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Page 1 of 10

  • Introduction

  • Edited by James Carleton Paget, University of Cambridge, Simon Gathercole, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Celsus in his World
    Published online:
    18 November 2021
    Print publication:
    25 November 2021, pp 1-35

  • Summary

    According to the New Testament’s Epistle to the Hebrews, the figure of Melchizedek comes on the scene in primeval history ‘without father or mother, without genealogy, without beginning of days’. Something similar is the case with Celsus, whose work the Alēthēs Logos appears in the second century as if from nowhere. Unlike Plato son of Ariston or Nicomachus son of Aristotle, we know nothing of Celsus’ parentage; unlike Zeno of Citium or Antiochus of Ascalon we know nothing of his place of origin or base of operations. An important study of Celsus titles him Celsus philosophus Platonicus, but this last epithet which seeks to place him in a tradition is a modern scholarly deduction, rather than a label with which Celsus identifies himself in the fragments which have come down to us.1 Even his nemesis Origen, whose Contra Celsum of 248–249 CE is our sole source for Celsus’ text, seems to have been unable to identify which Celsus he was; Origen equates him faute de mieux with an Epicurean Celsus from the time of Hadrian (Cels. 1.8) – a conclusion now universally rejected, and which even Origen himself grew to doubt.2 To use another analogy, Celsus arrives in history unheralded and full-grown, like Athene being born from her pater’s pate.

Celsus in his World
  • Philosophy, Polemic and Religion in the Second Century
  • Edited by James Carleton Paget, Simon Gathercole
  • Published online:
    18 November 2021
    Print publication:
    25 November 2021
  • Celsus penned the earliest known detailed attack upon Christianity. While his identity is disputed and his anti-Christian treatise, entitled the True Word, has been exclusively transmitted through the hands of the great Christian scholar Origen, he remains an intriguing figure. In this interdisciplinary volume, which brings together ancient philosophers, specialists in Greek literature, and historians of early Christianity and of ancient Judaism, Celsus is situated within the cultural, philosophical, religious and political world from which he emerged. While his work is ostensibly an attack upon Christianity, it is also the defence of a world in which Celsus passionately believed. It is the unique contribution of this volume to give voice to the many dimensions of that world in a way that will engage a variety of scholars interested in late antiquity and the histories of Christianity, Judaism and Greek thought.

  • 1 - ‘Jewish Christianity’ in Antiquity: Meaningless Category or Heuristic Irritant?

  • Edited by Ellie Gebarowski-Shafer, Ashley Null, University of Cambridge and Durham University, Alec Ryrie, Durham University
  • Book:
    Contesting Orthodoxies in the History of Christianity
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    09 January 2024
    Print publication:
    10 September 2021, pp 7-24

  • Summary

    Christianity’s struggles to define orthodoxy in its first centuries have cast a long shadow. This essay explores the historiographical and historical background of Jewish Christianity, a category made all the more fraught since Christianity and Judaism, despite their apparent ‘parting of the ways’, remained deeply entangled entities. Hence, the clarity between the two groups found in early chroniclers of Christianity would seem to be more aspirational than actual. Irenaeus adopted an essentialist narrative, that the pure gospel of Jesus was distorted by the ‘heresies’ of later groups, including Jewish believers who held on to practices of the law. Following a teleological approach, Eusebius described Christianity as ‘a consistent distancing from and critique of Judaism’. In the process the contention is made that, arguably, the first and most consequential Christian orthodoxy and heresy, namely ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’, were, like all subsequent heresies and orthodoxies, not so much ‘begotten’ but made, shifting taxonomies, which do not sit easily with static definitions. The study of ‘Jewish Christianity’, which throws up complex issues of definition, gives acute voice to this observation, suggesting more generally that Christianity’s historians take a more nuanced and suspicious view of the idea of ‘difference’.

    Introduction

    In the discussion of the subject of heresy and orthodoxy in the ancient Christian church there has been a gradual movement away from what some term the Irenaean, others the Eusebian, model of orthodoxy and heresy, which posits an original truth with Jesus, handed on by the apostles and then distorted by ‘heretics’. Walter Bauer’s important study of 1934 marked a significant advance on what had preceded, in his claim that in numbers of places in the empire it could be shown that so-called heresy preceded so-called orthodoxy. Arguably more important, however, was the work of Alain Le Boulluec, for where Bauer had assumed an essence to the categories of orthodoxy and heresy (his thesis could only work with such an assumption), the Frenchman, influenced by Foucault, moved the conversation towards the representation of the two categories. In such a view heresy and orthodoxy were not essences, but concepts which had been created. In this view one could not talk about one preceding the other, as Bauer had done, but of their necessarily simultaneous creation in a particular historical context.

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