# Our Understanding of Jesus Just Changed ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed.webp]] **Creator:** [Nils Glenn](https://www.youtube.com/@NilsGlenn) · **Published:** 2026-11-06 · **Length:** 31:55 · [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs) > Caption source: `yt-dlp` `en-orig` auto captions (first try; android_vr,web client; the secondary `en` track hit HTTP 429 but was not needed). Rollup cleaned to ~6,200 words; obvious ASR slips corrected (e.g. "Alexa menos" → Alexamenos, "Amelian" → Melian). Quotes below follow the spoken narration, which reads published translations aloud; wording may differ slightly from the printed editions. Progressive video: yt-dlp format **18** (360p) via android client. Added from the user's "Summarize" playlist. ## Outline ### Cold open: a meme of a crucified god ([0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=0s) to 1:45) - [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=0s) One of the oldest known pictures of Jesus on the cross is "a joke… maybe… a meme": a plaster graffito from Rome (~200 AD) of a donkey-headed man on a cross, captioned **"Alexamenos worships his god."** - [0:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=22s) Teaser: in **362 AD** a Roman emperor complains that Christians were feeding "their own poor, and… his." - [0:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=42s) Paul, ~20 years after the crucifixion: "We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and **folly** to the Gentiles." Thesis: how did a message that sounded like stupidity to the ancient world end up reshaping how the West sees society, so thoroughly "most of us can't even see it anymore"? ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed-t0008.webp]] *Cold open: line drawing of the Alexamenos graffito* ### Pliny the Younger in Bithynia, ~112 AD ([1:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=105s) to 4:45) - [1:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=105s) **Pliny the Younger**, governor of Bithynia (Black Sea coast, northern Turkey), senator, lawyer, prolific letter-writer (10 books survive); nephew of **Pliny the Elder**, who sailed toward erupting Vesuvius. - [2:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=126s) Never having attended a trial of Christians, he isn't sure whether the crime is the name itself or attached crimes. He asks the accused three times and executes those who persist: "contumacy and inflexible obstinacy deserved chastisement." - [3:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=188s) He tortures **two enslaved women "styled deaconesses"** and finds "nothing more than depraved and excessive superstition." Slave testimony was normally taken under torture; Pliny doesn't record their names. - [3:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=231s) What Christians did: met before dawn on a fixed day, sang "a hymn to Christ as to a god," swore an oath against fraud, theft, adultery and breaking their word, then shared an ordinary meal. - [4:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=251s) He writes to **Trajan**: "persons of all ranks and ages and of both sexes" are involved; the "contagious superstition" has spread to villages. ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed-t0105.webp]] *Bithynia, 112 AD* ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed-t0235.webp]] *Pliny's description of the pre-dawn hymn to Christ* ### Sponsor and the slave's death ([4:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=287s) to 9:40) - [4:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=287s) *Sponsor segment:* **Plaud Note** AI recorder (code NILS); resumes ~6:20. - [6:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=380s) Romans ranked executions: the sword for citizens; at the bottom, the **cross**. **Cicero** called it "the most miserable and most painful punishment, appropriate to slaves alone." **6,000** of **Spartacus**'s followers were crucified along the road to Rome. - [7:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=436s) Crucifixion was public messaging beside busy roads: "This is what you are, and this is what happens to things like you." To a Greek or Roman, the Christian claim meant "your god was executed the way that we execute runaway slaves." - [7:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=456s) The **Philippians 2** hymn (possibly some of the oldest Christian worship): Christ "emptied himself by taking the form of a servant… obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." The Greek **doulos** is the everyday word for *slave*. - [8:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=520s) **1 Corinthians 1:22–25**: "the foolishness of God is wiser than men." The Greek for folly, **moria**, shares a root with "moronic." - [9:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=551s) Ancient gods punished; the closest thing to a suffering god is **Prometheus**, and even there Zeus is the punisher and the sufferer a rebel. A highest god taking a slave's punishment himself "was absurd." ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed-t0400.webp]] *Crucifixion imagery along the roadside: the slave's punishment* ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed-t0545.webp]] *1 Corinthians 1:24–25 on screen: moria, “folly”* ### The world it walked into: "the strong do what they can" ([10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=600s) to 14:25) - [10:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=620s) Athens gave us philosophy, democracy and history-writing, yet in **416 BC** sailed on neutral **Melos**. **Thucydides**' Melian Dialogue: "the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must." The men were killed, women and children enslaved, and 500 colonists sent. - [11:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=680s) **Aristotle** asks "Is not all slavery a violation of nature?" and concludes some are "by nature free and other slaves," for whom slavery "is both expedient and right." In the same book: "Let there be a law that no deformed child shall live." - [12:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=742s) The **Hilarion letter** (1 BC, Alexandria) to his wife (Alis): tender ("How could I forget thee?"), yet "if it was a female, cast it out." Infant exposure was legal and common. - [13:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=782s) **Seneca** (Nero's tutor), essay on mercy: pity is "a mental defect." The wise man helps the shipwrecked but shouldn't *feel* pity. To **Lucilius**: "They are slaves… Nay, rather, they are men," yet he never suggests ending ownership. - [13:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=822s) Synthesis: the strong rule, some are born to serve, the weak and unwanted are abandoned by the gods. "Rome ran on that… as long as you were Roman, free, a man, and healthy." ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed-t0660.webp]] *Thucydides: “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”* ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed-t0700.webp]] *Aristotle on natural slavery* ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed-t0760.webp]] *The Hilarion papyrus (1 BC)* ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed-t0820.webp]] *Seneca on pity and slaves* ### The stubborn exception: Israel ([14:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=867s) to 16:10) - [14:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=867s) **Genesis 1:27**: "So God created man in his own image." In Assyrian and Babylonian texts the "image of God" is the **king**, the god's living statue. Genesis gives that title to everybody, and gives no human the right to rule another. - [15:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=905s) Israel's founding memory is of brick-making **slaves** chosen over Pharaoh. **Deuteronomy 24:17–18**: don't pervert justice for the sojourner or fatherless, "remember that you were a slave in Egypt." - [15:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=945s) **Hammurabi**'s code also protects widows and orphans, but as proof of a just king. Israel grounds it in "you were nobody, and yet God picked you anyway." - [16:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=965s) **Isaiah**'s servant who is "despised and rejected by men." ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed-t0950.webp]] *Hammurabi's stele: protecting the weak as a king's credential* ### Jesus: the slave of all ([16:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=968s) to 17:31) - [16:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=970s) **Mark 10:42–45**: "whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve." - [16:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1005s) **Matthew 25**: "as you did it to one of the least of these, my brothers, you did it to me." "In Athens and in Rome, the least of these were the people that the whole world stood on. In the Gospels, that is where God is standing." - [17:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1025s) *Self-promo:* his free Bible study guide (pay what you want). ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed-t0990.webp]] *“Whoever would be first… must be slave of all”* ### How it went over: mockery ([17:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1051s) to 20:20) - [17:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1051s) **1857**: excavators on the **Palatine Hill** open what seems to be a training school for imperial page boys (slaves) and find the Alexamenos graffito. Likely one young slave mocking another for worshipping a crucified god. - [18:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1092s) In the next room, different handwriting: **"Alexamenos fidelis"** ("Alexamenos is faithful"). "I'd like to think that he did" write it. - [18:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1112s) **Celsus** (~175 AD), the first full-length attack on Christianity: Christians can persuade "only the foolish, the lowborn, and the senseless, slaves, little women, and little children," and wool-workers and fullers who tell children not to listen to their fathers. - [18:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1134s) **Lucian** (a "second-century stand-up comedian") mocks Christians who believe they are all brothers, "worship the crucified sage," and send orphans and old widows to wait outside prisons. - [19:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1176s) Paul had already agreed on the demographics in **1 Corinthians 1:26–28**: "not many of you were wise… God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong." "Celsus thought it was an insult, but Paul kind of thought that it was the whole point." - [19:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1199s) **Galatians 3:28**: "neither slave nor free… male nor female." ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed-t1100.webp]] *“Alexamenos fidelis” in the next room* ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed-t1145.webp]] *Celsus, quoted in Origen, Against Celsus 3.55* ### Seating the people who didn't count ([20:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1210s) to 22:42) - [20:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1210s) **Philemon**: Paul sends the runaway **Onesimus** back "no longer as a slave… as a beloved brother." Paul never calls for abolition but "undermines any reason for slavery to exist." - [20:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1258s) Pliny's deaconesses were slaves holding church office. About a century later **Callistus**, an ex-slave (by one hostile account, an embezzler sent to the mines), became **bishop of Rome**. - [21:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1281s) **Carthage, 203**: **Perpetua** (well-born, educated, nursing mother) and **Felicity** (a slave, 8 months pregnant) are condemned to the beasts at games for the emperor's son's birthday. Felicity gives birth to a girl 3 days before. Perpetua kept a prison diary that someone completed after her death. - [22:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1322s) In the arena, facing a wild cow, Perpetua lifts the crushed Felicity "and both of them stood together." They exchange the kiss of peace before the sword. "In Carthage, a free woman and a slave did not die as equals, but those two did." ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed-t1260.webp]] *Perpetua and Felicity* ### Plague, Julian and the first hospitals ([22:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1362s) to 26:33) - [22:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1362s) **~250 AD** epidemic: **Dionysius**, bishop of Alexandria, says Christians "visited the sick fearlessly… and died with them most joyfully," while pagans "cast them out into the streets when they were half dead." - [23:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1402s) **Julian**, Constantine's nephew, spared as a ~6-year-old in the palace purge, raised Christian, secretly apostatizes and becomes emperor in **361**. - [23:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1425s) **362**, letter to the high priest **Arsaces**: "Why do we not observe that it is their benevolence to strangers… that have done most to increase atheism?" and "the impious Galileans support not only their own poor, but ours as well." Glenn calls it "the first recorded case of a politician complaining that the other side's charity was rather unfair." Nothing in Olympian religion told his priests why to care. Julian dies in battle the next year. - [24:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1489s) **Basil** in Cappadocia builds the **Basileias**, housing for travelers, the poor and the sick, with nurses and doctors. **Gregory** (Nazianzen): "behold the new city, the storehouse of piety." Glenn calls it "one of the first public hospitals in the world." - [25:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1529s) **~379**: **Gregory of Nyssa** preaching on **Ecclesiastes 2** ("I got me slaves and slave girls"): "For how many obols did you value the image of God?… If the contract had gotten eaten by moths… what proof would you have that you owned anybody?" Historians struggle to find anyone else in antiquity who called the institution itself a sin, and he got there through Genesis 1. ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed-t1470.webp]] *Julian, Letter to Arsaces (362)* ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed-t1555.webp]] *Gregory of Nyssa on Ecclesiastes 2: “I bought male and female slaves…”* ### Unfortunate centuries, then abolition ([26:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1593s) to 28:16) - [26:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1593s) The church did not abolish slavery in the 300s, 800s or 1400s. Christians, bishops and monasteries owned slaves; Christian kingdoms joined the slave trade, "one of the great horrors of human history." Slaveholders quoted the Bible, and a "slaves' Bible" removed certain passages. - [27:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1634s) Yet the arguments that broke slavery were Christian. **1787**: the campaign against the British slave trade, led in Parliament by evangelical **William Wilberforce**, adopts **Josiah Wedgwood**'s medallion of a kneeling chained man: **"Am I not a man and a brother?"** **Thomas Clarkson** records it inlaid on snuff-box lids and worn as bracelets and hairpins. "Brother" is Paul's word for Onesimus and the word Lucian laughed at. - [27:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1675s) Infants: the **Didache** (~100 AD) says "Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born." In **374**, under Christian emperors, killing an infant becomes a capital crime. ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed-t1670.webp]] *Wedgwood's “Am I not a man and a brother?” medallion* ### Nietzsche, Holland and the invisible victory ([28:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1696s) to 30:41) - [28:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1696s) **Friedrich Nietzsche** (1880s): moderns can't feel the shock of "God on the cross"; it "promised a transvaluation of all ancient values." He calls it a revolt of the slaves. In **The Antichrist**: "The equality of souls before God… this explosive concept… is Christian dynamite." "Nietzsche and the church agreed about what had happened, they just disagreed on whether… it was good news." - [29:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1757s) **Tom Holland**'s **Dominion**: Western common sense (that it is nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering, that every life has equal value, that victims deserve sympathy) came out of the worship of a crucified man who died a slave's death. "That's how completely the slaves' religion won." - [29:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1799s) Caveat: Christian history "has plenty of horrors," but when Christians did what Athens did at Melos, "they had to answer to the man that they worshipped," and their critics used his words. ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed-t1710.webp]] *Friedrich Nietzsche* ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed-t1770.webp]] *Tom Holland, Dominion (2019)* ### Back to Bithynia ([30:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1841s) to end) - [30:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1850s) **Trajan** replies: don't hunt Christians or accept anonymous accusations, but punish those who won't renounce the name. "A sensible Roman answer." - [31:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1882s) Closing: in Roman law a slave was a *thing*. Paul: "God chose… even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are." "Pliny's empire's gone now, and the things that were not are still here." ![[images/Our-Understanding-of-Jesus-Just-Changed-t1880.webp]] *Closing: “the things that were not are still here”* ## Key takeaways - The video's core claim: Christianity's centre, **a god executed by the slave's punishment**, was folly by Greco-Roman standards, and that very inversion became the West's moral default. - Its method is a chain of **primary sources** read aloud: Pliny, Cicero, Thucydides, Aristotle, Hilarion, Seneca, Celsus, Lucian, the Passion of Perpetua, Dionysius, Julian, Gregory of Nyssa, the Didache and Nietzsche. - It draws a Hebrew Bible lineage (**image of God** democratized in Genesis 1, slave-origin ethics, Isaiah's servant) running into Jesus' **"slave of all."** - It is candid that Christians practised slavery for centuries, framed as failing their own founder's standard, and credits abolitionist arguments to Christian texts. - Its interpretive frame comes from **Tom Holland's Dominion** and Nietzsche's *transvaluation of values*. ## Things mentioned ### Books and texts - **Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind** (US subtitle: *How the Christian Revolution Remade the World*) by **Tom Holland** (2019), cited at [29:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1757s); title and year shown on screen. - **The Antichrist** (*Der Antichrist*) by **Friedrich Nietzsche**, named at [28:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1737s). The "transvaluation of all ancient values" line at [28:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1716s) is from Nietzsche's **Beyond Good and Evil** §46 (quoted but not named on-mic). - **Contra Celsum** (*Against Celsus*) by **Origen**: the source of Celsus' *The True Word* fragments, shown on screen as "Celsus, in Origen, Against Celsus 3.55" at [19:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1145s). - **Politics** by **Aristotle**: natural slavery and the deformed-child law, [11:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=680s) (named as "the same book," not by title). - **History of the Peloponnesian War** by **Thucydides** (Melian Dialogue), [10:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=640s). - **Letters** (Book 10, ep. 96–97) by **Pliny the Younger**, [1:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=105s). - **On Mercy** (*De Clementia*) and **Moral Letters to Lucilius** (ep. 47) by **Seneca**, [13:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=782s). - **The Passing of Peregrinus** by **Lucian of Samosata** (the con-man story), [18:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1132s). - **The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity** (Perpetua's prison diary plus an anonymous redactor), [21:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1281s). - **Didache** (anonymous, ~100 AD), [27:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1675s). - Ancient letters: **Hilarion to Alis** (P.Oxy. 744, 1 BC); **Dionysius of Alexandria**'s plague letter (preserved in Eusebius); **Julian, Letter to Arsaces**; **Gregory Nazianzen** on the Basileias (Oration 43); **Gregory of Nyssa**, Homilies on Ecclesiastes (Homily 4). - Scripture: Genesis 1; Deuteronomy 24; Isaiah 53; Mark 10; Matthew 25; 1 Corinthians 1; Galatians 3; Philippians 2; Philemon; Ecclesiastes 2 (ESV quoted). - **"Slaves' Bible"** (*Select Parts of the Holy Bible for the use of the Negro Slaves in the British West-India Islands*, 1807), referenced without title at [26:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1614s). ### People Pliny the Younger and Pliny the Elder; Trajan; Cicero; Spartacus; Paul; Thucydides; Aristotle; Hilarion and Alis; Seneca and Lucilius; Celsus; Lucian; Onesimus and Philemon; Callistus; Perpetua and Felicity; Dionysius of Alexandria; Julian, Constantine and Arsaces; Basil of Caesarea; Gregory Nazianzen; Gregory of Nyssa; William Wilberforce; Josiah Wedgwood; Thomas Clarkson; Friedrich Nietzsche; Tom Holland. ### Places and artifacts Alexamenos graffito and "Alexamenos fidelis" (Paedagogium, Palatine Hill); Bithynia; Melos; Alexandria; Carthage; Cappadocia (Basileias); Code of Hammurabi; Wedgwood anti-slavery medallion. ### Sponsors and self-promo - **Plaud Note Pro** AI voice recorder (sponsor; code NILS / NILSGLENN) - Nils Glenn's free Bible study guide *On Eagles Wings* (Gumroad); newsletter; second channel @itsnilsstory ## Biographies ### Nils Glenn YouTube creator (~266K subscribers on this channel at capture) making long-form deep dives into the Bible and the ancient world. His site describes him as "a Bible nerd from Minnesota" covering "the parts of Scripture most of us were taught to skip" (divine council, Nephilim, Babel), and says his heart stopped for eight minutes on a soccer field in 2025. He also runs a second channel and an Instagram (@nilsglenn), and sells guides such as *The Complete Guide to Biblical Angels*. Sources: [nilsglenn.com](https://nilsglenn.com/), [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@NilsGlenn). ### Tom Holland (cited) British popular historian of the ancient and medieval world (*Rubicon*, *Persian Fire*, *In the Shadow of the Sword*) and co-host of *The Rest Is History*. *Dominion* (2019) argues that Christian assumptions underlie modern Western values, including secular ones. The video calls him "not a Christian." Holland has described his own stance on faith in more nuanced and evolving terms since the book. ### Key historical figures - **Pliny the Younger** (c. 61–c. 113): Roman senator and governor of Bithynia-Pontus; his Letter 10.96 is among the earliest non-Christian descriptions of Christian worship. - **Gregory of Nyssa** (c. 335–c. 395): Cappadocian bishop and younger brother of Basil of Caesarea; his Homily 4 on Ecclesiastes is often cited as the earliest outright condemnation of slavery as an institution. - **Julian** (331–363): the last pagan Roman emperor (r. 361–363), known as "the Apostate." ## Claims check | Claim | Verdict | Notes | | --- | --- | --- | | The Alexamenos graffito was found on the Palatine in 1857, in a building thought to be a school for imperial page boys | **True** | Discovered 1857 in the *Paedagogium*. Dating varies (late 1st–early 3rd c.); "~200 AD" is a common estimate. | | "Alexamenos fidelis" was written in an adjacent room | **True** | A second inscription in another room is commonly read this way; whether it is a reply is speculative, as Glenn says. | | Pliny tortured two enslaved *ministrae* ("deaconesses") ~112 AD and found only "superstition" | **True** | Pliny, *Letters* 10.96; Trajan's reply 10.97 matches the summary. | | Cicero called crucifixion the extreme punishment of slaves | **Substantially true** | *In Verrem* 2.5 calls it the "most cruel and disgusting" penalty, the extreme punishment of slaves. Glenn's English is a loose rendering. | | 6,000 of Spartacus' followers were crucified along the road to Rome | **True (per Appian)** | Appian, *Civil Wars* 1.120: along the Capua–Rome road (Via Appia). | | *Doulos* means slave; *moria* is cognate with "moron" | **True** | Standard lexica. | | Melos, 416 BC: men killed, women and children enslaved, 500 colonists | **True** | Thucydides 5.84–116. Thucydides was an Athenian general (*strategos*). | | Aristotle defended natural slavery and proposed a law that no deformed child be raised | **True** | *Politics* I.5 and VII.16 (1335b). | | The Hilarion letter (1 BC) tells his wife to expose a female baby | **True** | P.Oxy. IV 744 (dated 1 BC; wife Alis). | | Seneca called pity a defect yet wrote "they are slaves… nay, they are men" | **True** | *De Clementia* 2.5–6; *Epistle* 47. | | In Assyrian/Babylonian texts the "image of god" usually describes the king | **Broadly true** | A standard point in OT scholarship (e.g. Mesopotamian royal inscriptions; the Tell Fekheriyeh statue). | | Celsus wrote the first full-length attack on Christianity, ~175 AD | **Generally accepted** | *The True Word* (c. 175–180), preserved in Origen's *Contra Celsum*; 3.55 is the wool-workers passage. | | Callistus, an ex-slave accused of embezzlement and sent to the mines, became bishop of Rome | **True (per hostile source)** | Hippolytus, *Refutation* IX.12; bishop c. 217–222. | | Perpetua and Felicity died at Carthage in 203 at games for the emperor's son's birthday | **True** | *Passio* 7.9/16: Geta's birthday; the "wild cow" (heifer) detail is in the text. | | Dionysius described Christian versus pagan care during the ~250 plague | **True** | Eusebius, *Hist. Eccl.* 7.22 (the "Plague of Cyprian," 250s–260s). | | Julian, spared at ~6 in the 337 purge, emperor 361, wrote to Arsaces in 362, died in battle in 363 | **True** | Julian, *Ep.* 22 (authenticity occasionally questioned). Died in the Persian campaign, June 363. | | The Basileias was one of the first public hospitals | **Commonly claimed** | Founded c. 369–372; often cited as an early hospital. "First" claims vary. | | Gregory of Nyssa (~379) condemned slavery itself; historians find few if any parallels | **Broadly accepted** | *Hom. in Eccl.* 4. Widely described as unique in antiquity. | | A "slaves' Bible" removed certain passages | **True** | 1807 London edition for the British West Indies omitted passages such as Exodus liberation texts. | | The Wedgwood "Am I not a man and a brother?" medallion, 1787, Clarkson's account of it in jewelry | **True** | Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade; Clarkson, *History of the Abolition* (1808). Wilberforce led the cause in Parliament. | | The Didache (~100 AD) forbids abortion and infanticide | **True** | *Didache* 2.2. Dating estimates range from c. 50 to 120. | | A 374 law made killing an infant a capital crime | **True** | Valentinian I (and co-emperors), *Codex Theodosianus* 9.14.1. | | Nietzsche: "transvaluation of all ancient values"; "equality of souls before God… Christian dynamite" | **True** | *Beyond Good and Evil* §46 (1886); *The Antichrist* §62 (1888). | | Tom Holland, "not a Christian," argues Western values derive from Christianity in *Dominion* | **Mostly true** | The book's thesis is accurately summarized. Holland's personal faith stance is more ambivalent than "not a Christian." | | Julian's letter was "the first recorded case" of complaining about rival charity | **Rhetorical** | A joke, not a historical claim. | ## Tutorial N/A. This is a history and theology essay, not AI-tool content. ## Sources - YouTube: [Our Understanding of Jesus Just Changed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs) - Channel: [Nils Glenn](https://www.youtube.com/@NilsGlenn) · [nilsglenn.com](https://nilsglenn.com/)