If you want to get to the bottom of any historical event or movement, you have to get as close to its origins as possible. That’s why we spend a lot of time surveying the early history of Christianity to determine the nature and character of Jesus, his teachings, and his immediate followers. But what about Christianity’s critics? Wouldn’t it also be instructive to see what its earliest detractors—those around at the very inception of the religion—had to say about its perceived flaws?
Well, the Christians made sure this would be as difficult as possible. Porphyry, for example, the prominent Neoplatonic philosopher, wrote a famous work titled Against the Christians. We can’t read it, however, because, in the 5th century CE, the Chrisitan Roman emperor Theodosius II ordered every copy of it to be burned—the first sign that it may have contained some truth.
The same fate befell Celsus, a second-century critic of Christianity, as his treatise, The True Word, is also lost to history. But fortunately, and ironically, a majority of the text has been preserved through extensive quotations by the Christian scholar Origen, in his book Contra Celsum (“Against Celsus”). It is through these full quotations—presented for the sole purpose of refutation—that we can reconstruct most of Celsus’s arguments—and thus gain access to the earliest known comprehensive criticism of Christianity and Judaism.
In reading The True Word (or what’s left of it), you realize that Celsus, while not necessarily a first-rate philosopher, was widely and highly educated, displaying extensive knowledge of both Christian and Jewish scripture, various religious traditions, and Greek philosophy, particularly Platonism and Stoicism. Celsus is, therefore, a qualified critic.
He’s therefore not so easily dismissed. The fact that Origen, one of the most influential early Christian theologians and scholars, felt it necessary to devote an entire book to refuting him, demonstrates that Celsus was widely enough known—and that his teachings therefore resonated with others—to be worthy of such a lengthy refutation. We may do well to take seriously what he said.
A Note on Civility (Or the Lack Thereof)
For Celsus, decorum and civility were not strengths, to say the least, as a good majority of The True Word is an attack on the character and intelligence of Christians. “By the fact that [the Christians] themselves admit that (only the ignorant and uneducated) are worthy of their God,” wrote Celsus, “they show that they want and are able to convince only the foolish, dishonorable and stupid, and only slaves, women and little children.” Chrisitan teachers, according to Celsus, prey on the young and the intellectually weak—groups gullible enough to believe such outrageous tales in the first place.
In addition to the inexcusable misogyny, the persistent ad hominem attacks become monotonous, and, in any case, I’m not sure how persuasive a text can be to any group that you incessantly denigrate. So we are going to bypass, for the most part, his various attacks on the integrity of Christians, except to note that the Christian faith did not, in all likelihood, originate as a widely respected intellectual tradition. As Celsus wrote:
Just as the charlatans of the cults take advantage of a simpleton’s lack of education to lead him around by the nose, so too with the Christian teachers: they do not want to give or to receive reasons for what they believe. Their favorite expressions are “Do not ask questions, just believe!” and: “Your faith will save you!” “The wisdom of this world,” they say, “is evil; to be simple is to be good.”
Elsewhere, he writes:
The Christians appeal to the worst of these salvation-hungry people by insisting that the wisdom of men is nothing but foolishness with God, and thus do they attempt to bring into their fold the uneducated and stupid.
Whatever else we want to make of this, the anti-intellectual nature of the faith—or at least the common perception of this among its earliest critics—seems to be present from the start. And while there are plenty of intellectually sophisticated Christians—both historically and presently—the origins of the faith itself do not seem to be highly intellectualized.
Whatever the case may be, this is not Celsus’s strongest argument against the faith. It is not the intelligence (or lack thereof) of Christians as a group that is of great interest to us, but rather the unoriginality of Christian doctrine that ultimately betrays its man-made origins.
The Banality of Being the Son of God
You could be forgiven, being raised in an exclusively Christian environment, for thinking that the virgin birth, resurrection, miracles, and divine status of Jesus all represent momentous historical precedents. But at the time Celsus wrote, all of this was old news. Divine births were a dime a dozen.
“After all,” wrote Celsus, “the old myths of the Greeks that attribute a divine birth to Perseus, Amphion, Aeacus and Minos are equally good evidence of their wondrous works on behalf of mankind—and are certainly no less lacking in plausibility than the stories of [Jesus’s] followers.” Perseus, in fact, represents an excellent case in point.
In ancient Greek mythology, Perseus, the legendary founder of the Perseid dynasty, was the son of Zeus—the king of the gods—and the mortal Danaë. Zeus, it was said (as far back as 700 BCE), impregnated Danaë—who was likely a virgin—in the form of golden rain, streaming in through the roof and onto her lap. Whereas Mary was impregnated via the “Holy Spirit,” Danaë was impregnated with “holy rain”; each birth, though, was thought to be divinely inspired.
But whereas Perseus would go on to do some very cool things—like heroically killing Medusa, turning his enemies to stone, and founding a city—Jesus would simply go around begging and preaching to people who wouldn’t listen to him, and who would eventually turn him in to the authorities. Is this truly a story befitting an all-powerful God, or even the son of one, Celsus asks. Shouldn’t we expect a bit more? Jesus never even became king, which was not only prophesied in the Old Testament, but was the purported reason Herod ordered all infants born at that time to be killed. As Celsus wrote:
But let us review a story about [Jesus’s] birth: You say that Chaldeans came to worship you as God while you were still an infant, and that they told Herod the Tetrarch of this, and that he sent men to kill those born just at that time, hoping to destroy you along with them. This was done, so it is said, in order to ensure that you would not reign as king when you were grown up. Now this is very puzzling: if Herod did this in order to prevent you from becoming king when you were grown instead of him, why then have you not become a king? Why—though a son of God—do you go about begging for food, cowering before the threats of the people, and wandering about homeless?
It’s a fair question. According to Celsus, the answer is obvious: Jesus was a failed prophet, one of many, who accomplished very little. To compensate for this fact, his followers invented stories—the virgin birth in place of an illegitimate one (some accounts say Jesus was fathered by a Roman soldier named Panthera), miracles in place of magic tricks, and the resurrection in place of an ordinary execution.
But Perseus was far from the only competing example. Zeus also fathered Heracles, the greatest of the Greek heroes, from the mortal Alcmene. Heracles would also do some very cool, godly things—like killing lions, hydras, boars, bulls, and a dog with three heads, as well as freeing Prometheus from eternal suffering and traveling to the underworld and back. And Asclepius, the son of Apollo and a mortal woman named Koronis, was said to have healed the sick, cured the blind, and raised the dead. He was considered the founder of medicine, with healing sanctuaries established in his name. And he also had an epic death; rather than being crucified like any common criminal, he was struck dead by the thunderbolt of Zeus.
If we don’t think any of these impressive ancient figures were the son of God—as many people, in fact, at the time did believe—then why would we think otherwise of an ordinary carpenter—the son of a woman of little significance from an inconsequential corner of the world—who accomplished very little before being betrayed by his own followers and then summarily executed.
If we insist on believing that the son of god ever walked the earth, we have far better candidates, even outside of Greece. In ancient Egypt, for example, Amenhotep III was worshipped as a deity during his lifetime, considered to be the son of the god Amun, who impregnated Amenhotep III’s mortal mother, Queen Mutemwiya, under the guise of her husband Thutmose IV. And, in Rome, Romulus, the legendary founder, was said to be the son of the god Mars, who impregnated Romulus’s mother, Rhea Silvia, who was herself a vestal virgin.
Virgin births. Divine conceptions. Sons of God. None of this was new. It just so happened that the story of Jesus—one among several competing stories—was the lamest of the bunch (but which promised the greatest heavenly rewards with few real demands). Celsus, and Christianity’s earliest critics, saw this with the utmost clarity. And so the Christians burned their books.
The Monotony of Miracles and Resurrections
If someone went around today claiming to heal the blind or raise the dead, we would, with all justification, think they were insane; what we wouldn’t do is credulously believe them, without any evidence, and attempt to build a cult following in their name. But things were different in the ancient world. Apparently, these sorts of things happened all the time.
As Celsus wrote:
Asclepios did mighty works and foretold the futures of cities that kept his cult—Trikka, Epidaurus, Cos, and Pergamum; then there is Aristeas the Proconnesian, or the case of a certain Clazomennian—or of Cleomedes the Astypalean.
The list of ancient miracles is long, and repetitious, a sampling of which goes something like this: Asclepius was said to have resurrected Hippolytus from the dead (among many others) and cured paralysis and blindness; Aristeas, according to Herodotus, died and later returned to life after his body disappeared; Hermotimus of Clazomenae’s soul was said to have periodically left his body to travel and acquire hidden knowledge; Cleomedes was thought to have had superhuman strength; Empedocles stopped a plague and revived a woman thought dead; and Pythagoras, who, in addition to performing miraculous healings, performed a “tranquillization of the waves of rivers and seas, in order that his disciples might easily pass over them,” according to Iambichus, a student of Porphyry.
The upshot of all this is that every one of Jesus’s purported miracles—or magic tricks he learned in Egypt, as Celsus maintained—was performed, in a more impressive manner, by some other preceding historical figure. It was even acknowledged that Jesus’s own contemporaries performed the same kinds of miracles (tricks). As Celsus wrote:
As the Christians themselves have said, Jesus himself spoke of rivals entering the contest with his followers, wicked men and magicians, who would perform just the same sort of wonders, only under the supervision of Satan. Even Jesus admitted there was nothing exclusively “divine” about working these signs—that they could just as easily be done by wicked men. Nonetheless, in acknowledging this capacity in others, he unwittingly proves his own performances to be a lie. Good Lord! Is it not a silly sort of argument to reckon by the same works that one man is a god whilst his rivals are mere “sorcerers”?
It’s another solid point. Just as we have no reason to believe in the divine birth of Jesus over any of the other historical examples, we likewise have little reason to believe in the veracity of his miracles over the countless other historical figures that even Christians admitted performed similar (or the same) feats.
The same goes for purported resurrections: Dionysus, Osiris, Alcestis, Hippolytus, Zalmoxis, Aristeas, and many others were all thought to have cheated death and arisen from the dead. Jesus, then—rather than representing some incredible break from tradition—can simply be added to this mythological list. Perhaps Jesus’s resurrection can have some sort of symbolic meaning for the practicing Christian, but as for it actually happening, it’s no more believable than the tale of Aristeas.
As Celsus wrote:
Let’s assume for the present that he foretold his resurrection. Are you ignorant of the multitudes who have invented similar tales to lead simple-minded hearers astray? It is said that Zamolxis, Pythagoras’ servant, convinced the Scythians that he had risen from the dead, having hidden himself away in a cave for several years; and what about Pythagoras himself in Italy!—or Rhampsinitus in Egypt. The last of these, by the way, is said to have played dice with Demeter in Hades and to have received a golden napkin as a present from her. Now then, who else: What about Orpheus among the Odrysians, Protesilaus in Thessaly and above all Herakles and Theseus.
Honestly, you could make the case that the story of Jesus’s resurrection is less believable than the others. Consider that, if Jesus did foresee his own execution and resurrection, then why was he so distraught on the cross? Consider Mark 15:34:
And at three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).
You might expect the son of God to have more composure. As Celsus wrote, in comparison:
Well, what of Epictetus? When his master was twisting his leg he smiled and said with complete composure, “You are breaking it.” And when it was broken, he smiled and said, “I told you so.” Your God should have uttered such a saying when he was being punished!
The manner of Jesus’s return from the dead also raises some eyebrows. As Celsus wrote:
Has there ever been such an incompetent planner: When he was in the body, he was disbelieved but preached to everyone; after his resurrection, apparently wanting to establish a strong faith, he chooses to show himself to one woman and a few comrades only. When he was punished, everyone saw; yet risen from the tomb, almost no one.
This is not looking so good for the Christian apologist. Jesus’s life, teachings, miracles, and resurrection have all the markings of mythology that we would be quick to pin on any other ancient tale—if it weren’t for the weight of the tradition in which, by historical accident, we were raised.
The Good Book of Divine Plagiarism
Even if you place no stock in the miracles, divine birth, or resurrection of Jesus, you may still find his ethical teachings to be exemplary. If this is the case, then Celsus, again, can disabuse you of this notion. “There is nothing new or impressive about their ethical teaching,” wrote Celsus. “Indeed, when one compares it to other philosophies, their simplemindedness becomes apparent.”
First of all, as Celsus would tell you, there is very little in the New Testament, in general, that was not more eloquently stated by the Greeks. The immortality of the soul, for example, was more poetically expressed by Plato, and even the concept of a heavenly afterlife was more beautifully captured in the Elysian fields of Homer. (In fact, it is only in his explicit descriptions of hell that Jesus can be said to be innovative.)
But if you want the most egregious examples of biblical plagiarism, you can turn to none other than the ethical teachings of Jesus. As Celsus wrote:
Not only do [Christians] misunderstand the words of the philosophers; they even stoop to assigning words of the philosophers to their Jesus. For example, we are told that Jesus judged the rich with the saying “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.” Yet we know that Plato expressed this very idea in a purer form when he said, “It is impossible for an exceptionally good man to be exceptionally rich.” Is one utterance more inspired than the other?
The idea that wealth has a corrupting influence on character is widely found in Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and, especially, the Stoics and Epicureans, although it is passed off as new and revolutionary by the New Testament authors.
Jesus also preached, we are often told, a form of revolutionary pacifism: “But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also” (Matt. 5:39). Little do Christians know that this same sentiment comes from Plato in Crito:
Be careful to see whether you agree with me and it is acceptable to you, and then let’s reason together on the assumption that it is never right to do wrong and never right to take revenge; nor is it right to give evil for evil, or in the case of one who has suffered some injury, to attempt to get even. Do you agree with my premises or not? It seems to me the truth of what I say is evident, and seems as valid today as it did yesterday.
Much of Greek moral philosophy stressed the importance of virtue, and of rising above anger and vengeance to avoid harming one’s own character via evil acts. You find this, again, in Plato, Aristotle, and the Epicureans and Stoics, albeit more rigorously expressed and not in the form of simple commandments.
The Greek philosophers, especially Plato, had a profound influence on the New Testament authors’ portrayal of Jesus as a pacifist (although his pacifism did have exceptions). But there are key differences between Plato and Jesus. Plato didn’t “claim that he descended from heaven to announce his doctrines,” as Celsus wrote. In fact, Plato gives credit to others for many of his ideas—in other words, he cites his sources—and when he does say something new, he asks his readers to assess the logic of it for themselves—never to simply accept it on “blind faith.”
According to Celsus, then, Jesus—or what Christians later make Jesus say—simply repeats the ethical precepts of the Greeks, distorted and simplified and expressed less eloquently and with less rigor. But keep in mind that, if it appears to you that there is a clear ethical break between the New Testament and the Old Testament, it is because there is a clear ethical break between the Old Testament and Greek philosophy.
So when Jesus said, “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 7:12), what he should have said was that it summed up Plato and Greek philosophy.
Just Another Man-Made Religion
Lost in the passing of time is an argument that would have been highly persuasive to Celsus and his followers, but of which is only dimly appreciated today—namely, that Jesus was one of several magicians and prophets who were purported to have been born as gods, performed miracles, and risen from the dead. Rather than being exceptional, then, the story of Jesus simply copies—albeit with less literary flair—the tales from Greek antiquity, with Jesus’s moral philosophy being only an infantilized and distorted version of Greek virtue ethics mixed with the tribal supernaturalism of Jewish scripture.
Today, we pay the price for our historical amnesia. We take what was ordinary and widespread in the ancient world and misinterpret it as something rare and exceptional—and then use that as justification for our faith. Celsus would remind us, however, that Jesus was just another sorcerer—albeit one who promised eternal rewards—with overly gullible followers who stubbornly and vociferously spread their delusions. “After getting some few to believe them,” Celsus wrote of Jesus’s followers, “it was a small matter for the fire of superstition to spread.” But, like all fires, it must, at some point, burn out.
References
Celsus. On the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians. Translated by R. Joseph Hoffmann. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Hamilton, Edith. Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2017.
Iamblichus. Life of Pythagoras. Project Gutenberg.
Plato. Crito. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.