atopism of Christians being found in the remote province of Bithynia, before they had acquired any notoriety in Rome....  The inconsistency of the supposition that so just and moral a people as the primitive Christians are assumed to have been, should have been the first to provoke the Roman Government to depart from its universal maxims of toleration, liberality, and indifference....  The use of the torture to extort confession....  The choice of women to be the subjects of this torture, when the ill-usage of women was, in like manner, abhorrent to the Roman character” ("Diegesis,” pp. 383, 384).

Paley boldly states that Martial (born A.D. 43, died about A.D. 100) makes the Christians “the subject of his ridicule,” because he wrote an epigram on the stupidity of admiring any vain-glorious fool who would rush to be tormented for the sake of notoriety.  Hard-set must Christians be for evidence, when reduced to rely on such pretended allusions.

Epictetus (flourished first half of second century) is claimed as another witness, because he states that “It is possible a man may arrive at this temper, and become indifferent to these things from madness, or from habit, as the Galileans” (Book iv., chapter 7).  The Galileans, i.e., the people of Galilee, appear to have had a bad name, and it is highly probable that Epictetus simply referred to them, just as he might have said as an equivalent phrase for stupidity, “like the Boeotians.”  In addition to this, the followers of Judas the Gaulonite were known as Galileans, and were remarkable for the “inflexible constancy which, in defence of their cause, rendered them insensible of death and tortures” ("Decline and Fall,” vol. ii., p. 214).

Marcus Aurelius (born A.D. 121, died A.D. 180) is Paley’s last support, as he urges that fortitude in the face of death should arise from judgment, “and not from obstinacy, like the Christians.”  As no one disputes the existence of a sect called Christians when Marcus Aurelius wrote, this testimony is not specially valuable.

Paley, so keen to swoop down on any hint that can be twisted into an allusion to the Christians, entirely omits the interesting letter written by the Emperor Adrian to his brother-in-law Servianus, A.D. 134.  The evidence is not of an edifying character, and this accounts for the omission:  “The worshippers of Serapis are Christians, and those are consecrated to the god Serapis, who, I find, call themselves the bishops of Christ” (Quoted in “Diegesis,” p. 386).

Such are the whole external evidences of Christianity until after A.D. 160.  In a time rich in historians and philosophers one man, Tacitus, in a disputed passage, mentions a Christus punished under Pontius Pilate, and the existence of a sect bearing his name.  Suetonius, Pliny, Adrian, possibly Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, casually mention some people called Christians.

The Rev. Dr. Giles thus summarises the proofs of the weakness of early Christian evidences in “profane history:”—­