Today is a sacred day for Christians. This is what Stephen Greenblatt writes about them and the great religion of Christianity. From "The Swerve:"
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.
…
Christians could try, of course, to reverse the mockery. If such doctrines as the Incarnation and the resurrection of the body seemed absurd-"figments of diseased imagination," as one pagan put it, "and the futile fairy-tales invented by poets' fancy"—
…
The Incarnation, Epicureans scoffed, was a particularly absurd idea...Why should anyone with any sense credit the idea of Providence, a childish idea contradicted by any rational adult's experience and observation?...Christians are like a council of frogs in a pond, croaking at the top of their lungs, "For our sakes was the world created."
…
Some of the jibes were common to all of Christianity's polemical enemies--Jesus was born in adultery, his father was a nobody, and any claims to divine dignity are manifestly disproved by his poverty and his shameful end.
[Lucretius] would not have been surprised by...the endlessly reiterated, prominently displayed images of the bloody, murdered son.
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.
…
Christians could try, of course, to reverse the mockery. If such doctrines as the Incarnation and the resurrection of the body seemed absurd-"figments of diseased imagination," as one pagan put it, "and the futile fairy-tales invented by poets' fancy"—
…
The Incarnation, Epicureans scoffed, was a particularly absurd idea...Why should anyone with any sense credit the idea of Providence, a childish idea contradicted by any rational adult's experience and observation?...Christians are like a council of frogs in a pond, croaking at the top of their lungs, "For our sakes was the world created."
…
Some of the jibes were common to all of Christianity's polemical enemies--Jesus was born in adultery, his father was a nobody, and any claims to divine dignity are manifestly disproved by his poverty and his shameful end.
[Lucretius] would not have been surprised by...the endlessly reiterated, prominently displayed images of the bloody, murdered son.
