Against Celsus
Origen’s reply, in eight books, to the pagan philosopher Celsus, who had attacked Christianity about seventy years earlier. It quotes Celsus at length and reports arguments between Christians and Jews.
Celsus wrote his True Doctrine against the Christians in the later second century. The work is lost, and most of what is known of it comes from the long quotations in this reply, which Origen wrote at Caesarea in Palestine near the end of his life. Celsus put part of his attack into the mouth of a Jewish speaker, and Origen answers with what he had himself heard in debate with Jewish teachers.
The work is a primary source for how Christians and their critics argued in the second and third centuries, and for how each side read the prophets. Origen’s reports of Jewish interpretation come from an opponent of it and should be read as such.
Cited in
- about 550 BC to 539 BC, estimated date