Introduction to This Volume

How this book is arranged

This is the ninth volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church in order of date, from the generation after the apostles down to the eighth century. This volume is given to Origen’s great reply to Celsus and to his letters and one surviving debate.

Within each work the text is divided into chapters and numbered sections, so that any passage can be found again and cited. The small bold figures in the text are the section numbers.

The translations

The text is in English only. Wherever a modern English version has been prepared for SermonIndex it is used here; otherwise the book prints an older public-domain translation. In both cases the wording is the translator’s own: older translations have not been altered beyond dividing them into sections. The sources for every work are listed at the back of the book, together with the licence under which each text is released. All the works in this volume are printed in older public-domain translations.

In this volume

About AD 248 Origen wrote Against Celsus in Greek at the request of his friend Ambrose. It answers a book called The True Doctrine, written some seventy years earlier by a pagan philosopher named Celsus, which attacked Christianity. Origen quotes Celsus at length and replies to him point by point, so that the book preserves much of the original attack as well as the answer. It survives complete, and it is divided here into two parts.

The second part of the volume gathers shorter pieces. They include Origen’s letter to Gregory, urging him to use Greek learning in the study of Scripture, a letter from Africanus asking about the history of Susanna and Origen’s reply, and the Dialogue with Heraclides, a debate with a bishop that was recovered from a papyrus found at Tura near Cairo in 1941.

Dates and authorship

Dates are approximate and are debated by scholars. Each work begins with a short introduction that states what is known about its author and its date, and what is uncertain.