Lucian of Samosata

Look at what Lucian does say, in the passage the page itself prints:

• Christians worship "the man who was crucified in Palestine because he introduced this new cult into the world" (§11);
• their "first lawgiver persuaded them that they are all brothers… worshipping that crucified sophist himself and living under his laws" (§13).

Three facts, stated as common knowledge to a pagan readership expected to need no explanation: the cult's founder was a man; he was crucified, in Palestine; the movement's rules descend from him. This is the standard educated-pagan picture of Christianity by the 160s – matching Tacitus (executed in Judaea under a named prefect) and Celsus a decade later – delivered by a writer whose entire profession was deflating frauds, with no Christian sources to please and every satirical incentive to say something more damaging than "their founder was executed" if anything more damaging were available. "The whole thing is a fable about a man who never lived" is the most Lucianic punchline imaginable – it is precisely the joke he makes about the oracle-monger Alexander of Abonoteichus's invented god Glycon, whose manufacture Lucian gleefully exposes step by step. Faced with the Christians, the demolition-artist of invented gods reports a crucified man as the cult's origin, and aims his ridicule instead at the believers' gullibility. Satirists do not leave the best joke on the table; there was no such joke to make.

Why no name? Because namelessness is Lucian's register for contempt. In the same work Peregrinus's Christian phase names no one – not the "priests and scribes," not the governor of Syria who freed him, not the officials who slept in his cell; and elsewhere Lucian's satire habitually refers to figures by epithet ("that crucified sophist" is exactly parallel to his handling of other cult figures he declines to dignify). Every pagan witness of this era compresses the founder to his title or his death – Tacitus's "Christus," Pliny's "Christo," Mara's "wise king" – because "Jesus" meant nothing to Greco-Roman readers, while "the crucified one they're named for" identified him instantly. The page treats a stylistic universal as an evidentiary gap.

Note also what the "poor wretches" passage concedes historically: property-sharing, prison solidarity, funds raised across Asia at common expense, contempt for death, sacred books read aloud, food rules – an unfriendly but detailed ethnography agreeing point-for-point with Pliny's interrogation records fifty years earlier and with the Didache's itinerant-charlatan problem ("if the prophet asks for money, he is a false prophet" – the Didache legislating against exactly the Peregrinus type). Hostile witnesses corroborating each other's incidental details is how ancient social history gets established.

On the Ignatius☦–Peregrinus overlap the page gestures at: answered in full on the Ignatius page – the resemblance is Lucian satirising a type the church demonstrably contained, and the two men's documented ends are irreconcilable.