More on this line of thought.
"Today Christianity has been so important for so long that one is apt to assume that it must have appeared important to educated pagans who lived AD 50-150; and that if they fail to discuss Jesus' historicity or the pretensions of his worshippers, their silence must be attributed to their consciousness that they were unable to deny the truth of the Christian case. In fact, however, there is no reason why the pagan writers of this period should have thought Christianity any more important than other enthusiastic religions of the Empire." G.A. Wells, Did Jesus Exist? (Revised edition, London: Pemberton, 1986), p. 15.
"Whether the 'Christ' they worshipped had been on earth as a man will have been of no interest either to him [Pliny] or to Trajan. What worried them was that Christians were holding meetings which, because of Christian unwillingness to make due obeisance to the emperor, might have been seditious, they were not concerned about whether there was any historical basis to Christian doctrinal niceties." G.A. Wells, The Jesus Legend (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1996), p. 41.
"I would ask whose historicity was questioned in antiquity, when both pagan historians and Christian Fathers accepted pagan saviour gods as historical personages? (Herodotus says Attis was the son of a king of Lydia and that Horus, son of Isis and Osiris, was a ruler of Egypt. Clement of Alexandria regarded pagan saviour gods as 'mere men' and Firmicus Maternus called Osiris and Typhon 'without doubt' kings of Egypt). Can one expect much in the way of critical scepticism when, even in modern times, Wilhelm Till long passed as a real person?" G.A. Wells, The Jesus Legend (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1996), p. 47. |
