Origen and the Polis: A New Translation of Contra Celsum

Robin Darling Young and I believe that the Contra Celsum is a largely neglected masterpiece of political philosophy that continues to speak to us today. In our fraught political moment, various nationalistic interpretations of Christianity envision a melding of religious and political realms with adherents to Christianity at the helm of power. The message of the Contra Celsum about Christianity and governance could not be more different. Origen never says, "put us in charge." Instead, he says, "let us continue to do what we are already doing, namely, transforming ordinary people into citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem, Plato's otherwise unrealizable best politeia." This message resonates with the firm decision the actual founders of the American republic made to reject a state church and with Alexis de Tocqueville's admiration of American Protestantism's role in forming the "habits of the heart" he considered necessary for democracy. As Robin Darling Young will show in her contribution, the relationship between Christianity and a flourishing polity is at the heart of Origen's Contra Celsum. Nonetheless, though the work survived because it provided a uniquely powerful defense of Christianity against philosophical objections, the influence of its political message was limited to the alternative politeia of monasticism.

Robin and I want to encourage the study of the Contra Celsum through publishing a new translation in a format accessible to scholars, with the Greek text on the facing page, an introduction, and notes calling attention to relevant scholarship over the past two generations. This will be its first translation into English since Henry Chadwick's in 1953. Chadwick's mellifluous translation bears comparison with Stephen MacKenna's renowned translation of a nearly contemporary work, Plotinus's Enneads. Nonetheless, as there has been in the case of MacKenna's translation, there is room for others with different aims. We intend to provide a glossary of key philosophical, legal, and literary terms and, insofar as we can, to translate those words consistently. We pay such close attention to words because, as Mark James has recently shown, in Origen's largely Stoic philosophy of language, words are not arbitrary. Throughout the Contra Celsum, Origen employs onomazo, "to name," or more broadly, "to use a term," to ask, "am I using just the right word?" or hoionei, "so to speak," to say, "this is as close as I can get to expressing what is ultimately inexpressible in human speech." We try to represent key terms consistently in our translation, so that it reflects Origen's own categories of thought. None of these terms is more important than the word he contests with Celsus, logos. Though conventionally translated as "word," logos covers a wide semantic field that does not correspond closely with that of "word" in English. It does not refer to a "word" as an individual unit of speech, but can refer to reason, rational discourse, the rationally perceived order of the cosmos, the second divine hypostasis, and a host of other things, often several of them at the same time. We have chosen to leave it simply as logos. We have also chosen, when possible, to avoid translating words that belong to the common language of Origen's time in ways that now sound specifically Christian or come to us freighted with theological implications. Thus, for example, ekklēsia is "assembly" rather than "church;" apostolos is "envoy;" kharis is "favor" rather than "grace;" pronoia is "foreknowledge" rather than "providence."

Since 1953, when the most recent translation of Contra Celsum appeared, more scholarship on Origen has been published than had been up to that time, the best of it often in French, German or Italian. Among the most relevant to Contra Celsum are Nicholas De Lange's Origen and the Jews, demonstrating Origen's close and continuing relationship to Jewish scholars, whom he knew far better than Celsus, who attempted in the True Logos to provide a supposedly “Jewish” perspective on Christianity. Since Celsus fails to mention it, Origen supplies the Jewish argument that Isaiah 7.14 is not a prophecy of a virgin birth, along with his own response. Significantly, Origen accepts the objection that the Hebrew word does not have to mean "virgin," but he argues on purely philological grounds that it can and does in that particular case. As Guy Stroumsa has recently pointed out, "In the Roman Empire, philosophers, Christians, and Jews were in a constant, fruitful exchange of ideas." Bernhard Neuschäfer's Origenes als Philologe, demonstrating Origen's grounding in Alexandrian literary criticism, is another seminal work. Scholarship on Origen is still assimilating twenty-nine Homilies on the Psalms, discovered in Marina Molin Pradel in Bavarian State Library in 2012. It was swiftly and magnificently edited by Lorenzo Perrone with the assistance of Emanuela Prinzivalli and Antonio Cacciari, and these homilies have now been translated into English. Perrone has demonstrated that these are Origen's last datable works, written in the few years of freedom Origen had left after writing Contra Celsum in 248, and Perrone has also demonstrated multiple connections between the homilies and treatise.

The last sixty years have also witnessed a new interest in Graeco-Roman philosophy. The title of one seminal work, Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life, summarizes a new appreciation for what philosophy meant to Origen and his contemporaries. George Boys-Stones has shown that Graeco-Roman Platonism by Origen's time had reached the consensus that Plato was simply the best exponent of a primeval wisdom; Celsus, in fact, is one of the earliest and clearest exponents of this position. Lloyd Gerson has rethought the Platonic tradition, calling into question the term "Neoplatonism" and the mentality behind it. Considerable interest has focused, rightly, on Origen's contemporary Plotinus, who, we believe, was his acquaintance as a fellow-student of the same teacher, Ammonius Saccas. Iain McGilchrist, in his work on the implications of brain research, repeatedly directs our attention to the continuing validity of Plotinus's insights. Gerson headed a team that produced a new translation of the Enneads, and their glossary has been helpful to us. Another work of particular relevance to Contra Celsum, where Origen argues that Celsus was unaware of a philosophical Christianity unknown to most believers, is Nicholas Banner's Philosophic Silence and the 'One' in Plotinus. Although Origen reads Scripture as an esoteric work and intimates again and again in the Contra Celsum that there is far more that he could say, he is rarely read that way. Arthur Melzer's  Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing demonstrates that such reading was expected in ancient philosophy and indicates how to do it, by engaged attention to each word and phrase, the kind of reading Origen gives both to biblical literature and to Celsus. Guy Stroumsa's Hidden Wisdom, which attends to the links between Origen’s writings and the thought of his Jewish contemporaries, is one of the few scholarly works to take Origen's esoterism seriously.

Perhaps even more important than scholarly work on Origen or on Graeco-Roman philosophy was the emergence of the new approach inaugurated in 1963 with the publication of Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo. This approach generated a new field of study, Late Antiquity. In Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity, a book that helped define that field, Brown encouraged taking risks and commended the "imaginative curiosity" that makes us "attempt to project ourselves into the thoughts and feelings of men and women whose claim to our respect was precisely that they were profoundly different from ourselves." As he indicates in his recently published memoir, Brown was fascinated by the strangeness of the past, the way that it challenges our categories of thought and does not bear out the readings we impose on it: Augustine reversed progress from toleration to persecution, Syrian ascetics confound our understanding of sex, and Christians actually did change ingrained social practices dealing with benevolence to the poor and with death. The study of Late Antiquity thus encourages seeing society as a whole and being open to a world where air-tight categories like "religion" do not necessarily apply. 

When students of Late Antiquity, such as Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, Heidi Marx-Wolf, and Jared Secord, examine Origen, they see no reason to doubt that he could be both a Christian teacher and a teacher of Platonic philosophy. They have seen no convincing basis for the hypothesis first proposed in the seventeenth century, and widely accepted since then, especially among scholars of Graeco-Roman philosophy, that the Origen remembered in the Platonic tradition as a respected colleague of Plotinus and interpreter of the Timaeus was not the author of Contra Celsum, but rather a different person of the same name. I, myself, like quite a few students of Origen, including the dominant Origen scholar of the twentieth century, Henri Crouzel, was never convinced that there were two Origens. Nonetheless, like Crouzel, I had never considered this a question of great importance. That changed when I read Digeser's A Threat to Public Piety, which envisioned a Platonic philosophical circle in which Christians were fully a part, alongside non-Christian Hellenes like Plotinus and Porphyry. I realized how much it reveals about Origen and his thought that he actively associated with non-Christian philosophers and that they respected him and even found him intimidating. De Lange's work shows that Origen had much the same relationship with Jewish scholars in Caesarea; in a passage of the Contra Celsum whose implications have not been fully appreciated, Origen recounts submitting his position on prophecies of Christ in the Hebrew scripture to a rabbinic court (CC 1.45-46). In both cases, it is significant that he was open to them and they to him. Recognizing that Origen could be both a Christian teacher and a teacher of philosophy in the Platonic tradition means ceasing to see Christians as a group apart, dealing with Graeco-Roman culture as if it were foreign to them. Teresa Morgan, a Classics scholar who has turned her interest to the New Testament, takes a similar approach in works such as Being 'In Christ' in the Letters of Paul. 

Digeser's book piqued my interest in Contra Celsum. I was convinced that, if I looked, I would find Origen the philosopher hiding in plain sight in his one surviving work where he discusses philosophy at length. I suggested to Robin, with whom I have been reading Origen and related authors for some time, that we turn our attention to Contra Celsum and read the Greek text closely. I was not disappointed. While a recent work presents Origen as an adversary to Platonism, we have found the opposite. Although Celsus is now understood, no doubt correctly, as a Platonist, Origen begins Contra Celsum claiming that the author of the True Logos must have been one of two second-century Epicureans named Celsus. He attacks his supposed Epicureanism with the arguments of a Platonist. This may have been a rhetorical pose, since Epicureanism was out of favor by Origen's time, and it served his purposes to insinuate that only an Epicurean materialist would want to make a case on philosophical grounds against Christianity. In the later books, where he tacitly accepted that he was dealing with a Platonist, he argues that Plato is on his side. He never claims to be a Platonist -- as a Christian he thinks that Moses, the prophets, Solomon and Paul, not to mention Jesus, the embodiment of the divine logos, were superior philosophers to Plato -- but his criticisms of Plato are limited to three points: 1) Plato's philosophy does not reach ordinary people (Epictetus is better in that respect), 2) Plato approved cultic worship of daimons like Socrates's cock to Asclepius, and 3) Plato held that, in metensomatosis, rational souls can eventually descend to the bodies of irrational animals. When it comes to the second and third points, Origen's position is not that these discredit Platonism, but that Plato took positions inconsistent with his own insights. 

In 1962 Karl-Otto Weber assembled and commented on the notices from antiquity that could be ascribed to the hypothetical Origen the Neoplatonist as a set of numbered fragments. Although he set forth the discrepancies in historical accounts that have provided arguments for positing a second Origen, he, tellingly, could not find any actual philosophical views expressed in them that contradicted positions taken by the author of Contra Celsum. We intend to include these in an appendix to our translation, along with other testimonies to Origen as a teacher of philosophy, including his own, those of his student Gregory Thaumaturgus, and those of Porphyry, the source of most of Weber's fragments, who spoke of his encounter with Origen, the Christian teacher who was, unaccountably, always consorting with Plato. We are convinced that Origen was and understood himself as a philosopher. We believe that the fragments Weber brought together belong to his work as a whole and should be made accessible.

Roughly a thousand years separate the death of Justinian and the Fall of Constantinople. Justinian, it must be remembered, was the emperor who closed Plato's Academy and ensured that Origen was declared a heretic, largely for being a Platonist. Nonetheless, the Christian Roman Empire maintained, throughout its existence, an educational curriculum anchored in the classics of Greek literature and the philosophy of Plato, which it inherited from a pre-Christian past. When Constantinople fell, Byzantium passed that curriculum on, along with the complete works of Homer and Plato and much more, to Western Europe. Running like a red thread through Byzantine intellectual history is the dilemma these writings posed in later centuries: how do we reconcile Christianity and the Hellenic heritage? Though thanks in large part to Justinian, most of Origen's work perished, one major work survived intact: the Contra Celsum, the book that showed how reconciliation could be accomplished. As Western Europe began to absorb the Hellenic heritage, one of the first books printed in Greek with a facing Latin translation was Origen's Contra Celsum.

Origen's extensive learning, his penetrating intellect, his superhuman industry, and his deep piety — plus his good fortune in having an extraordinarily rich and generous patron — were indispensable to his one surviving masterpiece. Byzantium preserved Contra Celsum because it demonstrated that Christianity was compatible with Hellenism. Renaissance humanism welcomed it because, in doing so, Origen demonstrated that Hellenism was compatible with Christianity.  Origen could answer a serious and well-informed challenge to such compatibility because, as a teacher of Plato as well as of biblical literature, he embodied it himself.

Born in Henderson, Kentucky in 1949, Joseph Trigg received a doctorate in the History of Christianity from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 1978. He published on Origen and other early Christian topics, including an introduction to Origen’s work with extensive passages in translation, while serving as a parish minister in the Episcopal Church. After his retirement in 2014, he published a translation of Origen’s newly discovered Homilies on the Psalms. A set of essays on these homilies that he coedited with Robin Darling Young has just appeared. He lives with his wife, Joy, in Louisville, Kentucky, 

God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible

Candida Moss, God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible. Little, Brown and Company, 2024.

In God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible, Candida Moss expands discussions of slavery in antiquity by uncovering how enslaved persons’ intellectual labor and agency were erased in the production and transmission of the New Testament. Moss demonstrates that enslaved Christians experienced desocialization and depersonalization not only through physical displacement and diminished legal status but also through being textually ghosted: their indispensable contributions were effaced even as they made the very existence of Christian scripture possible. Moss’ work takes up and extends Orlando Patterson’s concept of “social death,” namely the violent uprooting of the enslaved individual from their social and cultural milieu paired with the paradox of being incorporated into their enslaver’s community while being treated simultaneously as nonbeings (1982: 38).

Moss foregrounds the role of the enslaved in the production and transmission of the New Testament, arguing that enslaved laborers were responsible for writing, copying, curating, and publicly reading the texts. In doing so, she challenges prevailing assumptions about solitary (or free) authorship and demonstrates that these contributions, previously erased, must be recognized as acts of coauthorship. For Moss, acknowledging this hidden labor “un-ghosts” the enslaved, granting them visibility and confronting historical harms (p. 265).

Following the Author’s Note and Introduction, Moss structures the book into three principal sections, within which eight chapters are distributed. She then concludes with an epilogue. The first section, “Invisible Hands,” begins with Chapter One, “Essential Workers,” which introduces Tertius, an amanuensis for Paul, who identifies himself in Rom 16:22 as the one writing the letter. Moss does not claim that Tertius composed the entire epistle; rather, she uses Tertius to illuminate the often-erased presence of enslaved and subservient scribes in the production of the New Testament. This chapter demonstrates that many enslavers sent their enslaved children to school to be educated. These individuals often became their enslavers’ scribes, secretaries, librarians, notaries, readers, philosophers, grammarians, and even imperial advisers, such as Tiro, Cicero’s scribe. Moss argues that literate enslaved workers were ubiquitous, and whenever someone in Mediterranean antiquity claimed to be “writing,” they were more likely dictating to an enslaved scribe.

Chapter Two, “Paul and His Secretaries,” highlights Paul’s reliance on enslaved scribes and other servile workers. Notable among these workers are Tychicus, who was with Paul during his imprisonment and may have assisted in composing letters (Eph 6:21); Epaphroditus, who supported Paul during his confinement in Ephesus (cf. Phil 2:25–30); and Onesimus, who likely served as both courier and possibly scribe of the Letter to Philemon. These individuals played crucial roles in the production and transmission of Paul’s correspondences. Typically, after recording his dictation, the scribes would read the letter back to Paul. However, due to the constraints of imprisonment, he may not have had the opportunity to review the final drafts thoroughly, increasing the possibility of errors or ambiguities. Considering their involvement, Moss suggests that Paul’s letters exemplify a form of collaborative authorship—a characteristic not only prevalent in early Christian writing but also common in broader Greek and Roman literary practices. The contributions of these scribes, however, remain largely invisible. This invisibility stems partly from the social stigma attached to reliance on individuals of lower status, and partly from ancient household ideologies that viewed enslaved persons as extensions of their enslavers’ bodies, thereby erasing their agency and labor.

The third chapter, “Rereading the Story of Jesus,” extends the argument that enslaved individuals were coauthors, suggesting that their experiences—particularly in the realm of textual production—reframe the narrative of Jesus. Moss contends that the pervasive structures of slavery deeply shaped both the world Jesus inhabited and the earliest Gospel accounts, making it impossible to separate his story from the realities of enslavement. She urges historians and those concerned with marginalized groups to remain attentive to the presence and influence of enslaved individuals when reading the New Testament (p. 93). Such awareness, she argues, helps illuminate elements of the Gospel narrative—for instance, Jesus’s use of “slavish” speech patterns and his embodiment of traits, which can be associated with an enslaved overseer. His silence during his trial and the degrading violence of crucifixion, Moss suggests, closely mirror the lived experiences of those who recorded and transmitted his story.

The second section, “Messengers and Craftsmen,” explores the often-overlooked roles of socially marginalized individuals in the spread and preservation of Christian literature. Chapter Four, “Messengers of God,” challenges the conventional view that Christianity primarily expanded during the Constantinian era through elite male apostles and intellectual figures. Such a perspective overlooks the critical contributions of enslaved, freed, and otherwise socially disenfranchised individuals. For example, Thomas, in the third-century Acts of Thomas, is sold into slavery by Jesus as a carpenter to Abbanes, while Burrhus, mentioned in Ignatius’ Letter to the Ephesians around 116 CE, served as a key intermediary facilitating communication between the Christian communities in Ephesus and Smyrna. These figures exemplify how enslaved messengers helped bridge the distance between senders and recipients, ensuring not only the physical delivery of letters but also their effective reception.

In the next chapter, Moss shifts her gaze to enslaved copyists who curated, collated, and reproduced manuscripts within wealthy households or in workshops operated by freed-person booksellers. This work required not only technical skill in writing and copying but also interpretive judgment and moral discernment, as copyists had to correct textual errors and inconsistencies while navigating the expectations of patrons and the economic pressures of manuscript production. The agency of these enslaved workers, however, complicates traditional assumptions about the relationships among copying, calligraphy, training, and social status. In this context, a notable mistake in the Lord’s Prayer in the Codex Bobiensis—the earliest Latin Gospel manuscript—offers a revealing example. Instead of “Let your kingdom come,” the manuscript reads, “I have come to your kingdom,” a variation that may reflect something about the manuscript’s production and its producers. Perhaps a bookseller, whether Christian or not, commissioned the codex, or the copyist was an enslaved person in a wealthy household and produced it for their enslaver, thereby leaving subtle but meaningful traces of their presence in the text.

This section draws to a close with a study of how enslaved men and women served as readers. Their oral delivery—through breath, vocalization, pauses, emphasis, and accent—shaped audience reception and interpretation. They not only read the text aloud but sometimes added words or sentences to help listeners better understand what they read and guided them through difficult passages. Accordingly, for Moss, the reader functioned as both a conduit and an author. To illustrate this, she turns to the longer ending of Mark (16:9–20). While agreeing with other scholars who question the status of Mark’s ending as a later development in the textual history of the Gospel, Moss proposes that it is the lector, rather than the copyists or editors, who possibly added the ending.

Part three, “Legacies,” weighs how Roman conceptions of “good” and “bad” enslaved persons shaped the self-understanding of early Christians and interpretations of New Testament texts. Chapter seven, “The Faithful Christian,” analyzes the portrayal of Christians as God’s enslaved and examines the phenomenon of martyrdom in the early centuries. While the concept of enslavement to God has evolved, it continues to rest on the enslaved person's loyalty (pistis/fides) to God as their new master. This dynamic underpins the rhetorical power of early Christian depictions of the enslaved, such as Blandina, a late second-century CE martyr, remembered in the Martyrs of Lyon as recorded in Eusebius’ Historia Ecclesiastica. For ancient readers, Blandina exemplified the ideal enslaved, who were expected to serve, labor, and show gratitude even to the point of death.  

 The final chapter, “Punishing the Disobedient,” presents Euclea as an archetype of the rebellious and disobedient enslaved person in the second-century apocryphal Acts of Andrew. She was tortured and mutilated by Aegeates, her mistress’s husband. Her story, though fictional, proves emblematic of the violence and mistreatment imposed by enslavers, Christians and pagans alike, on their willful slaves. Moss extends this analysis to Roman carceral spaces, describing their grim conditions: low nighttime temperatures combined with dark and windowless spaces created an atmosphere thick with whistling, weeping, singing, and inarticulate cursing. Moss argues that biblical depictions of divine punishment, such as being cast into hell or abandoned on the streets with gnashing teeth, reflect these real-world experiences of confinement in Roman incarceration and enslavement.

The epilogue highlights the collaborative roles of enslaved and free individuals in shaping the early Jesus movement and the formative centuries of Christianity. It calls for reading the New Testament through the lens of the enslaved, emphasizing their crucial yet often overlooked contributions. Moss asserts that disregarding enslaved laborers fails to address this textual and historical problem. Instead, it merely reinforces and reproduces the ancient enslaving logic of erasure to oppress and dehumanize the most vulnerable. 

God’s Ghostwriters provides a creative, eye-opening, and thought-provoking reassessment of ancient evidence, centering the lives of enslaved workers in the writing and dissemination of the New Testament. Through critical fabulation—an act that jeopardizes the status of the event, displaces the received authorized account, and imagines what might have been done or said, borrowed from Saidiya V. Hartman (2008)—Moss reimagines, refocuses, and readdresses the enslaved figures as collaborative authors of the New Testament. The enslaved not only exist in the texts as ghosted figures in the “author’s” hands but also as meaning-makers. With this book, Moss persuasively demonstrates that attending to the enslaved and their labor not only offers a reparative reading strategy for modern readers but also foregrounds their indispensable role in the composition and transmission of biblical and early Christian literature.

Herman Arnolus Manoe is a PhD student in New Testament at Emory University Graduate Division of Religion.  

Works Cited
Hartman, Sadiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe Vol. 2 (2008): 1-14.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study with a New Preface. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.