 A variety of reductionism adopted by early Christian writers in their treatment of pagan religion, such as Lactantius ([4th century] 1871: 22) and Augustine (The City of God, VII ch. 18), proposes that the pagan deities were based on real, mortal historical figures revered after their death for their contributions to human society and subsequently elevated to the status of gods. However, this is clearly not a linguistic reductionism. Augustine—in a chapter titled “A more credible cause of the pagan error”—aims to discourage and debunk pagan beliefs: they are fictions inspired by the benevolent deeds of mortal leaders. Linguistic reductionism does not seek to explain religious belief but identifies a reductive class of sentences by which the truth or falsity of sentences in the disputed class is determined.