>>And you do? 282RA. how do you know what other people know?<<

I'm sure I don't but I believe everybody should have the same information I do, it seems to me to be very important information and very strange to me that people should be so ignorant of it. With the importance we place on Christianity in the U.S. we know surprisingly little about it. I seriously doubt more than 1 in 10,000 American self-professed Christians could tell you a thing about Origen or could even honestly say they had ever heard of him.

Otherwise they would know he was a 3rd century Church Father who more or less fell out of favor with the Church because he had the audacity to be born in raised virtually in the same area as Nazareth was said to be and yet he had never heard of it and could locate nothing of it. He could neither locate nor verify the existence of cities as Bethany (where Jesus supposedly raised Lazarus) or Bethphage. Origen was a Josephus scholar who pored over the man's works in hopes of finding a historical reference to Jesus Christ and never mentioned the passage Eusebius quoted a century later.

We should know Eusebius was essentially a liar and certainly not a historian. That his Josephus quote is spurious, that it was he who wrote the account of Constantine seeing crosses in the sky before the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312 and therefore the account is likely not true. We should know Eusebius actually championed using falsehood and deceit to spread the gospel.

Then there's Bishop Cyril of Alexandria, Peter the Reader, Hypatia, the 2nd sacking of the Library and the history of the Library itself and what it was said to have housed in its glory days.

People should know how monks were recruited from prisons and those thrown out of the military. How they were shaped into a street army and, like Hitler's early SS, club down hecklers and beat up opponent's. On a word from the bishop they would riot, rampage, loot, pillage, rape and kill. This was how business was done for the Church and how so many ancient writings have disappeared--these marauding Christian armies destroying everything they could get their hands on.

There was also a wonderful library at Tripoli, Lebanon that was also destroyed. Very interesting reading.

Then there is early Christianity in Rome. Why Christ was never referred to as "Jesus" or any variation. He was only called "Chreist" or Chrestus. And the earliest known image of a crucified savior is graffito from 2nd century Rome and depicts a human body surmounted with an ass's head and the figure is nailed to a cross. Next to that the phrase in Latin, "Alexamenos worships his god" which tells us a lot about what kind of worship was going on in the Eastern Greek-speaking Empire (Alexamenos being a Greek name). And the fact that no New Testament scenes are found painted on the walls in the Roman catacombs, no crosses other than the swastika. One depiction of Jesus there shows him as Orpheus strumming a lyre and surrounded by Old Testament figures. You have to ask youself, what did Christians believe before there was a New Testament? It's bound to be very different from yours.