Chapter 53. Apologists and Church Fathers: Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen and the Pagan Critics

While magistrates questioned Christians and mobs attacked them, a small number of educated converts took the faith’s case to the empire in writing. In the second and third centuries the “apologists” and the first great Fathers argued that Christianity was the true philosophy. They argued that the pagan gods were demons, that heresy was a corruption of apostolic truth, and that their scriptures could be read with the tools of Greek scholarship. Pagan intellectuals answered with polemics of their own. This chapter follows that exchange: Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement and Origen on one side, Celsus and Porphyry on the other. It also covers two claims that run under the debate. One is the Fathers’ own admission that Christian rites resembled the Mithraic mysteries. The other is the argument of modern comparativists, among them Mehran Keshe, that the resemblance was no accident.

Justin Martyr: Logos, Demons and “Mimicry”

Justin (100-165 in Armstrong’s dates, who calls him “Justin of Caesarea”) is usually said to have been born at Neapolis (Nablus) in Samaria. He addressed his First Apology to Antoninus Pius c. 150; the Dialogue with Trypho “is generally supposed to be later” [Geden, Select Passages Illustrating Mithraism, #38272, notes on Justin; Armstrong, A History of God, #68999]. Pagels describes him teaching “Christian philosophy” to students in his Roman apartment “above the baths of Timothy”, and his beheading with those students after they refused to sacrifice [Pagels, Beyond Belief, #63510, ch.3]. Karen Armstrong is cool about his intellect: “Justin was neither a profound nor a brilliant thinker”. She sees his importance in his attempt to show pagans that their religion was “not a destructive breach with tradition” [Armstrong, #68999].

Justin’s most quoted passages concern Mithras. Geden translates them:

“Accordingly in the mysteries of Mithra also we have heard that evil spirits practise mimicry. For at the initiatory rites bread and a cup of water are set out accompanied by certain formulae, as you know or may ascertain.” (Apol. I.66)

“When in the tradition of the Mithraic mysteries they relate that Mithra was born of a rock, and name the place where his followers receive initiation a cave, do I not know that they are perverting the saying of Daniel that ‘a stone was hewn without hands from a great mountain’?” (Dial. 70)

Geden sums up: “Justin argues that the Mithraic rites are a parody of the Christian” [Geden, #38272, “Justin Martyr”]. The logic matters. Justin does not deny the resemblance. He explains it as demonic foresight.

His demonology came from Jewish apocalyptic. Annette Yoshiko Reed shows that Justin used the Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36). He followed the Enochic accusation that the angel Asael brought weapons, jewellery and cosmetics, and asserted that the fallen angels sowed “murders, wars, adulteries, intemperate deeds, and all wickedness”. In his Apologies, she writes, “demons trick pagans into worshipping idols, enslave them by means of magic and dream-visions” [Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity, #66169]. Reed calls this “a radical indictment of Greco-Roman culture”. She adds that, set beside his treatment of Judaism, Justin’s “genealogy of pagan error” is in a sense “sympathetic”, because it puts the blame on angels, not on human beings [Reed, #66169]. Samuel Dill traces the philosophical side of the same idea to Plutarch, whose theory of bad daemons explained “the grossness of myth and ritual”. He records “the triumphant use made of the theory by the Christian Apologists” [Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, #60232, contents of the chapter on Plutarch’s daemonology].

Justin also reports on how Christians lived. Montero quotes his description of converts: “we who valued above all things the acquisition of wealth and possessions, now bring what we have” into common use. Montero argues that what Justin and Tertullian describe was a “robust, formal welfare system” funded by voluntary giving and built into the liturgy [Montero, All Things in Common, #74555, ch.10].

Irenaeus: Succession, Rule of Faith and the “Universal” Church

Irenaeus of Lyons (Against Heresies, c. 180) turned apologetic into a system of church authority. Pagels presents him as Polycarp’s pupil, who hoped that scattered groups “would come to see themselves as members of a single church they called catholic, which means ‘universal'”. He defined true teaching by succession from the apostles through bishops, and fixed the four-gospel rule (see Chapter 51) [Pagels, #63510, ch.3]. Ehrman sets out the logic and its weakness. Leaders “appointed by the apostles could pass along their teachings”, but “as churches multiplied, each of them could no longer claim to have as its leader someone who had known an apostle”, and rival leaders claimed the same apostolic truths [Ehrman, Forged, #63605, Introduction]. Helen Ellerbe treats the result as the first stage of a coercive institution. Irenaeus “insisted there could be only one church, and outside that church ‘there is no salvation'” [Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History, #6699, ch.1].

Irenaeus also took part in disputes inside the church. Pagels notes that he carried a letter to Bishop Eleutherus of Rome about the “new prophecy” of Montanus, a movement “dividing Christians throughout Asia Minor as well as Rome” [Pagels, #63510, ch.3].

Tertullian: The Latin Polemicist

Tertullian of Carthage (born c. 150 to pagan parents), in Geden’s description, “found in Christianity the satisfaction and assurance which the philosophy and practice of his day failed to give” [Geden, #38272, notes on Tertullian]. His Apology reports the pagan accusations of child-eating and incest. In it he boasts that “the more we are mown down by you, the more we multiply; the blood of Christians is seed!” [Pagels, #63510, ch.3]. He is also the most detailed patristic witness to Mithraic ritual:

“For to him when he is initiated in a cavern… a crown is offered on a naked sword, as if in parody of martyrdom… declaring that Mithra is his crown… We may recognise the craft of the devil, who counterfeits divine things.” (De Corona 15)

“The devil… with idolatrous mysteries endeavours to imitate the realities of the divine sacraments. Some he himself sprinkles… he promises forgiveness of sins through baptism; and… marks his own soldiers with the sign of Mithra on their foreheads, commemorates an offering of bread, introduces a mock resurrection, and with the sword opens the way to the crown. Moreover has he not forbidden a second marriage to the supreme priest? He maintains also his virgins and his celibates.” (De Praescr. 40) [Geden, #38272, “Tertullian”]

Tertullian also used Enoch. Reed notes his appeal to the “scripture of Enoch” (De cultu feminarum), which shows that “some Christians fervently” defended its authority [Reed, #66169]. R.H. Charles’ introduction gathers the patristic evidence and records that the book “is quoted as a genuine production of Enoch by St. Jude, and as Scripture by St. Barnabas” [Charles, The Book of Enoch, #38260, Introduction]. Tertullian’s rigorism extended to the army. Nock sets the “intransigent attitude” of De Idololatria 19 against the many third-century Christians who served [Nock, The Roman Army and the Roman Religious Year, #60166, n.147]. Montero cites his Apology on the common chest: no “buying and selling of any sort in the things of God”, with the common fund paying for burials [Montero, #74555, ch.10].

Alexandria: Clement and Origen

Armstrong places Clement of Alexandria and Origen in a Platonist line. “Neither Origen nor Clement believed that God had created the world out of nothing (ex nihilo), which would later become orthodox Christian doctrine.” Origen, “as a Platonist”, held to “the kinship between God and the soul”, a knowledge of the divine that “could be ‘recollected'”. He developed “a symbolic method of reading the Bible” [Armstrong, #68999]. Havelock Ellis singles out Clement as “the most genuinely Greek of all the Fathers”, who “protested… against that prudery which, as the sun of the classic world set, had begun to overshadow life”. Ellis contrasts him with Augustine, “another North African, but of Roman Carthage and not of Greek Alexandria”, for whom “sin was hereditary” and had “its special seat” in sexuality. In Ellis’s view Augustine’s answer unfortunately prevailed [Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. 6, #32934, Part III].

Origen’s scholarship changed the Christian book. Grafton and Williams make the Hexapla, his parallel-column edition of the Old Testament, and the library at Caesarea the centre of their study. They write that “the background to much of our story is the city of Caesarea, the Palestinian port where Origen, Pamphilus, and Eusebius all found homes”. Eusebius’ description of the Hexapla, the earliest surviving one, “can probably be trusted”, because “he saw and used the original Hexapla in the library created by his mentor Pamphilus” [Grafton & Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book, #86907, Introduction; ch.2; ch.4 “Eusebius at Caesarea”]. Origen was more cautious about Enoch than Tertullian. Reed shows that in Against Celsus (c. 248) he expressed “an even more negative view of Enochic literature”. He did so because Celsus was using the angelic-descent myth against the uniqueness of the Incarnation [Reed, #66169].

The Pagan Critics: Celsus and Porphyry

Celsus’ True Word, written, Pagels says, about thirty years after Justin’s death, survives only in Origen’s long quotations [Pagels, #63510, ch.3]. Nixey observes: “No books of Celsus have survived the centuries untouched, true – but Origen’s attack has and it quoted Celsus at length” [Nixey, The Darkening Age, #70864, ch.3 “Wisdom is Foolishness”]. Celsus called the Virgin Birth nonsense (a Roman soldier had made Mary pregnant), the resurrection of the body “simply the hope of worms”, and the Flood a “debased” version of the classical myth. He regarded Jesus as a “sorcerer” like the market-place wonder-workers who “drive daemons out of men and blow away diseases”. He also argued, as a relativist, that every nation “thinks its way of doing things is ‘by far the best'” [Nixey, #70864, ch.3]. Geden preserves his description of the Mithraic “ascending road with seven gates” of lead, tin, bronze, iron, alloy, silver and gold. It is the fullest ancient account of Mithraic planetary soteriology, transmitted by Origen while he mocked it [Geden, #38272, “Origen”, citing Contra Celsum].

Porphyry’s later attack ran to “at least fifteen books”. It was “highly erudite” and asked: “what has become of men who lived in the many centuries before Christ came?” Nixey stresses that his works “were deemed so powerful and frightening that they were completely eradicated”, beginning with an attack by Constantine [Nixey, #70864, ch.3]. In her account Christian thinkers came to frame the whole confrontation as a “battleground of demons” (her ch.2), with the gods of the classical world recast as devils [Nixey, #70864, ch.2-3].

Mithras and Christianity: The Comparative Claims

The patristic texts establish one point that no party disputes: Justin and Tertullian saw in Mithraism a bread rite, a water rite, a forehead seal, a cave-birth, celibates and a “mock resurrection”. They called these diabolical imitations [Geden, #38272]. Interpreters disagree about the direction of borrowing.

C.J. Koster argues for continuity. “Many scholars have pointed out how the Sun-worshipping Mithraists, the Sun-worshipping Manicheans and the Christians were all syncretized and reconciled when Constantine led the takeover by Christianity, even if it meant the latter’s surrender of most vital Scriptural truths, especially its Hebrew roots” [Koster, Come Out of Her My People, #86909]. Jan Irvin and Andrew Rutajit’s Astrotheology & Shamanism, subtitled Christianity’s Pagan Roots, reads the gospel figures as solar and stellar allegory and ties them to entheogenic cults, explicitly building on Allegro [Irvin & Rutajit, Astrotheology & Shamanism, #86204, ch.3 “Astrotheology”; Part II].

Mehran Keshe gives the most specific historical narrative in the library’s KSW transcripts. In Workshop 386 (24 June 2021) he states that Roman soldiers on the Persian frontier found “no temples with statues”. The followers of “Mithraism at that time, the powers of Mitra” taught them that “you can carry that… within you, which is God”, and “that was a revolution”. Soldiers who had served in Palestine “were involved in the crucifixion of Christ. They came back, they could put a man to it. Now they had a figure”, and so “they created what we see as a cross, what we see as a sign of Rome”. Keshe claims the Vatican was built as “a compromise position… over the temple of Mitra, which was in the center of Rome. St. Peters Basilica is actually a temple of Mitra”. He also links “12 days of Christmas, 12 days of Mitra”. He says the Eucharistic wine replaced a Mithraic energising “sap from a tree”: “this is my body, my blood… It never existed, Christ never touched such a thing” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 386, #378098, “Origins of Christianity, Vatican Construction”]. In Workshop 360 he dates Christ’s birth to 21 December, “the birthday of Mitra” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 360, #378072].

Key points

• Justin Martyr (c. 100-165; First Apology c. 150) called Christianity the true philosophy and pagan gods demons, drawing on the Book of the Watchers; Armstrong judges him “neither a profound nor a brilliant thinker” [Reed, #66169; Armstrong, #68999].
• Justin and Tertullian describe Mithraic bread-and-cup rites, baptism, forehead seals and a “mock resurrection”, and explain them as diabolical mimicry [Geden, #38272].
• Irenaeus built authority on apostolic succession and the “universal” church; Ellerbe reads this as the start of exclusion (“no salvation” outside) [Pagels, #63510; Ellerbe, #6699].
• Tertullian defended Enoch’s authority, opposed military service and attested a communal chest; Origen doubted Enoch and answered Celsus [Reed, #66169; Nock, #60166; Montero, #74555].
• Origen’s Hexapla and the Caesarea library of Pamphilus and Eusebius changed Christian scholarship and the form of the book [Grafton & Williams, #86907].
• Celsus and Porphyry mounted learned attacks; Porphyry’s books were “completely eradicated” after Constantine [Nixey, #70864].
• Koster, Irvin and Rutajit, and Keshe argue that Christian rites and sites continue Mithraic and solar religion; Keshe claims St Peter’s stands on a temple of Mitra [#86909; #86204; #378098].