[1] This discourse (which should have found place here) was missing from the collection of the papers of Artemidorus, at the time when I was transcribing them; but having chanced upon it some months afterwards, I purpose to set it down at the end of the book.
“This letter I see deals with naught but ‘obstacles’ and ‘difficulties’ and ‘burdens’; yet I beg of you, my dear Artemidorus, not to suppose that I murmur at the task you have imposed on me or that I count the labor wasted. For indeed the more I muse on the matter, the more I judge that this Christus must have been endowed with a truly divine genius, or force of character (or whatever faculty else you may be pleased to call it) to have produced so vast an influence on a nation so perverse and morose as these Jews, not to speak of many thousands of the viler sort of Greeks who after attaching themselves to his sect have turned from vice to virtue. Philemon is well, but still unquiet and hardly to be controlled. Farewell.”
§ 6. HOW ARTEMIDORUS QUESTIONED ME FURTHER, AND OF HIS RELATION CONCERNING THE CASTING OUT OF THE SWINE.
“Although I could have wished, my dear Onesimus, that you had been able to answer my first questions, point by point, yet your account of the discourse spoken by the Christian priest Lucius was not without interest for me; confirming, as it did, an opinion that I have ever entertained, namely, that no portents how incredible soever, and no absurdities however palpable, can ever deter the multitude from embracing a new belief, if there be somewhat in it of a nature to fascinate the soul and feed the imagination. But still my desire is that you should do your utmost to discover what this superstition contains, of a nature thus to fascinate the multitude; for it is not apparent to me from anything that you have hitherto written, since you describe a religion that has no sacred books, no feasts, no processions, no code of laws that might unite and regulate a disorderly mass of men.
“In addition to this I would gladly receive answers to these two further questions, on the first of which you yourself touched in your first letter but so as to suggest rather than explain: 1st, Does this sect require that all, as many as join themselves to it, Greeks as well as Jews, (for I understand that Greeks also are admitted by them), shall observe the laws of the Jews? Or does it remit the laws for those who are not Jews? Or are they remitted for all, Jews as well as Greeks? 2nd, I cannot understand from the discourse of Lucius whether he supposes Christus to be born of man and woman in a natural way, or in a divine way born of woman only. This question I believe I asked before; but now I repeat it, partly lest you should suppose it to have been already answered by the priest’s discourse, partly because (in conversation with certain Christians of Hierapolis) I have heard that there is some diversity of opinion concerning this matter among the Christians themselves.