-- Against the Galileans, Bk 1, para 2, Emperor Julian (the Apostate)It is worth while to recall in a few words whence and how we first arrived at a conception of God; next to compare what is said about the divine among the Hellenes and Hebrews; and finally |321 to enquire of those who are neither Hellenes nor Jews, but belong to the sect of the Galilaeans, why they preferred the belief of the Jews to ours; and what, further, can be the reason why they do not even adhere to the Jewish beliefs but have abandoned them also and followed a way of their own. For they have not accepted a single admirable or important doctrine of those that are held either by us Hellenes or by the Hebrews who derived them from Moses; but from both religions they have gathered what has been engrafted like powers of evil, as it were, on these nations----atheism from the Jewish levity, and a sordid and slovenly way of living from our indolence and vulgarity; and they desire that this should be called the noblest worship of the gods.
Why worth a read? His mother was St. Helen, his father Constantine. The rest of his family who murdered him were Galileans. While you may see aspects of a family feud in it, this not definitely not an outsider's point of view as to what Christians were like. [Please no, Christians who do what we do not like are not real Christians, stuff. It is dreary.]
Modern?
-- para 3Now that the human race possesses its knowledge of God by nature and not from teaching is proved to us first of all by the universal yearning for the divine that is in all men whether private persons or communities, whether considered as individuals or as races. For all of us, without being taught, have attained to a belief in some sort of divinity, though it is not easy for all men to know the precise truth about it, nor is it possible for those who do know it to tell it to all men. . . .1 Surely, besides this conception which is common to all men, there is another also. I mean that we are all by nature so closely dependent on the heavens and the gods that are visible therein, that even if any man conceives of another god besides these, he in every case assigns to him the heavens as his dwelling-place; not that he thereby separates him from the earth, but he so to speak establishes the King of |323 the All in the heavens 2 as in the most honourable place of all, and conceives of him as overseeing from there the affairs of this world.
Google for articles on which part of the brain this innate knowledge of the divine resides.
Shortly after he takes apart the snake in Eden story in a thoroughly modern manner and condemns the story on its face as blasphemy as no god could be as described in it. And his analysis does not die with the modern truncation created by St. Augustine.
When he takes apart the Tower of Babel story he demonstrates a modern grasp of the magnitude of the universe with bricks the size of the moon just to reach the moon much less the heavens far beyond.
Anyway, worth a read in my opinion never humble opinion.