What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Early Christianity and the second sophistic

The article deals with the early Christian literature of the 2nd-3d centuries in the context of the Second Sophistic. Famous sophists and Christian intellectuals were contemporaries, and they were educated by the same teachers. The focus of the article is on such themes as the claims of apologists for the status of ambassadors to the Roman emperors, the desire to demonstrate their education and include Christianity in the mainstream of development of ancient culture, an appeal to Greek history. When Christians tried to prove the truth of their views on the world and the deity and to demonstrate the superiority of their culture and their own tradition, they often used ideas and methods borrowed from the arsenal of Second sophistic.