Talk:Lucian on Jesus

Death of Peregrinus
This is a report of three passages from the same work of Lucian, by somebody who hasn't read it, based on sources which are not reliable.

To begin with, the Death of Peregrinus is not a play, as this source calls it - thus proving itself unreliable; it's a (somewhat fictionalized) muckraking biography of one of Lucian's contemporaries, who - as one stage of a long and colorful career of religious entrepreneurship - became a Christian. Therefore the suggestion that it refers to the Church of James the Just is anachronism; it's about the Church of Lucian's own time. (And, consulting MacLeod's Lucian, Peregrinus died at the Games of 165; his period as a Christian prophet cannot be in James' time.)

Lucian's rhetoric about history is twice irrelevant; this isn't history, and the extent to which Lucian lived up to that conventional claim (a commonplace parallelled throughout antiquity) may be judged by the only work he called a history: the Vera Historia, about a man carried to the moon by a waterspout, who helps its inhabitants in their war with the inhabitants of the Sun - and I omit its less plausible narrative. I have, therefore, removed the apologetic about Lucian's unbesmirched reputation for truth-telling, which is like relying on Pooh-Bah. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:41, 21 February 2011 (UTC)