Dante Alighieri, author of the Divine Comedy, of which the Inferno is the first of three books, called Boethius, an early Christian, "The blessed soul who exposes the deceptive world to anyone who gives ear to him." But Boethius was not a non-conflicted Christian, and it seems, neither was Dante, who wrote the Divine Comedy at least partly as a sort of historical-political payback. (For example, in Canto VI of the Inferno, Ciacco mentions Pope Boniface VIII, the reigning Pope of his time, "whose intervention in the affairs of the city was, in Dante's view, a main cause of its miseries" (Sinclair, p. 95). St. John, on the other hand, was a non-conflicted Christian, who believed wholly in Jesus as the son of God, and entertained no other ideas. Although he likely wrote, and therefore thought in Greek, his devotion to Jesus, as one of Jesus' disciples, was absolute. According to "John: Introduction": .

             The Gospel according to John is quite different in character from the three synoptic .

             gospels. It is highly literary and symbolic. It does not follow the same order or .

             reproduce the same stories as the synoptic gospels. To a much greater degree, it is the .

             product of a developed theological reflection and grows out of a different circle and .

             tradition. It was probably written in the 90s of the first century. Boethius, on the other .

             hand, seemed, based on his writings, to vary between Christian faith and a Greek .

             belief system that included Philosophy, clearly a Greek conception and ideal, in the .

             form of a woman. .

             I will examine Dante's Christian beliefs within, and possible other motivations for writing, the Inferno, and suggest that these were perhaps less purely Christian than the apparent overall subject of the Divine Comedy, and the Inferno in particular might suggest. In that same sense, a comparison may be made between Dante and Boethius who both wrote of Christians and Greeks within the same texts, and shared an allegiance to both, spiritually and philosophically.