The Secret Vault presents: The Christian and Pagan Creeds Collated. Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B. & M. R. C. S.
and the Christian Manner of answering those Charges.
By the Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B. & M. R. C. S.
After having fairly considered and compared the striking features of resemblance which subsist between the Pagan and Christian doctrines, and also between the Pagan and Christian forms of worship, and given due weight to the admissions which Christian divines and historians have made touching that resemblance; our method requires that we should take some account of such of the charges which their early enemies brought against them, as their fairness has transmitted, or their inadvertency has suffered to escape and come down to posterity.
We can never lose from this calculation, the plumb dead weight which Christians themselves have thrown into the adverse scale, by those arts of suppressing facts, stifling testimony, preventing the coming-up of evidence, persecuting witnesses, and destroying or perverting the documents that were from time to time adduced against them, of which they stand convicted by the concurrent testimony of all parties, and their own reiterated avowals, full often themselves "glorying in their shame," and boasting of having promoted the cause of truth, by frauds and sophistications of which their heathen adversaries would have been ashamed.
Were we in full possession, as in reason and fairness we ought to have been, of the writings of Porphyry, Celsus, Hierocles, and other distinguished and conscientious opponents of the Christian faith; as they wrote themselves, and not as their adversaries were pleased to write for them, suffering them only to seem to make such objections as were ridiculous or weak in themselves, or such as Christian writers found themselves most easily able to answer; the probability is, that the whole apparatus of Christian evidence would be beaten off the field; and we should be able to give the fullest and most satisfactory explanation of those apparent defects in the manner by which those who held Christianity to be an imposture, ought to have assailed it, which cannot be ascribed to their deficiency of shrewdness, or insincerity of hostility. [LN., Porphyry of Tyre, around 234 to 305AD, he was a Neoplatonic philosopher who was opposed to Christianity. Celsus, he was a 2nd century Greek philosopher and was opposed to Christianity best known for his work titled the 'On the True Doctrine, which was banned in 448AD.]
We see even in our own days, and the author of this work experiences in his own person, in the endurance of an unjust and cruel imprisonment, [This work was composed in Oakham Gaol.] and still to be continued bondage of five years after the term of that imprisonment shall have expired, what sort of justice Christians would be likely to show to the arguments of their opponents. Were they orators whose powers of declamation their Christian adversaries must have despaired to cope with? Why, their persons could be Oakhamized. Were they writers whose diligence of research, fidelity of statement, and strength of argument, could not be equalled? Why, their writings could be suppressed, or kept back as much as possible from public knowledge; and then, to be sure, their Christian adversaries, in their guaranteed security that all that should be heard, and all that should be read, should be their preaching's and writings only, would not only represent their opponents as the most contemptible orators and weakest reasoners in the world, but could father them with such miserable specimens of eloquence, and such jejune and feeble objections, as Origen would exhibit as the composition of Celsus, and as Eusebius has invented for Porphyry. It was never to be endured by Christians, that an orator who opposed their faith should be believed to have been eloquent, or that a writer who confuted their opinions, should be thought to be reasonable.
Charge 1.
That the Christian Scriptures were plagiarisms from previously existing Pagan Scriptures, is the specific and particular charge which the early opponents of Christianity ought to have brought against it, if that charge were tenable. The apparent not bringing forward of such a charge leaves in the hands of the advocates of Christianity, the presumption that such a charge was not tenable; and ergo, that the Christian Scriptures were the original compositions of the persons to whom Christians themselves ascribed THEM.
The Answer.
To this, which is the pith of the whole argument, it is answered, 1st. That though the charge had been tenable, it could not, from its own nature, have been brought forward, before the Christians had first brought forward a pretence that they were in possession of original Scriptures, and had permitted it to be generally known what those Scriptures were. But that pretence was not made till after the Christian religion had been preached and established, and a large number of converts already made [a] without reference to, or any use made, or even the pretended existence of any Christian writings at all, nor till after the period when St. Paul says the Gospel had already been "preached to every creature under heaven." [a] "Lardner shows advantages arising from a late publication of the Gospels. It was first requisite, he states, that the religion should be preached and established, and a large number of converts made. The apostles, says Eusebius, spread the Gospel over the world; nor were they (at the first) much concerned to write, being engaged in a most excellent ministry, exceeding all human power."- Elsley's Annot. vol. 1, p. 11. What says reason? "If ye continue grounded and settled and be not moved away from the hope of the Gospel, which ye have heard, and which teas preached to every creature under heaven, whereof I, Paul, am made a deacon." - Col. 1-23. [GK] When will men learn to see with their own eyes, and reason with their own understandings? - 1. This Paul owns himself a deacon, the lowest ecclesiastical grade of the Tharapeutan church. 2. This epistle was written two years before any one of our gospels. 3. The gospel of which it speaks had been extensively preached and fully established before the reign of Augustus!]
After the substance of the matter which had thus attained extensive prevalence and general belief before it was committed to writings of any sort, appeared in written documents, it is not only not likely that the people who had been already "rooted and built up in the faith" without any service or help of such writings, should have much valued or sought for means of grace that they had so long done without; but it is absolutely certain that they continued to do without them; nor was it at any time within the three first centuries, that the general community of Christians were permitted to know what the contents of their Scriptures were.
And 2ndly. When the time had arrived that the charge of plagiarism against the Christian Scriptures, if tenable, should have been brought forward, the priests, in whose hands alone the Scriptures were to be found, had acquired such tremendous power and influence as to procure, by the decrees of Constantine and Theodosius, that all writings of Porphyry and others, that had been composed against the Christian faith, should be committed to the flames; and happy was the writer who got out of the way time enough to escape the fate of his writings.
Charge 2
"Among the various calumnies with which the worshippers of Christ were formerly assailed," says the learned Sebastian Kortholt, [Kortholti Paganus Obtrectator, Kiloni, 1698AD, p. 1. In extracts from this work, I claim the liberty of giving my own translation, without affixing more than the note of chapter and page from the original, except where there seems a strength in the original which the rendering might be thought to have enhanced.]
"the first place is justly given to the charge that they had brought in new and unheard-of rites, and that they sought to contaminate the holy purity of the religious ceremonies of antiquity, by the superstition of their novelty."
The Answer.
From this charge the Christians only attempted to vindicate themselves, by proving the most exact sameness and conformity of their doctrines and tenets to the purest and most respectable forms of the ancient idolatry: a mode of argument as serviceable to their cause, then, as in all inference of reason it is fatal now. Who would expect, among the very first and ablest advocates of a religion that had been revealed in the person of a divine prophet who had appeared in a province of the Roman empire, under the reign of the emperor Tiberius, such admissions as those of their Justin Martyr, that "what we say of our Jesus Christ is nothing more than what you say of those whom you style the sons of Jove? As to his being born of a virgin, you have your Perseus to balance that; as to his being crucified, there's Bacchus, Hercules, Pollux and Castor, to account for that; and as to rising from the dead, and ascending into heaven, why, you know, this is only what you yourselves ascribe to the souls of your departed emperors."
What short of an absolute surrender of all pretence to an existence distinctive and separate from Paganism,
is that never-to be-forgotten,
never-to-be-overlooked,
and I am sure never-to-be-answered
capitulation of their Melito, bishop of Sardis, in which, in an apology delivered to the emperor Marcus Antoninus, in the year 170, he complains of certain annoyances and vexations which Christians were at that time subjected to, and for which he claims redress from the justice and piety of that emperor: first, on the score that none of his ancestors had ever persecuted the professors of the Christian faith, Nero and Domitian only, who had been equally hostile to their subjects of all persuasions, having been disposed to bring the Christian doctrine into hatred; and even their decrees had been reversed, and their rash enterprises rebuked, by the godly ancestors of Antoninus himself. An absolute demonstration this, that all the stories of persecution suffered by Christians on the score of their religion are utterly untrue. And, secondly, the good bishop claims the patronage of the emperor for the Christian religion, which he calls our philosophy, "on account of its high antiquity, as having been imported from countries lying beyond the limits of the Roman empire, in the reign of his ancestor Augustus, who had found its importation ominous of good fortune to his government." An absolute demonstration this, that Christianity did not originate in Judea, which was a Roman province, but really was an exotic oriental fable, imported about that time from the barbarians, and mixed up with the infinitely mongrel modifications of Roman piety, till it outgrew the vigour of the stock on which it had been engrafted, and so came to give its own character entirely to the whole system.
The adoption of the fabulous Krishna of the Hindus per conveyance of the Egyptian monks into the Roman empire, having taken place in or about the reign of Augustus, gave occasion to later historians to pretend that Christ was born in the reign of Augustus; and to all that confusion which arises from the adversaries of Christianity charging it with novelty, while its earliest advocates challenge for it the highest and most remote antiquity. [Kortholti Paganus Obtrectator, ch. 1. p. 5. Pertinet huic quod Gregorius Nazianzenus affirmat, Christianam doctrinam veterem simul et novam esse. - Ibi- dem, p. 10.]
Charge 3.
In the edict of Diocletian, preserved in the fragments of Hermogenes, the Christians are called Manichees. It sufficiently appears that the Gentiles in general confounded the Christians and Manichees, and that there really was no difference, or appeared to be. none, between the followers of Christ and of Manes. Let who will or can, determine the curious question, whether Manes and his followers were heretical seceders from Christianity, or whether those who afterwards acquired the name of Christians, were heretics from the primitive sect of Manichees. The admitted fact of the existence of upwards of ninety different heresies, or manners and variations of the telling of the Gospel story, within the three first centuries, is proof demonstrative that there could have been no common authority to which Christians could appeal, and, consequently, no Scriptures of higher claims than any of the innumerable apocryphal versions, wherefrom to collect their opinions, or whereby to decide their controversies. It is admitted by Mosheim, that the more intelligent among the Christian people in the third century had been taught, that true Christianity as it was inculcated by Jesus, and not as it was afterwards corrupted by his disciples, differed in few points from the Pagan religion, properly explained and restored to its primitive purity; [Mosheim, vol. 1, cent. 3, chap. 2. Collate herewith the terms of compromise with Paganism offered by St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Gregory, and other holy popes.] so that these good people very conveniently found the way of swimming with the tide, and were converted to Christianity, while they continued as staunch Pagans as ever. But this, of course, could be viewed by a modern advocate of Christianity in no other light than as an invention of the enemy; however, it was neither a weak one in itself, nor unsuccessful in its issue. "Many were ensnared," says the Christian historian, "by the absurd attempts of these insidious philosophers. Some were induced by these perfidious stratagems to abandon the Christian religion, which they had embraced. Others, when they were taught to believe that Christianity and Paganism, properly understood, were virtually but one and the same religion, determined to remain in the religion of their ancestors, and in the worship of the gods and goddesses. A third sort were led, by these comparisons between Christ and the ancient philosophers, to form to themselves a motley system of religion, composed of the tenets of both parties, and paid divine honours indiscriminately to Christ and to Orpheus, to Apollonius, and the other philosophers and heroes, whose names had acquired celebrity in ancient times."
The Doctrine of Manes and his History.
Mani, properly so called, though more commonly Manes or Manichaeus, from whom the most important Christian sect that ever existed, takes its designation, was by birth a Persian, educated amongst the Magi, or wise men of the East, and himself originally one of that order. The ecclesiastical historian Socrates gives us this account of him: -
"Not long before the reign of Constantine, there sprang up a kind of heathenish Christianity, which mingled itself with the true Christian religion; for in those days the doctrine of Empedocles, a heathen philosopher, was clandestinely introduced into Christianity. One Scythianus, a Saracen, had married a captive woman, native of the upper Thebais, and upon her account he lived in Egypt. Having been instructed in the learning of the Egyptians, he introduced the doctrine of Empedocles and Pythagoras into Christianity; asserting the existence of two natures, the one good, the other evil, as Empedocles did, and calling the evil nature Neikos (Discord), and the good nature Philia (Friendship). Buddas, formerly named Terebinthus, became a disciple of that Scythianus; he travelled into Persia, where he told a great many strange stories of himself, - as, that he was born of a virgin, and brought up in the mountains. Afterwards he wrote four books: one of which was entitled the Mysteries; another the Gospel; a third Thesaurus, or the Treasury; the fourth a Summary.
He pretended a power to work miracles; but on one occasion, being on a high tower, the Devil threw him down, so that he broke his neck and died miserably. [a] The woman at whose house he had resided buried him, and succeeding to the possession of his property, bought a boy of seven years old, whose name was Cubricus. This youth she adopted; and after having given him his freedom, and a good education, she bequeathed him all the estate she had derived from Terebinthus, and the books which he had written according to the instructions of Scythianus his master. With these possessions and advantages, upon the death of his patroness, Cubricus went into Persia, and changed his name into Manes, and there gave out the books which Terebinthus had thus composed, under the direction of his master Scythianus, as his own original works. These books bore a show and colouring of Christianity but were in reality heathenish; for the impious Manes directs the worship of many gods, teaches that the Sun ought to be adored. He introduces the doctrine of fatal necessity and denies the free agency of man. He openly teaches the transmigration of souls, [b] as held by Pythagoras, Empedocjes, and the Egyptians. He denies that Christ was ever really born, or had real human flesh, but asserts that he was a mere phantom. He rejects the law and the prophets and calls himself the Paraclete or Comforter: All which things are far from the true and right faith of the church of God. In his epistles he was not ashamed to entitle himself an apostle. At length his abominations met with their merited punishment."
[notes. [a] The reader, who may find this entire passage in Dr Lardner's Credibility, vol. 2, p. 141, will observe my variations from it. I take this liberty only upon the grounds of preference for my own translation of the original itself, which I have on my table, and with which I compare the text of Lardner through every sentence.
[b] The Pythagorean doctrines are still traceable in the Christian Scriptures: the Christ of St John's Gospel is evidently a Pythagorean philosopher. Ye must be born again (John 3.), is the characteristic aphorism of the Pythagorean school. Seethe Chapter xxxiii. entitled Pythagoras, in this Diegesis, p. 217.]
"The son of the king of Persia happening to have fallen into dangerous illness, his father, having both heard of Manichaeus, and believing his miracles to be true, sent for him as an apostle, and believed that his son would by his means be restored. Upon his arrival he takes the king's son in hand, after the fashion of a conjuror, but the king having seen that the boy died under his hands, had him imprisoned, intending to put him to death; but he made his escape, and came into Mesopotamia. The king of Persia, hearing that he was in those parts, sent after him, and, upon his second apprehension, had him flayed alive." - This king of Persia was Varanes the First.
Notwithstanding the calumnies heaped on Manes, Dr Lardner has shown that he was, in the best and strictest acceptation of the term, a sincere Christian, and has adduced many passages from his writings equally honourable to his understanding and to his heart. Not only the learned Faustus, [LN., Faustus flourished about AD. 384 at the latest and had been known to Augustin before that wily and mendacious saint apostatized from Manicheism to orthodoxy.] Bishop of Melevi in Africa, whose tremendous charge against the authenticity of our canonical Gospels we have elsewhere given; but others, by far the most learned, intelligent, and virtuous men that ever professed and called themselves Christians, were Manichaeans, and among these was the renowned St. Augustin himself, till he found that higher distinctions and better emoluments were to be gained by joining the stronger party. Whereupon he left the poor presbytery of the Manichean church, to become the orthodox bishop of Hippo Regius: and from thenceforth, with the zeal that always characterizes a turncoat he set himself to heap all the calumnies and misrepresentations he possibly could upon that purer and more primitive Christianity which he had deserted; awkwardly enough confessing, that he himself should never have believed the Gospel, unless the authority of the church had induced him [c] ( paid him) to do so. There are, I fear, more than nineteen out of any twenty bishops that could be named, who owe their orthodoxy at this day to the same sort of inducement. [c] Ego evangelio nequa quam crediderim nisi ecclesiae auctoritas me commoveret. August, ut citat Michaelis.]
Demonstration that no such person as Jesus Christ ever Existed
There were two very different opinions concerning Christ very early among Christians. Some, as Augustin says, [d] believed Christ to be God, and denied him to be man; others believed he was a man and denied him to be God. The former was the opinion of the Manichees, and of many others before them; of others so early, indeed, and so certainly, that Cotelerius, in a note on Ignatius's Epistle to the Trallians, assures us that it would be as absurd as to question that the sun shone at mid-day, [e]to deny that the doctrine that taught that Christ's body was a phantom only, and that no such person as Jesus Christ had ever any corporeal existence, was held in the time of the apostles themselves. [f] Ignatius, the apostolic Father, expressly censures this opinion, as having gained ground even before his time. "If, as some who are atheists - that is, unbelievers - say, that he only suffered in appearance, - an expression which, as Cotelerius observes, plainly shows the early rise of this doctrine. And from the apostolic age downwards, in a never interrupted succession, but never so strongly and emphatically as in the most primitive times, was the existence of Christ as a man most strenuously denied. So that though nothing is so convenient to some persons as to assume airs of contempt, and to cry out that those who deny that such a person as Jesus of Nazareth ever existed, are utterly unworthy of being answered, and would fly in the face of all historical evidence, the fact of the case is, that the being" of no other individual mentioned in history ever laboured under such a deficiency of evidence as to its reality, or was ever overset by a thousandth part of the weight of proof positive, that it was a creation of imagination only.
1. [d] Ait enim Christus Deus est tantum, omnino hominis nihil habens. Hoc Manicheei dicunt. Photiani, homo tantum. Manichei, Deus tantum. - August. Serm. 37, c. 12.
2. [e] As absurd as to question that the sun shone, 8fc. Solem negaret meridie lucere, qui Docetas, seu phantasiastas hsereticos temporibus apostolorum inficiaretur erupisse. - Cotel. ad Ign. Ep. ad Trail, c. 10.
3. [f] Apostolis adhuc in seculo superstitibus, adhuc apud Judaeam Christi sanguine recenti, phantasma Domini corpus asserebatur. - Hieron. adv. Lucif. T. 4, p. 304]
To the question, then, on what grounds do you deny that such a person as Jesus Christ existed as a man? the proper answer is,
Because his existence as a man has, from the earliest day on which it can be shown to have been asserted, been as earnestly and strenuously denied, and that, not by enemies of the Christian name, or unbelievers of the Christian faith, but by the most intelligent, most learned, most sincere of the Christian name, whoever left the world proofs of their intelligence and learning in their writings, and of their sincerity in their sufferings;
And because the existence of no individual of the human race, that was real and positive, was ever, by a like conflict of jarring evidence, rendered equivocal and uncertain.
charge 4.
It was distinctly charged against the early preachers of Christianity, that they had adopted and transferred to their own use the materials they found prepared to their hands, in the writings of the ancient poets and philosophers; and by giving a very slight turn to the matter, and a mere change of names, had vamped up a patchwork of mythology and ethics, a mixture of the Oriental Gnosticism and the Greek Philosophy, into a system which they were for foisting upon the world as a matter of a divine revelation that had been especially revealed to themselves. All these figments of crack-brained opiniatry and silly solaces played off in the sweetness of song by deceitful poets, by you too credulous creatures, have been shamefully reformed and made over to your own God." [a] Such is the objection of Coecilius, in the Octavius of Minucius Felix, written in dialogue, about the year 211. A charge answered by admission, rather than denial, and corroborated by the never-to-be-forgotten fact, that the Egyptian Therapeuts in their university of Alexandria, where first Christianity gained an establishment, were professedly followers and maintainers of the Eclectic, philosophy, which consisted in nothing else but this very overt and avowed practice of bringing together whatever they held to be useful and good in all other systems; and thus, as they pretended, concentrating all the rays of truth that were scattered through the world into the common centre of their own system. This is fully admitted by Lactantius, Arnobius, Clemens Alexandrinus, and Origen; and denied by none who have ventured fearlessly to investigate the real origin of Christianity. [LN., Arnobius of Sicca, died around 330AD, was an early Christian apologist. Clemens Alexandrinus or Alexandria, called Titus Flavius Clemens, theologian, and writer. Origen of Alexandria (adamantiums), around 164 to 253AD, early Christian theologian and avid writer.]
[a] Omnia ista figmenta malesanae opinionis, et inepta solatia, a poetis fallacibus, in dulcedine carminis lusa, a vobis nimium credulis in Deum vestrum, turpiter reformata sunt. - Minucius Felix in Apol]
Charge 5.
Porphyry, whose very name is aconite to Christian intolerance, objects against Origen, that, being really a Pagan, and brought up in the schools of the Gentiles, he had, to serve his own ambitious purposes, contrived to turn the whole Pagan system, which he had first egregiously corrupted, into the new-fangled theology of Christians.
Charge 6.
Celsus, in so much of his work concerning the "true Logos" as Origen has thought proper to suffer posterity to become acquainted with, charges the Christians with a recoinage of the misunderstood doctrine of the ancient Logos.
Charges thus affecting the character of Origen, the great pillar of the Christian church, cannot fall innocent of wound on Christianity itself. Origen is the very first of all the fathers who has presented us with a catalogue of the books contained in the New Testament. He was the most laborious of all writers; and his authoritative pen was alone competent to produce every iota of variation which existed between the old Pagan legends of the Egyptian Therapeuts and that new version of them which first received from him the designation of the New Testament [a]
[a] See the chapter on Origen.]
Admissions of Bishop Herbert Marsh.
Bishop Marsh, in his Michaelis, the highest authority we- could possibly appeal to on this subject, [b] admits, that "it is a certain fact, that several readings in our common printed text are nothing more than alterations made by Origen, whose authority was so great in the Christian church, that emendations which he proposed, though, as he himself acknowledged, they were supported by the evidence of no manuscript, were very generally received." [c] The reader will do himself the justice to recollect, that Origen lived and wrote in the third century, and that "no manuscript of the New Testament now extant is prior to the sixth century; and, what is to be lamented, various readings which, as appears from the quotations of the Fathers, were in the text of the Greek Testament, are to be found in none of the manuscripts which are at present remaining.' [d]
[b] The Introduction to the New Testament by Michaelis, late professor at Gottingen, as translated by Marsh, is the standard work, comprehending all that is important on the subject. - The learned Bishop of Llandaff, quoted in Elsley's Annotations on the Gospels, vol. 1. (the intro.), p. 26.]
[c] Michaelis's Introduction to New Test., by Bishop Marsh, vol. 2, p. 368.]
[d] Ibid. vol. 2, p. 160.]
Admissions, to the Same Effect, of the Early Fathers.
To charges of such pregnant inference, we find our Christian Fathers, in like manner, making answers that only serve to authenticate those charges; to demonstrate that they were founded in truth and not in malice; and that, answered as they were, and as anything may be, they were utterly irrefragable.
"You observe the philosophers," says Minucius Felix, "to have maintained precisely the same things as we Christians, but not so is it on account of our having copied from them, but because they, from the divine preaching's of the prophets, have imitated the shadow of truth interpolated: thus, the more illustrious of their wise men, Pythagoras first, and especially Plato, with a corrupted and half-faith have handed down the doctrine of regeneration." [e] And Lactantius, after admitting the truth of the story, that man had been made by Prometheus out of clay, - adds, that the poets had not touched so much as a letter of divine truth; but those things which had been handed down in the vaticination [LN., Vaticination. A prophesying, divining, foretelling, sooth saying, of the prophets.], they collected from fables and obscure opinion, and having taken sufficient care purposely to deprave and corrupt them, in that wilfully depraved and corrupted state they made them the subjects of their poems. [f]
[e] Quoted in Paganus Obtrectator, p. 34.]
[f] Lactantii Instit. lib. 3, cap. 10. Sic etiam conditionem renascent!' sapientium clariores, Pythagoras primus, et praecipuus Plato, corrupta et difc. diata fide tradiderunt. - Min. Felix.] [LN., Lactantis, Lucius Caecilius Firmainus, around 250 to 325AD. Was an early Christian author and adviser to Emperor Constantine, his most important book was the 'the Divine institutes'.]
Tertullian calls the philosophers of the Gentiles the thieves, the interpolators, and the adulterators of divine truth; alleges, that "from a design of curiosity they put our doctrines into their works, not sufficiently believing them to be divine to be restrained from interpolating them, and that they mixed that which was uncertain with what they found certain." [h] Tertul. Apolog. cap. 46, 47.]
Eusebius pleads, that the Devil, being a very notorious thief, stole the Christian doctrines, and carried them over for his friends, the Pagan philosophers and poets, to make fun of. Theodoret accuses Plato especially, with having purposely mixed muddy and earthy filth with the pure fountain from which he drew the arguments of his theology.
Thus, if we may believe Eusebius, the beautiful fable of Ovid's Metamorphosis, describing Phaeton falling from the chariot of his father, the Sun, was nothing more than a wicked corruption of the unquestionable truth of the prophet Elijah having been caught up to heaven, as described (2 Kings 11.), "Behold there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven;" the heathens being so ignorant as to confound the name Helias with Helios, the Greek word for the Sun.
The almost droll Justin Martyr gives us a most satisfactory explanation of the whole matter; that "it having reached the Devil's ears that the prophets had foretold that Christ would come for the purpose of tormenting the wicked in fire, he set the heathen poets to bring forward a great many who should be called (and were called) sons of Jove. The Devil laying his scheme in this, to get men to imagine that the true history of Christ was of the same character as those prodigious fables and poetic stories."
I render from the beautiful Greek of Theodoret, a passage of considerable elegance, in which the reader will trace the rising dignity of style, superior manner, and cultivated taste with which an historian of the fourth century could improve and varnish the awkward sophistry of the more honest Christian Father of the second: -
"But if the adversaries of truth (our Pagan opponents) so very much admired the truth, as to adorn their own writings even with the smallest portions they could pillage from it, and these, though mixed with much falsehood, yet dimmed not their proper beauty, but shone like pearls resplendent through the squalors in which they lay, so that, according to the evangelical doctrine, the light shone in the darkness, and by the darkness itself was not concealed; we may easily understand how lovely and admirable the divine doctrines must be, secerned from falsehood, for so differs the gem in its rough matrix, from what it is when seen resplendent in a diadem,"
Charge 7.
The Emperor Julian - who, with all his imperfections on his head, was an ornament to human nature, and can by no means be conceived to have wanted any possible means of information on the subject - objects against the claims of Christianity, what a thousand testimonies confirm, that it was a mixture of the Jewish superstition and Greek philosophy, so as to incorporate the Atheism of the one with the loose and dissolute manner of living of the other. "If anyone," says he, "should wish to know the truth with respect to you Christians, he will find your impiety to be made up partly of the Jewish audacity, and partly of the indifference and confusion of the Gentiles, and that ye have put tog-ether, not the best, but the worst characteristics of them both."
The answer to which charge, on the part of the advocates of Christianity, was, that they neither took them to be gods whom the Gentiles considered to be such, and so were not assimilated to the Gentiles; nor did they respect the deisidemony of the Jews, and so were not adherents to Judaism. Nor was it a small matter of triumph to their cause, to contrast the apparent contrariety of charges that were alleged against them, in that as Julian accused them of adopting the worst parts of Gentilism, Celsus had accused them of selecting the best parts.
The Charges of Celsus
It is never to be forgotten, that the charges of Celsus stand only in the language in which Origen has been pleased to invest them; nor is it any very monstrous phenomenon that such wholly different characters as Julian and Celsus were, should either of them, with equal conscientiousness, have esteemed those self-same things the best, which the other considered the worst parts of Gentilism. [LN., Celsus, he was a 2nd century Greek philosopher and was opposed to Christianity best known for his work titled the 'On the True Doctrine, which was banned in 448AD.]
Celsus, an Epicurean philosopher, might very naturally think that an impostor acted with sound policy in giving to his new-fangled system all the advantages it could derive from the closest convenient conformity to the Epicurean carelessness of living, and indulgence in innocent, or even in perhaps not quite innocent pleasures; while Julian, all whose virtues were of the severest and most rigid self-restraint, looked with horror on the license which the doctrines of the apostolic chief of sinners had seemed to countenance in the lives and manners of the Christians. The charge of the Emperor Julian is in striking coincidence of verisimilitude with the apparent fact of the case, that Paul of Tarsus, who, in his Epistle to the Colossians, calls himself a deacon of the Gospel, and who could have stood in that humble grade, only as a servant and missionary from Therapeutan college; schematised from the church, and set up in trade for himself. He opposed the ascetic discipline in which he had been trained, and thus drew to his party that large majority of ignoramuses which in all ages and countries are eager to embrace every part of superstition but its mortifications and restraints. There were innumerable other charges brought against the early Christians, which, as they impinge on their moral character only, and might be either true or false without materially affecting the evidences of the religion, they professed, lie beyond the scope of this Diegesis. Their amount in evidence is, that they sustain the fact, that whatever the principles and conduct of Christians may be supposed to have been, they were never such as to conquer the prejudices or to conciliate the affections of their fellow men. Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny have spoken of them in the most disparaging terms; and though it might be that those really wise and good men were unfairly prejudiced, yet it must cost any man who is not prejudiced himself, an effort to think so.
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next Chapter 38. Christian Evidences Adduced from Christian Writings.