380 Aaron P. Johnson
lost treatise, Celsus’ argument vigorously castigated the Jewish and Christian scriptures
on a series of charges ranging from the irrationality of Christians and the magical nature of
Christ’s miracles to the origins of the Jews among the Egyptians and the inadequacy of
the Jewish account of creation.
Though replete with a seemingly disordered barrage of criticisms, his attack had cen-
tered upon issues of Christianity’s problematic relationship to the Jews and other nations.
Celsus repeatedly returned to the nature of ethnic identity, the importance and diversity
of traditional customs, and the key role of at least certain nations in passing on the sacred
heritage of an ancient wisdom, thetrue wordof his title (Andresen 1955: 108–45, but
also Burke 1985 and Boys-Stones 2001). An investigation of Origen’sContra Celsum,as
well as Celsus’True Wordembedded within it, dedicated to exploring the ways in which
ethnic identities functioned in driving both the attack and the defense of Christianity as a
racially conceived corporate identity, may profitably follow two lines. The first is the role
assigned to the other nations in bolstering the arguments of each polemicist; the second
considers the notion of Christians themselves as a nation or race. As will become clear,
both the pagan critique and the Christian rebuttal are portrayed as meeting on a battle-
field of nations sparring over contested identities and cultural, religious, and historical
higher ground.
We begin with Celsus. A large part of his criticism of Christianity arose from his particu-
lar vision of the world, its nations, and their respective histories, characters, and customs.
Even issues of doctrine and theological belief were to be considered within the framework
of competing ethnic identities. Both the termsethnosandgenoscould convey a cluster of
ideas regarding a people who shared descent from common ancestors, a shared history,
territory, and language; such a group practiced and passed on to succeeding generations a
set of particular customs, laws, religious rituals, and theological frameworks. Both terms
could be used in a non-ethnic sense as well: for example, Origen refers to rock-dwelling
hyraxes as “a weak ethnos” (C. Cels. 4.87). All of these elements of ethnic difference
between nations came to play more or less fundamental roles in Celsus’ anti-Christian
treatise (Olster 1995: 25–6).
There are three primary strategies of argumentation within his polemic that are based
upon ethnic conceptions. The first is the argument from antiquity. Celsus stands in a
long line of Greek thinkers who maintained that, because primal humanity was closer
to the gods, an ancient wisdom was the preserve only of those nations who could claim
the greatest antiquity. Later nations, and even later generations of those first nations,
only possessed imperfect knowledge of that wisdom, sullied as it was from neglect, igno-
rance, and insecure transmission over the years (Droge 1989; Pilhofer 1990; Boys-Stones
2001). Drawing attention to this historiographical and philosophical assumption touched
an already sensitive nerve in the apologetic conscience (seeC. Cels. 6.78); as noted in
the preceding text, the novelty of Christianity was sometimes a source of acute embar-
rassment.
However, Celsus goes further by denying the antiquity of the Jews as well (seeC. Cels.
1.1.14–16; 6.80; 8.53). Whereas contemporary philosophers such as Numenius grant
the Jews a special place among the earliest nations, Celsus sharply excludes them (Num.,
De bono, fr. 1a Des Places). Following lines already laid down by earlier anti-Jewish
polemicists (as recorded in Josephus’Contra Apionem; see De Lange 1976: 64–5; Feld-
man 1990: 112), Origen’s antagonist claimed that the Jews were rebels who had revolted