Celsus reminds us that the world may be watching more than we think. The point here is not that Christians should just cease all theological debate and pretend differences don’t matter. No, as already noted, some truths are so central to faith that they are worth battling over. At the same time, it is also true that the way we engage those battles makes an enormous difference to our public witness. 

In the earliest centuries of the church, the burgeoning Christian movement had its fair share of critics. And their complaints were wide and varied. Christians worshipped a criminal crucified by the Romans. Christians were a threat to the empire because of their refusal to pay homage to the gods. Christian books were filled with errors and contradictions. Jesus was a magician who learned his dark arts in Egypt. And so on.

Of all the early critics (and there were many), Celsus was undoubtedly the most strident. Writing in the latter half of the second century, Celsus was a Greek Philosopher who penned one of the earliest sustained critiques of Christianity called True Doctrine. So impactful were his criticisms, the later church father Origen felt compelled to write a full-length response.

The reason Celsus was so effective in his criticism is because he actually knew quite a bit about early Christians and their doctrines. He clearly knew the canonical Gospels and drew from them heavily. And he was intimately aware of Christian beliefs and practices. Unlike some other critics of the time, Celsus was relatively well-informed about what Christians were actually like.

While I have interacted with Celsus quite a bit over the years, I was recently reading through his True Doctrine again. And I was surprised by one of his critiques that I had never really noticed before.

Celsus did not reject Christianity merely because he found historical problems in the Gospels or found the idea of incarnation to be incoherent. He found the Christian religion to be problematic also because of the degree to which Christians fought and argued with one another.

For Celsus, these were no minor squabbles. He saw the early Christian movement as characterized by their in-fighting. Here are Celsus’s own words:

At the start of their movement, they [Christians] were very few in number, and unified in purpose. Since that time, they have spread all around and now number in the thousands. It is not surprising, therefore, that there are divisions among them-factions of all sorts, each wanting to have its own territory. Nor is it surprising that as these divisions have become so numerous, the various parties have taken to condemning each other, so that today they have only one thing-if that-in common: the name “Christian.”

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