Born of Fornication
The Jewish Charge of Jesus’ Illegitimacy
in John, Celsus, and Origen1
DANIEL C. HARLOW
In John 8:31–59 Jesus and “the Jews” engage in a theological paternity suit
during the Feast of Tabernacles. The Jews insist that they are “seed of
Abraham” and have never been enslaved to anyone (8:31–33). Jesus grants
their former assertion but not the latter, since they are slaves of sin, telling
them to do what they have heard from the Father (8:34–38). The Jews reply, “Our father is Abraham,” to which Jesus responds, “If you are really
Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works of Abraham, but now
you are seeking to kill me, a man who has been speaking to you the truth
that I heard from God. Abraham did not do this” (8:39–40). Jesus adds that
the Jews are doing the works of their father, intimating that someone other
than Abraham is their sire (8:41a). A few verses later he makes clear who
he has in mind: “You are of your father the devil” (8:44.) In 8:41bc the
Jews answer angrily, “We [h9mei=j] have not been born from fornication; we
have one father – God!” The emphatic pronoun h9mei=j in the first of these
two clauses suggests that the subtext of their statement is “as you were.”
So while defending their legitimacy, they are implicitly denying Jesus’ legitimacy. The question, however, is what sort of legitimacy they intend.
Are they aiming at Jesus’ spiritual illegitimacy, in effect claiming that, unlike him, they are not apostates? Or are they hinting that he is biologically
illegitimate? If so, do we have here an oblique rejection of the claim that
Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, or at least the implication that there
was something scandalous about the circumstances of his birth?2 To an 1
It is a pleasure for me to offer this essay in honor of Harry Attridge, whose brilliant
scholarship, stimulating teaching, and supportive mentorship at Notre Dame have continued to be a source of inspiration.
2
Allusions to Jesus’ illegitimacy have been sought in Mark 6:3 (“Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary . . . ?”) and in Gos. Thom. 105 (“Jesus said, ‘Whoever knows
father and mother shall be called the son of a whore’” [ⲡⲟⲣⲛⲏ]). The identification of
Jesus as the son of Mary in the Markan verse need not be taken as a slur on Jesus’ birth
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swer these questions we must examine John 8:41 in its immediate and
wider literary context. To gain some hermeneutical leverage on the Johannine verse, we will proceed to contrast it with the earliest explicit reference
to the illegitimacy charge, found in Origen of Alexandria’s apologetic treatise Against Celsus, itself written in reply to the anti-Christian tract of the
pagan philosopher Celsus, The True Doctrine. After considering Origen’s
reply to Celsus, we will turn to his Commentary on John to consider his
own interpretation of John 8:41. Taken together, these three fascinating
texts open a window onto disputations over the figure of Jesus among
Christians, Jews, and pagans in the early centuries of the common era.
John 8:41
(a) u9mei=j poiei=te ta_ e1rga tou= patro\j u9mw~n. (b) ei]pan [ou]n] au0tw~|: h9mei=j
e0k pornei/a j ou0 gegennh/meqa. (c) e3na pate/ra e1xomen to\n qeo/n.
The Jews’ statement in 8:41b is ambiguous for at least three reasons. First,
Johannine dialogues and monologues are famous for their often convoluted
progression. In dialogue scenes especially, the presence of ironic statements, rhetorical questions, and abrupt expostulations by Jesus frequently
make the conversation difficult to follow. Second, at some points in John it
is probably wrong to draw a hard and fast distinction between the literal
and figurative levels. At times they can overlap or complement one another. This appears to be so in 8:31–59, where Jesus and the Jews speak on
both levels as the dialogue develops. For example, when the Jews claim to
be Abraham’s “seed” (v. 33) and to have Abraham as their “father” (v. 39),
their physical descent from Abraham probably includes and from their perspective proves their spiritual fidelity. It may be that the Jews’ assertion in
8:41b operates on both levels as well. Third, although the Jews in John often misunderstand Jesus’ words, they sometimes do understand them,
while in other instances it is not entirely clear whether they comprehend
what he is saying or not. In lines leading up to 8:41, their misunderstanding is evident in 8:22 (“Will he kill himself, since he says, ‘Where I am
going, you cannot come?’”; cf. 7:35 for a closely related ironic question in
reply to a similar remark by Jesus); 8:27 (“They did not understand that he
but can be explained on the assumption that Joseph was dead and that both Mary and
Jesus were well known in their village. The obscure wording and lack of narrative context make the logion in Thomas an even less likely candidate. See further John Meier, A
Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 1: The Roots of the Problem and the
Person (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 225–27; Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the
Messiah (updated ed.; New York: Doubleday, 1993), 534–35, 537–41.
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was speaking to them about the Father”); and 8:33 (“We . . . have never
been enslaved to anyone”). Two of their remarks, though, are rather ambiguous. In 8:19 they ask, “Where is your father?” They seem to be inquiring about Jesus’ earthly father, whereas he has just been speaking of his
heavenly Father. But they may rather be rejecting sarcastically Jesus’
unique relation to God, as if to say: “Where is this heavenly Father you
keep talking about? We do not recognize the God of whom you speak!”
Also somewhat unclear is 8:39a, where the Jews reply to Jesus’ appeal –
that they do what they have heard from the Father (v. 38) – by exclaiming,
“Abraham is our father!” Perhaps they do not realize that Jesus is speaking
of God, but their remark may rather have them ironically favoring their
Abrahamic paternity over their divine paternity.3 In any case, in v. 39b Jesus says that their attempt to kill him proves that they are not the spiritual
children (te/kna) of Abraham.4
The Jews’ retort in 8:41 to Jesus’ animadversion that they are doing the
works of their father indicates that they understand him to be using the
word father in a spiritual sense. But their retort consists of two statements:
“We were not born of fornication” and “We have one Father, even God.”
The second of these statements clearly asserts their paternity on the spiritual level, recalling the affirmation of loyalty to the one true God uttered
by the priests at the beginning of each day of Succoth.5 The key question is
whether the first one does this as well.
Commentators on the Fourth Gospel remain divided over how to answer
this question, though in the last generation there has been a decided tilt
toward the spiritual interpretation.6 The emphatic pronoun h9mei=j (“We
3
Compare 19:15, where the chief priests unwittingly reject God’s kingship when they
tell Pilate, “We have no king but Caesar.”
4
Verses 38 and 39 are particularly confusing because of the variant readings in the
manuscripts. In v. 38, different witnesses read “seen” vs. “heard” and “the Father” vs.
“my Father” vs. “your Father.” In v. 39 the confusion centers on whether Jesus’ remark
states a real condition (“If you are . . . do”), a contrary-to-fact condition (“If you were . . .
you would be doing”), or a mixed condition (“If you are really . . . you would be doing”).
The third reading seems to be the correct one (with ei0 . . . e0ste in the protasis and
e0p oiei=te in the apodosis).
5
Francis Moloney, “Narrative and Discourse at the Feast of Tabernacles, John 7:1–
8:59,” in Word, Theology and Community in John (ed. John Painter, R. Alan Culpepper,
and Ferdinand F. Segovia; St. Louis, Mo.: Chalice, 2002), 158–59, 166, citing m. Sukkah
5:4 and Zech 14:9, “On that day the L ORD will be one and his name one.”
6
Commentators who think that physical legitimacy and illegitimacy are at issue include J. H. Bernard (1929), E. C. Hoskyns (1947), C. K. Barrett (1955; 2nd ed. 1978),
and R. A. Culpepper (1998). Those who think that spiritual legitimacy and illegitimacy
are in view include H. Odeburg (1929), W. Bauer (1933), M.-J. Lagrange (1936),
R. Schnackenburg (1971), E. Haenchen (1980), G. R. Beasley-Murray (1987), G. R.
O’Day (1995), A. Lincoln (2005), and J. R. Michaels (2010). Among those who think
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were not born of fornication”) has been taken to imply an accusation of
literal pornei/a on the part of Jesus’ parents.7 But the pronoun itself cannot
decide the issue; its occurrence in 8:41b is most readily explained as a
counterpoint to Jesus’ emphatic u9mei=j in 8:41a. As noted at the outset, its
rhetorical effect is to supply a subtext – “We were not born of fornication,
as you were” – but this subtext does not specify what sort of fornication is
at issue. Another suggestion is that taking pornei/a literally would make
the Jews’ statement in 8:41 match their earlier claim to be Abraham’s seed
(spe/rma, 8:33) and to have Abraham as their physical ancestor (8:39).8 But
this argument assumes that physical descent and spiritual paternity would
not be closely related from the Jews’ perspective.
So the immediate context of chapter 8 offers no strong support for the
view that the Jews are claiming physical legitimacy for themselves and
implying biological illegitimacy for Jesus. Yet three passages earlier in
John raise the possibility that the Fourth Evangelist knows – and expects
the reader to know – the story of Jesus’ birth from a virgin. If Johannine
awareness of that tradition may be taken for granted, then an implicit rejection of it in 8:41 would be more plausible.
Philip finds Nathanael and says to him, “We have found the one about whom Moses
wrote in the law and the prophets – Jesus, son of Joseph, from Nazareth. (1:45)
And they were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we
know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” (6:42)
Others were saying, “This is the Christ,” but some were saying, “The Christ is not to
come from Galilee, is he? Does not the scripture say that the Christ is from the seed of
David and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David was from?” (7:41–42; cf. Mic
5:2)
The mere mention of Joseph in the first two passages indicates only that
the Fourth Evangelist knows of him; it does not necessarily reflect
knowledge of the Matthean and Lukan infancy narratives or even of the
traditions that informed them. The verses in ch. 7 provide a prime example
of Johannine irony, but the point on which the irony turns is far from clear.
On the one hand, the evangelist may expect informed readers to know that
Jesus was in fact born in Bethlehem and to marvel at the crowd’s igno that an allusion to Jesus’ physical legitimacy is possible are L. Morris (1965), R. E.
Brown (1966), J. N. Sanders (1968), B. Lindars (1972), F. J. Moloney (1998), and D. M.
Smith (1999). Some commentators do not discuss the matter, or else briefly mention it
without taking a position; e.g., B. F. Westcott (1908), R. Bultmann (1959), and S. Schulz
(1978).
7
C. K. Barrett, The Gospel according to St. John (2nd ed.; London: SPCK, 1978),
348.
8
J. H. Bernard, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to
John (2 vols.; Edinburgh: Clark, 1929), 2:312.
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rance of this fact. Yet even if this is the case, acknowledging Bethlehem as
the place of Jesus’ birth need not include knowing and affirming that Mary
was still a virgin when she conceived Jesus. On the other hand, the irony
may be that Jesus is the Messiah even though he did not hail from Bethlehem but from Nazareth, because his ultimate origin is e0k tw~n a!nw (3:31;
8:23). We cannot, then, assume that the Fourth Evangelist knew and accepted the tradition of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, far less that he knew and
accepted the virginal conception tradition. He may have known these traditions but decided to suppress them, either because he rejected them or because he wished to develop his Christology in a different direction. But he
may not have known them. The Fourth Evangelist certainly incorporates
some traditions about Jesus that made their way into the Synoptics, and
may presume familiarity with a few traditions that he does not overtly
adopt, but even if he knew Matthew or Luke, he does not appear to have
relied on them.9 The net result is that none of the three passages cited
above can be called on to support the presence in 8:41 of an implicit slur
on Jesus’ parentage.
For this and the following reasons, the declaration h9mei=j e0k pornei/aj ou0
gegennh/meqa in John 8:41 is best understood in terms of spiritual legitimacy.10 Most immediately, the Jews’ avowal is a claim about themselves, not
about Jesus – it is they, not he, who are on the defensive. And as others
have noted, the word pornei/a is often used in the Greek Bible as a metaphor for covenant infidelity or idolatry, and makes good sense here.11
Moreover, Jesus has not denied the Jews’ physical descent from Abraham
at all, only their being the patriarch’s legitimate spiritual heirs. They therefore assert the highest paternity possible by claiming to have God as their
father; they are good monotheists who, in effect, affirm the Shema (Deut
6:4) and identify themselves with Israel, God’s son (e.g., Exod 4:22; Deut
14:1–2). Only in 8:48 do they go back on the offensive: “Are we not right
in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” (cf. 7:20). This rhetorical question, which expects a positive answer, amounts to an accusation of blasphemy. To call Jesus a Samaritan is to label him an apostate
(and possibly a magician as well), and to say that he has a demon is not
9
The whole question of John’s relation to the Synoptics is very complicated. For a
judicious review and assessment, see D. Moody Smith, John among the Gospels (2nd ed.;
Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2001).
10
Augustine understood John 8:41 in this way (Tract. Ev. Jo. 42.7): “And because it
is the custom of the Scriptures, which they [the Jews] read, to call it in a spiritual sense
‘fornication’ when the soul is, as it were, prostituted by subjection to many false gods,
they made this reply” (NPNF1 7:236).
11
See, e.g., Jer 3:2, 9; Ezek 16:15–36; Hos 1:2; 2:2, 4; cf. Philo, Migr. 69; Num. Rab.
2:15–16.
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only to call him mad but to charge him with leading others into idolatry
and committing it himself (cf. Deut 32:17; Ps 106:36–37).
The wider context of 8:41 also suggests that spiritual legitimacy is the
issue. The entire section extending from chapter 5 through chapter 10, in
which Jesus fulfills and replaces the Jewish festivals, is framed by the
charge of blasphemy:
For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only
breaking the Sabbath but also calling God his own Father, making himself equal to God.
(5:18)
The Jews answered him, “It is not for a good work that we are about to stone you but for
blasphemy – to wit, because you, a man, are claiming to be God.” (10:33)
The discourses and dialogues in chapters 5, 7, and 8 concern Jesus’ origin
and destination, and his status as both Son of God (in a divine sense) and
Messiah.12 The Jews regard Jesus’ claim to divine sonship as blasphemous,
while the crowds alternately question and dispute it. The blasphemy charge
and death plot are first announced in the aftermath of Jesus’ healing the
paralytic at the pool of Bethzatha (5:16–18). After he has been cured by
Jesus and accosted by the Pharisees for carrying his mat on the Sabbath,
the man is later found by Jesus in the temple and warned not to sin again
lest something worse happen to him. The man then goes and tells the Jews
the identity of his healer. (Whether he is simply reporting the fact or deliberately informing on Jesus is unclear.) At this point (5:16) the narrator reports, “Therefore the Jews were persecuting [or pursuing; prosecuting:
e0di/w kon] Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, ‘My Father is working still, and I am working.’” The
rest of chapter 5 (vv. 19–47) presents an apologetic speech by Jesus that
contributes substantially to John’s extended trial motif.13 Jesus responds to
12
The all-important Johannine question of Jesus’ origin also features in ch. 6 (esp.
6:41–42). John 6 makes sufficiently good thematic sense in its current position, given the
wider section’s portrayal of Jesus replacing the Jewish festivals. Even so, chs. 5, 7, and 8
almost certainly belong together, ch. 6 having been inserted when the gospel was revised
and expanded. Reading them together not only makes better sense of Jesus’ geographic
movements (5:1; 6:1; 7:1), it also accounts for the note in 7:1 that Jesus avoided going
about in Judea because “the Jews were seeking to kill him” (cf. 5:18), and for Jesus referring in 7:21–23 to his healing of the lame man in ch. 5 as if it occurred just yesterday.
Further, statements in Jesus’ monologue in ch. 5 are reprised in chs. 7 and 8 (compare
7:16–24 with 5:19–20, 44; 8:13–18 with 5:31–37a; and 8:49–50, 54 with 5:41–44).
13
See Andrew T. Lincoln, Truth on Trial: The Lawsuit Motif in the Fourth Gospel
(Peabody, Mass., Hendrickson, 2000). On the forensic rhetoric of the discourse, see Harold W. Attridge, “Argumentation in John 5,” in Rhetorical Argumentation in Biblical
Texts: Essays from the 2000 Lund Conference (ed. Anders Eriksson, Thomas H. Olbricht,
and Walter Übelacker; Emory Studies in Early Christianity 8; Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity
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the accusation of blasphemy by defending himself (he does only what he
sees the Father doing; 5:19–30), by calling witnesses to testify in his behalf (John the Baptist; the works themselves; and the Father, 5:31–39), and
by turning the table on the plaintiffs (they refuse the testimony of Scripture
and have Moses as their accuser; 5:40–47).
The conflict between the Jews and Jesus in chapter 5 escalates in chapters 7 and 8, which are set during the Festival of Booths (cf. 5:1, which has
Jesus going to Jerusalem for an unspecified festival). The material in 7:10–
52 focuses on the source of Jesus’ erudition and teaching, on his origins,
and on his messianic status. Both his presence at the festival and the statements he makes there meet with speculation among some Jerusalemites
and end in three (!) failed attempts to arrest him (7:30, 32 [cf. v. 45], 44).
Then in 8:12–20, after claiming to be the light of the world, Jesus again
invokes witnesses in his favor, as he did in 5:31–39, and eludes arrest yet
once more. The dialogue that ensues in 8:21–30 centers on Jesus’ announcement of his imminent departure and return to the Father, which the
Jews fail to comprehend.
The final dialogue in 8:31–59 puts the issue of paternity front and center. By 8:59 the Jews’ insistence that they have two fathers, Abraham and
God, has been shown to be false; their real father is none other than the
devil. The passage ends with Jesus’ declaration, “Before Abraham was, I
am” – his most audacious claim to divinity – and yet another failed attempt
to stone him (8:58–59). In all this Jesus’ self-claims, like his very coming
into the world as the incarnate Logos, provoke division: some believe;
some do not. The Jewish leaders, however, remain implacable in their resolve to kill Jesus, refusing to accept him as the one sent by God above to
the world below on a unique revelatory and saving mission.
With this context in mind, we may return to 8:41bc. The two assertions
of the Jews – “We are not born of fornication; we have one Father, even
God” – appear to be two ways of saying the same thing: “We are not spiritual bastards, like you, but legitimate sons of God.” The most compelling
reason to take their claims in this way comes in the very next verse, 8:42,
where Jesus immediately responds, “If God were your Father, you would
love me, for I proceeded and came forth from God; I came not of my own
accord, but he sent me.” Significantly, Jesus says not a word about fornication but only about the Father. That he does so suggests that the narrator
intends for the Jews’ two statements to make a single point about spiritual
legitimacy or paternity.
John 8:41, then, probably does not imply a charge of Jesus’ biological
illegitimacy or a rejection of the virgin birth tradition. Commentators who
Press International, 2002), 188–99; reprinted in Attridge, Essays on John and Hebrews
(WUNT 264; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 93–104.
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see the virgin birth being denied here are reading the verse, whether deliberately or unconsciously, in light of the Matthean and Lukan birth narratives. When one reads the Fourth Gospel canonically, the allusion is admittedly hard to resist. Nevertheless, John 8:41 cannot be adduced as solid
evidence that Jews in the first century knew and rejected the story of Jesus’ birth from a virgin.
Celsus’s The True Doctrine and Origen’s Against Celsus
John 8:41 looks all the more unlikely as an implicit rejection of Jesus’
parthogenesis when held up against an explicit rejection. For that we must
go into the second century, by way of Origen’s third-century treatise
Against Celsus. In this work Origen presents a detailed and lengthy refutation of Celsus’s The True Doctrine (Alēthēs Logos).14 Here we have the
first clear, dateable instance of the illegitimacy charge.
Origen became familiar with Celsus’s work when his wealthy patron
Ambrose gave him a copy of it around the year 248 C.E. and urged him to
refute it. For various reasons, he hesitated at first but eventually agreed.
We are fortunate that Origen’s eight-volume work survives virtually intact,
and in the Greek language in which he wrote it instead of in a Latin translation.
Origen preserves approximately seventy percent of Celsus’s treatise,
though apparently not in its original order. Celsus had composed True
Doctrine seventy or more years earlier, in the period 170–180, perhaps in
response to Christian apologetic writings such as those of Justin Martyr.15
We know very little about him beyond what can be gleaned from Origen.
Though Origen mistook him for an Epicurean philosopher, Celsus was a
14
The main critical edition is Marcel Borret, Origène, Contra Celse: Introduction,
Text Critique, Traduction et Notes (5 vols.; SC 132, 136, 147, 150, 227; Paris: Cerf,
1967–1976). The standard English translation is Henry Chadwick, Origin: Contra Celsum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953; repr. with corrections, 1965). On
Origen, Celsus, and their respective treatises, see esp. Chadwick, Origin: Contra Celsum,
ix–lx; Carl Andresen, Logos und Nomos: Die Polemik des Kelsos wider das Christentum
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1955), 8–107; Joseph W. Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy
in the Third-Century Church (Atlanta, Ga.: John Knox, 1983), 214–39; Robert L.
Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1984), 94–125; and R. Joseph Hoffmann, Celsus, On the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 5–49. (Hoffman’s book is a reconstruction and translation of Celsus’s treatise.)
15
On the identity and date of Celsus, see Chadwick, Origin: Contra Celsum, xxiv–
xxix. On Celsus’s work as a response to Justin, see Andresen, Logos und Nomos, 308–
400.
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Middle Platonist. A rather conservative intellectual, he loathed Christianity
above all because it undermined the reason (logos) and doctrine (nomos)
that lay at the foundation of Greco-Roman culture, and failed to give traditional beliefs and cultic observances their rightful due.
Through both wide reading and keen observation, Celsus was fairly well
informed about Judaism and about Christianity in its many second-century
varieties. Like other pagan critics of the upstart movement, such as Lucian
and Galen in the second century and Porphyry in the third, Celsus attacked
Christian belief and practice on several fronts, formulating a variety of arguments. He regarded Christianity as a subversive association that attracted only the ignorant and gullible, comparing it to various mystery cults,
which Romans tended to disdain. He disparaged the unoriginality of its
ethics and its apostasy from Judaism, whose worst features, a radical
monotheism and social exclusivism, were the only ones it adopted. He also
exploited the fact that Christianity was divided into several competing
sects whose only commonality was the name of Christ. He heaped scorn
upon the new religion’s conception of God as an anthropomorphic and
bloodthirsty deity, and denounced the doctrine of the incarnation as absurd. While rejecting polytheism and images, he charged, Christians nevertheless worship a crucified man as a second god. Celsus faulted the gospels
as well, criticizing them for being inconsistent and ridiculous and for depicting Jesus as a man of crude origins who became a magician and whose
more noble teachings only plagiarized Plato. The notion that he came
down to earth to live among men is preposterous, requiring belief in an arbitrary, capricious God. In any event, Jesus himself certainly did not act
like a god. The claim that he rose from the dead is completely spurious;
after his death he allegedly appeared to his followers – just the sort of people most likely to be deceived by sorcery and hallucination – but not to his
persecutors or to anyone else.
To make his ad hominem attack on Jesus more biting and entertaining,
Celsus at times imagined a Jew interrogating Jesus. His polemical account
of Jesus’ birth and early career comes about midway in Book 1 of Origen’s
treatise:
After this he [Celsus] represents the Jew as having a conversation with Jesus himself and
refuting him on many charges, as he thinks: first, because he fabricated the story of his
birth from a virgin; and he reproaches him because he came from a Jewish village and
from a poor country woman who earned her living by spinning. He says that she was
driven out by her husband, who was a carpenter by trade, as she was convicted of adultery. Then he says that after she had been driven out by her husband and while she was
wandering about in a disgraceful way she secretly gave birth to Jesus. And he says that
because he was poor he hired himself out as a workman in Egypt, and there tried his
hand at certain magical powers on which the Egyptians pride themselves; he returned
full of conceit because of these powers, and on account of them gave himself the title of
God. . . . Let us return, however, to the words put into the mouth of the Jew, where the
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mother of Jesus is described as having been turned out by the carpenter who was betrothed to her, as she had been convicted of adultery and had a child by a certain soldier
named Panthera.16 (Cels. 1.28, 32)
Origen recasts the direct address of Celsus’s Jewish interlocutor, which
would have read something like this: “Let us imagine what a Jew would
say to Jesus: ‘Is it not true that you fabricated the story of your birth from
a virgin . . .?’”17
Celsus’s account has every appearance of being a deliberately garbled
version of Matthew’s infancy narrative. It echoes Joseph’s initial resolve
to quietly break his engagement with Mary quietly on learning of her
pregnancy (Matt 1:19) and conflates the visit of the magi with the flight to
and return from Egypt (2:1–15). The claim that Jesus gave himself the title
“God” recalls Matthew’s explanation that the name Emmanuel means
“God with us” (1:23). As many have suggested, the name Panthera, though
common enough in Roman antiquity, may have been chosen as a pun on
παρθένος, the Greek word for “virgin,” with three of its consonants being
inverted (r–t–n > n–t–r).
Celsus may have concocted his antinarrative de novo from his own
reading of Matthew. More likely his version of the story is based on slanders circulating among Jews in his day.18 That such slanders became increasingly common in the following decades is indicated by Tertullian. In
his treatise On Spectacles (ca. 197), he imagines himself gloating over the
spectacle (!) of the damned in hell; among the tormented are those who
had mocked Jesus as “the son of a carpenter or a whore [quaestuariae filius], Sabbath-breaker, [and] Samaritan who had a demon” (30.6).19
In the Acts of Pilate, a work of the fourth or fifth century that includes
some traditions which may go back to the second century, Jesus is explicitly accused by the elders of the Jews, Annas and Caiaphas, and the whole
multitude, of being illegitimate: “What should we see? Firstly, that you
were born of fornication; secondly, that your birth meant the death of the
children in Bethlehem; thirdly, that your father Joseph and your mother
Mary fled into Egypt because they counted for nothing among the people”
(2.3).20 Twelve devout Jews standing before Pilate deny these accusations,
16
Trans. Chadwick, Origin: Contra Celsum, 28, 31. Chadwick puts the extracts from
Celsus in italics.
17
Cf. Hoffman, Celsus, On the True Doctrine, 57.
18
See further Brown, Birth of the Messiah, 535–37; Claudia J. Setzer, Jewish Responses to Early Christians: History and Polemics, 30–150 C.E. (Minneapolis, Minn.:
Fortress, 1994), 147–51; Stephen G. Wilson, Related Strangers: Jews and Christians 70–
170 C.E. (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 1995), 185–89.
19
The last epithet reflects the charge of the Jews in John 8:48.
20
Trans. Felix Scheidweiler, “The Gospel of Nicodemus, Acts of Pilate and Christ’s
Descent to Hell,” in New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 1: Gospels and Related Writings
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asserting that they were present at the couple’s betrothal. The context implies the charge that Mary conceived Jesus by Joseph but before they were
married, their scandalous premarital relations forcing them to flee to
Egypt. This passage may presuppose an earlier form of the Panthera story
than we find in Celsus or else be based strictly on Matthew.21
By the fourth century the Panthera story had become widespread in both
Jewish and Christian circles. In one of his early apologetic works, Eusebius of Caesarea commented on LXX Hos 5:14 (dio/ti e0gw& ei0mi w(j panqh\r
tw ~| Efraim) with the remark, “the text may be quoted against those of the
circumcision who slanderously and abusively assert that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was born of Panthera” (Ecl. proph. 3.10).22
Various rabbinic texts mention “Jesus ben Pandera,”23 but none from
the tannaitic period (70–200 C.E.) do so in relation to his birth. Yet, in uncensored manuscripts and printed editions of the Babylonian Talmud there
are two nearly identical passages, in different contexts, that appear to reflect Jewish polemics against the virgin birth of Jesus: b. Šabb. 104b and
b. Sanh. 67a. They do not name Jesus explicitly but evidently refer to him
alternately as Ben Stada and Ben Pandera. The passage in b. Šabbat occurs
in a discussion of the permissibility of writing on the Sabbath:
(rev. ed.; ed. W. Schneemelcher; ET ed. R. McL. Wilson; Cambridge: Clarke; Louisville:
Westminster/John Knox, 1991), 508.
21
Scheidweiler (“Acts of Pilate,” 501–2) suggests that the earlier, milder charge that
Mary had premarital sex with Joseph, rather than committing adultery with another man,
may have been current when Matthew’s genealogy was compiled or that it originated as a
Jewish rejection of Matt 1:18. The Matthean infancy narrative, however, does not look
like an apologia at all and in this respect stands in marked contrast to Matt 27:62–66 and
28:11–15. These latter two passages, unique to Matthew, have the chief priests, Pharisees, and elders posting a guard at Jesus’ tomb to prevent his disciples from stealing his
body and claiming that he had risen from the dead, and the subsequent spreading of the
rumor that Jesus’ disciples did this very thing. The narrator reports in 28:15, “And this
story is still told among the Jews to this day.”
22
Cited by Chadwick, Origen: Contra Celsum, 31 n. 3. In the same note, Chadwick
cites various Christian authors of the fourth to ninth centuries who identified Panther [sic]
as an ancestor, alternately, of Joseph (e.g., Epiphanius, Pan. 78.7.5) or Mary (e.g., John of
Damascus, De fide orthodoxa 4.14). It is not hard to see what is going on here: church fathers eventually resigned themselves to the Panthera tradition but rendered it innocuous by
transforming the figure from Mary’s lover into one of her (or Joseph’s) forebears.
23
E.g., t. Ḥul. 2:22–24 / y. Šabb. 14:4, fol.14d / y. ‘Abod. Zar. 2:2, fol. 40d / Qoh. Rab.
1:24 on Eccl 1:8. For discussion of these and other passages, see Peter Schäfer, Jesus in the
Talmud (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). Schäfer offers a needed corrective to the minimalist approach represented by Johann Maier, Jesus von Nazareth in der
talmudischen Überlieferung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978), which
for more than three decades has inclined most scholars to see very few, if any, references to
Jesus in rabbinic literature.
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H E WHO SCRATCHES A MARK ON THE FLESH. It was taught, R. Eliezer said to the Sages:
But did not Ben Stada bring forth witchcraft from Egypt by means of tattoos? – Was he
then the son of Stada? Was he not the son of Pandera? Said R. Ḥisda: The husband was
Stada, the lover Pandera. But was not the husband Pappos ben Yehuda (and) the mother
Stada? The mother was Miriam, a women’s hairdresser, as we say in Pumbeditha: This
one turned away from her husband. – He was a fool, they answered, and proof cannot be
adduced from fools.24
So in the tradition attributed to R. Ḥisda (died ca. 309 C.E.), Mary had a
husband (l(b) whose name was Stada but also a lover (l(wb) whose name
was Pandera. The last sentence in the discourse evidently explains the
name Stada as an epithet from the Hebrew/Aramaic root )+s/y+s (“to turn
away from, go astray, commit adultery”) that slandered Miriam (Mary) as
h+ws – an adulteress. The rabbinic discussion bears three striking similarities with the passage in Celsus: the adultery of Mary, the name Pandera for
her lover, and the reference to Ben Pandera (Jesus) learning magic in
Egypt. It seems likely that rabbinic sages and Celsus were drawing on the
same Jewish tradition that polemicized against the virgin birth tradition by
distorting details of the Matthean account.25
Origen devotes several paragraphs to refuting Celsus (Cels. 1.29–39).
He begins by reproaching Celsus for “failing to keep the character entirely
consistent with that of a Jew” (1.28). He also maintains that those who invented the myth that Jesus was the spawn of Panthera unwittingly show
that his birth was in fact extraordinary, since they kept the part of the story
about Mary not conceiving Jesus by Joseph.
Origen’s main riposte, however, is to argue from effects to cause. Despite being raised in humble circumstances, with no serious education or
rhetorical training, Jesus rose above his situation to become a popular, persuasive speaker and leader. His disciples were certainly convinced that
there was something divine about him, for they not only left their homes to
follow him but were willing to suffer the same fate he did, after they saw
him risen from the dead. It is highly unlikely that a man of Jesus’ fame and
character would have had such an ignominious birth. Far less could this be
true of one who not only performed wonders but taught morality. God,
who sends souls down into human bodies, would scarcely have forced such
a man to be born in so shameful a way. And if the physiognomists are right
that all bodies conform to the habits of their pre-existent souls, then the
soul of one who was destined to live a miraculous life would surely have
24
Translation adapted from H. Freedman in The Babylonian Talmud, Seder Mo’ed:
Shabbath, vol. 3 (ed. I. Epstein; n.p.: Rebecca Bennet Publications, 1959), 504 n. 2. The
parallel passage in b. Sanh. 67a comes in a discussion about the death penalty for those
who lead others into idolatry: “And thus they did to Ben Stada in Lod, and they hung him
on the eve of Passover. Ben Stada was Ben Pandera. R. Ḥisda said . . . .”
25
Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud, 20.
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been provided with a body miraculously. It was only fitting that he should
be, as the prophets foretold, the offspring of a virgin who bore “a child
whose name was significant of his work, showing that at his birth God
would be with men” (1.34).
At this juncture Origen calls on the Old Testament (1.34–36). He wryly
observes that Celsus does not have his Jew quote and expound Isa 7:1–14,
either because Celsus was ignorant of this text or because he knew it
would unintentionally support the doctrine he opposes. Were a Jew to argue that the passage speaks of a young woman and not a virgin, he could
easily be refuted on lexical grounds.26 Further, what kind of a miraculous
“sign” would a young woman bearing a son be? Only a woman who had
not had intercourse with a man would be a fitting mother for one called
Emmanuel, “God with us.” And since no one was born in King Ahaz’s
time in fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy, the prediction must have applied
to the Savior, who was “of the seed of David according to the flesh” (Rom
1:3).
After addressing Jewish objections, Origen turns to Greeks (1.37). They
know that the Creator enables females of certain species to bear offspring
without having intercourse with a male. Why then could God not have enabled a woman to do so? What is more, the Greeks themselves grant that
not all people were born of the union of a man and a woman. If the world
was created in the way they say it was, the first humans must have come
into existence not through intercourse but through the generative principles
inherent in the earth. But this is more incredible than believing that Jesus
was born of a mother but no human father. When Celsus has his Jew quote
Greek myths in ridicule of Jesus, he only makes his imaginary character
look like a buffoon. As for Jesus working his miracles by magic, it is hard
to see why a magician would bother teaching morality (1.38). Finally, the
gibe that God would not have had sexual intercourse with a woman of such
low origins as Jesus’ mother is vulgar street talk undeserving of a reply
(1.39).
26
Origen’s point here is that the Hebrew word hml( – used in Isa 7:14 and rendered
in the LXX as parqe/noj and in other Greek translations as nea~nij – is also applied to a
virgin in Deuteronomy (22:23–26). Perhaps Origen knew a Hebrew text of Deut 22:23
with the word hml( but the MT reads r(n (qĕrê: hr(n). In any case, the Hebrew words
hml( and hr(n refer to a young woman in general, without specifying whether she is a
virgin or not; hence the need in Deut 22:23 to specify (probably through a scribal gloss) a
virgin with the word hlwtb “If there is a young woman [hr(n] (who is) a virgin [hlwtb]
already engaged to be married, and a man in town lies with her. . . .”
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Origen’s Commentary on John
When Origen set about writing Against Celsus (ca. 248 C.E.), he had recently finished working on his Commentary on John, the earliest commentary on this book (indeed, on any New Testament writing) to survive, and
the first to see in John 8:41 a slur on Jesus’ virgin birth. Only nine of its
thirty-two volumes are extant (and survive, like Against Celsus, in
Greek).27 Origen dictated it to a team of stenographers over more than a
decade, from 231 to the 240s C.E., having undertaken it at the behest of
Ambrose, who probably wanted an “orthodox” counterpart to Heracleon’s
interpretation of the Fourth Gospel.28 Origen does quote and refute Heracleon, but only sporadically (most extensively in his exposition of John 4
in Book 13).29 It is difficult to discern any single, overriding purpose in his
sprawling commentary.30 There are polemical strains in it, aimed not only
at Heracleon and other “heterodox” interpreters, such as Marcion and
Patripassian modalists, but also at literalist ones. There are also apologetic
strains, in which Origen defends himself against objections to his hermeneutical method and theological positions. On the whole, though, the
commentary reflects the more positive goal of offering Christian intellec 27
Book 1 (John 1:1a), Book 2 (1:1b–7), Book 6 (1:15–29), Book 10 (2:2–25), Book
13 (4:13–54), Book 19 (8:19–25), Book 20 (8:37–53), Book 28 (11:39–57), and Book 32
(13:2–33). There are also fragments of Books 4 and 5. The most recent critical edition is
Cécile Blanc, Origène: Commentaire sur S. Jean: Introduction, Text Critique, Traduction et Notes (5 vols.; SC 120, 15, 222, 290, 385; Paris: Cerf, 1966–1992). For a full
English translation, see Ronald E. Heine, Origen: Commentary on the Gospel according
to John Books 1–10 (FC 80; Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press,
1989); idem, Origen: Commentary on the Gospel according to John Books 13–32 (FC
89; Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1993).
28
C f. Origen, Comm. Jo. 6.6–12; Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.24, 28, 32. For critical reconstructions of the chronology of Origen’s work on the Commentary on John, see Pierre
Nautin, Origène: Sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris: Beuchesne, 1977), 377–80, 410–11, 427–
38; and Heine, Books 1–10, 4–5; idem, Books 13–32, 4–19. Nautin dates the completion
of Book 32 to the year 248, Heine to 242. 29
Of Heracleon’s work – perhaps a commentary or perhaps a less ambitious exegetical effort – all that survive are fifty-one quoted extracts (forty-eight from Origen’s commentary, two from Clement of Alexandria, and one from Photius); they are conveniently
collected in W. Foerster, Gnosis: A Selection of Gnostic Texts (trans. R. McL. Wilson; 2
vols.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 1:162–83. For a lucid theological and philosophical
comparison of Origen and Heracleon, see Harold W. Attridge, “Heracleon and John: Reassessment of an Early Christian Hermeneutical Debate,” in Biblical Interpretation: History, Context, Reality (ed. Christine Helmer; Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature,
2005), 57–72; reprinted in Attridge, Essays on John and Hebrews, 193–207.
30
See further J. A. McGuckin, “Structural Design and Apologetic Intent in Origen’s
Commentary on John,” in Origeniana Sexta (ed. G. Dorival et al.; BETL 118; Louvain:
Peeters, 1995), 441–57.
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tuals, such as Ambrose, an exposition of the spiritual sense of the work
Origen regarded as the most profound of the four gospels – the “first
fruits” among them.
Origen’s basic approach in the commentary was not only to explain the
meaning of words and concepts in each passage of the Gospel of John (on
either or both the literal and figurative levels), but to relate them to occurrences of the same terms and ideas elsewhere in Scripture. This made for
very slow going. The first book covers only John 1:1a, and by the end of
Book 5 he had gotten only as far as John 1:17. Later volumes cover the
material at a faster pace, but by the time he laid aside the work after finishing Book 32, he had gotten only as far as John 13:33.
Like virtually all ancient Jewish and Christian interpreters, Origen believed that every word in Scripture was divinely inspired and that the Bible
was a unitary book.31 The literal sense of a passage is available to all
Christians, but its deeper, spiritual sense – the one that most concerned the
biblical authors themselves – was available only to those given the divine
grace to apprehend it. In the Commentary on John he sometimes explains
only the literal sense of a passage. To this level of interpretation he
brought all the technical skills of Alexandrian literary scholarship: textual
criticism, grammar (including what we would call genre criticism), etymology, lexicography, and semantics. At other times he considers only the
spiritual sense, which includes not only allegory but typology. On occasion
he elucidates both levels. Origen often appeals to the Synoptic Gospels to explain or elaborate on
an event or saying in the Fourth Gospel. He does not hesitate to note when
John and the Synoptics disagree in their depiction of an episode or saying
of Jesus. Most discrepancies, he thought, can be reconciled at the factual,
historical level, but others, such as John’s chronology of Jesus’ ministry
and of the temple incident in John 2, cannot. In these cases the spiritual
sense must be sought. The factual differences, he held, were intended precisely to express different spiritual truths: “The spiritual truth is often preserved in the bodily falsehood, so to speak” (Comm. Jo. 10.20). Indeed, the
greater the differences, the greater the range of spiritual meanings intended
by the four evangelists.
Origen’s exposition of John 8 comes in Books 19–20. Book 19, which is
only partially preserved, covers John 8:19–25; Book 20, which is com 31
On Origen’s hermeneutical approach and theological interpretation in the Commentary on John, see further Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy, 148–56; Heine, Books
1–10, 10–23; idem, Books 13–32, 19–65; M. F. Wiles, The Spiritual Gospel: The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel in the Early Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1960); and Kyle Keefer, The Branches of the Gospel of John: The Reception of the
Fourth Gospel in the Early Church (London: Clark, 2006), 64–80. 350
Daniel C. Harlow
plete, treats 8:37–53. His discussion of John 8:37–41a in Comm. Jo.
20.2–127 begins with a resolution of the apparent conflict between John
8:37 (“I know that you are seed of Abraham”) and 8:39 (“If you are Abraham’s children, do the works of Abraham”). He resolves the seeming contradiction by distinguishing the words “seed” and “child.” Seeds are generative principles (spermatikoi\ lo/goi, a good Stoic/Middle Platonic notion),
and the Jews do not have the proper ones implanted in their souls in a way
that would make them children of Abraham; they have not received the
Word to let it continue in them. Moreover, they have not seen the Father,
as Jesus has (8:38a), but they have heard him (John 8:38b) – in the testimony of Moses and the prophets. This proves that the Father of Christ is
none other than the God who gave the law and the prophets. Against Heracleon, Origen denies that Jesus’ statement “because my word has no place
in you” (8:37) means that the Jews are unfit in their nature or essence
(20.54–56). When the Jews reply “Abraham is our father” (8:39a), in response to Jesus’ urging “do what you have heard from the Father” (8:38b),
they are not being modest; clearly they do not love Jesus (8:42) since they
are seeking to kill him (8:40). In Jesus’ appeal, “If you are children of
Abraham, do the works of Abraham” (8:39b), the plural works is the
equivalent of saying “do all the works of Abraham.” The whole story of
Abraham must be interpreted allegorically, with each thing he did being
assigned a spiritual meaning (20.67–79). When the Jews seek to kill Jesus
(8:40a), they are seeking to kill a man, because even if they succeed, God
is not killed. “For it is not permitted to say that God dies. For this reason
the Word in the beginning with God, who also was God the Word, did not
die” (20.85). Origen then relates Jesus’ comment, “This Abraham did not
do” in 8:40b to his later statement, “Abraham rejoiced that he might see
my day” (8:56), explaining that “the spiritual economy related to Jesus”
has always been present (20.87–95). He interprets 8:41a, “You are doing
the works of your father,” in light of 8:44, “You are of your father the devil.” To disallow a deterministic interpretation of the latter verse, he cites
Matt 5:45 (“that you may become sons of your Father who is in heaven”)
and 1 John 3:8, 9 (“He who commits sin is of the devil. . . . Everyone who
has been born of God does not commit sin”). There is a crucial distinction,
he observes, between being “of the devil” and being “born of God,” a difference that refutes those who think that some are sons of the devil as a
result of creation (20.127). Here Origen probably has Heracleon in mind,
even though he does not name him.32 The problem with the Jews is that
they have not gone forth from their father’s house as Abraham did but
32
Cf. Comm. Jo. 20.168–170 on John 8:44, where Origen cites Heracleon explicitly
on this point. Born of Fornication
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“still belong to the wicked father and still do the works of that father”
(20.126). This brings us to Origen’s exposition of John 8:41bc, where the Jews
say, “We have not been born of fornication; we have one Father, God”:
I ask whether those Jews who are said to have believed in him [cf. John 8:31] do not respond rather vindictively, because they were reproved as not being children of Abraham
[cf. 8:39], by hinting in a veiled manner that the Savior was born of fornication. They
assume this as probable because they do not accept his famous and widely discussed
birth from the Virgin. For indeed it appears very irrational to me that they uttered these
words in response to his saying. For if their statement, “We have not been born of fornication,” be understood in its literal sense, it is appropriate neither to what precedes nor to
what follows. Furthermore, since the Savior said that God was his Father, and acknowledged no man as his father, it is likely because of the statement, “We have not been born
of fornication,” that, to give offense, they in turn add, “We have one Father, God.” It is
as if they were saying, “We are the ones who have one Father, God, rather than you, who
claim to have been born of a virgin, though you were born of fornication. You boast that
you have been born of a virgin by saying that you have God alone as your one Father.
We who acknowledge God as our Father do not deny that we also have a human father.” 33 (Comm. Jo. 20.128–130) Origen’s interpretation is striking. He takes the Jews’ response to include a
veiled allegation that Jesus was born a bastard, even though on his own
admission nothing in the preceding or following context calls for such an
accusation intended in the literal sense. As he sees it, the Jews make an ad
hominem attack on Jesus out of sheer spite because of what he has said to
them in verse 39. He assumes that the virgin birth tradition was widespread
in Jesus’ lifetime and that his Jewish opponents knew it and flatly rejected
it .34 Most striking of all, he depicts the Jews accusing Jesus himself of fabricating the story of his birth from a virgin – and broadcasting it to boot!
Three factors seem to be driving Origen’s reading of 8:41. The first one
has to do with his reading of the Fourth Gospel itself. Evidently he takes
5:18 – the statement that Jesus was “calling God his own Father” (pate/ra
i1dion e1lege to\n Qeo/n) – to imply that Jesus denied having an earthly father.35 The second one has to do with how Origen read John in relation to
the Synoptics. Here, as often in his Commentary on John and in other
works, he conflates the incarnational Christology of John and the virgin
33
Trans. Heine, Books 13–32, 233.
Origen was followed in this interpretation by Cyril of Alexandria (fl. 421–444),
Commentary on the Gospel of John 5.5: “The unbelieving Jews . . . thought that the Holy
Virgin had been corrupted . . . and that she gave birth to a child conceived not by the Holy Spirit or of adoption from above but rather conceived by one of those of the earth” (A
Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church, Anterior to the Division of the East and
West [ed. J. B. Pusey et al.; 48 vols.; Oxford: Parker, 1838–1881], 43:641).
35
It is clear from elsewhere that Origen regarded Joseph as Jesus’ adoptive father, as
Matthew and Luke do. 34
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birth Christology of Matthew and Luke – when, in fact, Matthew and Luke
say nothing about an incarnation, and John nothing about a virgin birth.
Earlier church fathers had done this,36 but never as graphically as Origen
does here when he imagines the Jews accusing Jesus himself of announcing and even boasting of his birth from a virgin. The third factor at work seems to be Jewish polemics against the virgin
birth tradition current in Origen’s own day. In his vivid, expansive paraphrase of their statements, the great commentator has the Jews in John 8 do
exactly what Celsus had his imaginary Jew do in True Doctrine: accuse Jesus directly of manufacturing the story of his virgin birth. Origen could not
have had Celsus’s Jew in mind when commenting on 8:41, since he had
finished with Book 8 of his Commentary on John some years before writing Against Celsus, but he no doubt did have in mind Jewish repudiation of
the virgin birth tradition in his own time. At this point in his commentary,
then, he is reading contemporary disputations among Jews and Christians
back into the time of Jesus – in a manner not wholly dissimilar to the
Fourth Evangelist’s retrojecting the Christology and conflicts of the Johannine community of the late first century back into the ministry of Jesus
several decades earlier.
Conclusion
We do not know how the story of Jesus’ virgin birth reached Matthew and
Luke, only that they inherited early tradition and then developed it independently of one another. The Fourth Evangelist shows no clear indication
of having known the tradition, and that is one reason why John 8:41 does
not seem to imply a charge of Jesus’ biological illegitimacy. By the midsecond century, though, it was widely enough known for Jews to begin refuting it by taking details of Matthew’s account and using them to concoct
a counterstory of Jesus’ origins and career. In the late second century Celsus exploited this trend in Jewish circles in his treatise against Christians;
in True Doctrine, he put the story of Jesus being born of an adulterous union between Mary and a Roman soldier named Panthera and learning magic
in Egypt into the mouth of an imaginary Jewish interlocutor who accosts
Jesus and accuses him of fabricating the story of his birth from a virgin.
Church fathers and rabbis of the third and fourth century were familiar with
this polemical recasting of the Matthean infancy narrative. In the mid-third
century Origen interpreted John 8:41 with the same Jewish attack in mind
as he wrote his Commentary on John, and then a few years later refuted
36
10).
Beginning as early as Ignatius in ca. 110 C.E. (Eph. 7, 18, 19; Magn. 11; Trall. 9,
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Celsus’s version of it in Contra Celsum. It is not difficult to imagine Christians, Jews, and pagans in cosmopolitan Caesarea, Origen’s adopted city,
arguing over their rival understandings of this aspect of the life of Jesus of
Nazareth.