Note 90 — Chapter VII · ANCIENT CHRISTIANITY AND ITS OPPONENTS

In general, the orthodox polemic is interesting only insofar as it preserves that of the opposition. The Dialogue with Trypho by Justin Martyr (about 150) is a mere documental discussion between a Christian and a Jew, each founding on the Hebrew Scriptures, and the Christian doing nearly all of the argument. There is not a scintilla of independent rationalism in the whole tedious work.90 Justin was a type of the would-be “philosopher” who confessedly would take no trouble to study science or philosophize, but who found his sphere in an endless manipulation of the texts of sacred books. But the work of the learned Origen Against Celsus preserves for us a large part of the True Discourse of Celsus, a critical and extremely well-informed argument against Christianity by a pagan of the Platonic91 school in the time of Marcus Aurelius,92 on grounds to a considerable extent rationalistic.93 The line of rejoinder followed by Origen, one of the most cultured of the Christian Fathers, is for the most part otherwise. When Celsus argues that it makes no difference by what name the Deity is called, Origen answers94 that on the contrary certain God-names have a miraculous or magical virtue for the casting out of evil spirits; that this mystery is known and practised by the Egyptians and Persians; and that the mere name of Jesus has been proved potent to cast out many such demons. When, on the other hand, Celsus makes a Jew argue against the Christist creed on the basis of the Jewish story that the founder’s birth was illegitimate,95 the Father’s answer begins in sheer amiable ineptitude,96 which soon passes into shocked outcry.97 In other passages he is more successful, as when he convicts Celsus’s Jew of arguing alternately that the disciples were deceived, and that they were deceivers.98 This part of the discussion is interesting chiefly as showing how educated Jews combated the gospels in detail, at a level of criticism not always above that of the believers. Sometimes the Jew’s case is shrewdly put, as when he asks,99 “Did Jesus come into the world for this purpose, that we should not believe him?”—a challenge not to be met by Origen’s theology. One of the acutest of Celsus’s thrusts is the remark that Jesus himself declared that miracles would be wrought after him by followers of Satan, and that the argument from miracles is thus worthless.100 To this the rejoinder of Origen is suicidal; but at times the assailant, himself a believer in all manner of miracles, gives away his advantage completely enough.