Egyptian riddles and Mosaic myths

Yet Celsus, even against his will, fell into bearing witness that the world is rather young and not yet ten thousand years old, when he said that the Greeks too consider these things ancient because, owing to the floods and conflagrations, they have neither seen nor remember anything older. Let the Egyptians, whom he counts the wisest, be Celsus’s teachers of the myth of conflagrations and inundations. The traces of their wisdom are irrational animals that are worshipped, and arguments to show that such worship of God is reasonable, and of a hidden and mystical kind.

If the Egyptians, to give dignity to their doctrine about the animals, offer theological explanations, they are wise. But if one who has assented to the law and the lawgiver of the Jews refers everything to the Creator of the universe, the only God, he is counted by Celsus and those like him inferior to one who brings divinity down not only into rational and mortal living beings but even into irrational ones. This goes beyond the mythical doctrine of transmigration, which tells of the soul falling from the vaults of heaven and descending as far as irrational animals, not only tame ones but even the most savage. And if the Egyptians tell myths, they are believed to have philosophized through riddles and secrets; but if Moses, writing for a whole nation, leaves them histories and laws, his words are thought to be empty myths that do not even admit of allegory.