Contra Celsum

Against Celsus (Greek: Κατὰ Κέλσου, Kata Kelsou; Latin: Contra Celsum), preserved entirely in Greek, is a major apologetics work by the Church Father Origen of Alexandria, written in around 248 AD, countering the writings of Celsus, a pagan philosopher and controversialist who had written a scathing attack on Christianity in his treatise The True Word (Λόγος Ἀληθής, Logos Alēthēs).

In the treatise itself, which was aimed at an audience of people who were interested in Christianity but had not yet made the decision to convert, Origen responds to Celsus's arguments point-by-point from the perspective of a Platonic philosopher.

Modern scholars note that Origen and Celsus actually agree on many points of doctrine, with both authors emphatically rejecting conventional notions of anthropomorphic deities, idolatry, and religious literalism.

The pagan philosopher Celsus had written a polemic entitled The True Word (Greek: Λόγος Ἀληθής, Logos Alēthēs), in which he had advanced numerous arguments against Christianity.

[7] Wilken likewise concludes that Celsus was a philosophical eclectic, whose views reflect a variety of ideas popular to a number of different schools.

[11] Wilken classifies Celsus as "a conservative intellectual", noting that "he supports traditional values and defends accepted beliefs".

[11] Theologian Robert M. Grant notes that Origen and Celsus actually agree on many points:[12] "Both are opposed to anthropomorphism, to idolatry, and to any crudely literal theology.

"[12] Celsus also writes as a loyal citizen of the Roman Empire and a devoted believer in Greco-Roman paganism, distrustful of Christianity as new and foreign.

[5] Joseph Wilson Trigg suggests that Ambrose may have been first exposed to the book through encounters with influential pagan intellectuals, who may have been turning to it to explain the ongoing decline of the Roman Empire as the ab urbe condita calendar approached the end of its first millennium.

[5] In any case, Ambrose considered the book an imminent threat to the continued growth of the Christian faith and believed that Origen needed to write a rebuttal to it.

[4] Origen initially followed this traditional response as well,[4][13][5] arguing that this was the approach taken by Christ, pointing to Jesus's refusal to respond to Caiaphas during his trial before the Sanhedrin.

[18][5] Finally, one of Celsus's major claims, which held that no self-respecting philosopher of the Platonic tradition would ever be so stupid as to become a Christian, provoked Origen to write a rebuttal.

[3][19] John Anthony McGuckin states that Origen probably undertook the task of writing Contra Celsum in the interest of furthering the Christian school he was trying to establish in Caesarea.

[3] In the book, Origen systematically refutes each of Celsus's arguments point-by-point[20][2] and argues that the Christian faith has a rational basis.

[25] Origen points out that the supposed "Jewish" source refers to Old Testament prophecies that do not really exist, indicating that the author was unfamiliar with the Hebrew Bible.

[30] He does argue that Christianity has always withheld its truly mystical teachings from the masses and reserved them exclusively for those who demonstrate true purity and detachment from the world, but states that Greek philosophical schools, such as Pythagoreanism, do precisely the same thing.

[30] Origen argues that Christian faith is justified because of a "demonstration of the Spirit and of power", a phrase borrowed from the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:4.

"[32] Likewise, Origen responds to Celsus's disgust at the fact that Jesus chose lowly fishermen and peasants as his disciples by insisting that this only makes it all the more astonishing that the Christian gospel has been so successful, for, if Jesus had chosen men skilled in rhetoric as his emissaries, it would be no surprise that Christianity had managed to spread throughout the entire known world.

[36] Celsus argues that the Christian interpretation of certain Biblical passages as allegorical was nothing more than a feeble attempt to disguise the barbarities of their scriptures.

[38] He then proceeds to attack the myths of Homer and Hesiod, including the castration of Ouranos and the creation of Pandora, labelling them as "not only very stupid, but also very impious".

[39] Origen analyzes Biblical stories, such as those of the Garden of Eden and Lot's daughters, defending them against Celsus's charges of immorality.

[42] While Celsus saw Christianity's willingness to accept sinners as disgusting, Origen instead declares it praiseworthy, insisting that even the worst of sinners have the ability to repent and follow the path of holiness,[43] giving examples of how Socrates converted Phaedo, a male prostitute, into a wise philosopher and how Xenocrates made Polemon, a notorious hell-raiser, into his successor as the head of the Platonic Academy.

[46] Origen also defends Christian refusal to serve in the military, basing his arguments on statements in the Bible prohibiting violence and killing.

[53] The Tura Papyrus dates to the seventh century[53] and is often closer to the text of the Vaticanus graecus 386 than to the archetypal seventh-century manuscript behind all copies of the Philokalia.

[58] Basilios Bessarion (1403–1472), a Greek refugee who fled to Italy after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, produced the first Latin translation of Origen's Contra Celsum, which was printed in 1481.

[60] Robert Bader argued that the supposed ability of modern scholars to reconstruct Celsus's original text is illusory.

[13] Henri Crouzel, a scholar of early Christianity, calls Contra Celsum "alongside Augustine's City of God, the most important apologetic writing of antiquity".

[64] Once he had already started this method, however, Origen apparently changed his mind and decided to instead take a more systematic approach of only refuting the main points of Celsus's argument.