A forum in celebration of Robin Darling Young and Joseph Wilson Trigg’s The Contra Celsum of Origen: English Translation and Facing Greek text (Washington and Cambridge: Harvard University Press/Dumbarton Oaks, 2026).
Origen and the Polis: A New Translation of Contra Celsum
“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.”
Contra Celsum from Caesarea to Constantinople: The Travels of a Byzantine Book
“Celsus’ views about empire and cult, whether they were pagan or Christian, were far from dead in the fourth century; they appear in Christian sermons and treatises – not just in their pagan echoes in Porphyry and Julian.”
In Defense of Celsus
“In this short tribute to Origen and his translators, I suggest that, among much else, Origen shows paradoxically how strong a mainstream polytheist’s case could be against Christianity in the second century, and how even a brilliant apologist could struggle to meet it.”
Plato, Politics, and Faith
by David Satran
At the outset of his majestic response to the attack leveled against Christianity by the second-century philosopher Celsus, Origen begins with a reflection on the silence of Jesus before his accusers (Mt 26:62-63, 27:12-14; Mk 14:60-61, 15:4-5; Lk 23:9). The brief justification offered by Origen for his own detailed defense has a legal and rhetorical flavor but also introduces, somewhat obliquely, a range of philosophical concerns: the contest of the true and the false, the nature of argument and evidence, the role of persuasion and its limits.
Contra Celsum as Socratic Philosophy
Joseph Trigg and Robin Darling Young interpret Origen’s Contra Celsum as a work of philosophy, and rightly so. If its philosophic merits have not been sufficiently appreciated, perhaps this is because it embodies an unfamiliar Socratic style of philosophizing.
Origen as Political Theologian
If Joseph Trigg and Robin Darling Young, the latest translators of the Contra Celsum are right, then our Origen was known in the Alexandrian philosophical school circuit for two works whose titles place their author squarely within the genre of late antique political theology: On the Demons and That the King is the Only Maker.