Origen of Alexandria, Against Celsus 1.16

I wonder how Celsus could place the Odrysians, Samothracians, Eleusinians, and Hyperboreans among the most ancient and wise nations, yet refuse to count the Jews as either wise or ancient, even though many writings from Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Greeks testify to their antiquity—writings I considered superfluous to reproduce here. Anyone who wishes can read Flavius Josephus’s two books on the antiquity of the Jews, where he assembles a large collection of authors bearing witness to it, and the younger Tatian’s discourse against the Greeks, which displays the most learned writers on the antiquity of the Jews and Moses. It appears, then, that Celsus speaks these things not in truth but out of a love for calumny, aiming to accuse the origin of Christianity because it is connected to the Jews. He also declares Homer’s Galactophagi, the Druids of the Gauls, and the Getae to be most wise and ancient peoples, discussing matters related to Jewish teachings—peoples of whom I do not know whether any writings survive—while he alone rejects the Hebrews, as far as he can, from both antiquity and wisdom. Again, when compiling a catalogue of ancient and wise men who benefited their contemporaries and later generations through their writings, he expelled Moses from the list of the wise. Of Linus, whom Celsus placed above those he named, neither laws nor words are brought forward that turned back and served nations; but the laws of Moses are carried by a whole nation scattered throughout the entire inhabited world. See, therefore, whether he did not openly act wickedly by excluding Moses from the catalogue of the wise. He claimed that Linus, Musaeus, Orpheus, Pherecydes, the Persian Zoroaster, and Pythagoras had received these things, committed their own doctrines to books, and preserved them until now. And he willingly forgot the myth about the so‑called gods as human‑like, a myth recorded especially by Orpheus.