The Christians as the Romans Saw Them - Ancient Roman Perspectives on Early Christianity | Historical Religious Studies for Scholars & History Buffs" 使用场景：Perfect for academic research, religious studies courses, or anyone interested in ancient Roman history and early Christianity.

This is probably the most insightful book I've yet read on Ante-Nicene Christian thought and its relation with the broader Greco-Roman world. Wilken takes us inside the minds of early critics of Christianity and shows exactly how and why they found Christianity to be both intellectually unsustainable and a threat to the civic order of the world. The latter is more difficult for modern people to grasp. Most in the Western world are accustomed to thinking of a sharp distinction between religion and government, where each institution operates independently of the other. This is anachronistic thinking, and it simply does not hold up in terms of Roman society and culture. Sacrifice and public worship was an integral part of civic life. The sacrifices observed as part of the civic calendar were what marked out the city as uniquely Roman. It drew together the people of the city into a single culture whose patrons were the traditional gods.Wilken shows that some critics were more than happy to incorporate Jesus into the pantheon. Porphyry, for example, declared that Jesus was like unto the heroes of old, who had been exalted to quasi-divine status because of the virtuous life that he lived. Others, however, disagreed. Celsus held that Jesus had learned sorcery in Egypt and that his miracles were not the result of divine power, but of magical incantations. What I found particularly interesting was the way in which the debates between Christians and pagans in the first three centuries paralleled debates between Christians and modernists today. Many of us have heard that the early Christians were unconcerned with the historical reality of the biblical story, or at least that they didn't care about the authenticity of the biblical history in its details. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, many pagan critics made the historical authenticity of the Bible a focal point of their critique, leading Augustine to write a Harmony of the Gospels wherein he intended to prove that the Gospels were in complete harmony, without so much as a single contradiction. Porphyry anticipated modernist theories about the origin of the Book of Daniel, suggesting that it was a forgery meant to spur Jewish hope during the Maccabean crisis.Wilken also elaborates on the relationship between Christianity, paganism, and Judaism at this period. Jews constituted as much as 10% of the Roman Empire, and were very often a visible part of civic life. They, like the Christians, did not offer sacrifice or worship the traditional gods. Most of the time, however, the Roman government left them alone because of the antiquity of their religion. The Jews constituted a nation with a traditional faith in a way the Christians did not. And the pagans believed they had discovered a weak point in Christian theology when it came to the relationship of Christianity to Judaism. If Christians worshiped the God of Abraham, then why did they not keep the laws given to Moses? Celsus asked whether God had changed His mind. Julian referred to Christians as apostates from Judaism. Christians laid such emphasis on the end of the old covenant in the fall of the Temple that Julian the Apostate believed that he could definitively refute Christianity if he oversaw the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.This is a remarkable book, and it is to be praised for its extended and insightful interaction with the primary sources. I very highly recommend it.