rise into assurance at the close of the work in the final request to Ambrosius.(1) There can be no doubt that the first statements and the closing paragraphs are contradictory, and whilst almost all critics pronounce against the accuracy of the former, the inferences from the latter retain full force, confirmed as they are by the intermediate doubts expressed by Origen himself.
Even those who, like Tischendorf, in an arbitrary manner assign an early date to Celsus, although they do not support their conjectures by any satisfactory reasons of their own, all tacitly set aside these of Origen.(2) It is generally admitted by these, with Lardner(3) and Michaelis,(4) that the Epicurean Celsus to "whom Origen was at one time disposed to refer the work against Christianity, was the writer of that name to whom Lucian, his friend and contemporary, addressed his Alexander or Pseudomantis, and who really wrote against magic,(5) as Origen mentions.(6) But although on this account Lardner assigns to him the date of a.d. 176, the fact is that Lucian did not write his Pseudomantis, as Lardner is obliged to admit,(7) until the reign of the
Emperor Commodus (180--193), and even upon the supposition that this Celsus wrote against Christianity, of which there is not the slightest evidence, there would be no ground whatever for dating the work before a.d. 180. On the contrary, as Lucian does not in any way refer to such a writing by his friend, there would be strong reason for assigning the work, if it be supposed to be written by him, to a date subsequent to the Pseudo-mantis. It need not be remarked that the references of Celsus to the Marcionites,(1) and to the followers of Marcellina,(2) only so far bear upon the matter as to exclude an early date.(3)
It requires very slight examination of the numerous extracts from, and references to, the work which Origen seeks to refute, however, to convince any impartial mind that the doubts of Origen were well founded as to whether Celsus the Epicurean were really the author of the [------]. As many critics of all shades of opinion have long since determined, so far from being an Epicurean, the Celsus attacked by Origen, as the philosophical opinions which he everywhere expresses clearly show, was a Neo-Platonist.(4) Indeed, although Origen seems to retain some impression that his antagonist must be an Epicurean, as he had heard, and frequently refers to him as such, he does not point out Epicurean