During the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire, several pagan intellectuals published works attempting to discredit the new faith.

Three works in particular are worthy of mention: Celsus’ True Doctrine (c. 170s CE), Porphyry’s Against the Christians (3rd century CE), and the Emperor Julian’s Against the Galileans (362-363 CE).  For reasons of censorship, these texts survive only in fragmentary form, embedded in the works of Christian writers.  It is worth noting that they were not unique: Christianity was also criticised by other authors, such as Lucian and Hierocles.  Moreover, the various anti-Christian writers did not operate in isolation: there was mutual influence between them.

The works of the anti-Christian apologists had some importance in their day.  They were still being condemned, refuted and burned in the fifth and sixth centuries.  At the time of the Enlightenment, some writers took them up again, including most notably Voltaire.  In modern times, their arguments were re-published by Thomas Taylor, the English Platonist philosopher and pagan revivalist (it bears noting that Celsus, Porphyry and Julian were all Platonists).

Below is a summary of the principal arguments that are found in the anti-Christian writers’ works.  (I have omitted criticisms with a political edge, to the effect that the Christians broke the law or were a threat to the Roman imperial state.)

1.  The Christian god was an inferior being

Anti-Christian writers saw the god of the Bible as a limited being.  He was not to be equated with the transcendent deity of Greek philosophy.  Julian, for example, wrote:

….We ought to think of the god of the Hebrews not as being the creator of the world and the ruler of all things….  We should consider him to be a limited being with boundaries placed upon his power who is one of a host of other gods.

For the same sort of reason, the Christian doctrine of the incarnation was greeted with incomprehension.  Celsus wrote:

But that certain Christians and all Jews should maintain, the former that there has already descended, the latter that there will descend, upon the earth a certain God, or son of a God, who will make the inhabitants of the earth righteous, is a most shameless assertion…. What is the meaning of such a descent upon the part of God? Was it in order to learn what goes on amongst men? Does he not know all things? And if he does know, why does he not make men better? Is it then not possible for him, by means of his divine power, to make men better, unless he send some one for that special purpose?

2.  Why the Jews?

The anti-Christian writers could not conceive why the God of the universe had interested himself only in the Jews, to the exclusion of the Greeks, the Romans and the other great nations of antiquity.  Julian wrote:

He looked on for tens of thousands of years, or thousands of years if you prefer, while men worshipped idols (as you call them) in complete ignorance, from where the sun rises to where it sets, and from the north to the south.  The only exception was that small nation which had settled in one part of Palestine less than two thousand years before.  If he is the God and creator of all men without distinction, why did he overlook us?

This line of argument could minimise the importance of the Jewish people in a way that was explicitly antisemitic.  Celsus wrote that the Jews led a “grovelling life in some corner of Palestine”; and that they “never performed anything worthy of note, and never were held in any reputation or account”.  He regarded them as having deviated from the true tradition of philosophy that culminated in Plato and Platonism.

This apologetic does not seem convincing to modern ears, both because it offensively denigrates the Jewish people and because a Christian could easily respond that God had deliberately overlooked the mighty empires of the ancient world when planning the course of salvation history.

3. Christianity wasn’t even properly Jewish

This argument went a step further than the preceding one.  It was bad enough that the Christian narrative stemmed from the Jews – it was worse that the Christians weren’t even faithful to their supposed Jewish inheritance.  They ignored the Jewish law.  They falsely claimed that Jesus was prophesied in the Jewish scriptures, and they disregarded the fact that the Jews themselves had rejected him.  Moreover, in worshipping Jesus as a god, they were in violation of the Jewish principle of monotheism.

4.  Christians were people of low calibre

It was claimed that Christianity appealed to the stupid, the credulous and the worthless.  Christians, from the outset, had been people of low character – “poor country bumpkins”, as Porphyry put it.  Celsus said that Christian evangelists “would never approach an assembly of wise men”, as opposed to “young men, and a mob of slaves, and a gathering of unintelligent persons”.  They were “able to gain over only the silly, and the mean, and the stupid, with women and children”.

The Greeks and Romans were very hierarchical.  To a free man, it was a serious insult to be associated with women and slaves.  There was no conception here of God enlightening the poor and humble.  Nevertheless, the allegations in question were not necessarily true and may amount to rhetoric.

5.  The Bible was flawed

The fact that the Christian religion gave a central place to its written scriptures perhaps made it inevitable that the Bible would attract the attention of anti-Christian writers.  Celsus thought that the scriptures contained “a web of sheer nonsense”.  Porphyry in particular spent some energy on this line of attack: most famously, he concluded that the Book of Daniel was not written by Daniel the Hebrew prophet, thus anticipating modern critical Bible scholarship by some centuries.