes discovered pi and laid the foundation for calculus; Eratosthenes posited that the earth was round and calculated its circumference to within 1 percent; Galen revolutionized medicine.
Alexandrian astronomers postulated a heliocentric universe; geometers deduced that the length of a year was 365 days and proposed adding a leap
day every fourth year; geographers speculated that it would be possible to
reach India by sailing west from Spain; engineers developed hydraulics and
pneumatics; anatomists first understood clearly that the brain and the nervous system were a unit; studied the heart and the digestive system, and conducted experiments in nutrition. The level of achievement was staggering.580
Following the imposition of Christianity, any similar achievement was held
in abeyance for well over a millennium.
Lacking originality, Christianity first pilfered from the Jewish scriptures for
proof texts that established its messianic claims. Next it rummaged through
Greco-Roman philosophical schools in order to concoct its own bastardized
metaphysics, but given its disdain for empiricism, made no advances in science or mathematics. Current Christian fundamentalism fares no better;
Mooney describes the appropriation of scientific trappings and the masking
of outwardly religious forms of argumentation by advocates of creation science:
Even as they thumped their Bibles and denounced evolution, early
American creationists sometimes made scientific arguments as well.
Scopes trial advocate William Jennings Bryan even joined the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1924. But not
until the 1960s and 1970s did creationists consciously style themselves as practitioners of creation science, purging their writings and
arguments of scriptural references and consciously recruiting Ph.D.s
who were also fundamentalist Christians to their side. Not content
with merely denying science, they increasingly began to mimic and
abuse it.581
Creationism removes the follower from the rational, reality-based world.
Signs, miracles, and wonders occur not only in the daily life of Christians,
but also in history, science, medicine and logic...This insistence on the primacy of personal opinion regardless of facts destabilizes and destroys the pri
579
Julian, Against the Galileans 178A-178B (translation of W.C. Wright, Julian III,
369.)
580
Greenblatt, The Swerve, 87.
581
Mooney, The Republican War on Science, 37.
90
macy of all fact.582 Charles Pierce comically describes his visit to the 50,000
square foot Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, where stood another, smaller dinosaur. Which was wearing a saddle. It was an English saddle, hornless and battered. Apparently this was a dinosaur that performed in
dressage competition and stake races.583
Not only did Christianity bring nothing new to the world, it actively destroyed many of the intellectual advances made before its advent and lost
others through neglect and incomprehension. The imposition of Christian
theocracy resulted in nothing less than the extinction of serious mathematiccal and scientific thinking in Europe for a thousand years.584 Commenting
on the very similar situation current in the regressive backwaters of Islam, the
late Christopher Hitchens remarked, Faith-based fanatics could not design
anything as useful or beautiful as a skyscraper or a passenger aircraft. But,
continuing their long history of plagiarism, they could borrow and steal these
things and use them as a negation.585
In short, the claims of Christianitys Roman critics would appear to be valid:
the new sect advanced due to superstition and credulity, ignorance and illiteracy, it plagiarized crudely from Judaism, the mystery religions, magic and,
finally, from Greek philosophy and Roman rhetoric. The Christian claim to
universality was, prima facie, absurd, its prophecies manifestly false, its texts
riddled with inconsistency and error. As Christianity insinuated itself into
Roman politics, its doctrinal controversies further fragmented an empire already in danger of falling to pieces and it proved, in that sense at least, seditious.
Had the Romans of the first century foreseen the conditions of the fourth,
there is no doubt they would have smothered Christianity in its cradle. So
why didnt they? Perhaps we should let a Roman answer that question. When
Paul appeared before Festus, the Roman procurator of Judea, and described
his conversion, Festus said with a loud voice, Paul, youre raving! Too much
learning (ta polla...grammata) is driving you out of your mind! (Acts
26:24). The implication, elided by Luke, was that Pauls obsession with scriptureta iera grammata, the sacred writings586had unbalanced him mentally. Christianity reflected a crucial difference between Greco-Roman and
Jewish religion:

582
Heges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, 117-118.
Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, 2.
584
585
586
2 Timothy 3:15.
583
91
Among the Jews, in the century or so before Jesus, [enthusiasts and

keen believers] played havoc with authors meanings. They took
their texts word by word and read them for the oddest senses; they
over-interpreted the words, ignored their context and general gist...
Nobody put critical, historical questions to the texts which they had
inherited, and, as a result, they raped them...They also avoided the
fundamental question: how much, if anything, was true?...Even the
most religious types of [Greek] philosophy raised basic questions...As
a result, in the first century BC in Athens and Rome, thinking about
religion usually made people less religious; among Jews, however,
the more you thought about religion, the more religious you became. The major reason for this difference was the Jews possession
of scripture. They set the agenda for thought, absorbed it and were
never questioned critically...The people who have been described as
obsessed with history had not a single historian among them with a
critical idea of evidence.587
It seems likely that Roman officials disregarded the threat of Christianity
because they regarded its adherents as functionally insanefrom the perspective of the 1st century Romans, the rise and triumph of Christianity would
represent the classic case of the inmates taking control of the asylum. What is
to become of this bizarre concoction of Jewish apocalyptic, mystery cult and
ancient god talk called Christianity?
While the biblical literalists fight an increasingly desperate rear guard action,
losing one engagement after another, liberal Christians have cobbled together a formless, New Age-y, idiosyncratic or, rather, solipsistic vision of Jesus
that can be anything or nothing. The modern Jesus, the relevant Jesus, has
been tumbled in the stream of consciousness until He is as smooth and as
rounded as a river stone. Some permutation of Jesus can be reliably co-opted
by any cause, enlisted by any campaign, but even His secondary career as a
shill seems to be fading. Granted, the New Testament continues to be read
and even studied, its witness often wrested out of any probable or even possible context both by eager amateurs who know nothing of history and by
cynical opportunists who stand to lose prestige and fortune should the walls
finally fall. Like all things, gods live their allotted time and die, some by cataclysm and some by sheer attrition. Indeed, we may already glimpse a time
when the tombs of the Galileans are just that, relics of a dead past, as sparse
and unattended as the temples of Zeus.

587
Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version, 107-108, 116.
92
REFERENCES
Allison, Dale E. A Plea for a Thoroughgoing Eschatology, Journal of Biblical
Literature 113 (1994): 651-668.
Armstrong, Arthur H. (tr) Plotinus II, 1966, Harvard University Press.
Armstrong, Karen. The Battle for God, 2000, Alfred A. Knopf.
Aune, David E. Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World,
1983, William B. Eerdmans.
Bauer, Walter. Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, R. Kraft & G. Krodel,
eds, 1971, Fortress Press.
Benko, Stephen. Pagan Rome and the Early Christians, 1984, Indiana University
Press.
Burkert, Walter. Ancient Mystery Cults, 1987, Harvard University Press.
Brakke, David. The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity, 2010,
Harvard University Press.
Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity,
1981, University of Chicago Press.
. Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire, 1992,
University of Wisconsin Press.
Cameron, Alan. The Last Pagans of Rome, 2011, Oxford University Press.
Cameron, Ron. The Other Gospels: Non-Canonical Gospel Texts, 1982, The Westminster Press.
Caner, Daniel F. The Practice and Prohibition of Self Castration in Early Chris588
tianity, Vigiliae Christianae 51 (1997): 396-415.
Canfora, Luciano. The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World, 1987, University of California Press.
Carroll, James. Constantines Sword: The Church and the Jews, 2001, Houghton
Mifflin Company.
Chadwick, Henry (tr). Origen: Contra Celsum, 1965, Cambridge University Press.
. Augustine on pagans and Christians: reflections on religious and social change,
History, Society and the Churches: Essays in honour of Owen Chadwick, D. Beales &
G. Best, eds, 1985, Cambridge University Press.
Clark, Gillian. Christianity and Roman Society, 2004, Cambridge University Press.
Conner, Miguel. Voices of Gnosticism, 2011, Bardic Press.
Conner, Robert. Magic in the New Testament: A Survey and Appraisal of the
Evidence, 2010, Mandrake of Oxford.
. Magic in Christianity: From Jesus to the Gnostics, 2014, Mandrake of Oxford.
. The Secret Gospel of Mark: Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and Four
Decades of Academic Burlesque, 2015, Mandrake of Oxford.
Connolly, A.L. kunarion, New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity: A Review
of the Greek inscriptions and Papyri Published in 1979, 1987, The Ancient History
Document Research Center.
Driver, Tom F. Liberating Rites: Understanding the Transformative Power of Ritual,
2006, BookSurge.
93
Ehrman, Bart D. Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, 1999, Oxford
University Press.
. Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, 2003,
Oxford University Press.
. Apostolic Fathers, II, 2003, Harvard University Press.
Epp, Eldon J. The Multivalence of the Term Original Text in New Testament
Textual Criticism, Harvard Theological Review 92 (1999): 245-281.
. Junia: The First Woman Apostle, 2005, Fortress Press.
Ericksen, Robert P. Theologians Under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and
Emmanuel Hirsch, 1985, Yale University Press.
Frankfurter, David. Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance, 1998,
Princeton University Press.
Fredriksen, Paula. From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of
Jesus, 1988, Yale University Press.
Freeman, Charles. Egypt, Greece, and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean, 1996, Oxford University Press.
.The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason, 2003,
Alfred A. Knopf.
Gaddis, Michael. There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in
the Christian Roman Empire, 2005, University of California Press.
Gager, John G. Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity,
1975, Prentice Hall.
. Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World, 1992, Oxford University Press.
Garland, Robert. Miracles in the Greek and Roman World, The Cambridge Companion to Miracles, G.H. Twelftree, ed, 2001, Cambridge University Press.
Goldberg, Michelle. Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, 2007,
W.W. Norton.
Grant, Michael. Jesus, 1977, Rigel Publications.
Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, 2011, W.W.
Norton & Company.
Greer, Rowan A. Origen: An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer, First Principles: Book
IV, Prologue to the Commentary on the Song of Songs, Homily XXVII on Numbers,
1979, Paulist Press.
Haas, Christopher. The Alexandrian Riots of 356 and George of Cappodocia,
Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 32/3 (1991): 281-301.
Harmon, Austin M. (tr). Lucian, III, 1921, Harvard University Press.
. Lucian, IV, 1925, Harvard University Press.
. Lucian, V, 1936, Harvard University Press.
Harris, Sam. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, 2004,
W.W. Norton & Company.
Harvey, W. Wigan. Saint Irenaeus Bishop of Lyons Five Books Against Heresies, I,
2013, St. Irenaeus Press.
Hitchens, Christopher. god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, 2007,
Twelve.
Hoffman, Joseph R. Celsus on the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians,
1987, Oxford University Press.
. Porphyrys Against the Christians: The Literary Remains, 1994, Prometheus Books.
Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 1963, Vintage Books.
94
Holmes, Michael W. (tr). The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, 3rd ed, 2007, Baker Academic.
Humphrey, Hugh M. From Q to Secret Mark: A Composition History of the Earliest
Narrative Theology, 2006, T&T Clark.
Humphries, Rolfe. Lucretius: The Way Things Are: The De Rerum Natura of Titus
Lucretius Carus, 1968, Indiana University Press.
Jenkins, Philip. Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors
Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years, 2010, HarperOne.
Johnson, Luke T. Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity, 2009,
Yale University Press.
Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion: The message of the alien God and the beginnings of
Christianity, 2nd ed, enlarged, 1958, Beacon Press.
Jones, Christopher C. Culture and Society in Lucian, 1986, Harvard University
Press.
Kannaday, Wayne C. Apologetic Discourse and the Scribal Tradition: The Evidence of
the Influence of Apologetic Interests on the Texts of the Canonical Gospels, 2004, Society
of Biblical Literature.
Kotansky, Roy. Greek Magical Amulets: The Inscribed Gold, Silver, Copper, and
Bronze Lamellae. Part I: Published Texts of Known Provenance, 1994, Westdeutscher
Verlag.
Kmmel, Werner G. The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of Its Problems, S.M. Gilmour & H.C. Kee, tr, 1972, Abingdon Press.
Lane Fox, Robin. Pagans and Christians, 1987, Alfred A. Knopf.
. The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible, 1992, Alfred A. Knopf.
Larson, Erik. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitlers Berlin, 2001, Random House.
Ldemann, Gerd. Heretics: The Other Side of Christianity, J. Bowden, tr, 1996,
Westminster John Knox Press.
. Paul: The Founder of Christianity, 2002, Prometheus Books.
MacDonald, Margaret Y. Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion: The Power of
the Hysterical Woman, 1996, Cambridge University Press.
MacMullen, Ramsey. Christianizing the Roman Empire (AD 100-400), 1984, Yale
University Press.
Marchant, Jo. Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old ComputerAnd the Cen-
tury-Long Search to Discover Its Secrets, 2009, DaCapo Press.

Marcovich, Miroslav. Origenes: Contra Celsum Libri VIII, 2001, Brill.
McGowan, Andrew. Eating People: Accusations of Cannibalism Against Christians
in the Second Century, Journal of Early Christian Studies 2/3 (1994): 413-442.
McKechnie, Paul. The First Christian Centuries: Perspectives on the Early Church,
2001, InterVarsity Press.
Miller, Patricia C. In Praise of Nonsense, Classical Mediterranean Spirituality,
A.H. Armstrong, ed, 1986, Crossroad.
Moberly, R. Walter. Miracles in the Hebrew Bible, The Cambridge Companion to
Miracles, G.H. Twelftree, ed, 2011, Cambridge University Press.
Mooney, Chris. The Republican War on Science, 2005, Basic Books.
Mount, Christopher. 1 Corinthians 11:3-16: Spirit Possession and Authority in a
Non-Pauline Interpolation, Journal of Biblical Literature 124 (2005): 313-340.
95
Murdoch, Adrian. The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate and the Death of the Ancient
World, 2008, Inner Traditions.
Netz, Reviel & William Noel. The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book Is
Revealing the True Genius of Antiquitys Greatest Scientist, 2007, Da Capo Press.
Ogden, Daniel. In Search of the Sorcerers Apprentice: The traditional tales of Lucians
Lover of Lies, 2007, The Classical Press of Wales.
Pagels, Elaine. The Origin of Satan, 1995, Random House.
Penton, M. James. Apocalypse Delayed: The Story of Jehovahs Witnesses, 1985, University of Toronto Press.
Petersen, Anders K. Paul and Magic: Complementary or Incongruent Entities,
Studies on Magic and Divination in the Biblical World, 2013, Gorgias Press.
Pierce, Charles P. Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the
Free, 2010, Anchor Books.
Plummer, Eric. The Absence of Exorcisms in the Fourth Gospel, Biblica 78
(1997) 350-368.
Pollard, Justin & Howard Reid. The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the
Modern Mind, 2006, Viking.
Preisendanz, Karl. Papyri Graecae Magicae: Die Griechischen Zauberpapyri, I, 2001,
K.G. Saur.
Posner, Sarah. Gods Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values
Voters, 2008, Polipoint Press.
Rudolph, Kurt. Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism, 1987, Harper San
Francisco.
Rutherford, Richard. Classical Literature: A Concise History, 2005, Blackwell.
edina, Miroslav. Magical Power of Names in Origens Polemic Against Celsus,
Listy filologick 136 (2013), 7-25.
Seely, Rachael Ann. St. Peters Basilica as Templum Dei: Continuation of the Ancient Near Eastern Temple Tradition in the Christian Cathedral, Studia Antiqua
4/1 (2005): 63-80.
Setzer, Claudia J. Jewish Response to Early Christians: History and Polemics, 30150
C.E., 1994, Fortress Press.
Smith, R. Morton. Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, 1973, Harvard University Press.
. Jesus the Magician, 1978, Harper San Francisco.
. How Magic Was Changed by the Triumph of Christianity, Studies in the Cult
of Yahweh, II, S.J.D. Cohen, ed, 1996, E.J. Brill.
Stanton, Graham N. Jesus of Nazareth: A Magician and a False Prophet Who Deceived Gods People? Jesus of Nazareth Lord and Christ: Essays on the Historical Jesus
and New Testament Christology, J.B. Green & M. Turner, eds, 1994, Wm. B.
Eerdmans.
Taylor, N. H. Apostolic Identity and the Conflict in Corinth and Galatia, Paul
and His Opponents, II, S.E. Porter (ed), 2005, Brill.
Thee, Francis C.R. Julius Africanus and the Early Christian View of Magic, 1984,
Mohr Siebeck.
Twelftree, Graham M. Introduction: Miracle in an age of diversity, The
Cambridge Companion to Miracles, G.H. Twelftree, ed, 2011, Cambridge University
Press.
Unger, Dominic J. St. Irenaeus of Lyons Against the Heresies, I, 1992, The Newman
Press.
96
Volp, Ulrich (tr). Makarios Magnes Apokritikos: Kritische Ausgabe mit deutscher bersetzung, 2013, De Gruyter.
Watts, Edward J. The Final Pagan Generation, 2015, University of California Press.
Wilken, Robert L. The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 2nd ed, 2003, Yale University Press.
Williams, Frank. The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Book I (Sects 1-46), 2nd ed,
revised & expanded, 2009, Brill.
Wright, Wilmer C. (tr). The Works of the Emperor Julian, II, 1913, Harvard University Press.
. Philostratus and Eunapius: The Lives of the Sophists, 1921, Harvard University
Press.
. The Works of the Emperor Julian, III, 1923, Harvard University Press.
97

Christianity&#39;s Critics: The Romans Meet Jesus

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Christianity&#39;s Critics: The Romans Meet Jesus

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Christianitys Critics:

The Romans Meet Jesus

Roman authors such as Celsus, Porphyry, Julian, and Lucian of Samosata

Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, 231-232.

McKechnie, The First Christian Centuries, 27.

Johnson, Among the Gentiles, 14, 16.

Twelftree, The Cambridge Companion to Miracles, 5.

dication of how seriously Christians took its arguments.27 We know about

Frend, The Rise of Christianity, 442.

Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians, 148.

groups, may have contributed to a distorted picture of this oriental

Benko, 21, 23.

Jesus and Paul were false prophets.

Humphries, Lucretius: The Way Things Are, 21.

Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, 100.

Greer, Origen: An Exhortation to Martyrdom, 3, 69.

of Christians would be living witnesses to Christs return from heaven

Ldemann, Paul, 14, 49.

him could cross on dry land. 98 Notwithstanding Theudas sticky end,

Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, XX, 97.

in the communityprobably because the notion of the resurrection of

Ldemann, Paul, 51, 206.

Hoffman, Celsus On the True Doctrine, 9-11.

the answer to all debatable questions of previous life-of-Jesus research,

Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, 82-83.

you keep away from such.127 The christemporos, or Christ-monger, was an

Penton, Apocalypse Delayed: The Story of Jehovahs Witnesses, 99-100.

Christianity is a Jewish heresy.

Armstrong, The Battle for God, 138-139.

Jeffers, The Greco-Roman World of the New Testament Era, 67.

dogs156 which he generally avoids.157 The Jesus movement...did not show

Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ, 194-196.

Paul, heretic and founder of Christianity.

Acts 13:26, 43, 44-52 (my translation).

growing in front of the ears.178 Jews were obviously meant to be different in

Galatians 2:5-6 (my translation).

Gager, Kingdom and Community, 4.

1 Timothy 4:1, 5:15, 6:4.

The two-volume apologetic we know as Luke-Acts addresses a theological

Luke 19:11-12, 27.

toms. Christians who believed the destruction of Jerusalem was punishment

Origen, Contra Celsum I, 47.

the Judaists soon became a heresy, rejected with conviction by the

Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, 236.

there was never a single Christianity.

The many-headed hydra of Gnosticism.

Ibid, III, 10, 12.

Brakke, The Gnostics, x, 19.

essential building blocks of Gnostic mythology are reinterpretations of Jewish

Pearson, Voices of Gnosticism, 72.

Eusebius Ecclesiastical History.

Celsus also knew of a Christian diagram illustrating ten heavens represented

Origen, Contra Celsum, VI, 21, 24-32.

Chadwick, Origen: Contra Celsum, 90-91 (II, 27).

sion to something like Marcions revision of Christian scripture: Timothy,

2 Thessalonians 2:2, NIV.

For this reason [confidence in the techniques of unbelievers] they

Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History V, 28, 17-18 (my translation).

Christianity appeals to the ignorant and

Mark 10:42, Matthew 20:25.

John 7:48, 49 (NIV).

Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians, 157.

Origen, quoting Celsus, Contra Celsum III, 55.

Acts 16:6-7, NIV. Compare Romans 8:9.

Christianity's Critics: The Romans Meet Jesus

Christianity's Critics: The Romans Meet Jesus