§ 23.1. Lucian’s Satire De Morte Peregrini takes the form of an account given by Lucian to his friend Cronius of the Cynic Peregrinus Proteus’ burning of himself during the Olympic games of A.D. 165, of which he himself was a witness. Peregrinus is described as a low, contemptible man, a parricide and guilty of adultery, unnatural vice and drunkenness, who having fled from his home in Palestine joined the Christians, learnt their θαυμαστὴ σοφία, became their prophet (§ 34, 1), Thiasarch (§ 17, 3) and Synagogeus, and as such expounded their sacred writings, even himself composed and addressed to the most celebrated Greek cities many epistles containing new ordinances and laws. When cast into prison he was the subject of the most extravagant attentions on the part of the Christians. Their γραΐδια and χῆραι (deaconesses) nursed him most carefully, δεῖπνα ποικίλα and λόγοι ἱεροί (Agapæ) were celebrated in his prison, they loaded him with presents, etc. Nevertheless on leaving prison, on account of his having eaten a forbidden kind of meat (flesh offered to idols) he was expelled by them. He now cast himself into the arms of the Cynics, travelled as the apostle of their views through the whole world, and ended his life in his mad thirst for fame by voluntarily casting himself upon the funeral pile. Lucian tells with scornful sneer how the superstitious people supposed that there had been an earthquake and that an eagle flew up from his ashes crying out: The earth I have lost, to Olympus I fly. This fable was believed, and even yet it is said that sometimes Peregrinus will be seen in a white garment as a spirit.—It is undoubtedly recorded by Aulus Gellius that a Cynic Peregrinus lived at this time whom he describes as vir gravis et constans. This too is told by the Apologist Tatian, who in him mocks at the pretension on the part of heathen philosophers to emancipation from all wants. But neither of them knows anything about his Christianity or his death by fire. It is nevertheless conceivable that Peregrinus had for some time connection with Christianity; but without this assumption it seems likely that Lucian in a satire which, under the combined influence of personal and class antipathies, aimed first and chiefly at stigmatizing Cynicism in the person of Peregrinus, should place Christianity alongside of it as what seemed to him with its contempt of the world and self-denial to be a new, perhaps a nobler, but still nothing more than a species of Cynicism. Many features in the caricature which he gives of the life, doings and death of Peregrinus seem to have been derived by him from the life of the Apostle Paul as well as from the account of the martyrdom of Ignatius, and especially from that of Polycarp (§ 22, 3).28

§ 23.2. Worshippers of an Ass (Asinarii) was a term of reproach that was originally and from early times applied to the Jews. They now sought to have it transferred to the Christians. Tertullian tells of a picture publicly exhibited in Carthage which represented a man clothed in a toga, with the ears and hoof of an ass, holding a book in his hand, and had this inscription: Deus Christianorum Onochoetes. This name is variously read. If read as ὄνου χοητής it means asini sacerdos. Alongside of this we may place the picture, belonging probably to the third century, discovered in A.D. 1858 scratched on a wall among the ruins of a school for the imperial slaves, that were then excavated. It represents a man with an ass’s head hanging on a cross, and beneath it the caricature of a worshipper with the words written in a schoolboy’s hand; Alexamenos worships God (A. σεβετε θεον); evidently the derision of a Christian youth by a pagan companion. The scratching on another wall gives us probably the answer of the Christian: Alexamenos fidelis.

§ 23.3. Polemic properly so-called.—

1. The Λόγος ἀληθής of Celsus is in great part preserved in the answer of Origen (§ 31, 5). He identifies the author with that Celsus to whom Lucian dedicated the little work Alexander or Pseudomantis in which he so extols the philosophy of Epicurus that it seems he must be regarded as an Epicurean. Since, however, the philosophical standpoint of our Celsus is that of a Platonist the assumption of the identity of the two has been regarded as untenable. But even our Celsus does not seem to have been a pure Platonist but an Eclectic, and as such might also show a certain measure of favour to the philosophy of Epicurus. Their age is at least the same. Lucian wrote that treatise soon after A.D. 180, and according to Keim, the Λόγος ἀληθής was probably composed about A.D. 178. Almost everything that modern opponents down to our own day have advanced against the gospel history and doctrine is found here wrought out with original force and subtlety, inspired with burning hatred and bitter irony, and highly spiced with invective, mockery, and wit. First of all the author introduces a Jew who repeats the slanders current among the Jews, representing Jesus as a vagabond impostor, His mother as an adulteress, His miracles and resurrection as lying fables; then enters a heathen philosopher who proves that both Judaism and Christianity are absurd; and finally, the conditions are set forth under which alone the Christians might claim indulgence: the abandonment of their exclusive attitude toward the national religion and the recognition of it by their taking part in the sacrifices appointed by the state.29
2. The Neo-platonist Porphyry, about A.D. 270, as reported by Jerome, in the XV. Book of his Κατὰ Χριστιανῶν points to a number of supposed contradictions in holy scripture, calls attention to the conflict between Paul and Peter (Gal. ii.), explains Daniel’s prophecies as Vaticinia post eventum, and censures the allegorical interpretation of the Christians. Although even among the Christians themselves Porphyry as a philosopher was highly esteemed, and notwithstanding contact at certain points between his ethical and religious view of the world and that of the Christians, perhaps just because of this, he is the worst and most dangerous of all their pagan assailants. Against his controversial writings, therefore, the edict of Theodosius II. ordering them to be burnt was directed in A.D. 448 (§ 42, 4), and owing to the zeal with which his works were destroyed the greater part of the treatises which quoted from it for purposes of controversy also perished with it—the writings of Methodius of Tyre (§ 31, 9), Eusebius of Cæsarea (§ 47, 2), Philostorgius (§ 5, 1) and Apollinaris the younger (§ 47, 5). Of these according to Jerome those of the last named were the most important. In the recently discovered controversial treatise of Macarius Magnes (§ 47, 6) an unnamed pagan philosopher is combated whose attacks, chiefly directed against the Gospels, to all appearance verbally agree with the treatise of Porphyry, or rather, perhaps, with that of his plagiarist Hierocles.
3. Hierocles who as governor of Bithynia took an active part in the persecution of Galerius, wrote two books Λόγοι φιλαλήθεις against the Christians, about A.D. 305, which have also perished. Eusebius’ reply refers only to his repudiation of the equality assigned to Christ and Apollonius of Tyana (§ 24, 1). While the title of his treatise is borrowed from that of Celsus, he has also according to the testimony of Eusebius in great part copied the very words of both of his predecessors.