What flickers through such moments of [Christian] abdication is a fear of being laughed at. The threat was not persecution--the official religion of the empire by this time was Christian--but ridicule...What was ridiculous about Christianity, from the perspective of a cultivated pagan, was not only its language--the crude style of the Gospels' Greek resting on the barbarous otherness of Hebrew and Aramaic--but also its exaltation of divine humiliation and pain conjoined with an arrogant triumphalism.
The "cultivated pagan" is, inter alia, Stephen Greenblatt.
The "cultivated pagan" is, inter alia, Stephen Greenblatt.
