I find amusing some of these old passages read again in the light of recent debates about the historicity or otherwise of Jesus. How the world has turned.
Here we have a sophisticated intellectual, Plutarch, writing about the same time the Gospels are often said to be being written, castigating the ignorance of the less educated riff raff for daring to think that the stories about the gods had some human historical foundation to them!
He can even write that these fools were misled by some proto-Joseph-Smithius claiming to have seen some golden lettered inscription that proved his claim, but of course no-one else had ever seen these mysterious tablets! Continue reading “Ancient mythicist-historicist role reversal”