John Rickards Mozley

“ In one of the most unpleasing passages of his work, he compares Jews and Christians to a set of worms or frogs squabbling in the mud, and saying, "God is, and we are next to Him, and it is for our sake that the whole world is made; and God will come and take us up to heaven, except those who are bad, whom He will burn with fire."
The work of Origen against him is, as a whole, of much controversial merit and philosophical breadth. Origen, indeed, like Celsus, is not free from the superstitions of his time ”

“ We think not. Philosophy and magic, the search after knowledge and the search after power, were familiar to men who had never heard of Christianity; but this ideal is different from either, and from both of them united. Those who affirm that Philostratus never thought of the Christian history in his work, say that he intended Apollonius as a rival to Pythagoras. ”

“ It should be noticed that the very striking resemblances between the biography of Apollonius and the Gospels are resemblances in externals; the inner spirit is entirely different: in the one we find the self-contained philosophic spirit, striking even amid all the rhetoric and tawdry marvels with which Philostratus has dressed it ”

“ Baur says that "in acuteness, in dialectical aptitude, in many-sided cultivation, at once philosophic and general, Celsus stands behind no opponent of Christianity." Admitting that this panegyric is not groundless, we must add, that in vital insight Celsus was deficient. As an opponent of Christianity, the chief characteristic of Celsus is a strong, narrow, intolerant common sense. To him Christianity is an "exitiabilis superstitio"; he gives credence to every story against it on which he can lay his hands ”

“ Do not they rather lead and assist to the attainment of truth?" Nor had that similarity between the human and the animal frame, which the natural science of our own day insists upon, escaped his notice. ”

“ That the founder of the Alexandrian school of philosophy (for such Ammonius Saccas was) should have been at the same time a Christian, though not impossible, seems hardly likely. Moreover, the Ammonius of Eusebius wrote books; whereas, according to both Longinus and Porphyry, Ammonius Saccas wrote none. Plotinus is said to have been most strongly impressed with his first hearing of Ammonius, and to have cried out, "This is the man I was looking for!" ”