The Mystical Rivals of Early Christianity

A History of Mankind (255)

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Later Christian tradition, simplified for the consumption of barely literate European medieval courts, would hold that ancient Christians and Jews struggled to teach their exalted view of the one true God to ignorant polytheists, who clung to their silly pagan superstitions.

This makes no sense because educated Greeks and Romans had been essentially atheists for centuries, a fact that wasn’t even hidden by the 2^nd century, when Alciphron, likely a follower of Lucian of Samosata, openly wrote about a particular sacrilege, and how “the gods will not be shocked: they are our own creation”¹; only the lower classes remained attached to pagan pageantry and in any case most Christian converts well into that century came from that same lower class. Edward Gibbon famously wrote in the 18th century:

"The various models of worship, which prevailed in the Roman World, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful."²