The Origins of Astronomy

Numinius rates the Jews among the Wise Barbarians and promotes Moses to a rank so high that Plato himself is described as Moses speaking Attic Greek. The reputation of Moses as a heavyweight sage had clearly grown outside of Jewish circles, but predictably we see an adoption of the figure of Moses without much evidence for a deep ethnographic engagement with actual Jewish thought. In fact, Moses features quite prominently in pagan arguments against Christianity on the grounds that the Christians are not really monotheists and have therefore betrayed the ancient tradition of Jewish monotheism founded by Moses.