Contra Celsum Ad Infinitum

Like 99.9999% of the people who talk about the "Gnostic gospels" or "The Gospel of Thomas" I do not read ancient Coptic though I am still working, slowly, on learning to read the New Testament in Greek.   I have, though, unlike those whose knowledge of such stuff relies more on Dan Brown and low-brow to low-middle-brow atheist and anti-Christian polemics, read translations of the "Thomas" gospel as well as translations of a number of the other so-called "Gnostic" gospels.  

The fad for "Gnosticism" which I find about as reliably authentic as most of the stuff peddled as authentic witchcraft, is ironic because the Gnostics were the genuine haters of the body and all its aspects, haters of the natural world, the stuff that the very same atheists who try to argue from the stuff that Elaine Pagels peddles accuse Christianity of.  I'd never deny that there is a lot of, especially, medieval Christianity that indulged in something of the sort and that the damage done is prevalent today - it takes more than a few centuries to get that kind of damage out of a human culture - it's either not authentic to the Gospel of Jesus, who was remarkably nonjudgmental about sex in the Gospels or it's based in a sentence or phrase obsessed about and not infrequently distorted to suit a preexisting obsession of the one doing it.  I suspect Pagels' like Bart Ehrman's apostasy is more a reflection of their unsurprising dissatisfaction with the strain of degenerate American evangelical distortion they adopted as young people than it is a stain on what Jesus, Paul, etc. actually said.  I get the feeling they're sort of anti-proof-texting to find stuff to attack what they don't like, a bad habit they may well have picked up from the evangelicals.  

I don't think we're going to get out of the damage that American and other English language Christianity has had done to it by Catholic integralism (which goes beyond one language community) and Protestants who can go under the label of "evangelical" without a long, protracted religious brawl.  

In looking into the history of scoffing at the Virgin Birth narrative I read at the beginning of Origen's book opposing an early example of that,  Countering Celsus, was something he had to be convinced to write since the habit of the early Christians was to not answer their critics as Jesus had not answered his accusers.  I don't think we in the 21st century are going to find it possible to let the "christians" get away with their distortions which are more damaging than the recycled, classical era scoffing of the atheists.   Looking at his book, considered by scholars to be the most accurate and reliable representation of what Celsus wrote (Origen, unlike so many of today's secular academics really believed it was a sin to bear false witness) it's remarkable how just about everything you'll read in online atheist invective was already current back then.