Early Christianity

their contents is limited. We are reliant on extracts of them

quoted by Christians who replied to them. Celsus’ True Doctrine

is known only through quotations in Origen’s response, the

Against Celsus. Similarly, Porphyry’s Against the Christians

(which Christian Roman emperors of the fifth century ordered to

be burned) is known only via fragments quoted by Christian

authors. Hence we only know about these anti-Christian polemics

from Christian responses that are themselves polemical: the

opportunities for distortion of what Celsus and Porphyry actually

wrote are considerable.

The fate of Celsus’ and Porphyry’s works is indicative

more broadly of problems that we encounter in looking for pagan

sources on early Christianity. We rely almost exclusively on

Christian reports of pagan writings for what the pagans said. This

is particularly the case with legislation against the Christians. Any

modern account of Roman persecutions of the early Christians

will depend for the most part on citations of anti-Christian laws

found in Christian works, especially Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical

History. The number of pagan sources that survive independently

is small (see chapter 6). Such circumstances provide us with a

salutary warning. If we are to make anything of the few pagan

sources that survive, then we need to try to reconstruct, as much

as possible, a context for them that depends not on what Christians

like Eusebius would have wanted us to believe, but on other texts

penned by pagans.

Documentary sources and material remains

Peter Brown, one of the foremost scholars of the transformation

from pagan to Christian in late antiquity, once began a book

with the remark: ‘I wish I had been one of the Seven Sleepers of

Ephesus’ (Brown 1978: 1). I sympathize with him. The story of

the Seven Sleepers, preserved by the sixth-century Gallic bishop

Gregory of Tours, tells of seven pious Christians who were

walled up in a cave outside the city of Ephesus in Asia Minor

during a persecution in the third century. They did not die, but

SOURCES AND THEIR INTERPRETATION

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