Pagan Testimony Against the Christians

Primary sources courtesy of "A. Wretch", archive.org

• Introduction
• Hermes Trismegistus - Asclepius (The Perfect Sermon)
• Julian the Apostate - Against the Galileans
• Eunapius - Lives of the Sophists: Antoninus, Son of Sosipatra
• Julian - Oration 7, 229D
• Julian - Misopogon
• Libanius - Oration 30: For the Temples (Pro Templis)

Introduction

From their earliest appearance, Christian communities were described by outside observers as secretive associations whose beliefs and practices violated established religious, civic, and familial boundaries. Pagan testimony accused Christians at different times of atheism, hostility toward the gods, magic, cannibalistic meals, incestuous sexual relations, corpse worship, sacrilege, coercion, and the destruction or appropriation of temples. This article collects those testimonies as evidence of what ancient critics claimed to have observed, heard, or believed about the Christians.

The below sources accuse late-antique Christians of replacing temples with tombs and traditional cult images with human remains.

1. Necromancy or corpse-centered religion: Christians gathered at tombs, sought assistance from dead martyrs, and installed their relics in former temples.
2. Temple plundering: Christian monks and officials destroyed sanctuaries, stole offerings and property, and then represented these materially profitable attacks as religious victories.

These are hostile Pagan testimonies and employ deliberate invective, but they preserve evidence that temple destruction, confiscation, occupation by monks, and the transfer of martyr relics into sacred spaces were contemporary points of conflict.

Hermes Trismegistus - Asclepius (The Perfect Sermon)

• Hermes Trismegistus, Asclepius (The Perfect Sermon) §§1–41, especially §§14–16, 21, 23–29, and 37–38; trans. Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 67–92.
• Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans 8.23–27, especially 8.23 and 8.26–27; trans. David S. Wiesen, City of God, vol. 3, Books 8–11, Loeb Classical Library 413 (1968).

Augustine is one of the most important Christians ever... so his lies are pretty endless. Augustine is explaining how Christianity is not to blame for the fall of the Roman empire, even though it is.

The entire text of Asclepius is a rebuttal against Christian doctrines and their criticisms of Hermeticism. Asclepius is the Hermetic explanation for the problem of evil but also alludes to the Book of Enoch and the older demonology of Christianity which Augustine changed forever after Augustine no Book of Enoch Augustine also integrated Plato into Christianity very explicitly Augustine is not just a propagandist but a full blown liar who slanders Hermeticism and Pagans, except he likes Plato.

The Asclepius, also called The Perfect Sermon or Perfect Discourse, presents the Hermetic explanation of divinity, humanity, the cosmos, evil, sexuality, cult statues, death, and the soul. Within its late-antique setting, the entire discourse functions as an answer to doctrines and accusations advanced by Christians against traditional religion.

Its anti-Christian force becomes clearest in the prophecy concerning Egypt. Egypt is described as an image of heaven and the temple of the whole world, where divine powers dwell among human beings. Hermes predicts that this sacred order will be violently overturned: the gods will be driven away, ancestral rites suppressed, temples abandoned, and the land formerly filled with gods and sanctuaries filled instead with tombs and corpses.

The accusations include:

• Christians would abolish the ancestral worship of Egypt and declare its rites false.
• They would expel the gods from their temples and sever humanity’s established relationship with the divine powers.
• They would replace temples, divine images, and living sacred presences with tombs, relics, and human corpses.
• They would impose new laws criminalizing traditional reverence.
• They would ridicule the older spiritual teachings and represent their adherents as deluded, insane, or evil.
• They would reverse the meaning of piety and impiety, calling the destruction of sacred institutions a religious victory.
• The religious order they established would leave humanity exposed to robbery, violence, warfare, fraud, and social disorder.
• Foreign and impious powers would occupy Egypt after its ancestral religion had been destroyed.
• Only inscriptions and stories would remain to testify that the old sacred world had ever existed.

The surviving Hermetic text does not name Christians directly, but Augustine identifies them unmistakably. He says that the prophecy appeared to describe his own period, when Christianity was overthrowing the traditional cults. He also admits that Christianity’s opponents understood the warning about tombs and corpses to mean that martyr memorials had succeeded Pagan temples and that Christians had replaced the gods with dead human beings.

Augustine’s response is Christian apologetics-that is, propaganda constructed to justify Christian conquest and conceal its violence. His method is not to deny what Christians were doing, but to rename it. Destroying temples becomes “liberation”; suppressing ancestral religion becomes “truth”; the gods become “demons”; seizing the sacred landscape becomes its purification; and worship conducted at altars over Christian corpses becomes mere “commemoration.” These distinctions allow Augustine to condemn Pagans for honoring divine images and deceased heroes while Christians gather around bones, tombs, and relics and perform sacrifices over the bodies of their own dead. From the Pagan perspective, this is not an explanation but a lie: Augustine admits the material facts and then falsifies their meaning so that the same practices become evil when performed by Pagans and holy when performed by Christians.

Augustine’s response confirms the material basis of the accusation. Christians honored human remains, collected relics, constructed altars over dead martyrs, assembled at their tombs, and performed sacrifices there. His defense is merely that the sacrifices were formally directed to the Christian God rather than to the corpse beneath the altar.

From the Pagan viewpoint, this verbal distinction concealed the visible reality. Christians had condemned Pagan reverence for divine images while organizing their own rites around human bones. They denounced the presence of divine powers in temples as demonic while attributing supernatural power to the tombs and relics of their own dead. They destroyed or appropriated ancient sanctuaries and then represented that destruction as liberation.

Augustine accomplishes this reversal by changing the names attached to everything:

• The ancestral gods become “demons.”
• Their temples become centers of deception.
• Sacred images become demonic traps.
• The suppression of traditional worship becomes spiritual liberation.
• The occupation of the sacred landscape by martyr tombs becomes holy commemoration.
• Rituals performed over Christian corpses cease to be “worship” merely because Christians refuse to call them worship.

From the Pagan lens, this is not a refutation of the accusation but an apologetic renaming of the conquest.

The remainder of the Asclepius supplies the positive Hermetic alternative to Christian teaching. The cosmos is living, divine, orderly, and worthy of reverence rather than a fallen realm awaiting destruction. Humanity participates in divinity and joins the mortal world to the divine. The existence of one supreme source does not invalidate the many gods. Sacred images can become embodied points of contact with divine powers rather than lifeless idols. Sexual generation is a holy expression of the creative power operating throughout nature.

The Asclepius also answers the problem of evil without Augustine’s later Christian system. Evil arises through material instability, ignorance, and the misuse of human choice. The supreme divinity gives humanity consciousness, knowledge, and intelligence as protection against it. No Christian monopoly upon salvation is necessary: human beings approach divinity through knowledge, reverence, right conduct, and participation in the living cosmos.

Augustine preserves the Asclepius because its accusations were recognizable and dangerous. He could not deny that Christians were overthrowing traditional religion, replacing temples with martyr memorials, building altars over corpses, and conducting rites at tombs. He could only insist that Christian corpses were holy, Christian tomb rituals were not worship, and the gods displaced by Christianity had never been gods at all.

From the Pagan Hermetic viewpoint, these were the lies by which Christians justified their destruction: they expelled the gods, criminalized ancient piety, seized the sacred landscape, filled it with relics and corpses, and called the resulting devastation a triumph of truth.

Augustine’s apologetics, propaganda, and lies are therefore parts of the same operation. He preserves the Pagan accusation because he cannot avoid it, confirms the Christian destruction underlying it, and then reverses every term so that the destroyers become liberators and the displaced gods become demons. The Asclepius preserves the opposing Pagan judgment: Christians expelled the gods, criminalized ancient piety, replaced temples with corpse shrines, and called the resulting devastation a triumph of truth.

Julian the Apostate - Against the Galileans

• Julian, Against the Galilaeans 327A–333C and 335C–340A; preserved in Cyril of Alexandria, Against Julian 10; trans. Wilmer Cave Wright, The Works of the Emperor Julian, vol. 3, Loeb Classical Library 157 (1923).

Julian advances two connected accusations:

• Christianity progressively altered its original teachings, particularly when John elevated Jesus into “God the Word.”
• Christian devotion to martyrs developed into a form of tomb-centered necromancy.

He argues that Christians contradict Jesus’ condemnation of tombs as unclean while filling the world with shrines, relics, and sepulchres. Drawing upon Isaiah’s reference to sleeping among tombs for dream-visions, Julian alleges that the apostles themselves practiced magical incubation or spells at graves and transmitted this practice to later Christians.

The accusation is therefore stronger than ordinary “ancestor worship”: Julian interprets Christian martyr devotion as necromantic ritual conducted around corpses.

Julian describes the expanding cult(s) of the martyrs as the addition of “many newly dead corpses” to the original corpse of Jesus. He therefore presents Christianity as progressively multiplying its sacred dead and filling the inhabited world with tombs.

Julian accuses John of cautiously and deceptively conflating Jesus with the Logos, while some Christians continued to distinguish the two.

Julian further connects the development of Christian theology with the emerging cult of the dead. He speculates that John first dared to call Jesus God after hearing that the tombs of Peter and Paul were already being worshipped, secretly, in cities of Greece and Italy. In Julian’s account, the elevation of Jesus into the Logos and the multiplication of martyr cults are related stages in Christianity’s progressive departure from its original teachings.

Eunapius - Lives of the Sophists: Antoninus, Son of Sosipatra

• Eunapius, Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists 6.11.7–12; trans. Wilmer Cave Wright, Philostratus and Eunapius: The Lives of the Sophists, Loeb Classical Library 134 (1921), pp. 420–427.

Eunapius describes the Christian destruction of the Serapeum and the temples at Canopus under Theophilus of Alexandria. He compares the Christians to the mythological Giants attacking the gods.

His accusations are specific:

• Christians demolished temples without any legitimate military cause.
• They stole statues, votive offerings, and other valuable temple property.
• They installed monks inside the conquered sacred places.
• They collected the bones and skulls of executed criminals, renamed them “martyrs,” and treated them as divine intermediaries.

Eunapius connects temple plundering with corpse worship: Christian monks displaced the traditional gods, occupied their sanctuaries, and filled those sanctuaries with the remains of condemned criminals. Antoninus’ prediction that “the temples would become tombs” is presented as fulfilled prophecy.

Eunapius presents the attack as a coordinated operation involving ecclesiastical, civil, and military authority: Theophilus presided over the Christians, Evagrius was prefect of Alexandria, and Romanus commanded the troops in Egypt. The destruction was also extraordinarily thorough. Everything movable was carried away from the Serapeum; according to Eunapius, only the floor remained because its stones were too heavy to remove. The attackers’ hands were “unstained by blood” but not by greed, and they subsequently boasted that their theft and sacrilege constituted a victory over the gods.

Eunapius portrays the black-robed monks installed in the sacred places as public tyrants who concealed disgraceful conduct beneath the appearance of piety. He says that humanity was made to worship slaves and executed criminals in place of the true gods. He concludes with a story in which an apparition invoked as Apollo is recognized by Iamblichus as merely the ghost of a gladiator. The story reinforces Eunapius’ accusation that deceptive appearances and ghosts of dead men were being mistaken for divine beings.

Julian - Oration 7, 229D

• Julian, Oration 7, To the Cynic Heracleios 227C–229D; the destruction of the ancestral temples and erection of sepulchres occurs at 227C–228C, while the description of Christianity as a “disease” appears at 229D; trans. Wilmer Cave Wright, The Works of the Emperor Julian, vol. 2, Loeb Classical Library 29 (1913).

Julian presents an allegorical attack upon Constantine and his dynasty. Constantine is portrayed as a wealthy but ignorant man who accumulated possessions without justice, neglected the gods, and failed to cultivate virtue in his children.

His sons consequently fought and slaughtered one another. They demolished the ancestral temples that their father Constantine had already despised and stripped of their votive offerings. Constantine’s sons erected sepulchres both upon new ground and upon the former sites of the temples they had demolished.

• Constantine despised the temples and stripped their votive offerings.
• Constantine’s sons demolished the temples and erected sepulchres.

The larger argument is that Constantine’s impiety produced both dynastic collapse and the physical conversion of sacred places into Christian tombs. Temple robbery, familial violence, and Christian funerary religion are treated as manifestations of the same moral disorder.

Julian portrays his own Christian formation as a disease from which Helios must cure him.

Julian - Misopogon

• Julian, Misopogon 342D–345B, especially 344A–B for the “old crones who grovel among the tombs”; trans. Wilmer Cave Wright, The Works of the Emperor Julian, vol. 2, Loeb Classical Library 29 (1913).

This section is mainly Julian’s bitter, satirical response to the Christians of Antioch. He criticizes their supposed humility, their resistance to his religious policies, their attachment to public entertainments, and their unwillingness to accept disciplined submission to gods and laws.

The passage also contains another reference to Christian tomb practices: Julian sarcastically calls upon the “old crones who grovel among the tombs” to pray for Antioch’s deliverance from him.

• This suggests that tomb visitation and prayer were sufficiently visible Christian practices to become material for public ridicule.
• The “old crones who grovel among the tombs” is not an isolated insult but the culmination of Julian’s broader accusation that Christian Antioch had inverted proper civic and religious order.

Julian contrasts this conduct with what he considers orderly Hellenic worship: restrained prayer directed toward the gods rather than noisy praise directed toward human rulers. This section supports the necromancy theme more indirectly than Against the Galileans; its principal subject is Christian civic and religious behavior.

Libanius - Oration 30: For the Temples (Pro Templis)

• Libanius, Oration 30, For the Temples (Pro Templis) §§1–55, especially §§8–12; trans. Nathaniel Lardner, in Thomas Taylor, ed., Arguments of Celsus, Porphyry, and the Emperor Julian Against the Christians (London: Thomas Rodd, 1830), pp. 72–96.

Libanius petitions Emperor Theodosius to stop Christian monks from destroying rural temples. He argues the imperial law prohibited sacrifice but did not authorize the destruction, closure, or plundering of temples. Incense remained lawful, people were still permitted to enter the temples, and Theodosius had issued no general command abolishing traditional worship.

He describes black-robed monks traveling in organized groups with wood, stones, iron tools, and, when necessary, their hands and feet. They tear down roofs, pull down walls, overturn altars, carry away images, confiscate land, and steal the produce farmers had stored for their sustenance. Bishops then protect the perpetrators and dismiss complaints from the victims, as though the victims should consider themselves fortunate that they had not suffered even more.

Libanius highlights the contrast between the monks’ professed asceticism and their conduct. He describes them as voracious eaters and drinkers who manufactured pale complexions to appear austere and then enriched themselves through destruction and confiscation. Priests were forced to remain silent under threat of death while their temples were dismantled. Temple destruction became competitive: trophies were raised upon trophies, the perpetrators compared their achievements, and a monk was ashamed if he could not report some great injury he had committed.

Accusations of illegal sacrifice allegedly served as calculated pretexts for plunder. According to Libanius, whenever the monks learned that a property contained something valuable, they announced that its owner was sacrificing and that an armed force should be sent against him. These supposed “reformers” then arrived like an army, seized stored produce and inherited land, and departed with spoils as though they had conquered an enemy. Some concealed or denied what they had done; others openly boasted of their attacks. Libanius therefore describes the monks not as legitimate agents of religious reform but as robbers waging war during peacetime against fellow subjects.

Libanius makes several arguments:

• Temples are the religious and economic centers of rural communities
• the “soul of the country.”
• Destroying them demoralizes farmers, reduces cultivation, and ultimately diminishes imperial tax revenue.
• Accusations of unlawful sacrifice were unsupported by witnesses and were used to justify attacks upon valuable property.
• Religious profession produced through coercion is insincere.
• Christian teaching itself supposedly favors persuasion rather than force.
• Temples remain valuable civic buildings and imperial property even if their religious use changes.
• The monks act without lawful imperial authority and therefore are robbers, not legitimate agents of reform.
• The emperor tolerates traditional worshippers in public office, and at his own table, proving that their mere beliefs are not crimes.
• The continued toleration of certain traditional rites at Rome and Alexandria contradicts the claim that all such worship is inherently harmful.

Libanius carefully distinguishes prohibited sacrifice from ordinary rural feasting. Killing and eating an animal, even while burning incense, singing, and invoking the gods, did not constitute the legally prohibited rite unless it included the defining sacrificial actions at an altar: the reception of blood, the burning of a portion, the presentation of sacrificial cakes, and the concluding libation. He argues that the monks deliberately erased this legal distinction so that lawful rural gatherings and festival meals could be denounced as forbidden sacrifices.

He further insists that no witnesses could be produced against the people whose property had been plundered. Neither neighbors, local inhabitants, enemies, men, women, young people, nor old people testified that the accused had sacrificed at an altar. The allegation therefore functioned as a lie through which peaceful subjects could be treated as criminals and their property seized.

Libanius also denies that coercion produced genuine Christian converts. Those compelled to conform merely performed Christianity outwardly; inwardly they remained what they had been and continued to invoke the gods when they prayed. He compares such converts to an actor playing a king in a tragedy: the costume and performance change, but the person does not. Christian violence therefore produced religious theatre rather than conviction. By resorting to force when persuasion failed, Christians violated their own professed laws, which commended persuasion and condemned compulsion.

Libanius challenges the Christian claim that eliminating temples benefited the world. He argues that Rome had attained its empire with the assistance of the traditional gods and that different divine powers protected Rome, its cities, and its countryside. He also points to the continued toleration of traditional rites at Rome and in Alexandria. If sacrifice and temple worship were inherently useless or destructive, he asks, why were they still permitted where the government considered them necessary?

The rites surrounding the Nile provide his clearest example. Egypt’s fertility and its contribution to the imperial food supply depended upon the river’s inundation, and the traditional rites honoring the Nile were consequently allowed to continue. Libanius argues that this selective toleration exposed the supposed religious principle behind temple destruction: Christian authorities abolished rites where they believed they could do so safely but preserved them where they feared material consequences.

Libanius separately accuses Constantine of stripping temples of their revenues and votive gifts. He interprets the bloodshed within Constantine’s dynasty-his sons and other relatives turning against and killing one another-as divine punishment for Constantine’s plundering of the temples.

• Constantine’s son gave temples to private associates as casually as he might give away a horse, slave, dog, or golden cup. These recipients dismantled the buildings, enriched themselves from sacred property, and incorporated temple columns and other materials into their residences.
• Libanius contrasts them with Julian, who restored the temples, altars, sacrifices, and traditional rites.

Temples were also civic monuments, public assets, and the inherited property of the empire. Libanius calls them the ornaments and “eyes” of cities. Destroying them was comparable to cutting off a person’s hand or tearing out a city’s eyes. Even if their religious function were changed, the buildings could remain standing, be taxed, and be adapted to other uses. It was senseless for the empire to destroy its own walls, architecture, and accumulated wealth.

Libanius also accuses the monastic faction of manipulating the emperor through fabricated reports that priests were continuing to sacrifice. Rumors were enlarged into dramatic stories designed to provoke imperial anger and obtain permission for further attacks. When challenged publicly, the perpetrators denied responsibility or claimed that they had merely obeyed the emperor’s orders. In private, however, they represented their temple war as loyal service to the imperial household. Libanius portrays this as an organized system of propaganda, plunder, and blame-shifting.

His final legal argument is that the emperor never issued an edict ordering everyone to abandon the gods, attend Christian worship, or face death. The temples that survived had not been spared because the monks respected them, but because the monks had not obtained the power to destroy them. Their incursions, confiscations, and demolitions therefore possessed neither legal authority nor a legitimate religious justification.

Libanius ends with a warning: if the emperor authorizes these attacks, traditional worshippers will endure them as imperial commands, however painfully. But if the emperor has granted the monks no such authority and nevertheless refuses to stop them, landowners may eventually defend their temples, walls, and remaining property themselves.