382 Aaron P. Johnson
an explanation of the diversity of morals and customs, while at the same time legitimizing
the forceful constraint of peoples’ practices to the particular customs of a nation or city.
Celsus’ third form of argumentation, that ofprosopopoiia(or the crafting of a fictional
character to voice certain accusations), arises from his contention that, just as the Jew-
ish nation arose through rebellion from Egypt, so the Christians had arisen as a result
of sedition from the Jews. Hence, he adopts the rhetorical strategy of putting his argu-
ment into the mouth of a constructed Jewish character (De Lange 1976: 68–9; Rokeah
1982: 58; Bammel 1986). Celsus’ Jew attacks the Christians on a number of fronts, from
Jesus’ birth as illegitimate (C. Cels. 1.28, 32) to the resurrection as only the hallucina-
tory experience of the disciples (C. Cels. 2.60–61). The general force of this portion of
his argument amounts to a weighty charge of Christian rebellion and irrationality. Just
as Celsus would delegitimize the Jews for their seditious break from the Egyptians, so
Celsus’ Jew defames Christians as revolutionary and wayward Jews (c.Cels. 2.1, 3–4).
The cumulative effect of both criticisms amounts to an accusation that Christians have
committed a double betrayal, placing them at a second remove from any claim to primal
ethnic purity.
Throughout Celsus’ argument, the basic ethnic assumptions—that older nations are
better, because they are closer to the truth; that deviation from these primitive national
ways of life could only be for the worse; and that the present diversity and relativity of
national laws and customs are based on a divine order—all serve as the building blocks for
his rejection of Christianity as an invalid and subversive ethnic option. Strikingly, Origen’s
response to Celsus’True Wordwould work within the same parameters, reflecting the
same ethnic assumptions; his conclusions, of course, would be rather different.
Ethnic Argumentation: Origen
Origen rejects the charge that the origins of the Jews lay in sedition from Egypt and
that they were, as an ethnic group, latecomers. Turning the argument from antiquity in
favor of the ancient Jews, the apologist staunchly defends the historical priority of Moses
over Plato, Homer, and even the introduction of the Greek alphabet (Droge 1989). The
greater antiquity of Moses is consistently and forcefully maintained. While Celsus could
claim that, where similar doctrines were found in the Hebrew writings and in Plato’s cor-
pus, the thoughts were better expressed by the Greeks, Origen marshals a two-pronged
assault: not only were the Hebrew Scriptures more effective because they were more
accessible to both common and educated hearers, but Moses was also clearly earlier than
Plato, and the dependency of the latter upon the former was worthy of emphatic con-
sideration. “It is not very clear,” Origen declares, “whether Plato fell upon these [stories
of Penia and Porus] by chance, or, as some suppose, during his visit to Egypt he hap-
pened to meet those who pursued the philosophy of the Jews and learned something
from them, some of which he preserved but other elements he altered, guarding against
giving any offense to the Greeks that might arise from preserving completely the wisdom
of the Jews” (C. Cels. 4.39). Again, when both Plato and the prophets (Isaiah and Hag-
gai) mention the holy land of eternity, Origen surmised that, because the Greeks “were
younger not only than Moses who was quite ancient but also than most of the prophets,
they either misheard certain statements given in riddling form [by the Hebrews] or,