v pohanství pokud zabil muž prostitutku byl potrestán v křesťanství byla tato popravena za mimomanželské smilstvo, např. nalitím tekutého olova do krku

The Christians, not only in their triumphant exaggerations but in their sheer bulk, today, seriously misrepresent the true proportions of religious history.

They misrepresent, first, because what was written in the past had to be transmitted from generation to generation across succeeding centuries, and those centuries, as everyone knows, constituted a differentially permeable membrane: it allowed the writings of Christianity to pass through but not of Christianity’s enemies.

I remind myself of these elementary facts about the shape of our present knowledge of late antiquity only to understand how, on first reading, the record seems to suggest that pagans were not only defeated by the end of the fourth century but had in fact all been converted. Really, however, such was far from true. Historians‘ consensus, such as it was until at least the 1980s, rested on a corrupt foundation.

Finally, on the subject of the record, there is a surprising reminder; „Saint Augustine did not live in a Christian world. We have studied hundreds of inscriptions illuminating urban life in Africa of the Late Empire. We must conclude that Christianity claims only the very most modest place in these documents.“

zdroj: Ramsay MacMullen Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries