384 Aaron P. Johnson
the laws of the nations and excused—indeed encouraged—the Christian rejection of
them. Whereas Celsus denounced breaking the laws as impiety since they were insti-
tuted by the overseers (law being, as Pindar had said, the king of all), Origen shoots
back tersely, “If you mean the laws belonging to the civic sphere, such a claim is false;
forallarenotruledbythesamelaw....WeChristians,therefore,understand law to be
the king of all by nature [only] when it is the same as the law of God” (C. Cels. 5.40).
Origen’s account of the rise of nations and national differences thus strikes at the heart of
Celsus’ animosity toward Christians. Aside from his ridicule of Christian doctrine (such
as the resurrection) and disdain for Christian gullibility and lack of intelligence, Celsus’
most serious criticisms arose from a concern to preserve the ancestral traditions and laws.
Christian associations posed a threat to the civic order, which rested upon historically
rooted ways of life; they were, quite frankly, illegal, and violated the common law, as
Celsus emphasized at the very beginning of his treatise. The laws invoked by Celsus lost
all their gravity if Origen’s narrative was granted validity.
There remained the issue of Christianity’s revolt against Jewish law. This was a point
whose importance had been highlighted by Celsus’ allegedly fictional Jew. Origen in turn
questions whether Celsus’ Jewish spokesman corresponds to the character, orientation,
and tone of an authentic Jew (Bammel 1986). Indeed, Origen avers, the Jew of theTrue
Wordcould scarcely hide the fact that his portrait was the work of his pagan maker. Origen
discovers elements that smack of a Samaritan or even a Greek character and outlook
rather than that of a true Jew. Indeed, even true Jews were not the faithful and accurate
guardians of their ancient heritage: their literal-minded understanding of the sacred texts
obfuscated the primal wisdom contained within them. Christians alone had become privy
to the higher truths of these enigmatic writings through the allegorical method. The
ancient wisdom of the early Hebrews that had marked them off as different and superior
to other nations was also, therefore, inaccessible to their Jewish descendants and reserved
only for those who willingly rejected their ancestral customs and laws for the ancient and
natural law of God.
Christians as a New Race
Because the Christians turned from their ancestral traditions and spurned the ethnic her-
itage to which they had been born, it might seem natural to us to conceive of Christian
identity in Origen as distinctly non-racial. However, the pages of theContra Celsum
are sprinkled with references to the Christian nation or race. The adoption of such ter-
minology exhibits itself as an integral component of ethnic argumentation. Ethnicity is
not merely an oppositional category in contrast to the Christian religion. It was not a
category of identity one left behind, or transcended, in the act of conversion. Rather,
Christianity remained conceptualized within the identity category of ethnicity. Conver-
sion involved a transference of identity from oneethnosto another, not to a non-ethnic
identity altogether.
The first instance of racial terminology for the Christians occurs within the context of
answering Celsus’ criticism of Christian credulity in the miracle stories of the Gospels.
If this attack was made by an Epicurean, Origen retorts, it would be fitting (or at least
expected); but a Jew who possessed equally miraculous material in his scripture was an