The New Gospel

… Josephus is virtually our only source for a profoundly important chapter of history.  He adds enormously to our information.  Where his personal prestige was not involved and his taste for hyperbole not enlisted, he tells a knowledgeable, exact and comprehensive story, and tells it conscientiously and fascinatingly. … Assisted by [a] powerful vein of frankness, which goes far to counterbalance his other aberrations, Josephus’ narratives are, for the most part, both illuminating and reliable.  They had to be since they would be read by important people who had actually played a leading part in the events. 

… this account [that of Eusebius, the earliest surviving Christian historian] bears no relation to secular history.  It reduces history to the foreordained movement of supernatural forces.  Historical inevitability, which was to recur in Augustine [City of God] and ever afterwards, was receiving its first classic exposition … Accordingly he claimed — in anticipation of a widespread medieval theory — that the communications and common language of the Empire had been willed by God so as to facilitate the dissemination of the Gospel … And so the long story moves on in its strange and fateful way, a mixture of invaluable detailed fact and devout fiction … Moreover, Eusebius’ style is depressing … Eusebius employs a cumbersome, obscure and slovenly Greek.  His narrative is shallow and uninspired, and follows a dull, muddled and haphazard plan. 

The Jewish belief in the Messiah still to come had exercised widespread attraction.  Yet it paled completely before the allure of a Messiah who had actually appeared on this earth already, within living memory — indeed the immediate past.  This, as events would show before long, was a sensation: a claim with which none of the pagan ‘mystery’ religions, with their far remoter saviors, could possibly compete.