Fame without rank, wealth or country

Among human beings, what helps a man become distinguished and famous, with his name spoken of everywhere, is birth, when his parents happen to be eminent and of high standing; the wealth of those who raised him and could afford to spend on their son’s education; and a fatherland that is great and renowned. But when someone who has everything opposite to these is able to rise above all that keeps him from becoming known, to stir those who hear of him, and to become conspicuous and well known to the whole world, a world that says conflicting things about him, how can we not marvel at such a nature, so plainly great in its gifts, setting its hand to great tasks, and possessing a boldness not to be lightly dismissed?

If one looked further into such a man’s life, how could one fail to ask how he, brought up in humble circumstances and poverty, having received no general education and having learned none of the arguments and doctrines that might have made him persuasive in addressing crowds, swaying the people and drawing more hearers, gave himself to teaching new doctrines? He brought the human race a teaching that set aside the customs of the Jews while still honouring their prophets, and that overthrew the laws of the Greeks, above all those concerning the divine. And how could such a man, brought up in this way, who had learned nothing of worth from any human being (as even those who speak evil of him admit), say such things about the judgment of God, about punishments for wickedness and honours for goodness, and say them in a way not easily despised, so that not only rustic and unlearned people were won by what he said, but also not a few of the more intelligent, those able to see into the hidden sense of sayings thought to be told in plain and humble words, a hidden sense that holds within it, so to speak, something more secret?

The man of Seriphus in Plato reproached Themistocles, who had become famous for his generalship, saying that he had won his fame not by his own character but by the good fortune of having the most celebrated fatherland in all Greece. He heard this reply from Themistocles, who was fair-minded and saw that his fatherland too had contributed to his fame: “If I had been a Seriphian, I would not have become so famous; nor would you, had you been fortunate enough to be born an Athenian, have become a Themistocles” (Plato, Republic 329e–330a). But our Jesus was reproached with coming from a village, and that not a Greek village, nor belonging to any nation held in esteem by most people. He was slandered as the son of a poor woman who worked with her hands, and as having left his fatherland because of poverty to work for hire in Egypt. To use the example already given, he was not only a Seriphian, from the smallest and most obscure of islands, but, so to speak, the most low-born of Seriphians. Yet he has been able to stir the whole inhabited world, more than Themistocles the Athenian, and more even than Pythagoras and Plato and any other wise men, kings or generals anywhere in the world.