In the long-lasting reaches of what we now call Late Antiquity, at the end of the Middle Empire, when for more than two decades a pandemic swept through half of Europe, wiping out its population at times by the thousands a day, Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire and conquered it defended its northern borders against Germanic tribes, whose names are as obscure as they are euphonious today, such as the Marcomanni and Quadi, so it was around that time, around the year 178, perhaps a year earlier or later, that the first comprehensive and downright detail-obsessed refutation of Christianity came into being .

Of course, this hardly deserved the designation of a religion.

Rather, it was an extremely heterogeneous, mostly hidden,

The title of that pamphlet is Alethes Logos (True Teaching).

Nothing is known of its author—a scholar named Kelsus—nor of its scope.

The text itself is lost.

Everything that can be reconstructed from the content - scholars are, as should be expected, at odds about the content of the tradition - comes from the eight-book counter-writing "Contra Celsum" by the church scholar Origen, in which, fortunately, his opponent so allows us to have a say in detail so that we can get an idea of ​​the original text.

Kelsus' criticism of man's feeling of superiority

The tone of Kelsos' critique of Christianity is polemical, at times even aggressive, and yet noticeably permeated by the effort to convince the apostates of the absurdity, even the madness of their beliefs with intellectual means, namely reason, which was already highly valued at the time.

Above all, the author takes issue with the narcissistic special position with which the biblical tradition grants man unrestricted dominion over the world, a supremacy that is not justified by anything.

"Why," asks Kelsus, is it claimed that "God made everything for man," since "the whole universe might as well have been created for the sake of unreasonable beasts as for man," and tests popular arguments for their validity: "If one If we want to assert that we are the rulers of the irrational creatures because we hunt and eat the irrational animals, then we will say: Why weren't we created rather for them, since they also hunt and eat us?"

Man is a wholly flawed creature to Kelsos, being by nature naked, barefoot, and unarmed, must acquire all the skills and possessions to ensure its survival, while non-human animals are pre-equipped with the equipment necessary for survival.

He also does not accept cultural achievements such as government, warfare or construction activity as a human unique selling point, but rather imagines the scrutinizing gaze of an extraterrestrial, almost godlike observer: “If someone looked down from heaven at earth”, he asks not without mockery, “what would he do find a difference between what we do and what ants and bees do?”