(r. 249–251), there were more than one million Christians (2 percent of the imperial population). By the beginning of the fourth century, the Church was home to six million people, or 10 percent of the population of the Roman Empire.32 The Church came into conflict with Roman society because her teachings and lifestyle were in opposition to societal norms. Roman society “believed man to be sufficient to himself and all belief to be mere opinions.” Conversely, the Church “proposed statement instead of hypothesis, affirmed concrete historical facts instead of suggesting myths, and treated its ritual of ‘mysteries’ as realities instead of [merely] symbols.”33
Pagan Attacks on the Church
The growing Catholic population became a concern for certain pagan authors who were dumbfounded that people would join what they saw as such a nonsensical religion. They attacked the Church in order to dissuade Romans from joining this new religion. The three main critics of the Church and her teaching, who wrote various books, pamphlets, and tracts against her, were Celsus (second century), Porphyry (234–305), and Julian the Apostate (r. 361–363).34
Celsus, a second-century philosopher, wrote the first major pagan attack against the Catholic Church. Most of what we know about Celsus and his anti-Catholic work True Doctrine (c. A.D. 170) comes from the writings of the Catholic apologist Origen (185–254), who wrote a work known as Contra Celsum that refuted Celsus’s criticisms of the Church. Celsus utilized popular critiques as well as intellectual arguments in his attack on the Church. He viewed Jesus as a low-grade magician who duped people into believing he could actually perform miracles.35 Celsus considered Christians a revolutionary fad, a threat to the ancient culture and traditions of Rome. Romans believed that religion and the nation were linked — one could not exist without the other — therefore, an extraterritorial group like the Catholic Church was an odd, seditious, and potentially threatening institution. Celsus also believed the newness of the Faith made it untrustworthy. The only acceptable and authentic religions, in the eyes of Celsus, were those whose teachings had been passed down from multiple generations. “Greco-Roman society revered the past. The older something was, the better it was thought to be … [because] those who lived very long ago, were thought to have been closer to the gods.”36
Celsus extended his theological criticisms of the Church to foundational doctrinal teachings, such as the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and Jesus’ divinity. Celsus questioned the timing of the Incarnation, asking: “Is it only now after such a long age that God has remembered to judge the human race? Did he not care before?” He found the Incarnation unreasonable: “The assertion that some God or son of God has come down to earth as judge of mankind is most shameful, and no lengthy argument is required to refute it. What is the purpose of such a descent on the part of God? Was it in order to learn what was going on among men? Does he now know everything?”37 Celsus considered the resurrection of Jesus an unnatural and therefore suspect event. Celsus did not dispute the claim that a man could be God or that men should worship him, but he doubted Jesus’ divinity because the Savior ate normal human food and spoke in a normal human voice. According to Celsus, “A divine figure would have had an enormously loud speaking voice!”38 He opined that it would have been better for the Christians to worship Jonah or Daniel from the Old Testament, men who had accomplished astounding feats, rather than Jesus. Finally, Celsus attacked the Faith because he saw it as nothing more than an apostate group from Judaism. Celsus viewed Christian repudiation of circumcision and Jewish dietary laws as proof that the movement was illegitimate and that no self-respecting Roman should join it.39
Porphyry (234–305) was born in Tyre (modern-day Lebanon) on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and was a Neoplatonic philosopher. He wrote a scathing critique of the Catholic Church titled Against the Christians, which was refuted by a long list of Christian apologists and intellectuals, including Eusebius of Caesarea, Saint Jerome, and Saint Augustine. Porphyry’s anti-Catholic work is known only from these Christian writers because Emperors Constantine and Theodosius II ordered copies of his work to be burned in the fourth and fifth centuries.40 Porphyry attacked the Scriptures with literary and historical criticism, arguing that they did not provide a reliable historical account of Jesus. Porphyry believed such central Christian doctrines as the Incarnation and the Resurrection were fabrications. He was stupefied that Christians would believe Jesus was an incarnate god:
Even supposing that some Greeks were stupid enough to think that gods dwell in statues, this would be a purer conception than to accept that the divine had descended into the womb of the Virgin Mary, that he had become an embryo, that after his birth he had been wrapped in swaddling clothes, stained with blood, bile and worse. … Why, when he was taken before the high priest and governor, did not the Christ say anything worthy of a divine man …? He allowed himself to be struck, spat upon on the face, crowned with thorns. … Even if he had to suffer by order of God, he should have accepted the punishment but should not have endured his passion without some bold speech, some vigorous and wise word addressed to Pilate his judge, instead of allowing himself to be insulted like one of the rabble off the streets.41
The Church endured general criticisms from a host of pagan authors in addition to Celsus and Porphyry, which included the charges that Christians were atheists, ignorant and poor people, bad citizens, cannibals, and sexual deviants. These pagan critics believed Christians were atheists because they did not participate in the traditional and imperial polytheistic religious cults. This angered the Romans, since they thought the Christian lack of faith in the gods could bring divine wrath and vengeance on the Empire. Pagan critics attempted to dissuade members of the upper class from joining the Church by arguing — falsely — that only members of the socially inferior class (women, children, slaves, the poor) were attracted to the Christian faith. Imperial Roman society and its religious cults were highly class-stratified. The Church, teaching that all believers were equal regardless of social standing, threatened the established social order. Additionally, pagan authors charged Christians with a lack of patriotism because they refused to worship the emperor, which was considered blasphemy and treason, and were allegedly not interested in political affairs or the welfare of the Empire. In reality, Christians were very much concerned with state affairs and, despite the persecutions, prayed for the prosperity of the Empire and the well-being of the emperor.
Early Christians believed in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist — that they were eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ. Pagans, misunderstanding, applied the charge of cannibalism to the Eucharist. Roman society tolerated many vices, but cannibalism was something not even immoral Rome abided. One of the earliest Christian apologists, Marcus Minucius Felix (c. 200), was a lawyer who wrote a dialogue between a Christian and a pagan, addressing the primary attacks of Roman pagans on the Church. The pagan labeled Christians as sexual deviants, baby-killers, and cannibals:
The story about the initiation of new recruits is as detestable as it is well known. An infant, covered with flour, in order to deceive the unwary, is placed before the one who is to be initiated into the mysteries. Deceived by this floury mass, which makes him believe that his blows are harmless, the neophyte kills the infant. They avidly lick up the blood of the infant and argue over how to share its limbs. By this victim they are pledged together, and it is because of their complicity in this crime that they keep mutual silence! Everyone knows about their banquets, and these are talked of everywhere. On festivals they assemble for a feast with all their children, their sisters, their mothers, people of both sexes and every age. After eating their fill, when the excitement of the feast is at its height and their drunken ardor has inflamed incestuous passions, they provoke a dog which has been tied to a lampstand to leap, throwing it a piece of meat beyond the length of the cord which holds it. The light which could have betrayed them having thus been extinguished, they then embrace one another, quite at random. If this does not happen in fact, it does so in their minds, since that is their desire.42
Despite these libelous attacks, by the third century, the Christian apologist Tertullian could boast “we are but of yesterday and we have filled all you have —
