This belief, however, led to consequences which do not at first sight seem to follow from it. The gods of classical antiquity were indeed supposed to be of like passions with ourselves, and the Greek of Homer’s time never thought it shame to attribute to them jealousy or lust or fear or vanity or any other of the weaknesses which afflict us[51]. But the one feature besides their beauty that distinguished the Greek gods from humanity was their immortality or freedom from death; and if demigods like Heracles were said to have gone through the common experience of mortals, this was held as proof that their apotheosis or deification did not take place until they had left the earth[52]. So much was this the case that the Greeks are said to have been much amused when they first beheld the Egyptians wailing for the death of Osiris, declaring that if he were a god he could not be dead, while if he were not, his death was not to be lamented[53]; and Plutarch, when repeating the story to his countrymen, thought it necessary to explain that in his view the protagonists in the Osiris and Set legend were neither gods nor men, but “great powers” or daemons not yet deified and in the meantime occupying a place between the two[54]. The same difficulty was, perhaps, less felt by the other Mediterranean peoples, among whom, as we have seen, the idea of a god who died and rose again was familiar enough[55]; but the Gnostic leaders must always have had before their eyes the necessity of making Christianity acceptable to persons in possession of that Hellenistic culture which then dominated the world, and which still forms the root of all modern civilization. How, then, were they to account for the fact that their God Jesus, whether they considered Him as the Logos or Word of Philo, or the Monogenes or Unique Power of the Supreme Being, had suffered a shameful death by sentence of the Roman procurator in Judaea?