Flavius Josephus, the first-century Romano-Jewish historian, grappled with this very question in his work, Against Apion. And his answer is surprisingly relevant, even today.
Josephus homes in on what he sees as a fundamental flaw in the pagan world's approach to the Divine. He argues that much of the confusion and, frankly, the scandals surrounding their deities stemmed from a basic lack of knowledge – and a lack of consistent teaching – about the true nature of God. The heathen legislators, as he calls them, didn’t fully grasp the essence of the Divine, and even what little they understood, they didn't share effectively with the people.
Can you imagine a society where even the leaders have only a hazy idea about God, and they don't prioritize sharing that understanding? Josephus points out that they didn't build their political systems around a central, consistent concept of the Divine. Instead, they treated religion almost as an afterthought. This opened the door for poets to invent gods with every human failing imaginable, and for orators to manipulate the masses into accepting foreign deities that suited their political agendas.
And then there were the artists. The painters and sculptors of Greece held immense power, each crafting their own version of the Divine. As Josephus notes, they could conjure up a god out of clay or create an image from a bare picture. The most celebrated artisans even had access to precious materials like ivory and gold for their creations.
But here's the kicker: as Josephus observes, this led to a kind of religious fickleness. Some temples flourished, adorned with elaborate rituals, while others were abandoned. The older gods, revered for generations, were overshadowed by newer, trendier deities. And these new gods? Some were quickly embraced, only to have their temples left desolate before long. It was a constant cycle of creation, worship, and abandonment, all driven by human whim.
The core of Josephus's argument is that opinions about God and the worship due to Him should be constant and unchanging. Imagine the contrast he's drawing with the Jewish tradition, where the concept of God, as revealed in the Torah, is meant to be a fixed point, a source of unwavering truth across generations. What happens when our understanding of the Divine becomes subject to the changing winds of popular opinion, artistic trends, and political maneuvering? Does it cheapen the sacred? Does it create confusion and ultimately, a spiritual void? Josephus certainly thought so, and his words offer a powerful critique of a world where the Divine is shaped more by human hands than by divine revelation.
35. And justly have the wisest men thought these notions deserved severe rebukes; they also laugh at them for determining that we ought to believe some of the gods to be beardless and young, and others of them to be old, and to have beards accordingly; that some are set to trades; that one god is a smith, and another goddess is a weaver; that one god is a warrior, and fights with men; that some of them are harpers, or delight in archery; and besides, that mutual seditions arise among them, and that they quarrel about men, and this so far, that they not only lay hands upon one another, but that they are wounded by men, and lament, and take on for such their afflictions. But what is the grossest of all in point of lasciviousness, are those unbounded lusts ascribed to almost all of them, and their amours; which how can it be other than a most absurd supposal, especially when it reaches to the male gods, and to the female goddesses also? Moreover, the chief of all their gods, and their first father himself, overlooks those goddesses whom he hath deluded and begotten with child, and suffers them to be kept in prison, or drowned in the sea. He is also so bound up by fate, that he cannot save his own offspring, nor can he bear their deaths without shedding of tears. These are fine things indeed! as are the rest that follow. Adulteries truly are so impudently looked on in heaven by the gods, that some of them have confessed they envied those that were found in the very act. And why should they not do so, when the eldest of them, who is their king also, hath not been able to restrain himself in the violence of his lust, from lying with his wife, so long as they might get into their bedchamber? Now some of the gods are servants to men, and will sometimes be builders for a reward, and sometimes will be shepherds; while others of them, like malefactors, are bound in a prison of brass. And what sober person is there who would not be provoked at such stories, and rebuke those that forged them, and condemn the great silliness of those that admit them for true? Nay, others there are that have advanced a certain timorousness and fear, as also madness and fraud, and any other of the vilest passions, into the nature and form of gods, and have persuaded whole cities to offer sacrifices to the better sort of them; on which account they have been absolutely forced to esteem some gods as the givers of good things, and to call others of them averters of evil.
They also endeavor to move them, as they would the vilest of men, by gifts and presents, as looking for nothing else than to receive some great mischief from them, unless they pay them such wages.
