Celsus was a Greek philosopher, probably a Platonist, who around 175–180 wrote The True Word, the earliest known full-scale attack on Christianity. Nothing is known of his life. His work survives only through Origen’s lengthy quotations in Against Celsus, written some seventy years later.
He mocks the virgin birth, repeats a story that Jesus’s father was a soldier named Panthera, says Jesus learned magic in Egypt, and ridicules the resurrection. His arguments assume that Jesus lived and was thought to have worked wonders; he contests their meaning, not the existence of the man.
