It is around the year 177 and we are in the ancient world and we're now meeting the person of Celsus. And we don't really know a lot about Celsus other than the fact that he was a jerk.

Celsus was not necessarily a good opponent for Christians. He liked to scorn and mock Christians and to call them all sorts of names and to come up with all sorts of allegations about the Christian faith. And Celsus' main work is called The True Word or the True Logos. And Celsus was a Greek philosopher. He was a pagan.

He thought of himself as an elite, as one of the better minds of his day, and he certainly was a scholar of some report. His work on the true word is actually lost to us today, though we have wide portions of it left to us because Origen, the third century philosopher and Christian, wrote a book, Contra Celsum, or Against Celsus, in which he cites Celsus' work repeatedly in an effort to refute it. But we're still back in the second century and Celsus has just taken notice of this Christian faith and he's decided to attack it.

Now this is really something new. For someone of his stature in terms of philosophy, even if he is a second-rate person and not a world-class scholar that would be remembered forever, but still he's a philosopher. And for Celsus to take on the Christian faith and to come up with allegations and comments about it, designed to make it look foolish, is actually a first step in the world around the Christian Church of the Apostolic Age, turning its eye and looking on the Christian Church and beginning to not like what it sees.

And Celsus had a number of allegations that endured long after he was gone and his book was lost. In particular he liked to mock not only Christ but Mary. Celsus stresses pretty aggressively that there's no way Mary could have been chosen by God his allegation actually that Mary was of such low birth and that she was neither rich nor of rank means of course you could not have been chosen by a divine figure to bring good to the world Celsius has some things to say about Christ as well he says that the miracles of Christ were not a result or evidence or proof of the divinity of Christ but rather proof that Christ was your sort of average rank-and-file sorcerer.

And you have to get the barb in this for Celsus to say that Christ is a sorcerer is not saying well he just did magic tricks but rather to say he's not even a good philosopher or a good religionist. His faith is this kind of lowbrow magic parlor tricks to wow the crowds but not anything of substance religionist. His faith is this kind of lowbrow magic parlor tricks to wow the crowds but not anything of substance with real philosophy in the Greek model.

Lesson 2: Introduction to Celsus

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