HEATHENISM AND CHRISTIANITY. 



163 



sect that they would live forever, and that if they 

 would only deny the Hellenic gods, and worship 

 instead that crucified Sophist and live according 

 to his laws, they were all brethren. He was well 

 aware of the courage with which the Christians 

 died, the joy with which they made any sacrifice 

 for their faith. But this heroism and self-sacri- 

 fice had no value in his eyes, being based on 

 notions so fanatical. Their superstition, he says, 

 makes the Christians the prey of every impos- 

 tor who knows how to work upon it; and while 

 he sees no serious danger in it to the existing 

 order of things, he is equally destitute of any 

 vision of the historical importance and intrinsic 

 value of the new faith. He speaks of it in the 

 superficial tone of a man who is too well convinced 

 of its unimportance to think it worth while to 

 inform himself further about it. 



Lucian's friend, the Platonist, Celsus, regard- 

 ed Christianity in a far more serious light. His 

 knowledge of it is also far more profound. In 

 "The True Word," which he addressed to the 

 Christians between a. d. 178 and 180, he shows 

 an acquaintance with their doctrines and docu- 

 ments in which he is quite alone among the op- 

 ponents of Christianity till we come to Porphyry. 

 Still, his verdict is not less severe than that of 

 his predecessors. Even though he does not deny j 

 that there is some truth in the Jewish-Christian j 

 doctrines, this gives Christianity but little advan- 

 tage in his eyes. As the Jewish and Christian j 

 Alexandrians made the heathen sages the disci- j 

 pies of Jewish revelation, the Greek philosopher 

 made the Jews and Christians plagiarists of the j 

 wisdom of the Greeks. The good that is found 

 among them they have borrowed from the Egyp- 

 tians, the Hellenes, and from the nations whose 

 gods they despised. But they have not made a 

 good use of this foreign good ; they have misun- 

 derstood and distorted the doctrines they have 

 appropriated, and mixed them up with supersti- 

 tious fancies and fictions of all sorts. Celsus 

 believes everything about the ancestors of the 

 Christians, the Jews, which their heathen foes 

 had been saying about them for centuries; he 

 believes all the calumnies about the founder of 

 Christianity and his disciples, which the hatred 

 of their compatriots had circulated in much the 

 same form as we find them in the later Talmudic 

 writings. Jesus was, according to the well- 

 known Jewish fable, not only of humble but 

 disreputable parentage ; in Egypt he learned the 

 arts of a magician and conjurer ; after his return 

 to his own country he gave himself out for a 

 worker of miracles and for the Son of God long 



foretold, and invented the Gospel stories of his 

 birth. He succeeded in collecting around him a 

 few followers from among the lowest rabble, 

 with whom he went about the country, not doing 

 anything more than other magicians had done, 

 or achieving more success. Being betrayed by 

 his own friends, he suffered death for his crimes, 

 and his disciples afterward carried on the im- 

 posture. They persisted that he was a God and 

 the Son of God, ascribed miracles to him which 

 he had never performed, put prophecies of his 

 death and resurrection into his mouth, and in- 

 vented the fable of his resurrection after the 

 pattern of heathen myths, but without adducing 

 any credible proof of it. Christianity is, there- 

 fore, from the beginning, not only a worthless 

 innovation but a tissue of lies; the "Sophist," 

 as Lucian calls its founder, now becomes a con- 

 jurer, whose magic arts the Platonist will not 

 dispute, though he will not admit that he is any- 

 thing but a good-for-nothing impostor. And, 

 according to Celsus, the character of the Chris- 

 tian religion accords with its origin. So far as it 

 deviates from what had long before been ac- 

 knowledged as truth, it is nothing but a com- 

 pound of superstition and imposture. In order 

 that they may worship the highest God alone, 

 the Jews and Christians refuse all reverence to 

 the other divinities — as if it behooved the high- 

 est God to interfere immediately and personally 

 in the material world ; as if he had not his ser- 

 vants and instruments by whom he rules the 

 world and in whom he will be honored — those 

 divinities whose glory we admire, those demons 

 whose invisible rule is continually about us, 

 whose favor we have good reason to secure by 

 prayers and sacrifices. And while the Christians 

 refuse the honors due to the greatest of created 

 beings, while they will not admit that Hercules 

 and ^Esculapius have been deified, they them- 

 selves adore as a God a conjurer who died a 

 shameful death. They assert that it was he 

 whose coming was foretold by Jewish prophets, 

 although his teachings are opposed to the Jewish 

 laws. They call him a son of God, forgetting 

 that they thereby ascribe to the God whose son 

 he was things unworthy of the Deity, just as 

 much as the Hellenic myths. They make God 

 come down to men, ill as it comports with his 

 unchangeableness and perfection. How absurd, 

 again, are their anthropomorphic representations 

 of the Deity ; their stories of the creation, the 

 fall, the flood, and the patriarchs ; their doctrine 

 of the devil who slays the Son of God, and of 

 Antichrist whom he has to fear as a rival ; their 



