Against Celsus, Book II

Jewish believers have not left the law§1

1In the first book of our dictated reply to Celsus’s work entitled The True Doctrine, we ended at the speech addressed to Jesus that Celsus puts in the mouth of his Jew, since that book had reached a sufficient length. This book we choose to compose, making our defence against the charges he brings against those from the people of the Jews who have believed in Jesus. And this is the very first thing we note: why, having once decided to bring on a character, Celsus does not have his Jew speak to those who believe from among the Gentiles, but to those from among the Jews. Yet his argument would have seemed most persuasive had it been written against us. But perhaps the man who professes to know everything did not see what consistency required in the speech he gave his character.

Let us consider, then, what he says to those from among the Jews who believe. He says that they have left the law of their fathers, that, beguiled by Jesus, they have been quite ridiculously deceived, and that they have deserted to another name and another way of life. He did not even notice that those from among the Jews who believe in Jesus have not left the law of their fathers. For they live by it, and they have come to be named after the poverty of their interpretation of the law. For among the Jews the poor man is called Ebion, and those from among the Jews who have accepted Jesus as the Christ are called Ebionites.

Peter too appears to have kept for a long time the Jewish customs that follow the law of Moses, since he had not yet learned from Jesus to rise from the law according to the letter to the law according to the spirit. This we have learned from the Acts of the Apostles. For on the day after an angel of God had appeared to Cornelius, telling him to send “to Joppa” for Simon called Peter (Acts 10:3–5), “Peter went up to the upper room to pray, about the sixth hour. And he became hungry and wanted to eat. While they were preparing it, a trance came upon him, and he saw heaven opened and a vessel coming down, like a great sheet, let down by its four corners upon the earth; and in it were all the four-footed creatures and creeping things of the earth and the birds of the sky. And a voice came to him: ‘Rise, Peter, kill and eat.’ But Peter said, ‘By no means, Lord, for I have never eaten anything common and unclean.’ And a voice came to him a second time: ‘What God has cleansed, you must not call common’ ” (Acts 10:9–15).

See in these words how Peter is presented as still keeping the Jewish customs about clean and unclean. And what follows makes clear that he needed a vision so that he would share the words of faith with Cornelius, who was not an Israelite according to the flesh, and with those who were with him; for he was still a Jew, living by the traditions of the Jews and looking down on those outside Judaism (Acts 10:28).

In the Epistle to the Galatians, too, Paul shows that Peter, still afraid of the Jews, stopped eating with the Gentiles, and when James came to him “he separated himself” from the Gentiles, “fearing those of the circumcision”; and the rest of the Jews and Barnabas did the same as he did (Galatians 2:12–13). And it was consistent that those who had been sent to the circumcision should not depart from the Jewish customs, when “those who were reputed to be pillars gave to Paul and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship,” and went off themselves “to the circumcision,” so that those two might preach to the Gentiles (Galatians 2:9).

But why do I say that those who preached “to the circumcision” drew back and separated themselves from the Gentiles, when Paul himself also became “to the Jews a Jew, that he might win Jews” (1 Corinthians 9:20)? That is why, as is written in the Acts of the Apostles, he even brought an offering to the altar, to persuade the Jews that he was not an apostate from the law (Acts 21:21–26).

If Celsus had known all this, he would not have made his Jew say to those from Judaism who believe: “What possessed you, my fellow citizens, to leave the law of your fathers, and, beguiled by that man with whom we were just now arguing, to be so ridiculously deceived, and to desert us for another name and another way of life?”

The many things the disciples could not yet bear§2

2Since we have now come to speak of Peter and of those who taught Christianity to the people of the circumcision, I think it not out of place to set down a saying of Jesus from the Gospel according to John, with its interpretation. It is written that he said: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but whatever he hears he will speak” (John 16:12–13).

And we ask in this passage what the “many things” were that Jesus had “to say” to his disciples, but which they could not then “bear.” And I say: perhaps, since the apostles were Jews and had been brought up in the law of Moses according to the letter, he had “to say” to them what the true law is, and of what “heavenly things” the worship among the Jews was carried out “as a copy and shadow” (Hebrews 8:5), and of what “good things to come” the law about eating and drinking, festivals, new moons and sabbaths contained “a shadow” (Hebrews 10:1; Colossians 2:16–17). And these were the “many things” that he had “to say” to them.

But he saw that it is very hard to uproot from the soul doctrines that have been almost born with a man and brought up with him to the age of manhood, and that have persuaded those who received them that they are divine and that to unsettle them is impious; and very hard to prove them, by the surpassing worth of the “knowledge” that accords with Christ, that is, with the truth, to be “refuse” and “loss” (Philippians 3:7–8), so that the hearers would be persuaded. So he put it off to a more suitable time, the time after his passion and resurrection. For truly the help would have been offered out of season to those not yet able to receive it, since it would have overturned the conception of Jesus they had already received, that he was the Christ and the Son of the living God (Matthew 16:16).

And consider whether understanding the words “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” in this way does not yield a meaning that is far from contemptible. For the “many things” are those that belong to the interpretation and clarification of the law in its spiritual sense; and at that time the disciples, born and brought up among the Jews, were somehow unable to “bear” them.

I think too that, because those things were a type, while what the Holy Spirit was going to teach them was the truth, it was for this reason said: “When he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13), as if he were saying: into all the truth of the realities, while you, being occupied with their types, supposed that you were offering God the true worship.

And according to the promise of Jesus, “the Spirit of truth” came upon Peter, saying to him about the four-footed creatures and creeping things of the earth and the birds of the sky: “Rise, Peter, kill and eat” (Acts 10:13). And the Spirit came to him while he was still superstitious; for even to the divine voice he says: “By no means, Lord, for I have never eaten anything common and unclean” (Acts 10:14). And he taught the doctrine of true and spiritual foods in the words “What God has cleansed, you must not call common” (Acts 10:15). And after that vision “the Spirit of truth,” guiding Peter “into all the truth,” told him the many things that he could not “bear” while Jesus was still with him in the flesh. But there will be another occasion for explaining these matters, which concern the interpretation of the law of Moses.

Celsus’s ignorance of Jewish believers§3

3But our present task is to expose the ignorance of Celsus, in whose book the Jew says to his fellow citizens and Israelites who have believed in Jesus: “What possessed you to leave the law of your fathers?” and what follows. Yet how have they left the law of their fathers who rebuke those who do not hear it, and say: “Tell me, you who read the law, do you not hear the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons,” as far as “which things are spoken as an allegory,” and what follows (Galatians 4:21–24)? And how have they left the law of their fathers who in their discourses always call to mind the heritage of their fathers, and say: “Or does not the law also say these things? For it is written in the law of Moses: ‘You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain’ (Deuteronomy 25:4). Is it for oxen that God cares? Or is he speaking altogether for our sake? For it was written for our sake,” and what follows (1 Corinthians 9:8–10)?

And how confusedly the Jew in Celsus says these things! He could have said more plausibly that some of you have left the customs on the pretext of interpretations and allegories; that others of you, while interpreting spiritually, as you profess, keep the customs of your fathers none the less; and that others of you, without interpreting, wish both to accept Jesus as the one foretold in prophecy and to keep the law of Moses as your fathers did, as though you had the whole meaning of the spirit in the wording.

But how could Celsus have made the facts of this matter plain? In what follows he made mention of godless sects wholly alien to Jesus, and of others that abandon the Creator, yet he did not know that there are also Israelites who believe in Jesus and have not left the law of their fathers. For it was not his aim to examine with a love of truth all that bears on the subject, so as to accept anything useful he might find. Rather, as an enemy, and one wholly bent on overthrowing such things the moment he heard them, he wrote them down.

The law as the beginning of the Gospel§4

4Next, the Jew in his book says to those from the people who have believed: “Only yesterday or the day before, when we were punishing this man who was duping you, you turned away from the law of your fathers.” He said this without any accurate knowledge of what he was talking about, as we have shown.

After this, the following seems to me to show some cleverness: “Or how is it that you begin from our sacred writings, yet as you go on you dishonour them, though you can name no other starting point for your doctrine than our law?”

For it is true that for Christians the introduction comes from the sacred writings of Moses and the writings of the prophets; and after the introduction, the progress of those being introduced lies in the interpretation and clarification of these writings, as they seek the mystery “according to revelation,” “kept in silence through eternal ages,” but “now made manifest” in the words of the prophets and in the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 16:25–26). But those who advance do not, as you claim, dishonour what is written in the law. Rather they bestow greater honour on it, showing how great a depth of wise and secret sayings is held by those writings, which the Jews have not contemplated, since they read them rather superficially and as if they were myths.

And what is out of place in the law being the beginning of our doctrine, that is, of the gospel? For our Lord himself says to those who did not believe in him: “If you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote about me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” (John 5:46–47). Moreover, one of the evangelists, Mark, says: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet: ‘Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way before you’ ” (Mark 1:1–2; Malachi 3:1; Exodus 23:20), showing that the beginning of the gospel depends on the Jewish writings.

What, then, is said against us by Celsus’s Jew in the words: “For if anyone foretold to you that the Son of God would come to men, that prophet was ours, and our God’s”? And what charge against Christianity is it if John, who baptized Jesus, was a Jew (Matthew 3:13–17)? For it does not follow, because he was a Jew, that every believer, whether he comes to the word from the Gentiles or from the Jews, must keep the law of Moses according to the letter.

The kingdom given to the Gentiles§5

5After this, although Celsus repeats himself about Jesus, saying now for the second time that he did wrong and paid the penalty at the hands of the Jews, we will not repeat our defence, but rest content with what we said before.

Next, his Jew belittles as stale the teaching about the resurrection of the dead, the judgment of God, and honour for the righteous but fire for the unrighteous; and by claiming that Christians are taught nothing new in these matters, he thinks he overturns Christianity. We must say to him that our Jesus, seeing that the Jews were doing nothing worthy of the lessons in the prophets, taught by a parable that “the kingdom of God” would be “taken away” from them “and given” to those from the Gentiles (Matthew 21:43). That is why one can truly see that all the teachings of the Jews of today are myths and idle talk, for they do not have the light of the knowledge of the Scriptures, while the teachings of Christians are truth. These are able to lift up and raise on high the soul and mind of a human being, and they persuade him to have a “citizenship” not like that of the Jews, somewhere here below, but “in heaven” (Philippians 3:20). This is evident among those who contemplate the greatness of the meanings in the law and the prophets, and who are able to present them to others.

Jewish customs and the hidden sense of the law§6

6Let it be granted that Jesus kept all the customs of the Jews, even down to their sacrifices: what does this contribute to the claim that we should not believe in him as the Son of God? Jesus, then, is the Son of the God who gave the law and the prophets; and we who belong to the Church do not transgress that law. Rather, we have fled from the myth-making of the Jews, and we are disciplined and taught by the mystical contemplation of the law and the prophets.

For the prophets themselves do not let the meaning of what they say come to rest in the plain narrative, nor in the legislation that follows the words and the letter. In one place, when they are supposedly about to recount history, they say: “I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter riddles from the beginning” (Psalm 78:2). In another, praying about the law as obscure and as needing God for it to be understood, they say in prayer: “Unveil my eyes, and I will perceive your wonders out of your law” (Psalm 119:18).

Jesus was not boastful, false or unholy§7

7Let them show where in Jesus there is found even a hint of a word spoken out of arrogance. For how is he arrogant who says: “Learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:29)? Or how is he arrogant who, “during supper” (John 13:2), took off his garment in the presence of his disciples, tied a “towel” around himself, poured “water into the basin” (John 13:4–5), washed the “feet” of each one, rebuked the one who was unwilling to offer his, and said: “If I do not wash you, you have no part with me” (John 13:8)? Or how is he arrogant who says: “And I was among you, not as the one who reclines at table, but as the one who serves” (Luke 22:27)?

Let someone prove what lies he told, and set out which lies are great and which small, so as to show that Jesus told the great ones. There is also another way to refute the Jew: just as no lie is more of a lie than another, so neither is one lie greater than another; just as no truth is more true than another, or more greatly true.

And let Celsus’s Jew, above all, declare what Jesus’ unholy deeds were. Or is it unholy to draw people away from bodily circumcision, a bodily sabbath, bodily feasts, bodily new moons, and clean and unclean things, and to turn the mind toward a law that is worthy of God, true and spiritual (Romans 7:14), while the one who is an ambassador “for Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:20) knows how to become a Jew “to the Jews, that he may win Jews”, and “to those under the law as under the law, that he may win those under the law” (1 Corinthians 9:20)?

Why the one foretold was rejected§8

8He says that many others of the same kind as Jesus could also appear to those who wish to be deceived. Then let Celsus’s Jew show not many, nor even a few, but even one such as Jesus was: one who, with the power that was in him, brought into the human race a teaching and doctrines that benefit life, and turned people from the flood of sins.

He says that those who believe in Christ bring this charge against the Jews, that they have not believed in Jesus as God. On this point too we have already made our defence above, showing at the same time in what way we understand him to be God, and in what respect we call him man.

“And how,” he says, “could we, who declared to all people that one would come from God to punish the unrighteous, have dishonoured him when he came?” To make a defence against this, since it is so very silly, does not seem reasonable to me. It is as if someone else were to say: “How could we, who taught self-control, have done anything licentious? Or how could we, who champion justice, have done wrong?” For as such things are found among human beings, so it was a human thing that those who claimed to have believed the prophets when they spoke of the Christ who was to come should have disbelieved him when he came in accordance with what was prophesied. And if another reason must be added, we will say that the prophets foretold this very thing as well. Isaiah, at any rate, says plainly: “Hearing you will hear and will not understand, and seeing you will see and will not perceive; for the heart of this people has grown dull” (Isaiah 6:9–10), and what follows.

Let them tell us what it is that the Jews hear and what they see, when it is prophesied of them that they will not understand what is spoken and will not see in the way they ought what is seen. Yet it is plain that when they saw Jesus they did not see who he was, and when they heard him they did not grasp from his words the divinity in him, which was transferring God’s care from the Jews to those from the Gentiles who believe in him. So one can see that after the coming of Jesus the Jews have been wholly abandoned, and have nothing of what they once held sacred, nor even any sign that some divinity is among them. For there are no longer prophets or wonders among them, though traces of these are found to some extent among Christians, and some of them even “greater” (John 14:12); and if we are to be believed when we say so, we too have seen them.

Celsus’s Jew says: “Why would we have dishonoured the one whom we proclaimed beforehand? Was it so that we might be punished more than others?” To this too one can say that, because of their unbelief toward Jesus and all the other outrages they committed against him, the Jews will not only suffer more than others at the judgment in which we believe, but have already suffered. For what nation has been banished from its own mother city and from the place proper to its ancestral worship, except the Jews alone? And they have suffered this as the most ignoble of men; for though they sinned in many things, they suffered it for none of those so much as for what they dared against our Jesus.

Not the body but the Word is God§9

9After this the Jew says: “How could we have regarded as God one who, among other things, as was commonly heard, displayed none of what he promised; and who, when we had convicted and condemned him and judged that he should be punished, was caught hiding and running away in the most disgraceful way, and was betrayed by the very men he called his disciples? And yet,” he says, “one who was God could neither flee nor be bound and led away; and least of all could one who was thought to be a saviour, and son and angel of the greatest God, be deserted and handed over by those who were with him, who had shared everything with him privately, and who had him for their teacher.”

To this we shall say that we too do not suppose that the body of Jesus, which was then seen and perceived by the senses, was God. And why do I speak of the body? Not even his soul, of which it is said: “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death” (Matthew 26:38; Mark 14:34). But just as, according to the Jews’ account, he who says “I am the Lord, the God of all flesh” (Jeremiah 32:27) and “Before me there was no other god, and after me there will be none” (Isaiah 43:10) is believed to be God, using the soul and body of the prophet as an instrument; and as, according to the Greeks, he who says “I know the number of the sand and the measures of the sea; I understand the mute, and I hear one who does not speak” (Herodotus, Histories 1.47) is held to be a god, speaking and being heard through the Pythia; so, according to us, the Word, who is God and Son of the God of the universe, said in Jesus: “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6), and “I am the door” (John 10:9), and “I am the living bread that came down from heaven” (John 6:51), and anything else like these.

We therefore charge the Jews with not regarding him as God, though the prophets in many places bear witness that he is a great power, and God in accordance with the God and Father of the universe. For we say that it was to him that the Father gave the command in the creation of the world recorded by Moses, saying “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3) and “Let there be a firmament” (Genesis 1:6), and all the rest that God commanded to come into being; and that it was to him he said, “Let us make man according to our image and likeness” (Genesis 1:26); and that the Word, so commanded, made all that the Father enjoined on him. We say this not as our own conjecture, but because we believe the prophecies current among the Jews, in which these very words are said about God and the things he made: “For he spoke, and they came into being; he commanded, and they were created” (Psalm 33:9; Psalm 148:5). For if God commanded and the things made were created, who, in the mind of the prophetic Spirit, could be the one able to carry out so great a command of the Father, except he who is, if I may so name him, the living Word and “the Truth” (John 14:6)?

That the Gospels too do not know the one who said in Jesus “I am the way and the truth and the life” as someone circumscribed, as though he existed nowhere outside the soul and body of Jesus, is plain from many passages, and also from the few that we shall cite, which run as follows. John the Baptist, prophesying that the Son of God would very soon appear, not as one confined to that body and soul but as one who reaches everywhere, says of him: “Among you stands one whom you do not know, who comes after me” (John 1:26–27). If, then, he had thought that the Son of God was only where the visible body of Jesus was, how could he have said, “Among you stands one whom you do not know”? And Jesus himself, raising the thoughts of his disciples to think greater things about the Son of God, says: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them” (Matthew 18:20). Of the same kind is his promise to the disciples when he says: “And behold, I am with you all the days until the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

We say this without separating the Son of God from Jesus; for after the saving dispensation the soul and body of Jesus have become, in the fullest sense, one with the Word of God. For if, according to the teaching of Paul, who says, “He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:17), everyone who has understood what it is to be joined to the Lord, and has been joined to him, is one spirit with the Lord, how much more, in a more divine and greater way, is that which was once composite one with the Word of God? He indeed showed among the Jews that he was “the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24) by the wonders he worked. Celsus suspected that these were done by sorcery; the Jews of that time, who had learned the tales about Beelzebul from I know not where, suspected that he cast out “demons by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons” (Matthew 12:24; Mark 3:22; Luke 11:15). Our Saviour refuted them there for speaking most absurdly, by pointing out that the kingdom of evil had not yet come to an end (Matthew 12:26; Mark 3:26). This will be clear to those who read the Gospel scripture with understanding; but this is not the time to explain it.

Jesus was not taken against his will§10

10But what did Jesus promise and not do? Let Celsus set it out and prove it. He will not be able to, above all because what he says against Jesus, or against us, he supposes he draws either from things misheard, or from readings of the Gospels, or from Jewish stories.

Again, since the Jew says that “we convicted him, condemned him, and judged that he should be punished,” let them show how those who were seeking to contrive false testimony against him convicted him (Matthew 26:59–60); unless, perhaps, the great proof against Jesus was the one his accusers stated: “This man said, ‘I am able to destroy the temple of God and to raise it up in three days’” (Matthew 26:61). For he himself “was speaking of the temple of his body” (John 2:21), while they, not knowing how to hear according to the speaker’s intention, thought that he meant the temple of stone, which the Jews honoured rather than honouring, as was right, the true temple of God the Word, of Wisdom and of Truth.

Let someone also tell us how Jesus “hid himself and slipped away most shamefully.” Let someone point out what in this deserved reproach. And since he says that he was also “caught,” I would reply that if being caught means being taken against one’s will, Jesus was not caught. For at the fitting time he did not prevent himself from coming into the hands of men, as “the Lamb of God,” so that he might take away “the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Indeed, “knowing all that was coming upon him, he went out and said to them, ‘Whom are you seeking?’ They answered, ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’ He said to them, ‘I am he.’ Judas also, who was betraying him, was standing with them. When he said to them, ‘I am he,’ they drew back and fell to the ground. So he asked again, ‘Whom are you seeking?’ And they said again, ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’ Jesus answered them, ‘I told you that I am he. So if you are seeking me, let these men go’” (John 18:4–8). Moreover, to the one who wanted to help him, who struck “the servant of the high priest” and cut off “his ear” (Matthew 26:51), he said: “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Or do you think that I cannot now call on my Father, and he will set beside me here more than twelve legions of angels? How then would the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must happen this way?” (Matthew 26:52–54).

If anyone thinks that in these matters the accounts are fictions made up by those who wrote the Gospels, why are the words of those who speak out of enmity and hatred toward him and toward Christians not rather the fictions, and the accounts of those who proved the sincerity of their devotion to Jesus by enduring anything whatever for the sake of his words the truth? For that the disciples of Jesus should have taken on such endurance and steadfastness, even to death, while their minds were inventing about their teacher things that never were […]. And to fair-minded people it is abundantly clear that they were persuaded of what they recorded, from the fact that they endured such great and so many sufferings for the sake of the one they believed to be the Son of God.

Judas was not wholly against his teacher§11

11Next, that he was “betrayed by those he called his disciples,” the Jew in Celsus learned from the Gospels, though he turned the one man Judas into many disciples, so as to seem to make the charge greater. But he did not go on to examine all that is recorded about Judas: that Judas fell into conflicting and opposed judgements about his teacher, and was neither against him with his whole soul, nor kept with his whole soul a pupil’s reverence for his teacher. For “he who betrayed him gave a sign” to the crowd that had come to seize Jesus, “saying, ‘The one I kiss is the man; seize him’” (Matthew 26:48). In this he kept something of his reverence for him; for had he not kept it, he would have betrayed him openly, without the pretence of a kiss.

Will this not, then, persuade everyone concerning Judas’s purpose, that together with his love of money and his wicked purpose to betray his teacher, he had something mixed into his soul, planted in him by the words of Jesus, which bore the look of a remnant, so to speak, of goodness? For it is written: “When Judas, who betrayed him, saw that he was condemned, he repented and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, ‘I have sinned in betraying righteous blood.’ But they said, ‘What is that to us? See to it yourself.’ And throwing the pieces of silver into the temple, he withdrew, and went away and hanged himself” (Matthew 27:3–5).

If Judas, the lover of money, who also stole what was put into “the money box” for the poor (John 12:6), “repented and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders,” it is clear that the teachings of Jesus were able to produce some repentance in him, and had not been utterly despised and spat out by the traitor. Moreover, the words “I have sinned in betraying righteous blood” were those of a man confessing his sin. See how burning and violent a grief arose in him from repentance for his sins, so that he could no longer bear even to live, but threw the money “into the temple,” withdrew, went away and hanged himself. For he passed sentence on himself, and so showed how much the teaching of Jesus could do even in Judas, the sinner, the thief and the traitor, who could not utterly despise what he had learned from Jesus.

Or will Celsus and those like him say that the passages which show that Judas’s defection was not complete, even after all he dared against his teacher, are fictions, and that only this is true, that one of the disciples betrayed him? And will they add to what is written that he betrayed him with his whole soul as well? That is implausible: to act in everything as an enemy would, both believing and disbelieving the same writings.

If we must also set out an argument about Judas that will put them to shame, we shall say that in the Book of Psalms the whole of the hundred and eighth Psalm (Psalm 109) contains the prophecy about Judas. It begins: “O God, do not pass over my praise in silence, for the mouth of a sinner and the mouth of a deceiver have been opened against me” (Psalm 109:1–2). It is also prophesied in it that Judas cut himself off from the number of the apostles because of his sin, and that another was chosen in his place (Acts 1:25–26); and this is shown in the words, “And let another take his office” (Psalm 109:8).

But come, suppose he was betrayed by one of his disciples who was worse disposed than Judas, and who had, as it were, poured away every word he had heard from Jesus: what does this contribute to an accusation against Jesus or against Christianity? And how does this prove the teaching false? We have also answered the points that come next in what we said before, showing that Jesus was not caught while running away, but willingly gave himself up for us all. It follows that, even if he was bound, he was bound willingly, teaching us to take such things upon ourselves for the sake of godliness, not unwillingly.

Pupils who turned against their teachers§12

12Childish, too, seem to me such claims as this: that “a good general, who has led many tens of thousands, has never been betrayed; no, nor even a wicked robber chief, captain of utter villains, since he seemed useful to those with him. But he, betrayed by those under him, neither led them as a good general, nor, after deceiving his disciples, did he inspire in those he had deceived even the goodwill, if I may call it so, that men feel toward a robber chief.” For one could find many accounts of generals betrayed by their own people, and of robber chiefs captured because of men who did not keep their agreements with them. But let it be granted that no general or robber chief was ever betrayed: what does this contribute toward making it a point against Jesus that one of his pupils became his betrayer?

Since Celsus professes philosophy, we would ask him: was it a charge against Plato that Aristotle, after hearing him for twenty years, left him and attacked his teaching on the immortality of the soul, and called Plato’s Ideas “twitterings” (Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 1.22, 83a33)? We might press the difficulty further and say: was Plato no longer strong in dialectic, or able to establish what he had thought out, once Aristotle had left him, and are Plato’s doctrines false for that reason? Or is it possible that, while Plato was right, as those who follow his philosophy would say, Aristotle proved wicked and ungrateful toward his teacher?

Chrysippus, too, is plainly attacking Cleanthes in many places in his writings, bringing in new views against what Cleanthes had taught, though Cleanthes had been his teacher when Chrysippus was still young and only beginning in philosophy. Yet Aristotle is said to have studied with Plato for twenty years, and Chrysippus to have spent no short time with Cleanthes; but Judas did not spend even three years with Jesus. From what is written in the lives of the philosophers one could find many things like those for which Celsus blames Jesus on account of Judas. The Pythagoreans used to build empty tombs for those who, after being turned to philosophy, ran back to ordinary life; and Pythagoras and his followers were not, for that reason, weak in argument and proof.

Jesus foretold the persecution of his followers and the fall of Jerusalem§13

13After this Celsus’s Jew says: “Though I have much to say about what happened in Jesus’ life, things that are true and unlike what Jesus’ disciples wrote, I deliberately pass them over.” What, then, are these true things, unlike what is written in the Gospels, that Celsus’s Jew passes over? Or is he using what passes for rhetorical skill, pretending that he has something to say, when in fact he had nothing from outside the Gospel to bring forward that could strike the hearer as true and as a clear accusation against Jesus and his teaching?

He charges the disciples with having invented the claim that Jesus foreknew and foretold everything that happened to him. That this too is true, whether Celsus likes it or not, we shall show from many other things the Saviour spoke prophetically, in which he foretold what would happen to Christians even in later generations. Who would not marvel at the prediction, “You will be brought before governors and kings for my sake, as a testimony to them and to the nations” (Matthew 10:18), and at whatever else he foretold about the persecution of his disciples? For on account of what doctrine, among all that have arisen among men, are others punished too, so that one of Jesus’ accusers could say that Jesus, seeing impious or false doctrines being prosecuted, thought he would lend dignity to this one too by an alleged prediction about it? If anyone had to be brought “before governors and kings” (Matthew 10:18) for their doctrines, who should it have been but the Epicureans, who do away with providence altogether, and the Peripatetics as well, who say that prayers and the sacrifices offered as to the divine achieve nothing?

But someone will say that the Samaritans too are persecuted for their religion. To him we shall reply: the Sicarii are put to death because of circumcision, as men who mutilate the body contrary to the established laws and to what is granted to the Jews alone. And you will not hear a judge asking whether a Sicarius who strives to live by this supposed religion will be released if he changes his mind, but led off to death if he holds firm. No, proof of circumcision is enough to have the man who underwent it put to death. Christians alone, in keeping with what their Saviour said, “You will be brought before governors and kings for my sake” (Matthew 10:18), are allowed by the judges, right up to their last breath, once they have forsworn Christianity, sacrificed according to the common customs and taken the oath, to go home and live without danger.

See whether it is not with great authority that these words are spoken: “Everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven; and everyone who denies me before men,” and the rest (Matthew 10:32–33). Go back with me in thought to Jesus as he says these things, and look at things prophesied that had not yet happened. See whether you would not say, if you disbelieved him, that he was talking nonsense and speaking in vain, since what he said would not come to pass; or, if you were in two minds about assenting to his words, whether you would not say: “If these things are fulfilled, and the teaching of Jesus’ words becomes established, so that governors and kings take pains to put to death those who acknowledge Jesus, then we shall believe that he says these things as one who has received great authority from God to sow this word in the human race, and who is convinced that it will prevail.”

Who will not marvel, going back in thought to him as he then taught and said, “This gospel will be preached in the whole world, as a testimony to them and to the nations” (Matthew 24:14), and seeing that, just as he said, the gospel of Jesus Christ has been preached throughout the world under heaven “to Greeks and barbarians, to wise and foolish” (Romans 1:14)? For the word spoken with power has prevailed over every kind of human nature, and no race of men can be found that has escaped receiving the teaching of Jesus.

Let Celsus’s Jew, who does not believe that Jesus foreknew all that happened to him, consider how, while Jerusalem still stood and the whole Jewish worship was carried on in it, Jesus foretold what would befall it at the hands of the Romans. For surely they will not say that Jesus’ own acquaintances and hearers handed down the teaching of the Gospels without writing and left their disciples without written records about Jesus. Now it is written in them: “When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near” (Luke 21:20). At that time there were no armies at all around Jerusalem, encircling it, enclosing it and besieging it. That began while Nero was still emperor and went on until the reign of Vespasian, whose son Titus destroyed Jerusalem: as Josephus writes, on account of James the Just, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ; but as the truth shows, on account of Jesus the Christ of God.

Celsus would not even grant him foreknowledge§14

14Celsus could, however, have accepted or conceded that Jesus foreknew what would happen to him, and then made it seem a trivial thing, as he did with the miracles when he said they were done by sorcery. He could indeed have said that many people, through divination by omens, by birds, by sacrifices or by horoscopes, have known what was going to befall them. But this he would not concede, as being the greater thing; whereas he has in a way accepted that Jesus worked the miracles, and seems to have discredited this under the pretext of sorcery.

Phlegon, however, in the thirteenth or fourteenth book, I think, of his Chronicles, even granted Christ foreknowledge of certain future events, although he confused what concerned Peter, taking it as said of Jesus; and he testified that the things foretold turned out as Jesus had said. Yet even he, through what he says about foreknowledge, declared, as if against his will, that the teaching found in the fathers of our doctrines was not without a more divine power.

The Gospel writers’ love of truth§15

15Celsus says that Jesus’ disciples too, “having no excuse to offer for a notorious fact, invented this: the claim that he had foreknown everything.” He did not notice, or did not wish to notice, the love of truth in those who wrote. They admitted that Jesus had told his disciples beforehand, “You will all fall away this night” (Matthew 26:31), and that he spoke the truth, since they did fall away (Matthew 26:56); and that he had also prophesied to Peter, “Before the cock crows you will deny me three times” (Matthew 26:34), and that Peter denied him three times (Matthew 26:69–75).

If they had not been lovers of truth but, as Celsus supposes, writers of fiction, they would not have recorded Peter’s denial or the falling away of Jesus’ disciples. For even if these things did happen, who could have refuted their account by showing that this is how it turned out? And yet one would expect men who wished to teach the readers of the Gospels to despise death for the sake of confessing Christianity to have kept silent about these things. But as it is, seeing that the word would prevail over men by its power, they set down even things like these, which somehow would neither harm their readers nor give them a pretext for denial.

He truly died, so he truly rose§16

16Very naively he says that the disciples wrote such things about Jesus to excuse what happened to him. “It is as if,” he says, “someone, while saying that a man is just, were to show him doing wrong; while saying he is holy, show him committing murder; while saying he is immortal, show him dead; and were to add to all this that he had foretold these things.” His example is plainly unlike the case. For there is nothing absurd in this, that one who had taken upon himself to be the pattern that would be set before mankind of how they ought to live should have shown how one ought to die for the sake of piety; and that is apart from the fact that his dying for men has been of some benefit to the whole universe, as we showed in the previous book.

Then he thinks that the whole admission of his suffering confirms the case against him rather than refuting it. For he has not seen how much has been worked out philosophically on this point in Paul, and said by the prophets. It also escaped him that one of those in the heretical sects has said that Jesus suffered these things in appearance, without really suffering. Not knowing this, he said: “For you did not even say that he seemed to impious men to suffer these things but did not suffer; no, you openly admit that he suffered.” But we do not apply “seeming” to his suffering, so that his resurrection too may not be false but true. For if one who truly died rose again, he truly rose; but one who only seemed to have died did not truly rise.

Since unbelievers mock the teaching about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we shall cite Plato too, who says that Er the son of Armenius rose from the pyre after twelve days and gave an account of those in Hades (Plato, Republic 10.614b). And since we are addressing unbelievers, the story in Heraclides about the woman who did not breathe will not be wholly useless at this point. Many, too, are recorded to have come back from their tombs, not only on the same day but even on the next. What wonder, then, if one who had wondrously done many things beyond human power, things so plain that those who cannot look the fact of their happening in the face slander them by putting them in the same class as sorceries, also had something more in his own death, so that his soul left the body of its own will and, after setting certain things in order outside it, came back again when it wished?

John records Jesus as having said something of this kind in the words: “No one takes my soul from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it again” (John 10:18). And perhaps this is why he went out of the body beforehand: to preserve it, and so that his legs would not be broken like those of the robbers crucified with him. “For the soldiers broke the legs of the first, and of the other who was crucified with him; but when they came to Jesus and saw that he had breathed his last, they did not break his legs” (John 19:32–33).

So we have answered this question too: “How then is it credible that he foretold it?” As for “How is the dead man immortal?”, let whoever wishes learn that it is not the dead man who is immortal, but the one who rose from the dead. So not only is the dead man not immortal, but not even Jesus before his death, the composite being, was immortal, since he was going to die. For no one who is going to die is immortal; one is immortal when he will die no more. “Christ, being raised from the dead, dies no more; death no longer has dominion over him” (Romans 6:9), even if those who have not been able to grasp how these words are meant would rather it were not so.

Meeting a foreknown death is no folly§17

17Very foolish too is this: “What god or spirit or sensible man, foreseeing that such things would happen to him, would not avoid them if he could, but would run into what he foreknew?” Socrates, at any rate, knew that he would drink the hemlock and die; and he could, had he listened to Crito, have slipped out of prison and suffered none of this (Plato, Crito 44b). But he chose, as seemed reasonable to him, what was better for him: to die as a philosopher rather than to live unworthy of philosophy. Leonidas too, the Spartan general, knowing he was on the point of dying with the men at Thermopylae, did not scheme to live on in shame, but said to those with him, “Let us take our breakfast as men who will dine in Hades.” Those who care to collect such stories will find many.

What wonder, then, if Jesus, knowing what would happen, did not avoid it but met the very things he foreknew? Even Paul, his disciple, having heard what would happen to him once he went up to Jerusalem, went straight to meet the dangers, rebuking those who wept around him and tried to stop him from going up to Jerusalem (Acts 21:10–14). And many in our own time, knowing that if they confessed Christianity they would die, but if they denied it they would be released and recover their property, have despised life and of their own free will chosen death for the sake of piety.

Foreknowledge did not undo their weakness§18

18Next after this, the Jew in Celsus says another silly thing: “How, if he foretold both the one who would betray him and the one who would deny him, would they not have feared him as a god, so that the one would no longer betray him and the other would not deny him?” (compare Matthew 26:21–25, 34). But the most wise Celsus did not see the contradiction in this passage. If Jesus foreknew as God, and his foreknowledge could not prove false, then it was not possible either for the man known as the future betrayer not to betray, or for the man shown to be the future denier not to deny. But if it was possible for the one not to betray and the other not to deny, so that not betraying and not denying would have come about in those who had learned of these things beforehand, then the one who said, “This man will betray and that man will deny,” was no longer speaking the truth.

For if he foreknew the man who would betray him, he saw the wickedness from which the betrayal would come, and this wickedness was in no way overturned by the foreknowledge. And again, if he had grasped who would deny him, he foretold that this man would deny him because he saw the weakness from which the denial would come; and that weakness was not going to be overturned so suddenly by the foreknowledge.

And where does he get this: “But they themselves betrayed and denied him without caring for him at all”? For it has been shown concerning the betrayer that it is false that he betrayed his teacher without having had any regard for him at all. And this is shown no less concerning the one who denied him, who after the denial “went out and wept bitterly” (Matthew 26:75; Luke 22:62).

The outcome proves the prophecy true§19

19Superficial too is this remark: “For surely even when a man who is being plotted against learns of it in advance and tells the plotters beforehand, they give it up and are on their guard.” For many have plotted even against people who had learned of the plot in advance.

Next, as though drawing the conclusion of his argument, he says: “So it was not because these things had been foretold that they happened, for that is impossible; but since they happened, the foretelling is proved false. For it is altogether impossible that those who had heard beforehand should still betray and deny.” But once his premises have been overturned, the conclusion is overturned with them: “It was not because these things had been foretold that they happened.” We say that these things both happened, as things that could happen, and that, since they happened, the foretelling is shown to be true; for truth about things to come is judged by the outcome. False, then, is what he said in these terms, that the foretelling is proved false; and Celsus has said to no purpose: “For it is altogether impossible that those who had heard beforehand should still betray and deny.”

Foreknowledge does not cause what it foresees§20

20After this let us see how he puts it. “He foretold these things,” he says, “being a god, and what was foretold certainly had to happen. So a god brought his own disciples and prophets, with whom he dined and drank, to the point of becoming impious and unholy, when he above all ought to have done good to all men, and especially to those who shared his table. Or would one who had shared a man’s table not afterwards plot against him, while one who had feasted with a god became his plotter? And, what is still more absurd, the god himself plotted against those at table with him, by making them traitors and impious men.”

Since you wish me to answer even those arguments of Celsus that seem to me trivial, we shall say this in reply. Celsus thinks that what is prophesied by some kind of foreknowledge comes to pass because it was prophesied. We do not grant this. We say that the one who prophesied is not the cause of what will be on the ground that he foretold it would happen; rather, what will be, which would have been even if it had not been prophesied, gave the one who foreknew it the cause for foretelling it. And all of this lies within the foreknowledge of the one who prophesies it: when it is possible for a given thing to happen and possible also for it not to happen, one particular one of the two will come about. And we do not say that the one who foreknows takes away the possibility of its happening or not happening and says, as it were, something like this: “This will certainly be, and it cannot turn out otherwise.” This principle extends to all foreknowledge of anything that lies in our power, whether in the divine Scriptures or in the histories of the Greeks. And what the logicians call the “lazy argument”, which is a sophism, will not be a sophism as far as Celsus is concerned; but by sound reasoning it is a sophism.

To make this understood, I shall use from Scripture the prophecies about Judas, or our Saviour’s foreknowledge of him as the one who would betray him; and from the Greek histories, the oracle given to Laius, granting for the present that it is true, since that does not harm the argument. Concerning Judas, then, the hundred and eighth Psalm (Psalm 109 in English Bibles) speaks in the person of the Saviour; it begins: “O God, do not pass over my praise in silence; for the mouth of a sinner and the mouth of a deceitful man have been opened against me” (Psalm 109:1–2). If you observe what is written in the psalm, you will find that, just as he was foreknown as the one who would betray the Saviour, so he was also the cause of the betrayal, and because of his wickedness deserved the curses spoken in the prophecy. For let him suffer these things, it says, “because he did not remember to show mercy, and persecuted a poor and needy man” (Psalm 109:16). So he could have remembered “to show mercy” and not persecuted the one whom he persecuted; but though he could, he did not do so, and betrayed him instead, so that he deserves the curses pronounced against him in the prophecy.

Against the Greeks we shall use what was said in this way to Laius, whether the tragic poet set it down in its very words or in words of equal force. It is said to him, then, by the one who indeed foreknew what would be: “Do not sow the furrow of children against the will of the gods; for if you beget a child, the one born of you will kill you, and all your house will walk through blood” (Euripides, Phoenician Women 18–20). In this too, then, it is clearly shown that it was possible for Laius not to sow “the furrow of children”, for the oracle would not have commanded him what was not possible; and it was also possible for him to sow, and neither of the two was forced upon him. But because he did not take care not to sow “the furrow of children”, it followed from his having sown that he suffered the tragedy of Oedipus and Jocasta and their sons.

The so-called lazy argument too, which is a sophism, is of this sort: it is put hypothetically to a sick man and, as a sophism, dissuades him from using a physician to regain his health. The argument runs like this: “If it is fated for you to recover from the illness, you will recover whether you call in the physician or not. But if it is fated for you not to recover from the illness, you will not recover whether you call in the physician or not. Now either it is fated for you to recover from the illness or it is fated for you not to recover. Therefore you call in the physician in vain.” But against this argument something like the following is wittily set: “If it is fated for you to beget children, you will beget children whether you lie with a woman or not. But if it is fated for you not to beget children, you will not beget children whether you lie with a woman or not. Now either it is fated for you to beget children or not to beget them. Therefore you lie with a woman in vain.” For just as in this case, since it is out of the question, indeed impossible, that a man who has not lain with a woman should beget children, lying with a woman is not resorted to in vain, so, if recovery from illness comes by way of medicine, the physician is necessarily called in, and it is false that “you call in the physician in vain.”

We have brought in all this because of what the most wise Celsus set down when he said: “Being a god, he foretold, and what was foretold certainly had to happen.” If by “certainly” he means “under compulsion”, we shall not grant it to him, for it was possible for it not to happen as well. But if he says “certainly” in the sense of “it will be”, which nothing prevents from being true even though it is possible for it not to happen, this does no harm to the argument. For it did not follow from Jesus’ having truly foretold what concerned the traitor, or what concerned the one who denied him, that he himself became the cause of their impiety and unholy deed. He who, as we hold, knew “what was in man” (John 2:25) saw the traitor’s wicked character, and saw what he would dare because he loved money and did not hold firmly to what he ought to think about his teacher; and so, among many other things, he said this too: “He who has dipped his hand with me in the dish, he will betray me” (Matthew 26:23).

Table companions have often turned traitor§21

21See too how superficial, and how plainly false, this statement of Celsus is. He declared that one who had shared a man’s table would not plot against him; and if he would not plot against a man, much less would one who had feasted with a god become his plotter. For who does not know that many who have shared salt and table have plotted against those who shared their hearth? The history of Greeks and barbarians is full of such examples. The iambic poet of Paros, reproaching Lycambes for breaking his agreements after “salt and table”, says to him: “You broke a great oath, and salt and table” (Archilochus).

Those who care for learning from histories, and have given themselves wholly to it, leaving aside the more necessary studies about how one ought to live, will cite more examples showing that men who shared a table with others plotted against them.

A charge he cannot prove§22

22Then, as though he had drawn his argument together with tightly fitted proofs and logical steps, he said: “And, what is still more absurd, the god himself plotted against those at table with him, by making them traitors and impious men.” For he could not show how Jesus either plotted against his disciples or made them traitors and impious men, except from the chain of reasoning he imagined, which even an ordinary person could very easily refute.

He took a body that could feel pain§23

23After this he says: “If he had resolved on these things and was punished in obedience to the Father, it is clear that, since he was a god and willed it, what was done to him in accordance with his own will was neither painful nor grievous.” He did not see that he was contradicting himself in the same breath. For if he granted that Jesus was punished, since he had resolved on these things and in obedience to the Father gave himself up, it is clear that he was punished, and it was not possible that what the punishers inflicted should not be painful; for pain does not depend on the will. But if, because he willed it, what was inflicted was neither painful nor grievous, how did he grant that “he was punished”?

He did not see that, once Jesus had taken up the body that comes through birth, he took it up as a body capable of pains and of the grievous things that befall those who are in bodies, provided we do not take “grievous” to mean something that depends on the will. So, just as he willingly took up a body not altogether different in nature from human flesh, so together with the body he also took up what is painful and grievous in it. It was not in his power not to suffer these things, since it lay with those who were dealing with him to inflict grievous and painful things upon him.

We have already answered above that if he had willed not to come into the hands of men, he would not have come. But he came, because he willed it, for the reason already given, that his dying for men would benefit the whole universe.

Celsus leaves out half the prayer§24

24Next, wishing to show that what happened to him was painful and grievous, and that even if he willed it he could not make it otherwise, he says: “Why then does he wail and lament, and pray to escape the fear of death, saying something like this: ‘O Father, if this cup can pass by’ (Matthew 26:39)?”

Here too observe Celsus’s malice. He does not credit the love of truth shown by those who wrote the Gospels. They could have passed over in silence the things that Celsus thinks discreditable, yet they did not keep silent, for many reasons, which someone will give in due time when expounding the Gospel. Instead he attacks the wording of the Gospel, piling tragic exaggeration on top of it and putting down what is not written; for nowhere is Jesus found lamenting. He paraphrases “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass” (Matthew 26:39), but he does not go on to quote what is recorded immediately after it, which at once shows Jesus’ reverence toward the Father and his greatness of soul. It runs: “Yet not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39). Nor does he let on that he has read of Jesus’ ready obedience to the Father’s will concerning what had been decided that he should suffer, made plain in the words: “If this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done” (Matthew 26:42).

In this he acts much like the impious, who listen to the divine Scriptures with malice and “speak injustice on high” (Psalm 73:8). For they too seem to have heard “I will kill,” and they often throw it in our faces, but “I will make alive” (Deuteronomy 32:39) they do not even remember. Yet the whole saying shows that those who live to the common harm and act out of wickedness are put to death by God, and that a better life is brought in for them in its place, the life God would give to those who have died to sin (Romans 6:2). In the same way they have heard “I will strike,” but they do not go on to see “and I will heal” (Deuteronomy 32:39). That is like what a physician might say who has cut into bodies and made severe wounds in order to remove what harms them and stands in the way of health, and who does not stop at the pain and the cutting but by his treatment restores the body to the health he intended for it. Nor have they heard the whole of “For he causes pain, and restores again” (Job 5:18), but only “he causes pain.”

So too, then, Celsus’s Jew has set out “O Father, would that this cup could pass by” (Matthew 26:39), but not what follows, nor what shows Jesus’ readiness and firmness in facing his passion. These matters call for a long explanation drawn from the wisdom of God, which will fittingly be handed on to those whom Paul called “mature,” when he says: “Yet among the mature we speak wisdom” (1 Corinthians 2:6). Setting them aside for the present, we shall briefly recall what is useful for the question before us.

Weak flesh and a willing spirit§25

25We said earlier too that some sayings belong to the “firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15) who was in Jesus, such as “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6) and others like it, while others belong to the man understood to be in him, such as “But now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth which I heard from the Father” (John 8:40). So here too, in his human nature, he portrays both the weakness of human flesh and the willingness of the spirit (Matthew 26:41): the weakness in “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me,” and the willingness of the spirit in “Yet not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39).

And if we must also keep to the order of what was said, notice that what belongs, so to speak, to the weakness of the flesh comes first and is a single saying, while what belongs to the willingness of the spirit comes afterward and runs to several. The single saying is “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me” (Matthew 26:39); the several are both “Not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39) and “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done” (Matthew 26:42). We should also observe that he did not say, “Let this cup go away from me,” but that the whole was said reverently and with humble reserve: “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.”

I know also an explanation of the passage along these lines. The Saviour saw what the people and Jerusalem would suffer in punishment for what the Jews had dared to do against him. For no other reason than his love for them, wishing the people not to suffer what they were about to suffer, he says: “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.” It is as if he were saying: Since, through my drinking this cup of punishment, a whole nation will be abandoned by you, I pray, if it is possible, that “this cup pass from me,” so that your portion, which has dared to act against me, may not be wholly abandoned by you.

Besides, if, as Celsus says, nothing painful or grievous befell Jesus at that time, how could those who came after him use Jesus as an example of enduring hardships for the sake of godliness, if he did not suffer what human beings suffer but only seemed to have suffered?

Liars would have left it out§26

26Further, Celsus’s Jew says to Jesus’ disciples, as though they had made these things up: “Not even by lying were you able to cover up your fictions convincingly.” To this it will be said that there was an easy way to cover up such things: not to record them at all in the first place. For if the Gospels did not contain these things, who could have reproached us because Jesus spoke such words in the course of the divine plan?

Celsus did not see that the same people cannot both have been deceived about Jesus, as though he were God and the one foretold in prophecy, and also have invented things about him, plainly knowing that their inventions were not true. Either, then, they did not invent them but believed these things and wrote without lying, or they lied in what they wrote, did not believe these things, and were not deceived into thinking him God.

Who has really altered the Gospel§27

27After this he says that some believers, like people come from a drinking bout to the point of turning on themselves, alter the Gospel from its first writing three and four and many times over, and reshape it, so that they may have a way of denying when they are refuted.

But I know of no others who have altered the Gospel except the followers of Marcion and of Valentinus, and I think also those of Lucan. Yet this charge, when made, is a charge not against the teaching but against those who have dared to tamper with the Gospels. Just as the sophists, the Epicureans, the Peripatetics, or whoever else may hold false opinions are no ground for a charge against philosophy, so those who alter the Gospels and bring in sects foreign to the intent of Jesus’ teaching are no ground for a charge against true Christianity.

Words no Jew would say§28

28Next, Celsus’s Jew also reproaches the Christians for making use of the prophets who proclaimed beforehand the things concerning Jesus. To this, besides what we said earlier on the point, we shall also say that, out of the concern for people that he claims to have, he ought to have set out the prophecies themselves, spoken up for whatever makes them persuasive, and then set out what seemed to him the refutation of the use made of the prophetic texts. In that way he would not have seemed to sweep away so weighty a point with a few trifling phrases, especially as he says the prophecies can be fitted to countless others far more plausibly than to Jesus.

He ought to have taken a careful stand against this proof, which has prevailed among Christians as the strongest, and to have set out for each prophecy how it can be fitted to others far more plausibly than to Jesus. But he did not even see that if this was a plausible thing for anyone to say against Christians, it might perhaps have been plausible on the lips of those who are strangers to the prophetic writings. As it is, Celsus has put into the mouth of the Jew he portrays what a Jew would not have said. For the Jew will not grant that the prophecies can be fitted to countless others far more plausibly than to Jesus. Instead, giving for each one the explanation that seems right to him, he will try to take a stand against the Christians’ interpretation; what he says will not be altogether convincing, but that is what he will attempt.

The prophets foretold two comings§29

29We have already spoken earlier about Christ’s being foretold as one who would make two comings to the human race. So we no longer need to answer what is said, as if by the Jew, that the prophets declare the one who is to come to be great, a mighty ruler, and lord of all the earth and of all the nations and armies.

But it was in Jewish fashion, I think, and out of their bitterness, that he said, while reviling Jesus without proof, not even a plausible one, that the prophets did not proclaim such a plague. Yet neither the Jews nor Celsus nor anyone else can show with proof that a plague turns so many people from a flood of evils to the life that accords with nature, with self-control and the other virtues.

Righteousness dawned and peace spread§30

30Celsus also threw in this remark: “No one proves anyone to be God and the Son of God from such signs and misunderstandings, nor from evidence so ignoble.” He ought to have set out the misunderstandings and refuted them, and shown by reasoning that the evidence is ignoble, so that, if the Christian seemed to say anything persuasive, he might try to contend against it and overturn the argument. But what he said about Jesus did come true, as of someone great, though he did not wish to see that it had come true, as the plain facts about Jesus make evident. “For as the sun,” he says, “lighting up all other things, first shows itself, so the Son of God ought to have done.”

We would say, then, that he has indeed done so. For “in his days righteousness dawned, and abundance of peace” (Psalm 72:7) came about, beginning from his birth. God was preparing the nations for his teaching, so that they would come under one Roman emperor, and so that the nations’ lack of contact with one another, owing to the many kingdoms, would not make it harder for Jesus’ apostles to do what Jesus commanded them when he said: “Go and make disciples of all the nations” (Matthew 28:19).

It is clear that Jesus was born in the reign of Augustus, who, if I may put it so, brought the many peoples of the earth to one level under a single kingdom. The existence of many kingdoms would have hindered the spread of Jesus’ teaching through the whole world, not only for the reasons already given, but also because people everywhere were forced to serve as soldiers and to fight for their homelands. That was what happened before the times of Augustus and still earlier, whenever there was need for a war, as between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, and so too between other peoples. How, then, could this teaching of peace, which does not even allow people to avenge themselves on enemies (Matthew 5:38–44), have prevailed, unless at the coming of Jesus the affairs of the world had everywhere been changed to a gentler state?

The Word who took a body§31

31After this he charges Christians with playing the sophist when they say that the Son of God is the very Word. He thinks he makes the charge stronger because, while we profess that the Son of God is Word, what we present is not a pure and holy Word but a man led away in utter dishonour and put to death. On this too something was said above, in brief, against Celsus’s accusations. There it was shown that the “firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15) took up a body and a human soul; that God gave the command concerning so many great things in the world, and they were created (Psalm 148:5); and that the one who received the command was God the Word.

And since the one who says these things in Celsus is a Jew, it will not be out of place for us to use the words, “He sent out his word and healed them, and rescued them from their destructions” (Psalm 107:20), which we also mentioned above. Yet I have conversed with many Jews, even men who professed to be wise, and I have heard none of them approve the teaching that the Son of God is Word, as Celsus has claimed when he fastens this onto the character of his Jew, who says: “If the Word is your Son of God, we too approve.”

Mary’s lineage and the genealogies§32

32We have already said that Jesus can be neither a braggart nor a sorcerer. So there is no need to go over again what has been said, lest we answer Celsus’s repetitions by repeating ourselves. In finding fault with the genealogy, he did not so much as name the questions which are raised even among Christians, and which some bring forward as charges, about the disagreement between the genealogies. For Celsus, who is truly a braggart and professes to know everything about Christians, did not know how to raise an intelligent difficulty about Scripture.

He says that those who traced Jesus’s descent from the first man and from the kings of the Jews were presumptuous (Matthew 1:1–17; Luke 3:23–38). And he thinks he is bringing forward something weighty when he says that the carpenter’s wife, if she had been of so great a lineage, would not have been unaware of it. What has this to do with the argument? Suppose she was not unaware of it: what harm does that do to the matter in hand? Or suppose she was unaware: how does it follow, from her being unaware, that she was not descended from the first man, and that her line did not go back to those who reigned among the Jews? Or does Celsus think that the poor must be born of ancestors who were all poor, or that kings must be born of kings?

To linger over this argument seems to me idle, since it is plain that even in our own times some people poorer than Mary have been born of rich and famous parents, and rulers of nations and kings have been born of the most obscure parents.

The wonders at the cross§33

33“But what noble deed,” he says, “did Jesus do, as a god would, scorning men, and laughing at and making light of what happened to him?” Since he asks this, from what source could we answer him, if we are to show the nobility and the wonder in what happened to Jesus, except from the gospels? They tell how “the earth was shaken, and the rocks were split, and the tombs were opened” (Matthew 27:51–52), “and the veil of the temple was torn from top to bottom” (Matthew 27:51), “and darkness came” in the daytime, as “the sun failed” (Luke 23:44–45).

But if Celsus believes the gospels where he thinks he can accuse Christians too, yet disbelieves them in what establishes the divinity that was in Jesus, we shall say to him: Sir, either disbelieve them all and do not think of bringing charges, or believe them all and marvel at the Word of God, who became man and willed to benefit the whole human race. And it is a noble work of Jesus that to this day those whom God wills are healed by his name.

As for the eclipse in the time of Tiberius Caesar, in whose reign Jesus seems to have been crucified, and the great earthquakes that took place at that time, Phlegon too has written of them, in the thirteenth or fourteenth book, I think, of his Chronicles.

Bacchus, Pentheus, and the mockers§34

34Celsus’s Jew, thinking he is making fun of Jesus, is portrayed as knowing the Bacchus of Euripides, who says, “The god himself will set me free whenever I wish” (Euripides, Bacchae 498). Jews are hardly given to the study of Greek literature. But let it be that some Jew became so well read. How then does it follow that Jesus, because he did not set himself free when bound, could not have done so? Let him believe, from my own Scriptures, that Peter too, bound in prison, came out when an angel loosed his chains (Acts 12:6–10), and that Paul, with Silas, bound in “the stocks” at Philippi in Macedonia, was set free by divine power, when the “doors” of the prison also “were opened” (Acts 16:24–26). But Celsus probably laughs at these things, or else never read the story at all. Otherwise he would have seen fit to answer it by saying that some sorcerers also loose bonds and open doors by incantations, so as to put what sorcerers do on the same level as what is recorded among us.

“But not even the man who condemned him,” he says, “suffered anything like Pentheus, who went mad or was torn apart.” He did not see that it was not so much Pilate who had condemned him, since Pilate “knew that it was out of envy that” the Jews “had handed him over” (Matthew 27:18), as the Jewish nation. That nation has been condemned by God, torn apart and scattered over all the earth, more terribly than Pentheus was torn apart. And why did he deliberately pass over the story of Pilate’s wife, who had seen a dream and was so moved by it that she sent word to her husband and said, “Have nothing to do with this righteous man, for today I have suffered many things in a dream because of him” (Matthew 27:19)?

And again, keeping silent about what reveals the divinity of Jesus, Celsus reproaches him with what is written in the gospel about him, citing those who mocked him and put a crimson cloak on him, the crown of thorns and the reed in his hand (Matthew 27:28–29). Where then, Celsus, did you learn these things, if not from the gospels? Did you, then, see that these things deserved reproach, while those who recorded them did not perceive that you and those like you would laugh, but that others would take him who readily died for piety as an example of how to scorn those who laugh and jeer at them for their piety? Rather, then, marvel at their love of truth, and at him who willingly suffered these things for the sake of men, and endured them with all forbearance and patience. For it is not recorded that he lamented, or that his condemnation drew from him any ignoble thought or word.

Why he did not punish his insulters§35

35To the question, “Why, if not before, does he not at least now display something divine, rescue himself from this disgrace, and punish those who insult both him and the Father?” we must say that something similar can be said to the Greeks also, who bring in providence and accept that divine signs occur: Why is it, then, that God does not punish those who insult the divine and do away with providence? For whatever defence the Greeks make against this, we too shall give a similar answer, or an even better one.

And a divine sign from heaven did in fact occur: the failing of the sun (Luke 23:44–45), and the other wonders, which showed that the one who was crucified had something divine about him, something more than most men.

Blood and water, not ichor§36

36Then Celsus says: “And what does he say while his body is being fixed to the stake? What sort of ichor, ‘such as flows in the blessed gods’?” (Homer, Iliad 5.340). He, then, is joking. But we will show from the gospels, which are in earnest, whether Celsus likes it or not, that the mythical, Homeric ichor did not flow from his body. Rather, when he was already dead, “one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and blood and water came out. And he who saw it has borne witness, and his witness is true, and he knows that he speaks the truth” (John 19:34–35).

Now in other dead bodies the blood congeals, and pure water does not flow out. But in the dead body of Jesus the wonder was that even from a dead body “blood and water” poured out of his side.

And if, to accuse Jesus and Christians, he brings forward words from the gospel that he does not even interpret rightly, while he keeps silent about what establishes the divinity of Jesus, yet wishes to hear of divine signs, let him read the gospel and see that “the centurion, and those with him who were keeping watch over Jesus, when they saw the earthquake and the things that took place, were greatly afraid, and said, ‘This man was the Son of God’” (Matthew 27:54).

The gall and the vinegar foretold§37

37After this, having picked from the gospel words which he thinks he can attack, he reproaches Jesus with the vinegar and the gall (Matthew 27:34, 48; John 19:28–30), as though Jesus had rushed greedily to drink and had not held out against his thirst, as even an ordinary man often holds out.

This point has its own explanation in the figurative reading. For now, the answer to his objections may be the more general one, that the prophets foretold this too. For it is written in the sixty-eighth psalm (Psalm 69 in English Bibles), in the person of Christ: “And they gave me gall for my food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink” (Psalm 69:21). Otherwise let the Jews say who it is that speaks these words in the prophet, and let them show from history the one who received “gall” for his “food” and was given “vinegar” to drink. Or let them at least dare to say that the Christ whom they expect to come will undergo these things, so that we may reply: What harm is there, then, if what was prophesied has already come to pass?

This very prophecy, spoken so many ages before, is enough, together with the other foreknowledge of the prophets, to move anyone who examines all the facts fairly to assent to Jesus as the Christ foretold and the Son of God.

What we hold against the Jews§38

38After this the Jew says to us further: “Is this, then, what you charge against us, most faithful ones: that we do not regard this man as a god, and do not agree with you that he endured these things for the benefit of men, so that we too might scorn punishments?”

To this too we shall say that we charge the Jews, who were brought up in the law and the prophets that announced Christ beforehand, with this: they neither refute the proofs we bring them that this man is the Christ, and so make the refutation their defence for not believing; nor, since they cannot refute them, do they believe in the one who was foretold. He showed plainly, in those who became his disciples, even after the time when he was in the body, that he endured these things for the benefit of men. The aim of his first coming was not to judge human affairs and, before teaching and bearing witness about what must be done, to punish the wicked and save the good. It was rather to sow his own word in a wonderful way, and with a power more divine, in the whole human race, as the prophets had also shown.

We also charge them because, when he displayed the power that was his, they did not believe him, but said that he cast the demons out of human souls “by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons” (Matthew 12:24; Luke 11:15). And we charge them that they slander even his love for humanity. He did not overlook a single city, nor even a single village, of Judea, so that he might proclaim the kingdom of God everywhere (Matthew 9:35; Luke 8:1); yet they slander this as vagrancy, and accuse him of wandering and roaming about in an ignoble body. But a body that endured so many labours for the benefit of those everywhere who could hear is not ignoble.

He did persuade his disciples§39

39And how is it not an outright lie, what the Jew in Celsus says, that he “persuaded no one while he lived, not even his own disciples, and was punished and endured such things”? For where did the envy that the chief priests, elders and scribes of the Jews stirred up against him come from (Matthew 27:18; Mark 15:10), if not from the crowds who were persuaded to follow him even into desert places (Matthew 14:13)? They were held not only by the coherent order of his words, for he always spoke in a way that suited his hearers, but also by his mighty works, by which he astonished those who did not believe through the coherence of his word.

And how is it not an outright lie that he did not persuade even his own disciples? At that time they did suffer a human weakness out of cowardice, for their courage had not yet been sharpened; but they did not cast off the judgment they had formed about him as the Christ. For Peter, after his denial, realizing into what evil he had fallen, “went out and wept bitterly” (Matthew 26:75; Luke 22:62). And the rest, stricken with despondency over him (for they still admired him), were confirmed through his appearing, so that they believed still more, and more firmly than before, that he was the Son of God.

Greatness lies in saving teaching and a pure life§40

40Celsus, too, falls into something unworthy of a philosopher when he imagines that pre-eminence among men lies not in saving teaching and a pure character, but in acting against the purpose of the role one has taken on: in not dying after taking on what is mortal, or else in dying, but not by a death that could become an example to those who would learn from the deed itself how to die for piety, and how to speak boldly in its cause before those who have gone astray on the question of piety and impiety. These men think the pious most impious, and suppose those to be most pious who wander astray concerning God and apply the undistorted notion of him to anything rather than to God, above all when they even rush to kill those who, through the clear evidence of the one God over all, have given themselves up with their whole soul “to the point of death” (compare Philippians 2:8).

Poverty and the cross are not evils§41

41Further, Celsus, speaking through his Jewish character, charges Jesus with not having shown himself “pure of all evils.” Of what evils, then, let Celsus’s argument tell us, did Jesus not show himself pure? If he says that Jesus was not pure of evils in the proper sense, let him plainly show a work of vice in him. But if he thinks that poverty, the cross and the plotting of perverse men are evils, then plainly he is saying that evils befell Socrates too, and that Socrates was unable to show himself pure of evils.

And how large a company of other poor men there is among the Greeks, men who practised philosophy and accepted poverty of their own will, even ordinary Greeks know from what has been recorded: of Democritus, who let his property become pasture for sheep, and of Crates, who set himself free by making a gift to the Thebans of the money he was paid when all his possessions were sold. Diogenes, too, lived in a jar out of his exceeding simplicity of life; yet no one with even a moderate share of sense thought Diogenes in an evil plight on that account.

Promises fulfilled and a noble example of endurance§42

42Further, since Celsus will have it that Jesus was not even blameless, let him prove it. Which of those who accepted his teaching recorded anything truly blameworthy in Jesus? Or, if he does not draw his charge of blame from them, let him show where he learned what led him to say that Jesus was not blameless.

Jesus, then, made what he promised credible by the good he did to those who gave heed to him. And as we see always being fulfilled what he said before it came to pass, that “the gospel” would “be preached” in the whole world (Matthew 26:13; compare Matthew 24:14; Mark 13:10), that his disciples would go to “all the nations” (Matthew 28:19) and proclaim his word, and further that they would be “led before governors and kings” (Matthew 10:18) for no other cause than his teaching, we stand in awe of him and daily confirm our faith in him. I do not know by what greater and clearer proofs Celsus wanted him to make credible what he had foretold; unless, as it seems, failing to understand the doctrine, he wanted Jesus, though he had become man, to suffer nothing human and not to become for men a noble example of how to bear what befalls them.

Even if these things seem to Celsus most pitiable and most shameful, since he holds pain to be the greatest of evils and pleasure the perfect good (a view that none of the philosophers who bring in providence, and who agree that courage is a virtue, and endurance and greatness of soul as well, has ever accepted), Jesus did not, for all that, discredit faith in him by what he endured. Rather, he strengthened it among those who wish to embrace courage, and among those who were taught by him that living in the proper and true sense, the blessed life, is not here but “in” what his words call “the age to come” (Matthew 12:32), while living in what is called the present age is a misfortune, or the first and greatest contest of the soul.

Did he go to Hades to persuade the dead?§43

43After this he says to us: “Surely you will not say of him that, having failed to persuade those who were here, he set out for Hades to persuade those who were there.” Whether he likes it or not, we do say this: that while he was in the body he persuaded not a few, but so many that he was plotted against because of the great number of those persuaded; and that when he had become a soul bare of the body, he spoke with souls bare of their bodies, turning to himself those of them also who were willing, or those whom he saw to be better suited, for reasons he himself knew (compare 1 Peter 3:19).

Jesus is not like sorcerers or robbers§44

44Next, somehow or other, he says something very silly: “If, when you come up with absurd defences by which you have been ridiculously deceived, you think that you are truly making a defence, what prevents you from thinking that others as well, all who have been condemned and come to a more miserable end, are greater and more divine messengers than he?” But it is plain to anyone that Jesus, who suffered what is recorded, is openly and clearly unlike those who came to a more miserable end because of sorcery or any other charge whatever. For no one can point to a work of sorcerers that has turned souls from the many sins found among men and from the flood of vice.

And since the Jew in Celsus also compares him to robbers and says: “One could, with like shamelessness, say also of a robber and murderer who had been punished that this man was no robber but a god, for he foretold to his fellow robbers that he would suffer such things as he did suffer,” it might be said, first, that it is not because he foretold that he would suffer such things that we think of Jesus as we do, and boldly declare it of him as one who has come down to us from God. Second, we say that even these things were in some way foretold in the Gospels, since God “was numbered with the lawless” (Luke 22:37; Isaiah 53:12) in the judgment of lawless men, who wanted rather a robber released, the one who had been thrown into prison “for sedition” “and murder” (Luke 23:18–19; John 18:40), and Jesus crucified, and who crucified him between two robbers (Matthew 27:38).

And in his genuine disciples, who bear witness to the truth, Jesus is always crucified with robbers and suffers among men the same condemnation as they do. And we say that if these men, who for the sake of their piety toward the Creator accept every outrage and every kind of death so as to keep that piety sincere and pure according to the teaching of Jesus, are in any way like robbers, then it is clear that Jesus also, the father of such teaching, is reasonably compared by Celsus to robber chiefs. But neither he, who died for the common good, nor these, who suffer such things for piety and alone of all men are plotted against because of the way of honouring the divine that has been shown to them, are put to death justly; nor was the plot against Jesus anything but impious.

The disciples who later died for his teaching§45

45Notice too how shallow his account is of the disciples Jesus had at that time, where he says: “Then those who were with him while he lived, who heard his voice and had him as their teacher, when they saw him punished and dying, neither died with him nor died for him, nor were they persuaded to despise punishments; instead they even denied that they were his disciples. But now you die with him” (compare Matthew 26:69–75). In these words he believes that the sin the disciples committed while they were still beginners and imperfect, which is written in the Gospels, did happen, so that he may accuse the teaching; but what they did rightly after the sin, when they spoke boldly before the Jews, suffered countless things at their hands and at last died for the teaching of Jesus, he passes over in silence.

For he did not wish to hear Jesus foretelling to Peter, “But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands,” and the rest (John 21:18), to which Scripture adds, “This he said to show by what death he would glorify God” (John 21:19). Nor did he wish to hear that James the brother of John, an apostle and the brother of an apostle, was put to death by Herod “with the sword” for the word of Christ (Acts 12:2). Nor did he wish to hear all that Peter and the other apostles did as they spoke boldly for the word, and how, after being flogged, they went out “from the presence of the council, rejoicing that they had been counted worthy to suffer dishonour for the name” (Acts 5:40–41), surpassing many of the stories told among the Greeks of the endurance and courage of those who practised philosophy.

From the beginning, then, this lesson of Jesus above all took firm hold among those who heard him: it taught them to despise the life that the many cling to, and to strive for a life that is like the life of God.

Not ten men but thousands§46

46And how is the Jew in Celsus not lying when he says that during his time here “he won over only ten sailors and tax collectors of the most worthless sort, and not even all of these”? For it is plain that even Jews would admit that he won over not ten only, nor a hundred, nor a thousand, but five thousand at once on one occasion and four thousand on another (Matthew 14:21; 15:38). And he won them over so far that they followed him even into desert places, which alone could hold a whole crowd gathered together of those who believed in God through Jesus; and there he showed them not only words but also deeds (Matthew 14:13–21; 15:32–38).

By repeating himself he forces us to do the same, since we take care not to be thought to pass over any of the charges he makes. So in the passage now before us, which comes next in the order of his book that we are following, he says: “If while he lived he persuaded no one himself, but after his death those who wish persuade so many, how is this not utterly absurd?” To keep his reasoning consistent, he ought rather to have said: if after his death not simply those who wish, but those who both wish and are able, persuade so many, how much more reasonable is it that he, while he dwelt in this life, persuaded many times as many by a more powerful word and by his deeds?

We do not believe because he was punished§47

47He supplies for himself, as if it were our answer, a reply to a question of his own, when he says: “By what reasoning were you led to think that this man is the Son of God?” For he has represented us as answering that we were led to it because we know that his punishment took place for the overthrow of the father of wickedness. In fact we were led by countless other reasons, of which we have set out a very small part in what has gone before; and, if God grants it, we shall set them out not only in our work against Celsus’s so-called True Doctrine, but in countless other works as well.

And as though we said that we think him the Son of God because he was punished, he says: “What then? Were not many others punished too, and no less ignobly?” In this Celsus acts like the most slavish-minded of the enemies of our teaching, who think it follows from the story of Jesus crucified that we worship those who have been crucified.

Healings foretold and few raised from the dead§48

48Celsus, unable to look squarely at the mighty works that Jesus is recorded to have done, has already often slandered them as sorcery, and we have often answered him in argument as best we could. And now he says that we answered, as it were, that we held Jesus to be the Son of God for this reason: “because he healed the lame and the blind.” He also adds: “and, as you say, he raised the dead.”

That he healed the lame and the blind, and that for this reason we hold him to be the Christ and the Son of God, is clear to us because it was also written in the prophecies: “Then the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf will hear; then the lame man will leap like a deer” (Isaiah 35:5–6). That he also raised the dead, and that this is not a fiction of those who wrote the Gospels, is shown by this: if it were a fiction, many would have been recorded as raised, and among them some who had already lain longer in their tombs; but since it is not a fiction, very few are told of. There is the daughter of the ruler of the synagogue (Luke 8:41–42, 49–56), of whom he said, in what sense I do not know, “She is not dead but is sleeping” (Luke 8:52; compare Mark 5:39; Matthew 9:24), saying something about her that was not true of all who have died. There is the only son of the widow, on whom he had compassion and whom he raised after stopping those who were carrying the dead man (Luke 7:11–15). And third, there is Lazarus, who had been four days in the tomb (John 11:17, 39–44).

To the fairer-minded, and above all to the Jew, we will say this further about these cases. “There were many lepers in the days of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian” (Luke 4:27), and “there were many widows in the days of Elijah” the prophet, “and to none of them was Elijah sent except to Zarephath in the land of Sidon” (Luke 4:25–26), for by some divine judgment she had been found worthy of the wonder that the prophet worked with the loaves (1 Kings 17:8–16). In the same way, there were many dead in the days of Jesus, but only those rose whom the Word knew to be fit for resurrection, so that the things done by the Lord might not only be symbols of certain things, but might also, by the deeds themselves, draw many to the wonderful teaching of the gospel.

For my part I would say that, in keeping with Jesus’ promise, the disciples have done even “greater” works (John 14:12) than the visible works that Jesus did. For the eyes of those blind in soul are always being opened, and the ears of those who had been deaf to words of virtue hear eagerly about God and the blessed life with him. Many, too, who were lame in the feet of what Scripture calls the “inner” man (Romans 7:22; Ephesians 3:16), now that the Word has healed them, do not merely leap but leap “like a deer” (Isaiah 35:6), an animal that is the enemy of snakes and stronger than all the venom of vipers. And these lame who have been healed receive from Jesus “authority to tread,” with the very feet in which they were formerly lame, “upon” the “serpents and scorpions” of wickedness, and in a word “over all the power of the enemy” (Luke 10:19); and as they tread they are not harmed, for they too have become stronger than the venom of all wickedness and of the demons.

Jesus warned against false Christs, not sorcerers§49

49Jesus, then, was turning his disciples away, not from heeding sorcerers in general and those who promise to work wonders by any means whatever (for his disciples had no need of that), but from those who proclaim themselves to be the Christ of God and try, by certain illusions, to turn the disciples of Jesus to themselves, when he said in one place: “Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ,’ or ‘Here he is,’ do not believe it. For false christs and false prophets will arise and will perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. See, I have told you beforehand. So if they say to you, ‘Look, he is in the wilderness,’ do not go out; ‘Look, he is in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it. For as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man” (Matthew 24:23–27). And in another place: “Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not eat in your name, and drink in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works?’ And I will say to them, ‘Depart from me, for you are workers of unrighteousness’” (Matthew 7:22–23; Luke 13:26–27).

But Celsus, wishing to put the wonders of Jesus on a level with the sorcery found among men, says in these very words: “O light and truth! With his own voice he openly declares, as you yourselves have written, that others also will come to you using similar powers, wicked men and sorcerers; and he names a certain Satan who contrives such things. So not even he denies that these works are nothing divine but are the deeds of wicked men. Yet, constrained by the truth, he has at once exposed what the others do and convicted what he himself does. How then is it not monstrous, from the same works, to consider the one a god and the others sorcerers? For why, on the strength of these works at least, should we think the others wicked any more than this man, when we have him as our witness? He himself, indeed, admitted that these things are the marks not of a divine nature but of certain deceivers and utter scoundrels.”

See, then, whether in these words Celsus is not plainly caught maliciously twisting the argument, since Jesus says one thing about those who will perform “signs and wonders” (Matthew 24:24), and the Jew in Celsus claims another. If Jesus had simply told his disciples to beware of those who promise wonders, without setting out what they would claim to be, Celsus’s suspicion might perhaps have had some ground. But those against whom Jesus wants us to be on guard profess to be “the Christ” (Matthew 24:23), which sorcerers do not do; and he says further that some who live wickedly will do certain mighty works in the name of Jesus and cast demons out of people (Matthew 7:22). Rather, if one may put it this way, sorcery is banished from the matters in this passage, and so is every suspicion raised against them; and what is brought in is the divinity of Christ and the divinity of his disciples. For it is possible that someone who uses his name and, I do not know how, is moved by some power to pretend that he himself is the Christ, may seem to accomplish things like those of Christ; and that others, in the name of Jesus, may seem to accomplish things somewhat like those of his genuine disciples.

Paul on the lawless one and lying wonders§50

50Paul too, in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, declares how there will one day be revealed “the man of lawlessness, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, presenting himself as God” (2 Thessalonians 2:3–4). And again he says to the Thessalonians: “And now you know what restrains, so that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only the one who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord God will slay with the breath of his mouth and will destroy by the appearing of his coming. The lawless one’s coming is by the working of Satan, with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all the deceit of unrighteousness among those who are perishing” (2 Thessalonians 2:6–10). Setting out also the reason why the lawless one is allowed to come into this life, he says: “Because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved. And for this reason God sends them a working of error, so that they believe the lie, in order that all may be judged who did not believe the truth but took pleasure in unrighteousness” (2 Thessalonians 2:10–12).

Let someone tell us, then, whether anything in the Gospel or in the apostle can give ground for suspecting that sorcery is being foretold in this passage. Anyone who wishes may also draw from Daniel the prophecy about the antichrist (compare Daniel 7:24–26; 8:23–25; 11:36). But Celsus falsifies the words of Jesus: though Jesus did not say, “others will come using similar powers, wicked men and sorcerers,” Celsus himself says that he said such a thing. For just as the power of the enchanters in Egypt was not like the wondrous grace in Moses, but the outcome proved that the works of the Egyptians were trickery while those of Moses were divine (Exodus 7:10–12; 8:18–19), so the works of the antichrists, and of those who make a show of mighty works as though they were disciples of Jesus, are said to be signs and wonders “of falsehood” (2 Thessalonians 2:9), prevailing “with all the deceit of unrighteousness for those who are perishing” (2 Thessalonians 2:10); whereas the works of Christ and of his disciples bore as their fruit not deceit but the salvation of souls. For who could reasonably say that a better life, one that day by day reduces wickedness, comes from deceit?

Divine power and sorcery are not of one kind§51

51Celsus caught a hint from Scripture when he made Jesus say that “a certain Satan” will contrive such things. But he also snatches at a conclusion when he claims that Jesus does not deny “that these works have nothing divine about them but are the deeds of wicked men”; for he has made them of one kind when they are in fact of different kinds. As a wolf is not of one kind with a dog, even if it seems to have some likeness in the shape of its body and in its voice, nor the wood pigeon with the dove, so what is accomplished by the power of God is nothing like what comes from sorcery.

We will say this as well against Celsus’s malicious arguments. Are mighty works done by sorcery through evil demons, while no mighty work at all is accomplished by the divine and blessed nature? Has human life borne the worse things, yet had no room at all for the better? It seems to me that this principle should be laid down as applying in every case: wherever something worse pretends to be of one kind with the better, there is certainly something better on the other side. So too with those who work by sorcery: there must certainly also be things that happen in this life through divine working. And by the same logic one must either do away with both and say that neither happens, or, if one grants the one, and especially the worse, admit the better as well. But if someone were to grant that things happen through sorcery yet not grant those that come through divine power, he seems to me like a man who grants that there are sophisms and plausible arguments which fall short of the truth while pretending to present it, but holds that truth, and a dialectic free of sophistry, has its home nowhere among men.

But if once we accept that, given the real existence of magic and sorcery worked by evil demons, who are charmed by magical invocations and obey sorcerers, it follows that what comes from divine power must also be found among men, why should we not also examine rigorously those who claim these powers, judging by their life, by their character, and by what follows from their powers, whether harm to people or the reform of their morals, to see who does such things in the service of demons through certain incantations and tricks, and who, having come into a pure and holy standing before God in his soul and spirit, and I think also in his body, and having received some divine spirit, does such things for people’s benefit and to urge them to believe in the true God. And if once we must inquire, without being carried away by the powers, who accomplishes such things from the better source and who from the worse, so that we neither revile them all nor admire and accept them all as divine, how will it not be plain from what took place under Moses and under Jesus, when whole nations were formed after their signs, that these men did by divine power the things that they are recorded to have done? For wickedness and trickery would not have formed a whole nation that rose above not only statues and the things set up by men, but also every created nature, and ascended to the uncreated first principle, the God of all.

Why trust Moses’ signs but not those of Jesus§52

52Since it is a Jew who says these things in Celsus, we might say to him: You there, why is it that you have believed the things written in your books, as done by God through Moses, to be divine, and try to argue against those who slander them as done by sorcery, like the things done by the wise men of Egypt (Exodus 7:11, 22), while the things done by Jesus, which even you admit took place, you accuse of not being divine, imitating the Egyptians who stand against you?

For if the outcome, the whole nation formed through the wonders of Moses’ day, gives clear proof that it was God who did these things in the time of Moses, how much more will the same be shown in the case of Jesus, who did a greater work than Moses? For Moses took over people already more ready: those of the nation who were of Abraham’s seed, who had kept circumcision from generation to generation and had become zealous for Abraham’s customs; and he led them out of Egypt, setting before them the laws which you have believed to be divine. But Jesus dared something greater: upon the way of life already established, upon ancestral customs, and upon an upbringing under the existing laws, he brought in the way of life that accords with the gospel.

And just as Moses needed the signs he is recorded to have done, so that he might be believed not only by the elders but also by the people (Exodus 4:29–31), why should not Jesus too, so that he might be believed by those of the people who had learned to ask for “signs and wonders” (John 4:48; compare 1 Corinthians 1:22), need such works of power as, being greater and more divine in comparison with those done through Moses, were able to draw them away from Jewish myths and from the human traditions among them (compare Titus 1:14; Mark 7:8), and to make them accept the one who taught and did these things as greater than the prophets? For how was he not greater than the prophets, who was proclaimed by the prophets as the Christ and the Saviour of the human race?

Every charge against Jesus strikes Moses too§53

53Indeed, everything that the Jew in Celsus says to those who believe in Jesus can be turned equally into a charge against Moses, so that one may say that the sorcery of Jesus either does not differ at all from that of Moses or is very like it, since both, as far as the words of Celsus’s Jew go, can be brought under the same charges. For example, about Christ the Jew in Celsus says: “But O light and truth! With his own voice Jesus openly declares these things, as you yourselves have recorded: that others too will come to you using like powers, wicked men and sorcerers” (compare Matthew 24:24).

But about Moses, one who disbelieves the writings of Moses, whether an Egyptian or anyone at all, might say to the Jew: ‘But O light and truth! With his own voice Moses openly declares, as you yourselves have recorded, that others will come to you using like powers, wicked men and sorcerers. For it is written in your law: “If a prophet arises among you, or one who dreams a dream, and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder comes to pass of which he spoke to you, saying, Let us go and follow other gods, whom you do not know, and let us serve them, you shall not listen to the words of that prophet, or of the one who dreams that dream” (Deuteronomy 13:1–3), and so on.’

And the one who slanders the words of Jesus says that he even names a certain Satan as contriving such things; but the one who turns this against Moses will say that Moses too names a prophet who dreams dreams as contriving such things. And just as the Jew in Celsus says of Jesus: “So that not even he himself denies that these things, at least, are nothing divine, but are the works of wicked men,” so the one who disbelieves the writings of Moses will set out the passage already quoted and say the same to him: ‘So that not even Moses himself denies that these things, at least, are nothing divine, but are the works of wicked men.’ He will do the same with this too: ‘Compelled by the truth, Moses at one stroke both laid bare the deeds of others and convicted his own.’

And when the Jew also says: “How then is it not monstrous, from the same works, to think the one a god and the others sorcerers?” someone might say to him, on account of the words of Moses set out above: ‘How then is it not monstrous, from the same works, to think the one a prophet of God and his servant (Numbers 12:7), and the others sorcerers?’

And since Celsus, dwelling on this point, added this too to the words I have set out and turned against Moses: “For why, on the strength of these things at least, should we think the others wicked rather than this man, when we have him as our witness?” we too shall add something like this to what has been said: ‘For why, on the strength of these things at least, should we think those wicked whom Moses says must not be obeyed when they display signs and wonders, rather than Moses, on account of the very words by which he slandered others over signs and wonders?’

Saying more to the same effect, so as to seem to strengthen his argument, he says: “These things, at any rate, he himself admitted to be the marks not of a divine nature but of certain deceivers and utter scoundrels.” Who, then, is “he himself”? You, Jew, say that it is Jesus; but the one who accuses you, as liable to the same charges, will refer “he himself” to Moses.

Moses also wrote of his own death§54

54After this the Jew of Celsus, in his speech to those of his own people who have believed, says, as if to us (to keep to the part assigned to the Jew from the start): “What, then, drew you to him, unless it was that he foretold that after dying he would rise again?” (compare Matthew 16:21). This too, like what came before, will be turned against Moses in the same way. For we shall say to him: ‘What, then, drew you to him, unless it was that he wrote such things about his own death: “And Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, by the word of the Lord; and they buried him in the land of Moab, near the house of Phogor. And no one knows his burial to this day” (Deuteronomy 34:5–6)?’

For just as the Jew makes it a charge that Jesus foretold that after dying he would rise again, so the man who argues the like about Moses will reply to the one who says this that Moses too wrote (for Deuteronomy also is his) that “no one knows his burial to this day” (Deuteronomy 34:6), dignifying and exalting even his burial as unknown to the human race.

Tales of return from Hades§55

55After this the Jew says to his countrymen who believe in Jesus: “Come, then, let us even grant you that this was said. How many others produce such marvels to persuade simple hearers, and make a profit out of the deception? So they say of Zamolxis among the Scythians, the slave of Pythagoras (Herodotus, Histories 4.95), and of Pythagoras himself in Italy, and of Rhampsinitus in Egypt: that this last even ‘played dice’ in Hades ‘with Demeter,’ and came back up bearing ‘a gift from her, a golden napkin’ (Herodotus, Histories 2.122). So too of Orpheus among the Odrysians, of Protesilaus in Thessaly, of Heracles at Taenarum, and of Theseus. But this is what must be examined: whether anyone who truly died ever rose again with the very same body. Or do you think that the stories of the others are myths and seem so, while you have contrived a seemly or plausible ending for your drama: his cry on the stake as he breathed his last (Matthew 27:46, 50), and ‘the earthquake’ (Matthew 27:51, 54), and the darkness (Matthew 27:45)? That he did not help himself while he lived (compare Matthew 27:42), yet rose when dead and showed the marks of his punishment and how his hands had been pierced (John 20:20, 25–27): who saw this? A frantic woman, as you say (compare John 20:11–18), and anyone else there may have been from the same sorcery, who either dreamed it in some state of mind and, as he wished, saw a vision shaped by a deluded opinion, which has happened to countless people before now, or, what is more likely, wanted to astound the rest with this marvel-mongering, and by such a lie to give an opening to other charlatans.”

Since, then, it is a Jew who says these things, we make our defence of our Jesus as to a Jew, still turning the argument against Moses as well and saying to him: ‘How many others produce such marvels as Moses did, to persuade simple hearers, and make a profit out of the deception?’ Indeed, it is more open to one who disbelieves Moses to cite Zamolxis and Pythagoras, who produced marvels, than to the Jew, who is not at all a keen student of the histories of the Greeks. And the Egyptian who disbelieves the wonders told of Moses will cite Rhampsinitus with some plausibility, saying that Rhampsinitus is far more believable when he is said to have gone down to Hades, played dice with Demeter, snatched a golden napkin from her, and shown it as a token that he had been in Hades and had come back up from there, than Moses, who wrote of himself that he entered “into the thick darkness where God was” (Exodus 20:21), and that he alone, apart from the rest, drew near to God. For he wrote thus: “And Moses alone shall come near to God, but the others shall not come near” (Exodus 24:2).

So we, the disciples of Jesus, will say to the Jew who says these things: You who bring charges over faith in Jesus, make your defence to us now, and tell the Egyptian and the Greeks: what will you say to the charges you have brought against our Jesus, charges that would have struck Moses first? And even if you strive with all your might to defend Moses, as indeed the facts about him do admit a forceful and clear argument, you will, without noticing it, in your very defence of Moses have commended Jesus, against your will, as more divine than Moses.

A public death rules out pretence§56

56The Jew in Celsus says that the heroic tales of those who are said to have gone down to Hades and come back up from there are marvel-mongering, taking it that the heroes vanished for a time, stole themselves away from the sight of all men, and afterwards showed themselves as though they had come back up from Hades. For his words seem to suggest something of this kind about Orpheus among the Odrysians, Protesilaus in Thessaly, Heracles at Taenarum, and Theseus too. Come, then, let us show that the account of Jesus’ being raised from the dead cannot be compared with these.

For each of the heroes spoken of in those places could, had he wished, have stolen himself away from human sight and, when he decided, gone back again to those he had left. But since Jesus was crucified before all the Jews, and his body was taken down in the sight of their people (compare John 19:38), how is it possible to invent a like tale, saying that he, like the heroes of the stories, went down to Hades and came back up from there?

We say, too, that perhaps something like this might also be said in defence of Jesus’ crucifixion, especially because of the stories told about the heroes who are thought to have gone down to Hades by force: that if, for the sake of argument, Jesus had died an obscure death, so that his death was not evident to the whole people of the Jews, and then after that had truly risen from the dead, there would have been room for what was suspected about the heroes to be said about him too. Perhaps, then, besides other reasons why Jesus was crucified, this too may contribute to his having died openly on the cross, so that no one could say that he withdrew from human sight of his own accord, and seemed to have died but had not died, but, when he wished, appeared again and staged a marvel of rising from the dead.

Clear and evident, I think, is the argument drawn from his disciples. They gave themselves to a teaching that put their lives in danger, and they would not have taught it with such vigour if they had made up the claim that Jesus had been raised from the dead; and all the while they not only prepared others to despise death but themselves did so long before.

Elijah and Elisha raised the dead§57

57Consider whether it is not very blindly that Celsus’s Jew, as though it were impossible for anyone to rise from the dead with his very body, says: “But this is what must be examined: whether anyone who really died ever rose with his very body.” The Jew would not have said this if he believed what is recorded in the third and fourth books of Kingdoms about children, one of whom Elijah raised and the other Elisha (1 Kings 17:17–24; 2 Kings 4:18–37).

And this, I think, is also why Jesus came to dwell among no other nation than the Jews, who had grown used to marvels: so that, by setting what they already believed beside what was done by him and recorded about him, they might accept that he, around whom greater things took place and by whom more wonderful things were accomplished, was greater than all those men.

Our Scriptures are not myths§58

58After the Greek stories he set out, about men who, as it were, worked wonders and men who supposedly rose from the dead, the Jew says to the Jews who believe in Jesus: “Or do you think that the stories of the others are myths and are taken for myths, while you have devised a fitting or convincing ending for the drama, his cry on the stake as he breathed his last (Matthew 27:50; Luke 23:46)?”

We shall answer the Jew that we have held the stories you set out to be myths. But what stands in the Scriptures we share with you, in which not you alone but we too take pride, we say is in no way myth. That is why we believe those who wrote about the people who rose from the dead there, as men who were not telling marvellous tales; and in the present case we believe the one who both foretold it, and was foretold, and rose.

And in this he who rose from the dead is more wonderful than they: prophets, Elijah and Elisha, raised them (1 Kings 17:22; 2 Kings 4:35), but none of the prophets raised him; the Father in heaven did. That is why his resurrection has also achieved greater things than theirs. For what has come to the world from the children raised through Elijah and Elisha that is as great as what has come through the resurrection of Jesus, which is preached and has been believed by divine power?

Did Jesus fail to help himself?§59

59He thinks that both the earthquake and the darkness are a marvellous tale (Matthew 27:45, 51). We made our defence about these earlier, as far as we could, citing Phlegon, who recorded that such things occurred at the time of the Saviour’s passion. He also says that “while he was alive Jesus did not help himself, but when dead he rose and showed the marks of his punishment, and how his hands had been pierced” (John 20:20, 27).

We ask him: what does “helped himself” mean? If it refers to virtue, we shall say that he helped himself very much indeed. For he neither said nor did anything improper; but truly “he was led as a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer is silent” (Isaiah 53:7), and the Gospel testifies that “so he did not open his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7; Matthew 27:12–14). But if he takes “helped himself” in the sense of things indifferent and bodily, we say that we have shown from the Gospels that he came to these things of his own will.

Next, after stating what comes from the Gospel, that on rising from the dead he showed the marks of his punishment and how his hands had been pierced, he asks: “Who saw this?” And slandering the account of Mary Magdalene, who is recorded to have seen him (John 20:11–18), he said: “A frenzied woman, as you say.” And since she is not the only one recorded to have seen Jesus risen, but others too, Celsus’s Jew slanders these as well, and says: “and anyone else involved in the same sorcery.”

Apparitions show the soul survives§60

60Then, as though this could happen, I mean that someone has an apparition of a dead man as if he were alive, he goes on like an Epicurean and says that “someone dreamed in a certain state of mind, or by his own wish had an illusion through mistaken belief, and reported such a thing; which,” he says, “has already happened to countless people.”

Even if this seemed to have been said with great cleverness, it nonetheless establishes a necessary doctrine: that the soul of the dead does subsist, and that whoever has taken up this doctrine has not believed in vain in its immortality, or at least in its survival; as Plato too, in his work on the soul, says that “shadowy apparitions” of people already dead have appeared to some around tombs (Plato, Phaedo 81d). Now the “apparitions” that occur concerning the soul of the dead arise from something that underlies them: the soul that subsists in what is called the luminous body.

But Celsus, not wanting this, would have it that some people dream even while awake and, according to their own wish, have illusions through mistaken belief. To believe that this happens in sleep is not unreasonable; but that it happens while awake, to those who are not wholly out of their minds and delirious, or melancholic, is not credible. Foreseeing this, Celsus said the woman was frenzied, though the written account, from which he draws the material for his charges against the events, does not show this.

Thomas and the marks of the nails§61

61So, as Celsus thinks, Jesus too after death was sending out an appearance of the wounds he received on the cross, and was not truly wounded in that way. But as the Gospel teaches (Celsus believes some parts of it, the ones he wishes, so that he may accuse, and disbelieves others), Jesus called to himself one of the disciples who disbelieved and thought the wonder impossible. For that disciple had agreed with the woman who said she had seen him, on the view that it is not impossible for the soul of one who has died to be seen; but he did not go on to think it true that he had been raised in a solid body. That is why he said: “Unless I see,” “I will not believe”; and he added: “Unless I put my hand into the mark of the nails and touch his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25).

Thomas said these things because he judged that the body of a soul can appear to physical eyes, the soul being “in all things” like its former form, “in stature and fair eyes and voice,” and often “wearing such clothes about its skin” (Homer, Iliad 23.66–67). And Jesus, calling Thomas to him, said: “Bring your finger here and see my hands; and bring your hand and put it into my side; and do not be unbelieving, but believing” (John 20:27).

Between solid body and bare soul§62

62And it was in keeping with everything prophesied about him, which included this too, and with what he did and what happened to him, that this should prove the greatest wonder of all. For it had been foretold in the prophet, speaking in the person of Jesus: “My flesh will dwell in hope; and you will not abandon my soul to Hades, nor let your Holy One see corruption” (Psalm 16:9–10).

And at his resurrection he was, as it were, in a kind of borderland between the solidity of the body he had before the passion and the appearing of a soul bare of such a body. Hence, when “his disciples” were together, “and Thomas with them, Jesus comes, though the doors were shut, and stood in their midst and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then he says to Thomas, ‘Bring your finger here’”, and what follows (John 20:26–27).

In the Gospel according to Luke, too, as Simon and Cleopas were talking “with each other about all that had happened” (Luke 24:14), Jesus came up to them and “went along with them. But their eyes were held so that they did not recognize him. And he said to them, ‘What are these words that you are exchanging with each other as you walk?’” (Luke 24:15–17). And when “their eyes were opened and they recognized him,” then Scripture says in these very words: “And he vanished from them” (Luke 24:31).

So even if Celsus wants to put the events concerning Jesus, and those who saw him after the resurrection, on the same footing as other apparitions and others who have seen apparitions, yet to those who examine the facts fairly and wisely the greater wonder will be plain.

Why the risen Jesus was not seen by all§63

63After this Celsus, in a way not to be lightly dismissed, finds fault with what is written and says that “if Jesus really wished to show divine power, he ought to have appeared to those very men who had abused him, and to the one who condemned him, and in short to everyone.”

For indeed it is plain to us too, from the Gospel, that after the resurrection he was not seen in the way he formerly appeared, publicly and to all. Rather, in the Acts it is written that, “appearing over forty days,” he proclaimed to the disciples “the things concerning the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3). And in the Gospels it is not said that he was always with them; but in one place, after eight days, he appeared in their midst “when the doors were shut” (John 20:26), and in another in some other such way.

Paul too, at the end of the First Letter to the Corinthians, implying that he was not seen publicly as in the time before the passion, writes: “For I delivered to you first of all what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,” “and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at once, most of whom remain until now, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared to me also” (1 Corinthians 15:3–8).

I take it that what this passage contains is great and wonderful, beyond the merit not only of the many among believers but even of those who have advanced far; in it the reason might be made plain why, after rising from the dead, he did not appear in the same way as in the former time. But out of many points, as befits such a work as this, written against the treatise attacking the Christians and their faith, see whether, by setting out a few with good reason, we shall be able to reach those who will hear our defence.

One Jesus seen in many ways§64

64Jesus, though one, was many in aspect; and he was not seen alike by all who saw him. That he was many in aspect is clear from “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6), and “I am the bread” (John 6:35), and “I am the door” (John 10:9), and countless other sayings. That even when seen he did not appear the same to all who saw him, but according to what each beholder could receive, will be clear to those who consider why, when he was about to be transfigured on the high mountain, he did not take even all the apostles, but only Peter and James and John (Matthew 17:1–2). For they alone could take in the sight of his glory at that time, and were able also to perceive Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory (Luke 9:30–31), and to hear them talking together, and the voice from heaven out of the cloud (Matthew 17:5).

And I think that even before he went up the mountain, where only the disciples came to him and he taught them about the beatitudes (Matthew 5:1–12), when he was somewhere below the mountain and, “when evening had come” (Matthew 8:16), was healing those brought to him, freeing them from every disease and every sickness (Matthew 4:23), he did not appear the same to the sick who needed his healing as to those who, because they were healthy, were able to go up the mountain with him.

Moreover, since he privately explained to his own disciples the parables that had been spoken in a veiled way to the crowds outside (Mark 4:11, 34), then just as those who heard the explanation of the parables were superior in their hearing to those who heard the parables without explanations, so too were they superior in their sight: certainly the sight of the soul, and, I believe, of the body as well.

That he did not always appear the same is shown by what Judas said, when about to betray him, to the crowds who came out with him, as to men who did not know him: “Whomever I kiss, he is the one” (Matthew 26:48). I think the Saviour himself also indicates something of this in the words: “Day after day I was with you in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me” (Matthew 26:55; Mark 14:49).

Since, then, our view of Jesus is that he is so great, not only in the divinity within him, hidden from the many, but also in his body, which was transfigured when he wished and for those he wished, we say this: all were able to see Jesus while he had not yet “stripped off the principalities and the powers” (Colossians 2:15) and had not yet died “to sin” (Romans 6:10). But once he had stripped off “the principalities and the powers” and no longer had anything the many could take in by sight, not all who had seen him before were able to see him. Hence, sparing them, he did not appear to all when he had risen from the dead.

Seen only by those with eyes to see§65

65And why do I say “to all”? For not even with the apostles and disciples themselves was he always present, or always visible to them, since they could not take in the sight of him without a break. For once he had completed the dispensation, his divinity shone more brightly. Cephas, that is Peter, as it were the “firstfruits” of the apostles, was able to see it; after him the Twelve, Matthias having been appointed in place of Judas (Acts 1:26); and after them “five hundred brothers at one time.” “Then he appeared to James, then to all the” other “apostles” besides the Twelve, perhaps to the Seventy (Luke 10:1); “and last of all” to Paul, as to “one untimely born” (1 Corinthians 15:5–8). Paul knew well in what sense he said, “To me, less than the least of all the saints, this grace was given” (Ephesians 3:8); and perhaps “less than the least” means the same as “untimely born.”

Just as, then, no one could readily find fault with Jesus for not taking all the apostles up the high mountain, but only the three already named, when he was about to be transfigured and to show the brightness of his garments and the glory of Moses and Elijah talking with him (Matthew 17:1–3), so no one could reasonably blame the apostles’ accounts for relating that after the resurrection Jesus was seen not by all, but by those whom he saw had gained eyes able to see his resurrection.

I think these words said about him also help the defence of what is before us: “For to this end Christ died and rose, that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living” (Romans 14:9). Notice in these words that Jesus “died” “that he might be Lord of the dead,” “and rose, that he might be Lord” not only “of the dead” but “also of the living.” And the apostle does know as the dead over whom Christ is Lord those he lists in this way in the First Epistle to the Corinthians: “For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable” (1 Corinthians 15:52); and as the living, those who will be changed, who are other than the dead who will be raised. About these too the passage reads: “and we shall be changed” (1 Corinthians 15:52), said right after “the dead will be raised first” (compare 1 Thessalonians 4:16).

In the First Epistle to the Thessalonians as well he sets out the same distinction in other words, and says that those who sleep are one group and the living another: “We do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, about those who are asleep, so that you may not grieve as the rest do who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep through Jesus. For this we tell you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means go before those who have fallen asleep” (1 Thessalonians 4:13–15). The interpretation of these passages that seemed right to us we have set out in the commentaries we dictated on the First Epistle to the Thessalonians.

God appears by measure and judgement§66

66And do not be surprised if not all the crowds who have believed in Jesus see his resurrection, when Paul, writing to the Corinthians as to people who could not take in more, says: “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). Of the same kind is this saying too: “For you were not yet able; but even now you are still not able, for you are still fleshly” (1 Corinthians 3:2–3).

So the word, doing everything by divine judgement, has recorded of Jesus that before the passion he appeared to the many without distinction, and even this not always, but that after the passion he no longer showed himself in the same way, but with a certain judgement that measured out to each what was fitting. It is recorded that “God appeared to Abraham” (Genesis 12:7; compare 17:1; 18:1) or to one of the saints, and this “appeared” did not happen always but at intervals, nor did he appear to all. In just the same way, I ask you to understand that the Son of God also appeared by a judgement like the one by which God appeared to them.

Sent to be known and to be hidden§67

67We have answered, then, as far as we could in a work of this kind, the claim: “If he really wished to display divine power, he ought to have appeared to the very men who had abused him, and to the one who condemned him, and in short to all.” He ought not, then, to have appeared to the one who condemned him, nor to those who had abused him. For Jesus was sparing both the one who condemned him and those who had abused him, so that they might not be struck with “blindness,” as the men of Sodom were struck when they plotted against the beauty of the angels who were guests in Lot’s house. This is made plain by these words: “The men stretched out their hands and drew Lot into the house to them, and shut the door; and they struck the men who were at the door of the house with blindness, from small to great, and they wore themselves out looking for the door” (Genesis 19:10–11).

So Jesus wished to display his power, which was divine, to each of those able to see it, and in the measure of what each could take in. Surely it was for no other reason that he took care not to be seen than out of regard for the capacities of those who could not take in the sight of him.

And Celsus brings this in to no purpose: “For he certainly no longer feared any man, once he had died and was, as you say, God; nor was he sent in the first place for this, to stay hidden.” For he was sent not only to be known but also to stay hidden. For even those who knew him did not know all that he was; something of him escaped them, and to some he was not known at all. And he opened the gates of “light” to those who had been sons of “darkness” and “night,” but who had given themselves to becoming sons of “the day” and of “light” (1 Thessalonians 5:5). And the Lord came to us as Saviour, as a good physician, to those full of sins rather than to the righteous (Matthew 9:12–13).

He could vanish when he willed§68

68Let us see how Celsus’s Jew puts it: “In any case, to display his divinity he ought at least to have done this much: to vanish from the stake at once.” This too seems to me like the argument of those who set themselves against providence, who sketch for themselves things other than what exists, and say, “It would have been better if the world were as we have sketched it.” Where what they sketch is possible, they are shown to be making the world worse, so far as it lies with them and their sketch; and where they seem to be painting something not worse than what exists, they are shown to want what is impossible by nature. So either way they are ridiculous.

Here too, then, that it was not impossible for him, as one of a more divine nature, to become invisible whenever he wished, is clear in itself. It is plain also from what is written about him, to anyone except those who accept some of the writings in order to attack the word, and think others are fictions. Now it is written in the Gospel according to Luke that after the resurrection Jesus “took the bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it” to Simon and Cleopas; and when they had taken the bread, “their eyes were opened, and they recognised him; and he vanished from their sight” (Luke 24:30–31).

Why he did not vanish from the cross§69

69We wish to show how it would not have been more useful for the whole dispensation that he should vanish bodily from the stake at once. The things recorded as having happened to Jesus do not hold the whole contemplation of the truth in the bare wording and the history. For each of them is shown, to those who read Scripture with more understanding, to be also a symbol of something.

His crucifixion holds the truth made plain in “I have been crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20), and in what is meant by “Far be it from me to boast except in the cross of my Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Galatians 6:14). His death was necessary because of the words “For the death he died, he died to sin once for all” (Romans 6:10), and because the righteous man says “being conformed to his death” (Philippians 3:10), and “For if we have died with him, we shall also live with him” (2 Timothy 2:11). In the same way his burial too reaches those who are conformed to his death, who have been crucified with him and have died with him, as Paul has also said: “For we were buried with him through baptism” (Romans 6:4), and we rose with him (compare Colossians 2:12).

As for what is recorded about the burial, the tomb, and the one who buried him, we shall expound it more fittingly and at greater length elsewhere, where these are our chief subject. For now it is enough to mention the clean linen cloth in which the pure body of Jesus had to be wrapped (Matthew 27:59), and the new tomb “which” Joseph “had hewn in the rock” (Matthew 27:60), “where no one had yet lain” (Luke 23:53), or, as John says, “in which no one had yet been placed” (John 19:41). Consider whether the agreement of the three evangelists can move anyone. They took care to record that the tomb was quarried or hewn in rock (Matthew 27:60; Mark 15:46; Luke 23:53), so that whoever examines the meaning of what is written may see something worth reflecting on about these things too, and about the newness of the tomb, which Matthew and John relate, and about no dead body having been there, as Luke and John say.

For he was not like the rest of the dead: even in death he showed signs of life, the water and the blood (John 19:34), and was, if I may call him so, a new kind of corpse. It was right, then, that he should be placed in a new and clean tomb, so that, just as his birth was purer than every birth, because he was born not from intercourse but from a virgin, so his burial too might have purity. This purity is shown through the symbol of his body being laid in a new tomb, one not built of gathered stones with no natural unity, but standing in a single rock, united throughout, quarried and hewn.

The interpretation of these things, and the ascent from what is recorded to have happened to the realities that the events signified, one could expound in a greater and more divine way, setting out such matters more fittingly in a work given to them. As for the literal sense, one might explain it this way too: it was fitting for one who had decided to endure being hung on a stake to keep what followed consistent with that purpose too, so that, having been taken down as a man because he had died as a man, he might also be buried as a man.

Moreover, suppose it had been written in the Gospels that he vanished from the stake at once: Celsus and the unbelievers would have found fault with what was written, and would have brought a charge in this form too, saying: “Why ever did he vanish after the cross, and not contrive this before he suffered?” If, then, having learned from the Gospels that he did not vanish from the stake at once, they think they can find fault with the account for not inventing, as they demanded, that he vanished from the stake at once, but for relating the truth, is it not reasonable that they should also believe in his resurrection? And should they not believe that when he chose, at one time, “the doors being shut,” he “stood in the midst” of the disciples (John 20:19, 26), and at another, having given bread to two of his followers, at once “vanished from their sight” (Luke 24:31), after speaking certain words to them?

Jesus did not hide, and Celsus contradicts himself§70

70On what grounds has Celsus’s Jew said that Jesus was in hiding? For he says of him: “Who, sent as a messenger, ever hides himself when he ought to announce what he has been commanded?” Yet the one who said to those seeking to arrest him, “Day after day I was in the temple, teaching openly, and you did not seize me” (Mark 14:49; compare Matthew 26:55; John 18:20), was not hiding.

As for the next point, which Celsus repeats, we have answered it once and will be content with what we said before. For above we have also written a reply to this: “Or did he, while he was disbelieved in the body, preach freely to all, but, when he could have produced strong faith by rising from the dead, show himself secretly to one little woman alone and to his own band of followers?”

But it is not even true that he appeared to one little woman alone. For it is written in the Gospel according to Matthew: “After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to see the tomb. And behold, there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven, approached and rolled away the stone” (Matthew 28:1–2). And a little later Matthew says: “And behold, Jesus met them” (clearly, the Marys mentioned before), “saying, ‘Greetings.’ And they came up, took hold of his feet and worshiped him” (Matthew 28:9).

An answer has also been given to “So when he was being punished he was seen by all, but when he had risen, by one,” when we offered our defense on the point that he was not seen by all. And now too we will say that what was human in him was visible to all, but what was more divine in him (I mean not what consists in a relation to something else, but what is so by its own distinguishing character) was not open to all to receive.

Notice also how Celsus at once contradicts himself. Thus, having said just before that he appeared secretly to one little woman and to his own band of followers, he immediately adds: “So when he was being punished he was seen by all, but when he had risen, by one, whereas the opposite ought to have happened.” Let us hear what he thinks ought to have happened. It was the opposite of his being seen by all when punished and by one when risen; for, so far as his own wording goes, he wanted something both impossible and unreasonable: that when punished he should be seen by one, but when risen, by all. Or how will you explain “whereas the opposite ought to have happened”?

Who sent Jesus, and why§71

71Jesus also taught us who it was that sent him, in the words “No one has known the Father except the Son” (Matthew 11:27; compare Luke 10:22), and in “No one has ever seen God; and he who is indeed the only-begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” (John 1:18). It was he who, speaking of God, declared to his true disciples what concerns God; and since we find traces of this in the Scriptures, we have starting points for speaking about God. In one place we hear, “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5); in another, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24).

Moreover, the purposes for which the Father sent him are countless. Let anyone who wishes learn them, partly from the prophets who proclaimed him beforehand, partly from the evangelists; and he will learn not a few things from the apostles as well, and above all from Paul. Further, he gives light to the godly and will punish sinners. Celsus did not see this when he wrote: “and to give light to the godly, and to have mercy on those who sin or who have repented.”

The voice from heaven was heard only by some§72

72After this he says: “If he wished to escape notice, why was the voice from heaven heard proclaiming him Son of God? But if he did not wish to escape notice, why was he punished, or why did he die?” By this he thinks he is exposing a disagreement in what is written about him. He does not see that Jesus wished neither that everything about him should be known to all, to anyone at all, nor that everything concerning himself should remain hidden.

At any rate, the voice from heaven that proclaimed him to be the Son of God and said, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17), is not recorded to have been within the hearing of the crowds, as Celsus’s Jew supposed. Moreover, the voice from the cloud on the very high mountain was heard only by those who had gone up with him (Matthew 17:1–5; compare Mark 9:2–7; Luke 9:28–35). For the divine voice is of such a kind that it is heard only by those whom the speaker wishes to hear it. I do not yet add that the voice of God recorded in Scripture is by no means struck air, or a stroke of air, or whatever else it is called in the treatises on voice, and that for this reason it is heard by a hearing higher and more divine than the hearing of the senses. And whenever the speaker wishes his voice not to be audible to all, the one who “has” the higher “ears” (Matthew 13:9) hears God, while the one whose soul’s hearing has been deafened does not perceive God speaking.

So much in answer to “Why was the voice from heaven heard proclaiming him Son of God?” As for “If he did not wish to escape notice, why was he punished, or why did he die?”, what we have said at length above about his passion is enough.

He had already called all to the light§73

73After this Celsus’s Jew sets out as a consequence what does not follow. For from “He wished, by the punishments he suffered, to teach us to despise even death,” it does not follow that “after rising from the dead he should openly call all to the light and teach why he had come down.” For he had called all to the light earlier, saying, “Come, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).

And why he had come down is recorded in the discourses he delivered at length: in the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3–12) and in what is proclaimed after them, in parables, and in his conversations with the scribes and Pharisees. And in the Gospel according to John are set out the things he taught, which show the grandeur of Jesus’ speech, a grandeur not of phrasing but of substance. And it is clear from the Gospels that “his word was with authority” (Luke 4:32; compare Matthew 7:28–29), at which they marveled.

Israel disbelieved God even when he was present§74

74To all this Celsus’s Jew adds: “These points, then, we have drawn for you from your own writings, and for them we need no other witness; for you contradict yourselves.” But we have shown that, in conflict with our writings, the Gospels, much nonsense has been talked in the Jew’s speeches, whether addressed to Jesus or to us. And I do not think he has proved how we contradict ourselves; he only thinks so.

And since his Jew adds to this, “In short, O most high and heavenly one, what god, when present among men, is disbelieved?”, we must say to him that even according to the law of Moses God is recorded to have been most clearly present with the Hebrews, not only in the signs and wonders in Egypt (Exodus 7:3), and further in the crossing of the Red Sea (Exodus 14:21–29) and the pillar “of fire” and the cloud of light (Exodus 13:21–22), but also when the Ten Commandments were proclaimed to the whole people (Exodus 20:1–17; Deuteronomy 5:4–22); and yet he was disbelieved by those who knew these things. For if they had believed what was seen and heard, they would not have made a calf (Exodus 32:1–6), nor “exchanged their glory for the likeness of a calf that eats grass” (Psalm 106:20), nor said to one another about the calf, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 32:4).

And consider whether it is not in keeping with the same people both to have disbelieved, long ago, such great marvels and so many manifestations of God throughout the whole wilderness, as is written in the law of the Jews, and, at the extraordinary coming of Jesus, not to be won over by the words he spoke with authority (compare Matthew 7:29) and by the marvels he did in the sight of all the people.

Unbelief at both beginnings§75

75And I think this is enough for anyone who wishes to show that the unbelief of the Jews toward Jesus was consistent with what was recorded about the people from the beginning. For to the Jew in Celsus who says, “What god, when present among men, is disbelieved, and that when he appears to those who are hoping for him? Or why ever is he not recognized by those who have long been expecting him?”, I would say this: Are you willing, sirs, to answer our questions? Which mighty works seem greater to you, so far as your own judgment goes: those in Egypt and in the wilderness, or those which we said Jesus did among you? If in your view those are greater than these, is it not plain at once that despising the lesser also fits the character of those who disbelieved the greater? For this is what is supposed about the things we tell of Jesus.

But if the mighty works told of Jesus are said to be equal to those recorded by Moses, what is strange in what has happened to a people that disbelieved at the beginning of both orders of things? For the beginning of the giving of the law came in the time of Moses, and in it the sins of the unbelievers and the sinners among you are recorded; and we acknowledge that the beginning of a second giving of law and of a second covenant came about with Jesus. And by your unbelief toward Jesus you bear witness that you are sons of those who in the wilderness disbelieved the divine manifestations (compare Matthew 23:31). And what our Savior said will be said to you also, who disbelieved him: “So you are witnesses, and you approve the deeds of your fathers” (Luke 11:48). And in you the prophecy is fulfilled that says, “Your life will be hanging before your eyes, and you will not believe your life” (Deuteronomy 28:66). For you did not believe the Life that had come to dwell among the human race.

The woes of Jesus and the woes of the prophets§76

76Celsus, bringing the Jew on as a speaking character, could find nothing to put into his mouth in his discourse that could not be thrown back at him from the writings of the Law and the Prophets. For he finds fault with Jesus, saying this about him: “He threatens and reviles rashly whenever he says, ‘Woe to you’ (compare Matthew 23:13–29; Luke 6:24–26) and ‘I tell you beforehand.’ For in these words he openly admits that he cannot persuade, which would not happen to a god, nor even to a sensible man.”

But see whether these charges do not plainly turn back on the Jew. For in the writings of the Law and the Prophets God threatens and reviles when he pronounces woes no less than those in the gospel. Such are these words in Isaiah: “Woe to those who join house to house and bring field near to field” (Isaiah 5:8); and “Woe to those who rise early in the morning and pursue strong drink” (Isaiah 5:11); and “Woe to those who drag their sins along as with a long rope” (Isaiah 5:18); and “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20); and “Woe to the strong among you, who drink wine” (Isaiah 5:22). And you could find countless others. And how are the words “Woe, sinful nation, people full of sins, evil seed, lawless sons” (Isaiah 1:4), and what follows, not like the threats he speaks of? These words are followed by threats so great that they are no less than those he says Jesus spoke. Or is it not a threat, and a great one, that says: “Your land is desolate, your cities burned with fire; strangers devour your country in your presence, and it is laid waste, overthrown by foreign peoples” (Isaiah 1:7)? And how are there not insults against the people in Ezekiel as well, where the Lord says to the prophet, “You dwell in the midst of scorpions” (Ezekiel 2:6)?

Did you, then, Celsus, know what you were doing when you made the Jew say of Jesus that “he threatens and reviles rashly whenever he says, ‘Woe to you’ and ‘I tell you beforehand’”? Do you not see that the very things your Jew says in accusing Jesus could be said to him about God? For, by the Jew’s way of thinking, the God of the prophets is plainly found open to like charges, as one unable to persuade.

Further, to those who think that Celsus’s Jew is right to bring these charges against Jesus, I would say this on the point: a great many curses are written in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (see Leviticus 26:14–39; Deuteronomy 27:15–26; Deuteronomy 28:15–68). However the Jew defends them when he stands up for the Scripture, in that way, or even better, we will defend what are taken to be the insults and threats spoken by Jesus. And we shall be better able than the Jew to defend the Law of Moses itself, since we have been taught by Jesus to hear the writings of the Law with more understanding than he does. Yet the Jew too, if he sees the intent of the prophetic words, will be able to show that God does not threaten and revile rashly when he says “Woe” and “I tell you beforehand,” and how God would say such things for the conversion of human beings, things that Celsus thinks not even a sensible man would do. And Christians, who know one God, the same in the prophets and in the Lord, will show the good reason behind what are thought to be threats and what Celsus calls insults.

Let me also say a few words on this point to Celsus, who claims both to be a philosopher and to know our teachings. My good man, if Hermes in Homer says to Odysseus, “Why, unhappy man, do you go once more alone across the hilltops?” (Homer, Odyssey 10.281), you accept the defence that Homer’s Hermes speaks to Odysseus like this to turn him; for flattery and pleasing words belong to the Sirens, beside whom lies “a heap of bones” (Homer, Odyssey 12.45), and who say, “Come here, much-praised Odysseus, great glory of the Achaeans” (Homer, Odyssey 12.184). But if my prophets, and Jesus himself, say “Woe” and what you take for insults to turn their hearers, is nothing then wisely arranged for the hearers by such words, and does he not apply such speech to them as a healing remedy of Paeon?

Unless, perhaps, you would have God, or one who shares in the divine nature, when he speaks with human beings, look only to what belongs to his own nature and is worthy of himself, and no longer consider what is fitting to declare to the people who are being guided and led by his word, and to speak with each according to that person’s own character. And how is it not laughable that this inability to persuade should be said of Jesus, when it applies equally not only to the Jew, who has many such things in his prophecies, but also to the Greeks? Among them each of those who won great fame for wisdom was unable to persuade those who plotted against him, or the judges, or the accusers, to cease from wickedness and to travel by way of philosophy toward virtue.

The resurrection and the demand to see§77

77After this his Jew says, evidently in keeping with what Jews hold: “We hope, of course, to rise again in the body and to have eternal life, and that the one who is to be sent to us will be the pattern and pioneer of this, showing that it is not impossible for God to raise someone up together with the body.” Now we do not know whether the Jew would say that the Christ he expects shows in himself a pattern of the resurrection; but let it be so: let it be granted that he both thinks and says this. And we will answer the one who said that he had spoken to us out of our own writings: My good man, did you read the passages by which you suppose you can accuse us, but not go through those on the resurrection of Jesus, and on his being “the firstborn from the dead” (Colossians 1:18; compare Revelation 1:5)? Or, because you do not want these things to have been said, have they then not been said?

But since the Jew in Celsus still speaks of the resurrection of bodies and accepts it, I do not think this is the right moment to discuss the matter with one who both believes and says that there is a resurrection of bodies, whether he has worked out such a belief clearly in his own mind and can champion the doctrine well, or whether he cannot, but assents to the doctrine in a rather mythical way. Let that, then, be our answer to Celsus’s Jew.

And since after this he says, “Where is he, then, so that we may see and believe?” (compare Mark 15:32) we will say to him: Where, then, is he now who speaks in the prophets and who has worked wonders, so that we may see and believe that God has a portion? Or are you allowed to offer a defence for God’s not always appearing to the race of the Hebrews, while we are not granted the same defence concerning Jesus, who once rose again and persuaded his disciples of his own resurrection, and persuaded them so thoroughly that by what they suffer they show everyone that, with their eyes on eternal life and on the resurrection shown to them in word and in deed, they make light of all the hardships of this life?

Jewish unbelief and the calling of the Gentiles§78

78After this the Jew says: “Or did he come down for this, that we might disbelieve?” To him it will be said: He did not come for this, to produce unbelief in the Jews; but knowing beforehand that it would come about, he foretold it, and he made use of the Jews’ unbelief for the calling of the Gentiles. For “through their trespass salvation has come to the Gentiles” (Romans 11:11). Of these Gentiles the Christ who speaks in the prophets says: “A people whom I did not know served me; at the hearing of the ear they obeyed me” (Psalm 18:43–44); and “I was found by those who did not seek me; I became manifest to those who did not ask for me” (Isaiah 65:1; compare Romans 10:20). And it is clear that the Jews also suffered punishment in this life, after they had done to Jesus what they did.

But if the Jews bring charges against us, let them answer this: “Wonderful indeed is God’s providence and kindness toward you, who are being punished and have been deprived of Jerusalem, of what is called the sanctuary, and of the most solemn worship!” For whatever they say in defence of God’s providence, we shall establish it more firmly and better, saying that God’s providence has been wonderful, since it made use of that people’s sin so that those from the Gentiles, “strangers to the covenants” (Ephesians 2:12) and aliens to the promises, might be called through Jesus into the kingdom of God.

The prophets also foretold this: that because of the sins of the Hebrew people God would choose not one nation but picked people from every quarter, and that, choosing “the foolish things of the world” (1 Corinthians 1:27), he would make the senseless nation (compare Deuteronomy 32:21) become versed in the divine words, with the kingdom of God taken from them and given to these (Matthew 21:43). For the present it is enough, out of many, to set down the prophecy about the calling of the Gentiles from the Song in Deuteronomy, which runs thus and is spoken in the person of the Lord: “For they made me jealous with what are no gods; they provoked me to anger with their idols; and I will make them jealous with what is no nation; with a senseless nation I will provoke them to anger” (Deuteronomy 32:21).

No mere man could win the world§79

79Then, as the conclusion to all of this, the Jew says about Jesus: “He, then, was a man, and such a man as the truth itself makes plain and the argument shows.” But I do not know whether a man who dared to sow throughout the whole world the worship of God and the teaching that come from him could, without God, do what he wishes and prove stronger than all who oppose the spread of his teaching: kings and governors, the Roman Senate, rulers everywhere, and the common people. And how could a human nature that had nothing higher in itself convert so great a multitude? It would be no wonder if these were only the sensible; but they include the most irrational too, people given over to their passions and, because of their unreason, all the harder to bring over to a more self-controlled life. But because Christ was the power of God and the wisdom of the Father (1 Corinthians 1:24), for this reason he has done these things and still does them, even though neither Jews nor Greeks wish it, who do not believe his word.

We, then, will not cease believing in God according to the precepts of Jesus Christ, and seeking to turn those who are blind about the worship of God, even if those who are truly blind revile us as blind, and those who beguile the people who agree with them, whether Jews or Greeks, accuse us of beguiling people. A fine kind of beguiling indeed, which makes people self-controlled instead of licentious, or at least advancing toward self-control; just instead of unjust, or advancing toward justice; wise instead of foolish, or on the road to wisdom; and brave and steadfast instead of cowardly, mean-spirited and unmanly, showing this above all in the struggles for piety toward God who created all things!

So Jesus Christ came, proclaimed beforehand not by one prophet but by all. And this too was a mark of Celsus’s ignorance: to make the Jewish character say that a single prophet had foretold the Christ. And since the Jew in Celsus has been brought on saying these things as though in keeping with his own law, and ended his speech somewhere about here, after saying other things not worth remembering, I too will end here the second book of what I have dictated in answer to his treatise. And, if God grants it and the power of Christ dwells in our soul, we shall try in the third to deal with what Celsus wrote next.