General Bio of Celsus and the Possibility that the Celsus Who Wrote "The True Word" was not the Celsus who was friend of Lucian

  • Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsus


    Celsus (/ˈsɛlsəs/; Hellenistic Greek: Κέλσος, Kélsos; fl. AD 175–177) was a 2nd-century Greek philosopher and opponent of early Christianity.[1][2][3] His literary work, The True Word (also Account, Doctrine or Discourse; Greek: Hellenistic Greek: Λόγος Ἀληθής),[4][5] survives exclusively in quotations from it in Contra Celsum, a refutation written in 248 by Origen of Alexandria.[3] The True Word is the earliest known comprehensive criticism of Christianity.[3] Hanegraaff[6] has argued that it was written shortly after the death of Justin Martyr (who was possibly the first Christian apologist), and was probably a response to his work.[6] Origen stated that Celsus was from the first half of the 2nd century AD, although the majority of modern scholars have come to a general consensus that Celsus probably wrote around AD 170 to 180.[7][8]



    THIS points out that there may be more than one Celsus, and there is confusion as to whether the anti-Christian Celsus was in fact an Epicurean:


    Philosophy[edit]

    All that is known about Celsus personally is what comes from the surviving text of his book and from what Origen says about him.[9] Although Origen initially refers to Celsus as an Epicurean,[10][11][12] his arguments reflect ideas of the Platonic tradition, rather than Epicureanism.[10][13][12] Origen attributes this to Celsus's inconsistency,[10] but modern historians see it instead as evidence that Celsus was not an Epicurean at all.[10][11] Joseph Wilson Trigg states that Origen probably confused Celsus, the author of The True Word, with a different Celsus, who was an Epicurean philosopher and a friend of the Syrian satirist Lucian.[11] Celsus the Epicurean must have lived around the same time as the author of The True Word and he is mentioned by Lucian in his treatise On Magic.[11] Both Celsus the friend of Lucian and Celsus the author of The True Word evidently shared a passionate zeal against superstitio, making it even easier to see how Origen could have concluded that they were the same person.[11]


  • Cassius

    Changed the title of the thread from “General Bio of Celsus” to “General Bio of Celsus and the Possibility that the Celsus Who Wrote "The True Word" was not the Celsus who was friend of Lucian”.