Scaurus finished this part of his letter by quoting a passage that I had long had in mind, but I had forgotten its context, “Do you remember, Silanus, how the old Egyptian priest says in the Timaeus, ‘Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always boys’? Then comes the reason, ‘_You have not in your souls any ancient belief based on tradition from the days of old_.’ Well, we Romans are in the same position as the poor Greeks. So are the Egyptians for the matter of that. For it is not antiquity alone, but _divine_ antiquity, that counts. None of us have this divine antiquity of ‘tradition from the days of old’ going back to such characters as Abraham, Moses, and the prophets. I think we must put up with our inferiority. These things we had better leave to others. We have, as Virgil says, ‘arts’ of our own, the arts of war and empire. There, we are men, full-grown men. But as compared with Moses, Isaiah, and above all with this Jesus, or Christ, I must frankly confess I sometimes feel myself a ‘boy,’ and never so much as now. My conclusion is, _I will keep to the things in which I am not a ‘boy.’_ Do you the same.” CHAPTER XXVI SCAURUS ON CHRIST’S RESURRECTION (I) Passing next to the subject of Christ’s resurrection, “To deal first,” said Scaurus, “with Christ’s alleged predictions that he would ‘rise again,’ what strikes me as the strangest point in them is his frequent mention of being ‘_betrayed_.’ For the rest, if Jesus believed himself to be the Messiah or Christ—as I think he did, if not at first, yet soon—or even if he did not believe himself to be the Christ, but thought that he was to reform the nation, I can well understand that he adopted the language of one of their prophets, Hosea by name, who says, ‘Come and let us return unto the Lord … he hath smitten, and he will bind us up. After two days will he revive us. On the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight.’ Using such language as this, a later Jewish prophet, such as Christ, might lead his followers up to Jerusalem at the Passover, not knowing whether he should live or die, but convinced that the Lord would work some deliverance for Israel. And the predictions of ‘scourging,’ and ‘smiting,’ and ‘spitting,’ I could also understand, as coming from the prophets. But ‘betrayal’ is not mentioned by the prophets, and I cannot understand its insertion here.”