This comes from my random unplanned reading. The book of this title was one that my daughter bought for a college class. She never read it, though, and I spotted it sitting on a bookshelf. I guess it's fitting that I can benefit from the book, having paid for it.

It's fascinating when a historian can open up for a reader a whole new perspective, especially when starting pretty much from ignorance. It's important to be able to trust the historian not to play favorites and line up the bad guys vs. the good, and Robert Louis Wilken doesn't. That doesn't mean he can't be sympathetic, in this case to the pagan philosophers and theologians who had a lot to say about the Christians as that religion grew over the first few centuries of the new era. Christian apologetics has given the pagan writers a negative reputation, basically turning the tables on the Romans, who had the upper hand until the Fourth Century. The new religion grew to be a serious threat to the establishment, of course.

We're most used to criticism of Christians from a humanist/atheist standpoint. Of course, that didn't exist with the Romans, who were also quite religious, though in different ways from Christians. So you don't see any attacks on supernaturalism, which Roman religion also had plenty of. What you do see, though, is some criticisms that look modern, such as the historical reliability of the Hebrew scriptures on which Christianity based itself, the divinity of Jesus, the dating of some of the scriptures, the truth of the Christian views of OT prophecy, and the taking of myths as literal truths. To some extent, the criticism of Christians was criticism of Jews as well, but Jews generally fared much better because they had a quality greatly admired by the Romans: the antiquity of their faith. To the Romans, what established a religion as valid was mostly that it had grown up through centuries. They were big on the argument from authority. Christians, by contrast, could not claim this history, in Roman eyes, because they had actually repudiated the laws that God had handed to the Hebrews. How, then, could they borrow the credibility of the Hebrew religion?

Christians were most dangerous to society because they were separatists. They did not participate in the civic life of Roman societies in the region.

A criticism or two don't look modern, such as the complaint that Christians failed to offer live animal sacrifices, and the charge that Jesus was only a sorcerer, after all, who could perform miracles.

Perhaps the most surprising criticism of Christians was that they were insufficiently monotheistic. In high Roman paganism, above all the familiar pantheon of gods was the most high, ineffable and indescribable god, who is actually God. It was important to honor a whole slew of lesser gods, but these were not to be raised near the level of the most high. In elevating Jesus to the level of the one God, Christians did the unpardonable, splitting what cannot be split and confusing flesh with spirit. The Roman writers whom Wilken discusses believed that Jesus had not said he was divine, and that this was not the belief during his life. It was his followers who made him God.

Also, to claim that God intervened at one time in history, on behalf of one group of people, seemed unpardonably narrow, and simply impossible, for the God of all humans. God would not be so bound by time and space.

A figure whom I had only heard of, Julian the Apostate, is featured. Julian was briefly Emperor around 360 CE. He lived in the time when Christianity had become so strong that even emperors adopted it, though it hadn't become the official religion of the empire. Julian was raised Christian and educated, as was desirable for both Christians and Jews, in the Greek tradition of philosophy and rhetoric. Julian, though, took all of it to heart and repudiated his Christianity, becoming perhaps the first to convert to paganism. He led a campaign to tamp down Christianity, and wrote a treatise against it. One of his more brilliant ideas was to enlist Judaism in the battle. He would take it upon himself to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem for the Jews. This could be perhaps fatal to the Christian faith, which relied on the scriptural prophecies that never again was the Temple to be rebuilt, thus signalling the end of Judaism as God's true faith and the ascendency of Christianity. Julian put the rebuilding in motion, but he died in battle after only a short reign. One of the more tantalizing what-ifs is what would have happened had he lived to complete the task.

Going on a bit long, but just wanted to share.

Sounds like an interesting read!

Thanks for putting this up.