Last week Tom Holland reflected on the ‘utter strangeness’ of Christianity’s claim that Christ’s death on the cross was a sign of strength. St Paul agreed: ‘We preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the gentiles [correcting the SJV ‘Greeks’] foolishness.’ So did pagan philosophers, who argued fiercely about the nature of the gods. One such was Celsus (2nd C ad), who wrote an anti-Christian diatribe, ‘The True Doctrine’. It survives only in the quotations used by Origen in refuting it (248 ad).
Though Celsus had a sense of humour (Christians respected the cross as the tree of life: had Jesus been thrown off a cliff, would there be a cliff of life?), he was deadly earnest about Christianity. Did Christ’s miracles demonstrate that he was the son of God? Of course not, he argued: magicians were ten a penny across the Roman world, doing this sort of thing all the time.
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