The plain honesty of the Gospel writers

We must now consider what Celsus says next. In it he says that with us too it is faith, having taken hold of our soul beforehand, that produces this kind of assent concerning Jesus. Faith does truly produce such assent in us. But see whether faith itself does not at once show what is praiseworthy in it, when we entrust ourselves to the God who is over all, giving thanks to the one who led us to such faith, and saying that it was not without God that he dared and achieved so great a thing.

We also trust the intentions of those who wrote the Gospels, discerning their reverence and their conscience, which show in their writings, for they have nothing spurious about them, nothing of the gambler's tricks, nothing made up and nothing crafty. For it is clear to us that souls which had not learned the sort of things taught by the crafty sophistry of the Greeks, which has great persuasiveness and sharpness, and by the rhetoric that wallows in the law courts, would not have been able to invent in this way matters that could carry in themselves what leads to faith and to a life in keeping with that faith.

I think too that this is why Jesus chose to use such men as teachers of his doctrine: so that there might be no room for any suspicion of plausible sophistries, and so that it might shine out plainly to those able to understand that the guilelessness of the writers' intention, which had in it much of what I may call simplicity, was counted worthy of a more divine power, a power that achieves far more than elaborate speech, the arrangement of words, and an argument that proceeds by divisions and the technical methods of the Greeks are thought able to achieve.