“The first Christian who can write decent Latin is Minucius Felix, whose Octavius, written in the first half (possibly the first quarter) of the Third Century must have done much to make Christianity respectable. He concentrates on ridiculing pagan myths that no educated man believed anyway and on denying that Christians (he means his kind, of course!) practice incest (a favorite recreation of many sects that had been saved by Christ from the tyranny of human laws) or cut the throats of children to obtain blood for Holy Communion (as some groups undoubtedly did). He argues for a monotheism that is indistinguishable from the Stoic except that the One God is identified as the Christian deity, from whose worship the sinful Jews are apostates, and insists that Christians have nothing to do with the Jews, whom God is going to punish. What is interesting is that Minucius has nothing to say about any specifically Christian doctrine, and that the names of Jesus or Christ do not appear in his work. There is just one allusion: the pagans say that Christianity was founded by a felon (unnamed) who was crucified. That, says Minucius, is absurd: no criminal ever deserved, nor did a man of this world have the power, to be believed to be a god (erratis, qui putatis deum credi aut meruisse noxium aut potuisse terrenum). That ambiguous reference is all that he has to say about it; he turns at once to condemning the Egyptians for worshipping a mortal man, and then he argues that the sign of the cross represents (a) the mast and yard of a ship under sail, and (b) the position of man who is worshipping God properly, i. e. standing with outstretched arms. If Minucius is not merely trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the gullible pagans, it certainly sounds as though this Christian were denying the divinity of Christ, either regarding him, as did many of the early Christians, as man who was inspired but was not to be identified with God, or claiming, as did a number of later sects, that what appeared on earth and was crucified was merely a ghost, an insubstantial apparition sent by Christ, who himself prudently stayed in his heaven above the clouds and laughed at the fools who thought they could kill a phantom. Of course, our holy men are quite sure that he was "orthodox."”

The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

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Revilo P. Oliver37

American philologist 1908–1994

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“There can be no question but that Christianity was originally a Jewish promotion, and it is noteworthy that the Christians who try to make their cult respectable in the Third Century claim that they repudiate the Jews. One of the earliest to do this was Tertullian, a Carthaginian shyster, whose Apologeticum, a defense of Christianity, was written at the very beginning of the Third Century. He asserts that Christianity is not a conspiracy of revolutionaries and degenerates, as was commonly believed, and claims that it is an association of loving brothers who have preserved the faith that the Jews forsook – which has been the common story ever since. Our holy men salvage Tertullian by claiming that he was "orthodox" in his early writings, but then, alas! became a Montanist heretic, poor fellow. Tertullian is the author of the famous dictum that he believes the impossible because it is absurd (credo quia absurdum), so he is naturally dear to the heart of the pious. How much Jerome and other saints have tampered with the facts to make Tertullian seem "orthodox" in his early works has been most fully shown by Timothy Barnes in his Tertullian (Oxford, 1971), but even he spends a hundred pages pawing over chronological difficulties that can be reconciled by what seems to me the simple and obvious solution: Tertullian, who was evidently a pettifogging lawyer before he got into the Gospel-business, had sense enough to eliminate from his brief for the Christians facts that would have displeased the pagans whom he was trying to convince that Christians represented no threat to civilized society; he accordingly concealed in his apologetic works the peculiar doctrines of the Christian sect to which he had been originally "converted," but he naturally expounded those doctrines in writings intended, not for the eyes of wicked pagans, but for other brands of Christians, whom he wished to convert to his own sect, which was that of Montanus, a very Holy Prophet (divinely inspired, of course) who was a Phrygian, not a Jew, and who had learned from chats with God that since the Jews had muffed their big opportunity at the time of the Crucifixion, Jesus, when he returned next year or the year after that, was going to set up his New Jerusalem in Phrygia after he had raised hell with the pagans and tormented and butchered them in all of the delightful ways so lovingly described in the Apocalypse, the Hymn of Hate that still soothes the souls of "fundamentalist" Christians today. If, in his Apologeticum and similar works, Tertullian had told the stupid pagans that they were going to be tortured and exterminated in a year or two, they might have doubted that Christians were the innocent little lambs that Tertullian claimed they were.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

“You can't make a man a Christian unless you first make him believe he is a sinner.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living (1937), p. 17
Misattributed

“The aversion of the first Christians to the images, inspired by the Pagan simulachres, made room, during the centuries which followed the period of the persecutions, to a feeling of an entirely different kind, and the images gradually gained their favour. Reappearing at the end of the fourth and during the course of the fifth centuries, simply as emblems, they soon became images, in the true acceptation of this word; and the respect which was entertained by the Christians for the persons and ideas represented by those images, was afterwards converted into a real worship. Representations of the sufferings which the Christians had endured for the sake of their religion, were at first exhibited to the people in order to stimulate by such a sight the faith of the masses, always lukewarm and indifferent. With regard to the images of divine persons of entirely immaterial beings, it must be remarked, that they did not originate from the most spiritualised and pure doctrines of the Christian society, but were rejected by the severe orthodoxy of the primitive church. These simulachres appear to have been spread at first by the Gnostics,—i. e., by those Christian sects which adopted the most of the beliefs of Persia and India. Thus it was a Christianity which was not purified by its contact with the school of Plato,—a Christianity which entirely rejected the Mosaic tradition, in order to attach itself to the most strange and attractive myths of Persia and India,—that gave birth to the images.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Source: A Treatise of Relics (1549), p. 13

“Early Christian art during the first two or three centuries of its existence was merely a development or even a variant of late Roman art. So great is the similarity between late pagan and early Christian work that the decisive change of style must have occurred between the classical and post-classical, not between the pagan and Christian eras.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

The Social History of Art, Volume I. From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, 1999, Chapter IV. The Middle Ages

“By Christianity I do not mean charity, mercy, kindness, forgiveness. I mean no natural virtue, because all the natural virtues existed and had been practiced by hundreds and thousands of millions before Christ was born. There certainly were some good men even in the days of Christ in Jerusalem, before his death. By Christianity I mean the ideas of redemption, atonement, a good man dying for a bad man, and the bad man getting a receipt in full. By Christianity I mean that system that insists that in the next world a few will be forever happy, while the many will be eternally miserable. Christianity, as I have explained it, must be protected, guarded, and sustained by law. It was founded by the sword that is to say, by physical force,—and must be preserved by like means.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Interview with the Chicago Times, Feb. 14, 1881.

“Henceforward the Christian Churches having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof, came into the hands of the Encratites: and the Heathens, who in the fourth century came over in great numbers to the Christians, embraced more readily this sort of Christianity, as having a greater affinity with their old superstitions, than that of the sincere Christians; who by the lamps of the seven Churches of Asia, and not by the lamps of the Monasteries, had illuminated the Church Catholic during the three first centuries.”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

Vol. I, Ch. 13: Of the King who did according to his will, and magnified himself above every God, and honored Mahuzzims, and regarded not the desire of women
Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733)