Reconstructing Celsus

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
Secret Alias
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Re: Reconstructing Celsus

Post by Secret Alias »

You drew Eunuch from Matthew 19:12 (εὐνοῦχος), which is not part of the Marcionite.
But Origen says differently. And where did they get their castration interest if not here? I don't want to get sidetracked by these repeated abstraction but again, Origen says Marcionites read this. No one else says they didn't so please ...
Not only was it illegal in the Roman Empire at that time, but extremely dangerous, often fatal. He was almost certainly ἐγκρατής and single.
The sources say he did and why on earth Eusebius wouldn't have denied it if it wasn't well known to be true is beyond comprehension. My guess is that when Origen was interrogated they stripped and him and knew the truth. Again Eusebius his apologist never denies the charge.
The issue of celibacy was not a theological dividing point.
Not celibacy per se but surely the original position was no sex that made babies. Then the Catholics watered this down to claim that one could accommodate marriage in Christianity. Certainly not true at the earliest stage of the religion.
Stephen's fixation on homosexuality is rather unfounded here.
If you count my posts homosexuality is hardly a feature of many of them. Yes, I am interested in the question of the authenticity of the Letter to Theodore and I am intrigued by the parallel in Origen and Origenism. I think the letter is authentically Clementine and that whatever Alexandria was doing in the second century was passed down in a watered down form through 'Origenism' (which I suspect represented 'Alexandrianism' in a way which accorded with the Patristic habit of naming traditions after recent 'innovators').

The frequency of pederasty in the Catholic priesthood opens them to the charge of being 'homosexual' in some manner. Montaigne mentions visiting a monastery where all the priests were married. It's not a ridiculous line of inquiry.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
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Re: Reconstructing Celsus

Post by Secret Alias »

The testimony of Michel de Montaigne:
On the 18th [March] the ambassador of Portugal made obeisance to the Pope for the kingdom of Portugal on behalf of King Philip—the same ambassador who was here to represent the deceased king and the Cortes opposed to King Philip.

On my return from Saint Peter's I met a man who informed me humorously of two things: that the Portuguese made their obeisance in Passion week; and then, that on this same day the station was at San Giovanna Porta Latina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Giova ... rta_Latina, in which church a few years before certain Portuguese had entered into a strange brotherhood.

They married one another, male to male, at Mass, with the same ceremonies with which we perform our marriages, read the same marriage Gospel service, and then went to bed and lived together. The Roman wits said that because in the other conjunction, of male and female, this circumstance of marriage alone makes it legitimate, it had seemed to these sharp folk that this other action would become equally legitimate if they authorized it with ceremonies and mysteries of the Church.

Eight or nine Portuguese of this fine sect were burned. I saw the Spanish ceremony. They fired a salvo of cannon from the Castle of Sant'Angelo [and the palace, and the ambassador was conducted] by the Pope's trumpeters and drummers and archers. The ambassador from the tsar of Muscovy, who was at a decorated window to see this ceremony, said that he had been invited to see a great assemblage, but that in his country, when they speak of troops of horse, it is always twenty-five or thirty thousand; and he laughed at all this ado, from what I was told by the very man who was commissioned to talk to him through an interpreter. https://books.google.com/books?id=laXKD ... 22&f=false
The author provides countless examples of these sorts of ceremonies stretching back to the 12th century. These are hardly ideosyncratic examples.
Last edited by Secret Alias on Sun Aug 13, 2017 9:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
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Re: Reconstructing Celsus

Post by Secret Alias »

My point again is to get away from 'academism' and toward understanding what about early Christianity made it so dangerous to the social order. If a bunch of people believed that aliens were coming from outer space or that one prominent alien who looked like an ordinary man visited in the recent past this shouldn't have been that dangerous. Christians gave up adhering to the rules of society generally - not just 'Jewish society' (whatever that would mean). They stopped having sex with women, they stopped making babies, they stopped serving in the army, they stopped eating meat and drinking alcohol. This wasn't a mere 'academic' tradition. This was a new way of life.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
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Re: Reconstructing Celsus

Post by Secret Alias »

Apparently someone has done some research and identified the victims mentioned in Montaigne's story:

https://www.academia.edu/14743355/Is_Th ... sance_Rome
Montaigne’s passage has been accessible to historians since the Travel Journal was first published in 1774. Yet the source was never cross-refer-enced with Orano’s list of the condemned. The exception here is the Cath-olic historian Ludwig von Pastor, who knew both sources very well, but given his polemic with the liberal Orano, he avoided quoting Montaigne’s passage while suggesting that the eight men (he wrote “seven”) burned at Porta Latina were Marrano Portuguese, tried for apostasy to Judaism by the Roman Inquisition.6 Pastor cited two partially unreliable items in the hand-written newsletter Avvisi di Roma (News from Rome) dated 9 and 13 August 1578, which were originally addressed to the Duke of Urbino—who was informed about Rome in many other ways—and are now kept in the Vatican Library. They labeled the men arrested at San Giovanni a Porta Latina as “Portuguese and Marranos,” told of a possible intervention of the Inquisition and mentioned the “number of seven” when referring to their execution. Nevertheless, the Avvisi of 9 August was explicit enough when describing the crime as a “monstrous, abominable, and nefarious vice,” an expression unequivocally relating to the sin of sodomy

... This traditional literature on the Roman episode is undermined by newly discovered archival evidence pertaining to the arrest of the men burned at the stake, which I presented in an article published in 2010.10 Three fragmentary records describe the case against eleven men arrested on 20 July 1578, including the eight executed three weeks later.11 This is all that survives of the rapid legal action taken by the Governor’s Criminal Court of Rome.12 The fragments are not part of the original trials, at least if we follow the News from Rome dated 16 August 1578, contained in the collection of information originally addressed to the powerful Fugger family: “the Spanish were executed, their bodies and the records of their trials being burned in the place where they were arrested in order to erase any memory of them.”13 Hence, the three fragments were probably com-plementary copies kept for judicial use, perhaps of the Procurator Fiscal. At some point, they might have been partially and selectively destroyed, where questionings under torture had been transcribed.14 Indeed, that of San Giovanni is the first known case of same-sex marriages documented in substantial archive material.

... A later episode of same-sex marriage in Naples, also involv-ing clergymen, confirms a significant concentration of appropriations of the sacrament—this time explicitly in the way of parody—in sixteenth-century Italy.50 In this sense, one would like to know more about the “accomplices” the men of San Giovanni had “in many parts of Italy.” For the moment, however, the only fragment of certain information we have is that the people gathered at San Giovanni on the day of the arrest “were many more,” and that “after the eight Spanish men were executed for their nefarious vice, others have been caught, among whom a hermit and the licentious
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
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Re: Reconstructing Celsus

Post by Secret Alias »

My difficulty is connecting the original 'they gather in secret synthekai that go against the established social order' (= same sex male unions) and the introduction of the Jew. I don't yet see a clear cut explanation to why - if this was Celsus's point - the Jew was introduced so early in the work. The structure of the Jew section seems to be connected to the comparison of Jesus to the tragic youth god (1.16,17):
And again, when making a list of ancient and learned men who have conferred benefits upon their contemporaries (by their deeds), and upon posterity by their writings, he excluded Moses from the number; while of Linus, to whom Celsus assigns a foremost place in his list, there exists neither laws nor discourses which produced a change for the better among any tribes; whereas a whole nation, dispersed throughout the entire world, obey the laws of Moses. Consider, then, whether it is not from open malevolence that he has expelled Moses from his catalogue of learned men, while asserting that Linus, and Musaeus, and Orpheus, and Pherecydes, and the Persian Zoroaster, and Pythagoras, discussed these topics, and that their opinions were deposited in books, and have thus been preserved down to the present time. And it is intentionally also that he has omitted to take notice of the myth, embellished chiefly by Orpheus, in which the gods are described as affected by human weaknesses and passions.(1.16)
We can be certain that the 'secret synthekai which go against the established social order' argument immediately preceded the 'true Logos was preserved by original races viz the Egyptians, and Assyrians, and Indians, and Persians, and Odrysians, and Samothracians, and Eleusinians' (1.14 and 1.16) and their representatives "Linus, and Musaeus, and Orpheus, and Pherecydes, and the Persian Zoroaster, and Pythagoras."

The Christians couldn't have been punished for simply being 'late to the table' so to speak among the first nations of the world. They are explicitly understood to have been punished because of their 'secret synthekai that go against the established social order.' The Jews are also excluded from the table of first nations but are tolerated.

The Linus argument seems to be that both Jesus and the killing of the firstborn and Moses being sent by his mother in an ark down the Nile are versions of a primal myth held by the first nations. Linus, as noted elsewhere, was understood by Herodotus to have invented the lamenting of the death of the youth-god which spread to all other nations. Herodotus was particularly influential on Celsus.

So somehow (if my understood holds) there was a 'true logos' from the very beginning where 'bad guys' assault and kill a divine youth-god who ultimately resurrects. The Egyptian version of this myth is explicitly laid out by Herodotus as pertaining to their first king Maneros:
“They keep the customs of their forefathers. Among other notable customs of theirs is this, that they have one song, the Linus-song, which is sung in Phoenicia and Cyprus and elsewhere; each nation has a name of its own for this, but it happens to be the same song that the Greeks sing, and call Linus; so that of many things in Egypt that amaze me, one is: where did the Egyptians get Linus? Plainly they have always sung this song; but in Egyptian Linus [the song] is called Maneros. The Egyptians told me that Maneros was the only son of their first king, who died prematurely, and this dirge was sung by the Egyptians in his honor; and this, they said, was their earliest and their only chant.”
So clearly Christianity, which built around the mythical representation of a dying and resurrecting as a youth is likened to Maneros and Linus and related myths among the first nations of the world. Yet, if my understanding again holds, this version of the story current among Christians is a corruption of that held among the first nations - and not only that - it is a dangerous corruption which involves 'secret synthekai' that go against the established social customs of the world.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
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Re: Reconstructing Celsus

Post by Secret Alias »

I think I found the intellectual 'link' between the main argument of Celsus (i.e. that the Jesus myth was developed from Linus et al) and what appears in the Jewish writer cited by Celsus:

But how is it that this Jew of Celsus could say that Jesus concealed Himself? For his words regarding Him are these: "And who that is sent as a messenger ever conceals himself when he ought to make known his message?" Now, He did not conceal Himself, who said to those who sought to apprehend Him, "I was daily teaching openly in the temple, and ye laid no hold upon Me." Bat having once already answered this charge of Celsus, now again repeated, we shall content ourselves with what we have formerly said. We have answered, also, in the preceding pages, this objection, that "while he was in the body, and no one believed upon him, he preached to ail without intermission; but when he might have produced a powerful belief in himself after rising from the dead, he showed himself secretly only to one woman, and to his own boon companions."

If you look at the sentence from Celsus's Jew it hasn't been properly rendered into English. We read:

ἑνὶ μόνῳ γυναίῳ καὶ τοῖς ἑαυτοῦ θιασώταις κρύβδην παρεφαίνετο

to only one woman and his thiasoi he secretly showed himself

In other words you have the critical understanding that it was the Jew who provided the evidence for all the details that appear at the beginning namely:

1. Jesus was a later day Dionysus (and thus a connection to the Linus mourning ritual)
2. his followers were thiasoi a term which only applied to the followers of Dionysus
3. their gatherings were 'in secret'

Indeed at the very beginning of the section we see 'secrecy' again invoked:

Πόθεν δὲ τῷ Κέλσου Ἰουδαίῳ λέλεκται ὅτι ἐκρύπτετο Ἰησοῦς (But how is it that this Jew of Celsus could say that Jesus concealed Himself)

Jesus appears to his thiasoi in secret after his resurrection. This is clearly Celsus's point.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
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Re: Reconstructing Celsus

Post by Secret Alias »

And the idea in the writing of the Jew is repeated in Celsus's main treatise:

But this low jester Celsus, omitting no species of mockery and ridicule which can be employed against us, mentions in his treatise the Dioscuri, and Hercules, and AEsculapius, and Dionysus, who are believed by the Greeks to have become gods after being men, and says that "we cannot bear to call such beings gods, because they were at first men, and yet they manifested many noble qualifies, which were displayed for the benefit of mankind, while we assert that Jesus was seen after His death by His own thiasoi (τὸν δ' Ἰησοῦν ἀποθανόντα ὑπὸ τῶν ἰδίων θιασωτῶν ὦφθαί φαμεν)" and he brings against us an additional charge, as if we said that "He was seen indeed, but was only a shadow!" [3.22]

and again:

And what is there that is venerable in the madman Dionysus, and his female garments, that he should be worshipped as a god? And if they who would defend such beings betake themselves to allegorical interpretations, we must examine each individual instance, and ascertain whether it is well founded, and also in each particular case, whether those beings can have a real existence, and are deserving of respect and worship who were torn by the Titans, and cast down from their heavenly throne. Whereas our Jesus, who appeared to the members of His own thiasoi (Ὁ δ'
ἡμέτερος Ἰησοῦς ὁ ὀφθεὶς τοῖς ἰδίοις θιασώταις) --for I will take the word that Celsus employs--did really appear, and Celsus makes a false accusation against the Gospel in saying that what appeared was a shadow.

So the Dionysian character of Jesus's death the 'mourning' by his followers and his subsequent (ritual) reappearance is taken by Celsus to be a proof that Christianity itself is a poor copy of the 'true logos' of preserved by various nations of the myth of Linus.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
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Re: Reconstructing Celsus

Post by Secret Alias »

The understanding of Jesus's followers as thiasoi was clearly important to Celsus's argument:

In the next place, Celsus, as is his custom having neither proved nor established anything, proceeds to say, as if we talked of God in a manner that was neither holy nor pious, that "it is perfectly manifest that they babble about God in a way that is neither holy nor reverential;" and he imagines that we do these things to excite the astonishment of the ignorant, and that we do not speak the truth regarding the necessity of punishments for those who have sinned. And accordingly he likens us to those who "in the Bacchic mysteries introduce phantoms and objects of terror." With respect to the mysteries of Bacchus, whether there is any trustworthy account of them, or none that is such, let the Greeks tell, and let Celsus and his thiasoi listen (Ἕλληνες καὶ ἀκουέτω Κέλσος καὶ οἱ συνθιασῶται αὐτοῦ). But we defend our own procedure, When we say that our object is to reform the human race, either by the threats of punishments which we are persuaded are necessary for the whole world, and which perhaps are not without use s to those who are to endure them; or by the promises made to those who have lived virtuous lives, and in which are contained the statements regarding the blessed termination which is to be found in the kingdom of God, reserved for those who are worthy of becoming His subjects.[4.10]

and again closest yet to the bullseye, in the section that compares Jesus to Antinous:

In the next place, that he may have the appearance of knowing still more than he has yet mentioned, he says, agreeably to his usual custom, that "there are others who have wickedly invented some being as their teacher and demon, and who wallow about in a great darkness, more unholy and accursed than that of the thiasoi of the Egyptian Antinous (τῶν Ἀντίνου τοῦ κατ' Αἴγυπτον θιασωτῶν)." And he seems to me, indeed, in touching on these matters, to say with a certain degree of truth, that there are certain others who have wickedly invented another demon, and who have found him to be their lord, as they wallow about in the great darkness of their ignorance. With respect, however, to Antinous, who is compared with our Jesus, we shall not repeat what we have already said in the preceding pages. "Moreover," he continues, "these persons utter against one another dreadful blasphemies, saying all manner of things shameful to be spoken; nor will they yield in the slightest point for the sake of harmony, hating each other with a perfect hatred." Now, in answer to this, we have already said that in philosophy and medicine sects are to be found warring against sects. We, however, who are followers of the word of Jesus, and have exercised ourselves in thinking, and saying, and doing what is in harmony with His words, "when reviled, bless; being persecuted, we suffer it; being defamed, we entreat;" and we would not utter "all manner of things shameful to be spoken" against those who have adopted different opinions from ours, but, if possible, use every exertion to raise them to a better condition through adherence to the Creator alone, and lead them to perform every act as those who will (one day) be judged. And if those who hold different opinions will not be convinced, we observe the injunction laid down for the treatment of such: "A man that is a heretic, after the first and second admonition, reject, knowing that he that is such is subverted, and sinneth, being condemned of himself." Moreover, we who know the maxim, "Blessed are the peacemakers," and this also, "Blessed are the meek," would not regard with hatred the corrupters of Christianity, nor term those who had fallen into error Circes and flattering deceivers. [5.63]

So the idea that the Christ myth was paralleled by the homosexual mysteries of Antinous is reinforced by both adherents (i.e. those of Jesus and Antionous) being consistently described as 'thiasoi.'
Last edited by Secret Alias on Mon Aug 14, 2017 9:11 am, edited 1 time in total.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
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Re: Reconstructing Celsus

Post by Secret Alias »

I think we have all the building blocks for an argument that something like the doctrine of Secret Mark was known to Celsus and was the basis for a widespread persecution of Christians in the late second century.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Giuseppe
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Re: Reconstructing Celsus

Post by Giuseppe »

Whst about 1 Cor 6:2-3 ? Could this presumed amorality of the Christians be linked with their claim to "judge the world" ? Did Celsus feel himself, as Pagan, "judged" by the Christians? With all the fear of the case?
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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