Against Celsus, Book V

A prayer to pull down Celsus’s conceit§1

1It is not in pursuit of the much speaking that is forbidden, the speaking from which there is no escaping “sin” (Proverbs 10:19), that we now begin a fifth book against Celsus’s treatise, holy Ambrose. It is because, as far as our strength allows, we are trying to let nothing he has said pass untested, and above all those points where some might think he has brought a shrewd charge against us or against the Jews.

If it were possible for us to enter, with our argument, into the conscience of every single person who reads his treatise, to draw out each arrow that wounds anyone not fully fenced with the whole armour of God (Ephesians 6:11), and to apply a medicine of reason to heal the wound Celsus deals, the wound that keeps those who attend to his words from being sound “in the faith” (Titus 1:13), we would have done so.

But this is God’s work: to come and dwell invisibly, by his own Spirit together with the Spirit of Christ, in those in whom he judges he ought to dwell. Our part, since we try through words and writings to bring people to faith, is to do everything so that we may be called workmen who have no cause for shame, rightly handling “the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). And one part of that “everything,” it seems to us, is to refute Celsus’s plausible arguments as far as we can, faithfully carrying out the task you have set us. So come: let us set out what follows the words of Celsus to which we have already replied (whether we also overturned them, the reader will judge), and let us add our answer to it.

May God grant that our mind and our speech come to the task not bare and stripped of divinity, “so that the faith” of those we pray may be helped “may not rest in the wisdom of men” (1 Corinthians 2:5). Having received “the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16) from his Father, who alone gives it, and being helped to share in the Word of God, may we cast down “every height that is lifted up against the knowledge of God” (2 Corinthians 10:5), and with it the conceit of Celsus, who lifts himself up against us and against our Jesus, and against Moses and the prophets as well; so that, as he who gives “a word to those who preach the good news with great power” (Psalm 68:11) supplies this to us also and grants the great power, faith may come about in those who will read this, in the word and power of God (1 Corinthians 2:4–5).

Celsus says no God comes down§2

2Our task now, then, is to overturn his statement, which runs as follows: “No god, O Jews and Christians, and no son of God has come down, or would come down. But if you speak of certain angels, what do you call them: gods, or some other kind of being? Some other kind, presumably: the demons.”

Celsus is repeating himself here (for he has said these things many times already above), so there is no need to discuss them at greater length; what we have said on the point will suffice. Out of many things we shall set out a few, which we think agree with what was said before, yet do not carry entirely the same sense. In them we shall show that, by declaring universally that no god or son of God has come down to men, he does away both with what the multitude believe about the appearing of a god and with what he himself said earlier.

For if the statement Celsus has made universally, “No god and no son of God has come down, or would come down,” is true, then plainly it is ruled out that there are gods on earth, come down from heaven either to give oracles to men or to heal them through oracles. Then neither the Pythian god nor Asclepius nor any other of those believed to do such things could be a god who came down from heaven. Or else he would be a god, but one who had always had the earth as his allotted dwelling, like an exile from the place of the gods; or he would be one of those who have no right to share in the company of the divine beings there. Or else Apollo and Asclepius, and all who are believed to do anything on earth, would not be gods but some kind of demons, far worse than those wise men among mankind who, by their virtue, ascend even to the vault of heaven.

Celsus caught deserting to Epicurus§3

3Notice, then, that in his wish to do away with our teaching, this man, who never admitted anywhere in his treatise that he was an Epicurean, is caught deserting to Epicurus. Now is the time for you who read Celsus’s words and agree with what he sets before you: either deny that God comes to dwell among men, caring for human beings one by one, or, if you hold that he does, show Celsus’s argument to be false.

If you do away with providence altogether, you will make false those words of his in which he affirms gods and providence, just so that you can say that this statement is true. But if you hold to providence none the less, as one who does not agree with Celsus when he says that neither a god nor a son of God has come down or comes down to men, why will you not examine carefully, from what we have said about Jesus and from what was prophesied about him, whom one ought rather to believe to be God and Son of God come down to men? Is it Jesus, who arranged and accomplished so much? Or is it those who, under the pretext of oracles and divinations, do not set right the character of those they heal, who have besides fallen away from the pure and unmixed reverence owed to the Maker of the universe, and who, under the pretext of honouring many gods, split the souls of those who attend to them away from the one and only manifest and true God?

Angels serve, but prayer goes to God§4

4After this, as though Jews or Christians would answer that those who come down to men are angels, he says, “But if you speak of certain angels,” and goes on to ask, “what do you call them: gods, or some other kind of being?” Then again he brings them in as if they had answered, “Some other kind, presumably: the demons.” Come, let us consider this too.

For we too do indeed acknowledge that there are angels, who are “ministering spirits, sent out for service for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation” (Hebrews 1:14). They ascend, bringing men’s petitions up to the purest regions of the world, the heavenly ones, or even to the regions above the heavens, which are purer still; and they come down again from there, bringing to each, as he deserves, something of what God commands them to minister to those who receive the benefit. Since we have learned to call them angels from the work they do, we find that, because they are divine, they are sometimes even named “gods” in the sacred Scriptures. Yet this is not so that we should be commanded to revere and worship, in place of God, those who minister to us and bring us the things of God.

For every supplication and prayer and intercession and thanksgiving (1 Timothy 2:1) must be sent up to the God who is over all, through the High Priest who is above all the angels, the living Word and God. And we shall make supplication to the Word himself also, and intercede with him, and give thanks to him, and pray to him too, if we can understand how the word “prayer” is used in its strict sense and in its looser sense.

Why angels are not called demons§5

5For it is not reasonable to call upon angels without first acquiring a knowledge of them that is beyond human reach. And even supposing that this knowledge of them, wonderful and secret as it is, were attained, that very knowledge, by showing what their nature is and what task each of them is appointed to, will not allow anyone to venture to pray to any other than the God over all, who suffices for all things, through our Saviour, the Son of God. He is the “Word” (John 1:1), and Wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:24), and Truth (John 14:6), and all else that the writings of God’s prophets and of Jesus’ apostles say of him.

For the holy angels of God to be gracious to us and to do everything on our behalf, it is enough that our disposition toward God should imitate, as far as human nature can, their purpose, as they imitate God; and that our understanding of his Son, the Word, so far as we can attain it, should not be at odds with the holy angels’ clearer understanding of him, but should press on toward it every day in clearness and precision.

Celsus, as one who has not read our sacred Scriptures, answers himself as if speaking for us, saying that we call the angels who come down from God for the benefit of men some other kind of being; and he says that presumably we would call them demons. He does not see that the name “demons” is not even neutral, as the name “men” is, among whom some are good and some bad. Nor is it a good name, as the name “gods” is, which is applied, not to base things, whether demons or statues or animals, but, by those who know the things of God, to beings that are truly more divine and blessed. The name “demons,” on the other hand, is always applied to the wicked powers that are outside the grosser body, which lead men astray and distract them and drag them down from God and from the things above the heavens to the affairs of this world.

Celsus misreads Jewish worship§6

6After this he sets out a passage about the Jews, as follows: “First, then, one may well wonder at the Jews, that they revere heaven and the angels in it, yet pass over the most venerable and most powerful parts of it, the sun and the moon and the other stars, both fixed and wandering; as if it were possible for the whole to be a god while its parts are not divine. Or that they worship most devoutly beings who are said to draw near, somewhere in the dark, to people blinded by a crooked sorcery or dreaming through dim phantoms, while those who prophesy so plainly and so brilliantly to all, through whom rains and heat and clouds and thunders (which they worship) and lightnings and fruits and every kind of offspring are dispensed, through whom God is revealed to them, the most manifest heralds of the world above, the truly heavenly angels, these they count as nothing.”

In these remarks Celsus seems to me to be confused, and to have written, from things he heard amiss, about matters he did not know. For it is clear to those who examine the ways of the Jews and set those of the Christians beside them that the Jews follow the law, which says in the person of God: “You shall have no other gods besides me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, nor a likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the waters under the earth. You shall not worship them, nor serve them” (Exodus 20:3–5). Following this law, they revere nothing but the God over all, who made heaven and everything else.

And it is plain that those who live by the law, revering the One who made heaven, do not revere heaven together with God; nor does anyone who serves the law of Moses worship the angels in heaven either. Just as they do not worship the sun and the moon and the stars, “the array of heaven,” so they abstain from worshipping heaven and the angels in it, obeying the law which says: “And do not, when you look up to heaven and see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the array of heaven, be led astray and worship them and serve them, things which the Lord your God has allotted to all the nations” (Deuteronomy 4:19).

A divine whole does not make its parts divine§7

7Celsus also assumes, on his own account, that the Jews regard heaven as a god, and he adds to this something he presents as absurd. He accuses those who worship heaven but not also the sun, the moon and the stars, saying that the Jews do this “as if it were possible for the whole to be a god while its parts are not divine.” By the whole he seems to mean heaven, and by its parts the sun, the moon and the stars.

Now neither Jews nor Christians plainly say that heaven is a god. But let it be granted, on his terms, that the Jews say heaven is a god, and let the sun, the moon and the stars also be parts of heaven (which is not necessarily true, for the animals and plants on earth are not parts of the earth either). On what ground is it true, even by the Greeks’ own account, that if some whole is a god, its parts are thereby divine as well? The Greeks plainly say that the whole world is a god: the Stoics say it is the first god, the followers of Plato the second, and some of them the third. Do such men hold, then, that since the world as a whole is a god, its parts too are thereby divine, so that not only human beings but also all the irrational animals are divine, being parts of the world, and the plants as well? And if the mountains, the rivers and the seas are parts of the world, are the rivers and the seas therefore gods because the whole world is a god? But the Greeks will not say this either. Rather, it is the demons (or gods, as they name them) that preside over rivers and seas, if there are any, that they would call gods.

And so Celsus’s general rule proves false even by the account of those Greeks who bring in providence: the rule that if some whole is a god, its parts are necessarily divine. It follows from Celsus’s argument that if the world is a god, everything in it is divine, being a part of the world. On that reasoning, flies, gnats, worms and every kind of snake, and of birds and fishes too, will be divine living beings; and not even those who say that the world is a god will say that. But the Jews who live by the law of Moses, even if they do not know at all how to understand the meaning of the law, which is expressed in a hidden way and points to something secret, will say neither that heaven is a god nor that the angels are.

Worshipping heaven and angels breaks the Jewish law§8

8Since we say that he was confused by certain things he misheard, come, let us for our part make these points clear too, as far as we can, and show that, though Celsus thinks it a Jewish practice to worship heaven and the angels in it, such a practice is not Jewish but a transgression of Judaism, as is the worship of the sun, the moon and the stars, and of images too. You will find, at any rate, especially in Jeremiah, the word of God reproaching the Jewish people through the prophet for worshipping such things and for sacrificing “to the queen of heaven” (Jeremiah 44:17–19) and “to all the host of heaven” (Jeremiah 19:13).

The writings of the Christians also show, when they denounce the sins committed among the Jews, that once God had abandoned that people for certain sins, they committed these sins as well. For in the Acts of the Apostles it is written about the Jews: “But God turned and gave them over to worship the host of heaven, as it is written in the book of the prophets: Did you offer me slain beasts and sacrifices forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel? And you took up the tent of Moloch and the star of the god Rompha, the figures which you made in order to worship them” (Acts 7:42–43; Amos 5:25–26).

And in Paul, who was strictly trained in the ways of the Jews (Acts 22:3) and later became a Christian through an extraordinary appearance of Jesus (Acts 9:3–6), such things are said in the letter to the Colossians: “Let no one disqualify you, insisting on humility and the worship of angels, dwelling on what he has seen, puffed up without cause by the mind of his flesh, and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, supplied and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with the growth that is from God” (Colossians 2:18–19).

But Celsus, having neither read nor learned these things, has represented the Jews, I do not know how, as worshipping heaven and the angels in it without breaking the law.

Sorcery and star-worship are both against the law§9

9Further, being somewhat confused, and not having looked carefully into what concerns this subject, he supposed that the Jews were led on by the spells used in magic and sorcery to worship the angels in heaven, because of certain phantoms that appear, in answer to the spells, to those who chant them. He did not see that this too, in those who did such things, was done against the law, which says: “You shall not follow mediums, and you shall not attach yourselves to enchanters, so as to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 19:31).

He ought, then, since he regards the Jews as keeping the law and says that they are the ones who live by the law, either not to have attributed these things to the Jews at all, or, if he attributed them, to have shown that it was the Jews who broke the law who did such things. But again: just as those break the law who, blinded and dreaming through dim phantoms, worship by sorcery beings somewhere in the dark, bowing down to those said to draw near and to others of that kind, so too those who sacrifice to the sun, the moon and the stars break the law most thoroughly. And it was not consistent for the same man to say that the Jews are on their guard against worshipping the sun, the moon and the stars, and yet are not on their guard against such worship where heaven and angels are concerned.

God’s people are to shine like the stars, not worship them§10

10But if we, who refuse to worship angels and the sun, the moon and the stars alike, must make a defence for not worshipping even those whom the Greeks call visible and perceptible gods, we will say that the law of Moses also knows that these were allotted by God “to all the nations under heaven” (Deuteronomy 4:19), but not to those who were taken as God’s chosen portion out of all the nations on earth. It is written, at any rate, in Deuteronomy: “And do not, when you look up to heaven and see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the array of heaven, be led astray and worship them and serve them, things which the Lord your God allotted to all the nations under the whole heaven. But the Lord God took us and brought us out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be a people of his own inheritance, as on this day” (Deuteronomy 4:19–20).

So then the Hebrew people, called by God to be “a chosen race” and “a royal priesthood” and “a holy nation” and “a people for his possession” (1 Peter 2:9; Exodus 19:6), the people about whom it had been foretold to Abraham by the voice of the Lord speaking to him, “Look up to heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. And he said to him: So shall your offspring be” (Genesis 15:5), this people, having the hope of becoming like the stars in heaven, was not going to worship those whom they were to resemble through understanding and keeping the law of God. For it has been said to them: “The Lord your God has multiplied you, and behold, you are today like the stars of heaven in number” (Deuteronomy 1:10). And in Daniel also such things are prophesied about the resurrection: “And at that time your people shall be saved, everyone who is written in the book; and many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to reproach and everlasting shame; and those who understand shall shine like the brightness of the firmament, and from among the many righteous, like the stars, for ever and beyond” (Daniel 12:1–3). From this Paul too takes his point when, speaking of the resurrection, he says: “There are also heavenly bodies and earthly bodies; but the glory of the heavenly is one, and the glory of the earthly is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:40–42).

It was not reasonable, then, that those who had been taught to rise with greatness of soul above all created things, and to hope from God for the best things for themselves in return for the noblest life; who had heard the words “You are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:14) and “Let your light shine before men, so that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16); who train themselves to possess Wisdom, “bright and unfading” (Wisdom of Solomon 6:12), or have already received that Wisdom, which is “the radiance of eternal light” (Wisdom of Solomon 7:26), should be so struck with awe at the perceptible light of the sun and the moon and the stars that, because of that perceptible light of theirs, they should think themselves somewhere beneath them, though they possess so great an intelligible light of knowledge, and “the true light” (John 1:9), and “the light of the world” (John 8:12), and “the light of men” (John 1:4), and that they should worship those bodies.

If those bodies ought to be worshipped at all, they ought to be worshipped not for the perceptible light admired by the many but for their intelligible and true light, if indeed the stars in heaven are also rational and virtuous living beings and have been enlightened with the light of knowledge by Wisdom, which is “the radiance of eternal light” (Wisdom of Solomon 7:26). For their perceptible light is the work of the Creator of all things, while their intelligible light is perhaps also their own, having come from the free will within them.

Not even the sun asks to be worshipped§11

11But not even that light of theirs should be worshipped by one who sees and understands the true light, by sharing in which these too, it seems, have been given light; nor by one who sees God, the Father of the true light. Of him it is well said: “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).

Those who worship the sun, the moon and the stars because their light is visible and heavenly would not worship a spark of fire or a lamp on earth, for they see how beyond comparison the things they think worthy of worship surpass the light of sparks and lamps. In the same way, those who have understood in what sense “God is light” (1 John 1:5), who have grasped in what sense the Son of God is “the true light, which enlightens every man coming into the world” (John 1:9), and who understand too in what sense he says, “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12), could not reasonably worship what is, so to speak, a tiny spark of true light in the sun, the moon and the stars, set beside the light that God is.

Nor do we say such things about the sun, the moon and the stars because we despise these great works of God, or because we call the sun, the moon and the stars “a red-hot mass”, as Anaxagoras did. We say them because we perceive the divinity of God, whose pre-eminence is beyond words, and also how his Only-begotten surpasses all the rest. And since we are persuaded that the sun itself, and the moon and the stars, pray to the God who is over all through his Only-begotten, we judge that we ought not to pray to those who are themselves praying. For they themselves wish to send us up to the God to whom they pray, rather than draw us down to themselves, or split our power of prayer, turning part of it away from God and toward themselves.

Here I will also use the following example about them. Our Saviour and Lord, hearing himself once addressed as “Good Teacher” (Mark 10:17; Luke 18:18), sent the speaker back to his own Father and said: “Why do you call me good? No one is good but one, God the Father” (Mark 10:18; Luke 18:19). If the Son of the Father’s “love” (Colossians 1:13), being the “image” of God’s goodness (Wisdom of Solomon 7:26), had good reason to say this, how much more reason would the sun have to say to those who worship it: “Why do you worship me? For ‘you shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve’ (Matthew 4:10; Deuteronomy 6:13); and him I too, and all who are with me, worship and serve.”

And even if someone is not so great, let such a one none the less pray to the Word of God, who is able to heal him, and much more to his Father, who for the righteous of earlier times also “sent forth his word and healed them, and delivered them from their destruction” (Psalm 107:20).

God is near; the stars are only his heralds§12

12God, then, in his kindness comes down to men, not in a spatial sense but by his providence. And the Child of God is with his own disciples not only at that time but always, fulfilling the words, “Behold, I am with you all the days, until the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). And if “a branch cannot bear fruit unless it abides in the vine” (John 15:4), it is clear that the disciples of the Word as well, the spiritual “branches” (John 15:5) of the true vine, the Word (John 15:1), cannot bear the fruits of virtue unless they remain in the true vine, the Christ of God. He is with us too, whose place is here below on earth; and being with those everywhere who have grown into him, and indeed with those who do not know him, he is everywhere. John, who wrote the Gospel, shows this too in the person of John the Baptist, who says: “Among you stands one whom you do not know, who comes after me” (John 1:26–27).

Since he who has filled heaven and earth, and has said, “Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord” (Jeremiah 23:24), is with us and is near us (for I believe him when he says, “I am a God at hand, and not a God far off, says the Lord” (Jeremiah 23:23)), it is absurd to seek to pray to the sun or the moon or any of the stars, which do not reach to all things.

But let it be granted, to use Celsus’s very words, that the sun, the moon and the stars are “prophesying rains and heat and clouds and thunder”. If, then, they prophesy such great things, should we not rather worship God, in whose service they prophesy, and revere him rather than his prophets? Let them, then, prophesy “lightnings, too, and fruits and every kind of offspring”, and let them “dispense” all such things; yet we will not for that reason worship those who themselves worship, just as we do not worship Moses either, or those after him who prophesied from God things better than rain and heat and clouds and thunder and lightning and fruits and every offspring the senses perceive. But even if the sun, the moon and the stars were able to utter prophecies better than rains, not even so will we worship them, but the Father of the prophecies in them, and the Word of God, who is the minister of those prophecies.

But grant that they are also his “heralds” and “truly heavenly angels”. Even so, how should we not worship the God whom they herald and announce, rather than his heralds and his angels?

The stars await the freedom of God’s children§13

13Celsus takes it for granted that we hold the sun, the moon and the stars to be “nothing”. About them we confess that they too wait for “the revelation of the sons of God” (Romans 8:19), being subjected for the present to “the futility” of material bodies “because of him who subjected them in hope” (Romans 8:20).

If Celsus had read the countless other things we say about the sun, the moon and the stars, and the words “Praise him, all you stars and light” (Psalm 148:3) and “Praise him, you heavens of heavens” (Psalm 148:4), he would not have declared of us that we say these great beings, which praise God greatly, are “nothing”. Nor does Celsus know the words: “For the eager longing of the creation waits for the revelation of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from the bondage of corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:19–21).

With this, then, let our defence for not revering the sun, the moon and the stars come to an end. Let us also set out his next passage, so that afterwards, God granting, we may say in reply to it whatever will be given us from the light of the truth.

Celsus mocks the hope of the resurrection§14

14He says, then: “It is foolish of them also to think that when God, like a cook, brings on the fire, all the rest of the race will be roasted through, while they alone will survive, not only the living but also those who died long ago, rising up from the earth in that very same flesh. This is simply the hope of worms. For what human soul would still long for a body that has rotted? Seeing that this doctrine is not shared even by some among you and among the Christians, one may show how utterly foul and loathsome it is, and at the same time impossible. For what body, once wholly corrupted, can return to its original nature, and to that very first make-up from which it was dissolved? Having nothing to answer, they flee to a most absurd refuge: that everything is possible to God (Matthew 19:26). But God cannot do what is shameful, nor does he will what is against nature. Nor, if you in your own depravity desire something vile, will God be able to do it, nor need one believe at once that it will happen. For God is the author not of faulty appetite, nor of wandering disorder, but of right and just nature. He could grant everlasting life to a soul; but ‘corpses’, says Heraclitus, ‘are more fit to be thrown out than dung’ (Heraclitus, fragment 96). As for flesh, full of things it is not even decent to name, God will neither wish nor be able to make it everlasting against reason. For he himself is the reason of all things that exist; he can therefore do nothing contrary to reason, nor contrary to himself.”

The fire that cleanses and heals§15

15See, then, how here, from the very start, he slanders with mockery the burning of the world, a teaching put forward also by some Greeks whose philosophy is not to be despised, and how he would have it that we, as though making God a cook, bring in our account of that burning. He has not seen that, as some Greeks held (perhaps having taken it from the most ancient nation, the Hebrews), the fire is brought upon the world to cleanse it, and probably also upon each of those who need the punishment and at the same time the healing that comes through fire. It burns, but does not burn up, those who have no matter that needs to be consumed by that fire; but it burns and burns up those who, in the building that is spoken of figuratively, the building of deeds, words and thoughts, have built with “wood, hay or straw” (1 Corinthians 3:12).

The divine words say that the Lord will come “like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap” (Malachi 3:2) to each of those who need it, because there has been mixed into them, as it were, a base matter that melts, the matter that comes from wickedness; to those, I mean, who need fire, as though he were smelting those who have been mixed with “bronze and tin and lead” (Ezekiel 22:18–20). Anyone who wishes may learn this from the prophet Ezekiel.

That we do not say God brings the fire like a cook, but as God, the benefactor of those who need pain and fire, the prophet Isaiah will also bear witness, in the place where it is written that it was said to a certain sinful nation: “Since you have coals of fire, sit upon them; these will be a help to you” (Isaiah 47:14–15). The Word, arranging what suits the multitudes who will read Scripture, speaks the grim things in a veiled way and with wisdom, to bring fear on those who cannot otherwise turn back from the flood of their sins. Even so, the attentive reader will find shown there the end that the grim and painful things bring about for those who suffer. For the present it is enough to set down these words from Isaiah: “For my name’s sake I will show you my anger, and I will bring my glories upon you, so that I may not utterly destroy you” (Isaiah 48:9).

We have been compelled to hint at things that do not suit those who believe more simply and who need a simpler handling in our teaching, so as not to seem to leave unrefuted the charge Celsus makes when he says, “when God, like a cook, brings on the fire.”

Simple believers and the fire of punishment§16

16From what has been said it is clear, to those who listen with more understanding, how one must answer also his words, “all the rest of the race will be roasted through, while they alone will survive.” It is no wonder if such ideas have been formed by those among us whom the Word calls “the foolish things of the world”, “the low-born”, “the despised” and “the things that are not” (1 Corinthians 1:27–28), those whom “through the foolishness of preaching God was pleased to save”, namely “those who believe” in him, “since in the wisdom of God the world through wisdom did not know God” (1 Corinthians 1:21). They are not able to set out clearly the sense of the passages, nor have they been willing to give their time to searching the Scripture, although Jesus says, “Search the Scriptures” (John 5:39); and so they have formed such notions about the fire that God brings on and about what will happen to those who have sinned.

And perhaps, just as it suits children to be told certain things fitted to their infancy, so as to turn them, being very young children, toward what is better, so for those whom the Word has named the foolish things of the world, the low-born and the despised, the obvious understanding of the punishments is fitting, since they can take in no other way of turning back and of keeping away from their many evils than through fear and the imagining of the punishments.

The Word, then, says that only those will survive without a taste of the fire and the punishments who have been perfectly purified in their doctrines, their character and the ruling part of their soul. But those who are not such, who according to their deserts need the dispensation of punishment through fire, it says will be in these punishments for some end; an end which it befits God to bring upon those who were made “in his image” (Genesis 1:26–27) and have lived against the purpose of the nature that is “in his image.” This, too, is our answer to the words, “all the rest of the race will be roasted through, while they alone will survive.”

Paul counts himself among the living§17

17Next, having misunderstood either the sacred writings or those who have not understood the sacred writings, he says that we teach that at the time of the cleansing that will be brought upon the world through fire, we alone will survive, “not only those then living but also those who died long ago.” He did not grasp that it was with a certain secret wisdom that the apostle of Jesus said: “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed” (1 Corinthians 15:51–52). He ought to have considered what the speaker had in mind when, as one by no means dead, he set himself and those like him apart from the dead, and after “and the dead will be raised incorruptible” said: “and we shall be changed.”

To confirm that the apostle had some such meaning when he wrote the words I have quoted from the First Letter to the Corinthians, I will quote also the words from the First Letter to the Thessalonians, where Paul, as one living and awake and other than those who have fallen asleep, says this: “For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are living, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means go before those who have fallen asleep; for the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a word of command, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God” (1 Thessalonians 4:15–16). Then again, right after this, knowing that the dead in Christ are others than himself and those like him, he goes on to say: “The dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are living, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air” (1 Thessalonians 4:16–17).

The seed and the body that is to be§18

18He has mocked at some length the resurrection of the flesh, which is preached in the churches but understood more clearly by the wiser. There is no need to set out his words again, since they have already been quoted once. Come, then, let us set out and present a few things on this problem too, as far as we can, with an eye to those who will read this, as befits a defence addressed to one who is a stranger to the faith and written for the sake of those who are still infants, tossed by waves and carried about “by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in craftiness, toward the scheming of error” (Ephesians 4:14).

Neither we nor the divine writings say that those who died long ago will live, “rising up from the earth” in the very same flesh, flesh that has received no change for the better; Celsus slanders us in saying so. For we hear many scriptures speaking of the resurrection in a way worthy of God, but for the present it is enough to quote Paul’s words from the First Letter to the Corinthians, where he says: “But someone will say, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’ Foolish one! What you sow is not made alive unless it dies. And what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare grain, perhaps of wheat or of some other kind; but God gives it a body as he willed, and to each of the seeds its own body” (1 Corinthians 15:35–38).

See how in these words he says that it is “not the body that is to be” that is sown, but that from what is sown and cast bare upon the earth, as God gives “to each of the seeds its own body,” a kind of resurrection takes place, as a stalk rises from the seed cast down in plants such as mustard, or, in the case of a larger tree, from the stone of an olive or of some fruit tree.

Sown a natural body, raised a spiritual body§19

19So “God gives” “to each” “a body as he willed” (1 Corinthians 15:38): as with things that are sown, so also with those who are, as it were, sown in dying, and who at the fitting time receive from what was sown the “body” that God puts around each one according to his worth. We hear Scripture too, teaching at more length the difference between what is, so to speak, sown and what is, so to speak, raised from it, when it says: “It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:42–44).

Let anyone who is able go further and grasp what is meant by the one who says: “As is the one of dust, so are those who are of dust; and as is the heavenly one, so are those who are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the one of dust, so let us also bear the image of the heavenly one” (1 Corinthians 15:48–49).

Though the apostle wished to hide the secret things of this passage, things that do not suit the simpler sort and the common hearing of those who are led to better things through believing, he was still compelled afterwards, so that we would not mishear his words, to say after “let us bear the image of the heavenly one” this: “This I say, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does corruption inherit incorruption” (1 Corinthians 15:50). Then, knowing something secret and mystical in the passage, as befitted one who was leaving his thoughts in writing for those who would come after him, he goes on to say: “Behold, I tell you a mystery” (1 Corinthians 15:51). This is the phrase usually set before things that are deeper and more mystical and are rightly hidden from the many; as it is written in Tobit: “It is good to hide a king’s mystery” (Tobit 12:7), while, with regard to what is glorious and suited to the many, together with truth given by way of accommodation, “it is good” “to reveal the works of God gloriously” (Tobit 12:7).

Our hope, then, is not the hope of worms, nor does our soul long for the body that has rotted. Even if the soul needs a body for moving from place to place, the soul that has meditated on “wisdom,” according to the words “The mouth of the righteous will meditate on wisdom” (Psalm 37:30), understands the difference between the earthly house that is being dissolved, in which the tent is, and the tent in which the righteous, “those who are” in it, groan, “being burdened,” not wishing to put off the tent but to “be clothed over” it, so that through this being “clothed over” “what is mortal may be swallowed up by life” (2 Corinthians 5:1–4).

“For,” since every bodily nature is corruptible, “this corruptible” tent “must put on incorruption,” and its other aspect, which is “mortal” and liable to the death that follows on sin, must “put on immortality” (1 Corinthians 15:53); so that when “the corruptible puts on incorruption and the mortal immortality, then” there “will come to pass” (1 Corinthians 15:54) what the prophets foretold long ago: the overthrow of the victory death won when it conquered us and made us subject to itself (Isaiah 25:8), and of the sting that comes from it, with which it stings the soul that is not guarded on every side and inflicts on it the wounds that come from sin (Hosea 13:14; 1 Corinthians 15:55–56).

The Stoics’ Socrates born again§20

20What we hold about the resurrection has now been said in part, as far as room allowed for the present; for we have composed a work on the resurrection elsewhere, where we examined the questions of this subject at greater length. Now we must deal, as is reasonable, with what Celsus says. He has neither understood what is written among us nor been able to judge that the meaning of those wise men must not be thought to be represented by people who profess nothing more than faith in the Christians’ teaching.

Come, let us show that men who are not to be despised for their logical theory and their dialectical inquiries have said things that are wholly absurd; and if any teachings are to be sneered at as base old wives’ tales, it is theirs rather than ours.

The Stoics say that periodically a conflagration of the universe takes place, and after it a reordering of the world, with everything exactly the same as in the former ordering. Those of them who were ashamed of the doctrine have said that a slight and very small difference arises from cycle to cycle compared with what was in the cycle before. These men say that in the next cycle things will be as follows: Socrates will again be the son of Sophroniscus and an Athenian, and Phaenarete, married to Sophroniscus, will give birth to him again.

So even if they do not use the name of resurrection, they point to the thing itself: Socrates, starting from the seed of Sophroniscus, will rise again and be formed in the womb of Phaenarete, and having been brought up in Athens he will be a philosopher, as though his former philosophy also were rising again and would be just the same as before. Anytus and Meletus too will rise again as accusers of Socrates, and the council of the Areopagus will condemn Socrates. What is more laughable still, Socrates will put on clothes exactly the same as in the former cycle, and he will live in exactly the same poverty and in exactly the same city of Athens as in the former cycle. Phalaris will be a tyrant again, and his bronze bull will bellow with the voices of those inside it, men exactly the same as those condemned in the former cycle. Alexander of Pherae will be a tyrant again, with cruelty exactly the same as before, condemning men exactly the same as those he condemned before.

Why need I list the Stoics’ philosophical teaching on such matters? Celsus does not laugh at it, but perhaps even reveres it, since Zeno seems to him wiser than Jesus.

When the stars return to their places§21

21The followers of Pythagoras and Plato too, though they seem to hold that the world is incorruptible, still fall into much the same notions. For they say that when the stars, in certain appointed cycles, take on the same configurations and positions toward one another, all things on earth are in the same state as they were when the world held that same arrangement of the stars. By this argument, then, when after a long cycle the stars come to the same position toward one another as they had in Socrates’ time, Socrates must be born again of the same parents and suffer the same things, accused by Anytus and Meletus and condemned by the council of the Areopagus.

The learned men of the Egyptians who hand down such teachings are held in honour and are not laughed at by Celsus and those like him. But we say that the universe is ordered by God in proportion to the state of what lies in each person’s power, and is always led, as far as is possible, toward what is better; and we know that the nature of what lies in our power admits of whatever it admits, for it cannot hold the utter changelessness of God. Yet we are not thought to say anything worth testing and examining.

Words that will not pass away§22

22Let no one suspect, when we say this, that we belong to those who are called Christians but reject the doctrine of the resurrection taught in the Scriptures. For on their own premises they have no way at all to show how a stalk or a tree rises, as it were, from a grain “of wheat or of some other kind” (1 Corinthians 15:37).

But we are persuaded that what is sown “is not made alive unless it dies” (1 Corinthians 15:36), and that what is sown is “not the body that is to be” (1 Corinthians 15:37); for “God gives it a body as he willed” (1 Corinthians 15:38), raising it “in incorruption” after it has been sown “in corruption,” raising it “in glory” after it has been sown “in dishonour,” raising it “in power” after it has been sown “in weakness,” and raising it “spiritual” after it has been sown “a natural body” (1 Corinthians 15:42–44). So we keep both the mind of the church of Christ and the greatness of God’s promise, and we show that it is possible, not by bare assertion but by argument as well. For we know that even if “heaven and earth” pass away, and the things in them, still the “words,” the principles of each thing, which stand to the Word who was “in the beginning” “with God,” God the Word (John 1:1), as parts to a whole or species to a genus, will never pass away. For we choose to listen to him who said: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away” (Matthew 24:35; Mark 13:31; Luke 21:33).

The seed, the Stoics, and what God can do§23

23We, then, do not say that the corrupted body returns “to its original nature,” any more than the corrupted grain of wheat returns to being a grain of wheat (1 Corinthians 15:37; John 12:24). For we say that, just as an ear rises from the grain of wheat, so a certain principle lies within the body; and from this principle, which is not corrupted, the body “is raised in incorruption” (1 Corinthians 15:42).

The Stoics, however, say that the body “wholly corrupted” returns “to its original nature,” because of the doctrines they hold about things that recur without variation in each cycle; and they say that “that very first make-up from which it was dissolved” will be put together again, establishing these things, as they suppose, by the necessities of logic.

Nor do we retreat to “a most absurd refuge” when we say that “everything is possible to God” (Matthew 19:26; Mark 10:27). For we know how to understand that “everything”: it does not refer to things that have no existence, nor to things that cannot be conceived. We say, too, that God cannot do shameful things, since then God would be able not to be God; for if God does anything shameful, he is not God.

But since Celsus lays it down that God does not will “what is against nature” either, we draw a distinction in what is said. If someone calls wickedness against nature, we too say that God does not will what is against nature, neither what springs from wickedness nor what happens without reason. But if one means what happens in accordance with God’s reason and his will, then such things must at once be not against nature; for what God does is not against nature, even if it is extraordinary, or seems extraordinary to some.

And if we must use a forced term, we will say that, compared with nature as it is more commonly understood, there are some things above nature which God might at some time do: raising man above human nature, causing him to change into a better and more divine nature, and keeping him so, as long as the one so kept also shows by his deeds that he wills it.

God wills nothing unworthy of himself§24

24Having once said that God wills nothing that is unbefitting to himself, since such a thing would destroy his very being as God, we will say that if a man in his own depravity wills something vile, God will not be able to do it. So we are not bent on quarrelling with what Celsus says; rather, examining his words out of love for the truth, we will agree that God is not the God “of faulty appetite, nor of wandering disorder, but of right and just nature,” since he is the author of all that is good. And we confess another thing: that he can “grant everlasting life to a soul”; and not only can he, but he does grant it.

Because of what we have said already, nothing at all troubles us, not even the saying of Heraclitus which Celsus has taken over, that “corpses are more fit to be thrown out than dung” (Heraclitus, fragment 96). And yet one might say about this too that dung is indeed fit to be thrown out, but the corpses of human beings are not, because of the soul that dwelt in them, especially if that soul was a finer one. For under the more civilised of laws they are thought worthy of burial, with such honour as is possible for such things, so that we may not, in effect, insult the soul that dwelt within by casting away the body after the soul has left it, as we do the bodies of cattle.

Let it be granted, then, that God does not will “to make everlasting against reason” the grain of wheat, but rather the ear that comes from it; nor what is sown “in corruption,” but what is raised from it “in incorruption” (1 Corinthians 15:42). Further, the reason of all things is, according to Celsus, God himself; but according to us it is his Son, the Word, about whom we say in our philosophy: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). And according to us too, God “can do nothing contrary to reason, nor contrary to himself.”

Celsus on the ancestral laws of the Jews§25

25Let us look also at Celsus’s next passage, which runs as follows: “Now the Jews, having become a nation of their own and having laid down laws according to their local custom, still maintain them among themselves to this day; and in keeping a form of worship, whatever kind it may be, but at any rate ancestral, they act like the rest of mankind, since each people honours its ancestral customs, however they happen to have been established. And to do so seems to be of benefit too, not only because different people have come to think in different ways, and what has been publicly ratified must be preserved, but also because, as is likely, the parts of the earth were allotted from the beginning to different overseers and, being divided into certain dominions, are administered in this way. And indeed what is done among each people would be done rightly when it is done in the way that pleases them; and it is not holy to abolish the customs established in each place from the beginning.”

In these words Celsus implies that the Jews, who were Egyptians of old, later became a nation of their own, and that having laid down laws they maintain them. And, so as not to repeat Celsus’s words set out above, he says that it benefits them to practise their ancestral worship, like the other nations who honour their own customs. He also sets out a deeper cause why it benefits the Jews to honour their ancestral customs, hinting that those who were allotted to be overseers of the land of the peoples receiving laws laid down each people’s laws, working together with the lawgivers. He seems, then, to show that the land of the Jews too, and the nation living in it, is overseen by someone, or by several, and that the laws of the Jews were laid down by that one or those several, working together with Moses.

Who divided the earth among its overseers?§26

26“And the laws must be kept,” he says, “not only because different people have come to think in different ways, and because what has been publicly ratified must be preserved, but also because, as is likely, the parts of the earth were allotted from the beginning to different overseers and, being divided into certain dominions, are administered in this way.” Then, as though he had forgotten what he said against the Jews, Celsus now includes them too in his general praise of all who keep their ancestral customs, saying: “And indeed what is done among each people would be done rightly when it is done in the way that pleases them.”

And see whether he does not plainly wish, as far as it rests with him, that the Jew who lives under his own laws should not depart from them, since he would be doing what is not holy if he departed. For he says that “it is not holy to abolish the customs established in each place from the beginning.”

On this I should like to ask him, or those who think as he does: who, then, was it who from the beginning distributed the parts of the earth to different overseers, and clearly also gave the land of the Jews, and the Jews themselves, to the one or the several who received it by lot? Was it, to use the name Celsus would give him, Zeus who gave the nation of the Jews and their land to someone, or to several, and did he will that the one who received Judaea should lay down such laws among the Jews? Or did this come about against his will? Whichever way he answers, you see that his argument will be hard pressed.

But if the parts of the earth were not distributed to their overseers by some one being, then each of them took a share of the earth haphazardly, as it happened, with no one presiding. Yet this too is absurd, and goes some way toward doing away with the providence of the God who is over all.

If every ancestral law were holy§27

27How, and under what dominions, the parts of the earth are divided and administered by those who oversee them, let anyone who wishes explain. And let him tell us also how what is done among each people is done rightly when done in the way that pleases the overseers, and whether, for example, the laws of the Scythians about killing their fathers are right, or those of the Persians, which do not forbid mothers to be married by their own sons, or daughters by their own fathers.

And why need I gather instances from those who have written treatises on the laws of the various nations, and press the difficulty further: how are the laws among each people rightly kept, in the way that pleases the overseers? Let Celsus tell us how it is not holy to abolish ancestral laws about marrying mothers and daughters, or about its being blessed to depart this life by hanging, or about the claim that those who give themselves up to the fire and to release from life through fire are wholly purified. And how is it not holy to abolish laws such as those among the Taurians about offering strangers as sacrifices to Artemis, or among some of the Libyans about sacrificing children to Cronus?

Yet it does follow from Celsus’s view that it is not holy for the Jews to abolish their ancestral laws, which say that one must worship no other god besides the Maker of the universe. And on his account what is holy will be divine not by nature but by some enactment and custom. For among some it is holy to revere the crocodile and to eat something that others worship; among others it is holy to revere the calf; and among others again, to consider the goat a god. And so the same man will be doing holy things with regard to these laws, and unholy things with regard to others; which is the most absurd thing of all.

Holiness is not a matter of custom§28

28But they will probably say in reply that the man who keeps his ancestral customs is holy, and not unholy in any way for failing to keep the customs of others as well; and again, that the man considered unholy by certain people is not unholy when, following his ancestral customs, he worships what is his own, and makes war on and feasts upon what is revered among those whose laws are the opposite of his.

But see whether this does not reveal great confusion about what is just and holy, and about piety, as though piety had no clear definition, nor any nature of its own that marks out as pious those who act in accordance with it. If, then, piety and holiness and justice belong among relative things, so that the same thing is holy and unholy according to different relations and laws, see whether temperance too will not consequently be relative, and courage, and prudence, and knowledge, and the rest of the virtues; and nothing could be more absurd than that.

Now, for those who take a simpler and more ordinary stand against the words of Celsus set out above, what has been said is enough. But since we think that some readers of a more searching kind will also come upon this writing, let us venture to set out a few of the deeper matters, which hold a certain mystical and secret insight, about the regions of the earth having been allotted from the beginning to different overseers; and let us, as far as we are able, present the teaching clear of the absurdities we have listed.

Moses on the dividing of the nations§29

29Celsus seems to me to have misheard certain more mystical teachings about how the things on earth were apportioned. Greek history too touches on these in some way, when it brings in some of those reputed to be gods contending with one another over Attica, and when in the poets it makes some of the so-called gods admit that certain places are more their own. Barbarian history also, and above all that of the Egyptians, shows something of the kind about the division of what are called the nomes of Egypt, saying that Athena, who obtained Sais by lot, is the same who also holds Attica. The learned men of the Egyptians will tell countless things of this sort, though I do not know whether they also include the Jews and their land when they assign lands to one being or another. But enough for the present about what is said on these matters outside the divine word.

We say that Moses, the prophet of God among us and his true servant, sets out in the song of Deuteronomy the following about the division of the earth: “When the Most High divided the nations, when he scattered the sons of Adam, he set the boundaries of the nations according to the number of the angels of God; and his people Jacob became the Lord’s portion, Israel the measured lot of his inheritance” (Deuteronomy 32:8–9).

And the same Moses, in the book entitled Genesis, tells of the division of the nations in the form of a history, as follows: “And all the earth had one language, and there was one speech for all. And it came to pass, as they moved from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they settled there” (Genesis 11:1–2). And a little after: “The Lord came down,” it says, “to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. And the Lord said: Behold, they are one race and all have one language; and this they have begun to do, and now nothing that they set out to do will fail them. Come, let us go down and confound their tongue there, so that none of them may understand the speech of his neighbour. And the Lord scattered them from there over the face of all the earth, and they stopped building the city and the tower. For this reason its name was called Confusion, because there the Lord God confounded the language of all the earth, and from there the Lord God scattered them over the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:5–9).

And in the book entitled the Wisdom of Solomon, where it speaks of wisdom and of the events at the confusion of tongues, when the division of those on earth took place, this is said about wisdom: “She also, when the nations had been confounded in their agreement in wickedness, knew the righteous man, and kept him blameless before God, and kept him strong against his tender love for his child” (Wisdom of Solomon 10:5).

The teaching on these matters is long and mystical, and to it applies the saying, “It is good to keep hidden the secret of a king” (Tobit 12:7). This is so that the teaching about souls that are bound into a body, not by transmigration, may not be thrown to whatever ears happen to hear it, and what is holy may not be given “to the dogs,” nor pearls thrown before swine (Matthew 7:6). For such a thing is impious, since it means betraying the secret oracles of the wisdom of God, of which it is well written: “Wisdom will not enter a soul that plots evil, nor dwell in a body in debt to sin” (Wisdom of Solomon 1:4). It is enough to present in the manner of a history what is told in a hidden way as though it were history, so that those who are able may work out for themselves what bears on the passage.

Leaving the east and building the tower§30

30Let us think of all those on earth, then, as using one divine language; and for as long as they are in harmony with one another, let them be kept in that divine language. And let them remain unmoved from “the east” so long as their minds are set on the things of the light, and of the radiance that comes from “eternal light” (Wisdom of Solomon 7:26). And when these move themselves “from the east,” setting their minds on things foreign to “the east,” let them find “a plain in the land of Shinar” (Genesis 11:2), a name which means “shaking out of teeth,” as a symbol that they lose the things by which they are fed; and let them settle there.

Then, wishing to gather together the things of matter, and to fasten to heaven what by nature cannot be fastened to it, so that by material things they may plot against things that are immaterial, let them say: “Come, let us make bricks and bake them with fire” (Genesis 11:3). So then, as they harden and make solid what is of clay and of matter, and want to make the brick into stone and the clay into bitumen (Genesis 11:3), and by these means to build “a city and a tower whose top,” as far as their own notion goes, “shall reach to heaven” (Genesis 11:4), in the manner of the heights that are lifted up “against the knowledge of God” (2 Corinthians 10:5), let them be handed over, each of them, to angels: angels harsher in a greater or lesser degree, and of one kind or another, in proportion to the movement “from the east” that has taken place in them to a greater or lesser degree, and in proportion to their making bricks into stones and clay into bitumen, and to their building from these, until they pay the penalty for what they have dared.

And let them be led, each of them, by the angels who implanted in them their own language, to the parts of the earth according to what each deserves: some, let us say, to a scorching land, others to a land that punishes those who live in it by its cold; some to a land harder to farm, others to one less so; some to a land full of wild beasts, others to one with fewer of them.

The Lord’s portion and its exile§31

31Next, if anyone can, as under the figure of a history which has something true in itself and yet also points to something secret, let him see also those who kept the original language: because they did not move “from the east,” they remained in the east and in the eastern language. And let him understand that these alone became the Lord’s portion and his people called “Jacob,” and became also “Israel, the measured lot of his inheritance” (Deuteronomy 32:9). And let these alone be governed by a ruler who did not receive those under him for punishment, as the others did.

Let him who is able see also the sins, such as happen among human beings, committed in the commonwealth of those assigned to the portion that belongs to the Lord. At first they were tolerable, and of such a kind that the people did not altogether deserve to be forsaken; later they were more numerous, but still tolerable. And understanding that this went on for a long time, and that healing was always being applied, and that at intervals they turned back, let him see them abandoned, in proportion to their sins, to those who had received the other lands by lot: at first punished lightly and paying the penalty, and then, as if they had been disciplined, returning to their own land. But later let him see them handed over to harsher rulers, whom the Scriptures would name Assyrians and then Babylonians.

Then, though remedies were applied, let him see them increasing their sins none the less, and for this reason scattered among the other portions by the rulers of the other nations who plundered them. And let their own ruler deliberately overlook their being plundered by the rulers in the other nations, so that he too, with good reason and as if avenging himself, may receive authority to draw away from the other nations all whom he can, and may do so, and give them laws and show them the life they must live, in order to lead them up to the goal to which he used to lead those of the former nation who did not sin.

Christ frees the nations from their overseers§32

32And from this let those who are able to see things so great learn that he who received by lot those who had not sinned before is far more powerful than the rest. For he has been able to take chosen ones from everyone’s portion, to withdraw them from those who had received them for punishment, and to bring them to laws and to a life that helps toward an amnesty for the sins they had committed before. But, as we said earlier, let these things be spoken by us in a veiled way.

These things make clear what was misheard by those who said that “the parts of the earth were from the beginning allotted to different overseers, divided into certain dominions, and administered in this way”; from them Celsus too took the words already set out. But since those who moved “from the east” were handed over, because of their sins, “to a debased mind” (Romans 1:28), and “to dishonourable passions” (Romans 1:26), and “in the lusts of their hearts to impurity” (Romans 1:24), so that, having had their fill of sin, they might hate it, we will not submit to Celsus’s opinion when he says that because of the overseers allotted to the parts of the earth, what is done among each people is done rightly. On the contrary, we positively wish not to do what comes from those overseers “in the way that pleases them.”

For we see that it is holy to abolish “the customs established in each place from the beginning” by better and more divine laws, which Jesus laid down as one most powerful, when he rescued “us from the present evil age” (Galatians 1:4) and from “the rulers of this age, who are being brought to nothing” (1 Corinthians 2:6); and that it is unholy not to cast oneself upon him who has appeared and been shown to be purer and more powerful than all rulers. To him God said, as the prophets foretold many generations before: “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession” (Psalm 2:8). For “he himself” has become the “expectation” (Genesis 49:10) of us who from “the nations” have believed in him and in God over all, his Father.

Where the Christians come from§33

33What we have said was said not only in answer to what was set out about the overseers; it also in some measure anticipates what Celsus says against us. For he says: “Let the second party come forward. I will ask them where they have come from, or whom they have as the founder of their ancestral laws. They will name no one, since they themselves set out from there and bring their teacher and chorus leader from nowhere else; and yet they have broken away from the Jews.”

We, then, have come, each of us, “in the last days,” when our Jesus has come to visit us, to “the manifest mountain of the Lord” (Isaiah 2:2), that is, to the Word who is “above” every word, and to the house “of God,” which “is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15). And we see in what way this house is built “on the tops of the mountains,” that is, on all the prophetic words, which are its foundation. And this “house” is raised “above the hills” (Isaiah 2:2), that is, above those who appear to profess something exceptional among men in wisdom and truth.

And we, “all the nations,” come to it, and we, the many nations, go, and say to one another, as we urge each other on toward the worship of God that shone out “in the last days” through Jesus Christ: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of the God of Jacob, and he will declare his way to us, and we will walk in it” (Isaiah 2:2–3). For the “law” went out from those in “Zion” and passed over to us as a spiritual law (Isaiah 2:3). And “the word of the Lord” also went out from that “Jerusalem” (Isaiah 2:3), so that it might spread everywhere and judge “between the nations,” choosing those whom he sees are ready to obey, and reproving the “many people” who will not obey (Isaiah 2:4).

And to those who ask us where we have come from, or whom we have as our founder, we say that we have come, following the counsels of Jesus, to beat our warlike and insolent “swords” of speech “into ploughshares,” and we are refashioning “the spears” of our former fighting “into sickles” (Isaiah 2:4). For we no longer take up “sword against nation,” nor do we learn “to make war any more” (Isaiah 2:4), since because of Jesus we have become sons of peace. He is our founder; and in place of the ancestral laws, under which we were “strangers to the covenants” (Ephesians 2:12), we have received a law, for which we give thanks to him who rescued us from error, and say: “How false were the idols our fathers acquired, and there is none among them that sends rain” (Jeremiah 16:19; 14:22).

So our chorus leader and teacher, having gone out from the Jews, holds the whole inhabited world as his own by the word of his teaching. In saying this in advance, we have overturned, as far as we could, a passage of Celsus that comes much later, joining it to his statements already set out.

Celsus calls Herodotus to witness for ancestral custom§34

34So that we do not pass over what Celsus said in the passage between, let us set this out as well. “One might also call on Herodotus as a witness to this, who says as follows: ‘The people of the city of Marea and of Apis, who live in the parts of Egypt bordering on Libya, thought themselves Libyans and not Egyptians, and chafed at the observance of the sacred rites, since they did not wish to be barred from cows. So they sent to Ammon, saying that they had nothing in common with the Egyptians, for they lived outside the Delta and did not agree with them, and that they wished to be allowed to taste of everything. But the god would not let them do this. He said that Egypt was the land which the Nile overflows and waters, and that those were Egyptians who live below the city of Elephantine and drink from this river’ (Herodotus, Histories 2.18). That is Herodotus’s account. But Ammon is no worse an envoy of divine things than the angels of the Jews, so that there is nothing wrong in each people practising its own customs.

“Indeed we shall find the greatest difference among them from nation to nation, and yet each people seems to think its own customs the best of all. Of the Ethiopians, those who live at Meroe worship ‘Zeus and Dionysus alone’ (Herodotus, Histories 2.29); the Arabians worship Urania and Dionysus, these alone (Herodotus, Histories 3.8). All the Egyptians worship Osiris and Isis; the people of Sais worship Athena; the people of Naucratis, who began not long ago, have named Serapis; and the rest each in their own way, nome by nome. Some abstain from sheep, revering them as sacred, others from goats, others from crocodiles, others from cows, and they abstain from pigs because they loathe them. Among the Scythians it is a fine thing even to feast on men, and there are Indians who think they do a holy thing by eating even their fathers.

“And somewhere the same Herodotus says (I will again use his very words, so as to be believed), and his account runs thus: ‘If one were to set before all men the task of choosing the finest customs out of all customs, each, after looking them over, would choose their own, so firmly does each people believe its own customs to be by far the finest. It is not likely, then, that anyone but a madman would make a mockery of such things. That all men hold this view about customs may be judged from many other proofs, and among them from this one. Darius, during his reign, called the Greeks who were present and asked them for what sum they would be willing to eat their fathers when they died. They said that they would not do it for any sum. After this Darius called the Indians known as Callatiae, who eat their parents, and asked them, while the Greeks were present and learned through an interpreter what was said, for what sum they would agree to burn their fathers with fire when they died. They cried out loudly and told him to speak no words of ill omen. So these things are fixed by custom, and Pindar, I think, put it rightly in his verse when he said that custom is king of all’ (Herodotus, Histories 3.38; Pindar, fragment 169).”

Philosophers do not keep foolish ancestral customs§35

35By these words Celsus’s argument seems to be making its way to the claim that all men ought to live according to their ancestral customs, and would not be blamed for doing so, while the Christians, who have abandoned their ancestral customs and are not one particular nation, as the Jews are, are open to blame for attaching themselves to the teaching of Jesus.

Let him tell us, then: will those who study philosophy and are taught not to be superstitious be right to abandon their ancestral customs, so far as even to eat things forbidden in their homelands, or will they be doing what is not fitting? For if, because of philosophy and the lessons they learn against superstition, they do not keep their ancestral customs and would even eat what their fathers forbade them, why should Christians not do this without blame as well? For reason requires them not to busy themselves with statues and shrines, nor even with the works of God, but to rise above these and to present the soul to the Creator; in this they do what corresponds to what the philosophers do.

But suppose that Celsus, or those who approve of his views, will say, to protect the position he has set himself, that even a man who has taken up philosophy will keep his ancestral customs. Then it is high time for philosophers, among the Egyptians for instance, to become utterly ridiculous, taking care not to eat an onion, so as to keep their ancestral customs, or certain parts of the body, such as the head and the shoulder, so as not to break what their fathers handed down to them. And I am not yet speaking of those Egyptians who shudder at the trivial noises the body makes in passing wind, to point out that if one of these becomes a philosopher and keeps his ancestral customs, he would be a ridiculous philosopher doing unphilosophical things.

In the same way, then, a man who has been led by reason to worship the God of the universe, and who because of his ancestral customs stays somewhere down below among the statues and the shrines men have set up, and is unwilling to rise to the Creator by his own choice, would be like those who have learned the lessons of philosophy, yet fear what is not to be feared and think it impiety to eat this or that.

Herodotus’s Ammon and the customs of Scythians and Indians§36

36And what, too, is Herodotus’s Ammon like, whose words Celsus has taken over as if to prove that each people must keep its ancestral customs? For their Ammon does not allow the people from the city of Marea and from Apis, who live in the parts bordering on Libya, to treat the use of cows as indifferent; and yet this is a thing that is not only indifferent by its own nature, but also does not prevent anyone from being noble and good. If their Ammon had forbidden the use of cows because the animal is useful for farming, and besides because the stock increases mostly through the females, his word might perhaps have had some plausibility. But as it is, he simply insists that because they drink of the Nile they must keep the Egyptians’ laws about cows.

And it was on this point that Celsus, mocking the angels among the Jews who serve as envoys of the things of God, said that Ammon was no worse an envoy of divine things than the angels of the Jews. Yet he did not examine their words and their appearances, to see what they mean. For he would have seen that “God does not care for oxen” (1 Corinthians 9:9), even where He seems to be making laws about oxen or animals without reason (Deuteronomy 25:4), but that what was written for the sake of human beings (1 Corinthians 9:10), under the outward appearance of dealing with animals without reason, contains a teaching about the nature of things.

Celsus, then, says that each people does nothing wrong in wishing to practise its own customs. On his view it follows that the Scythians do nothing wrong, since they feast on men according to their ancestral customs. And those Indians who eat their fathers think they do a holy thing, and according to Celsus they do so, or at least do nothing wrong. At any rate he sets out a passage of Herodotus that argues that each people does right to follow its ancestral laws, and he seems to approve of the Indians of Darius’s time called Callatiae, who eat their parents, since, when Darius asked them for what sum they would be willing to give up this law, they cried out loudly and told him to speak no words of ill omen.

The law of nature stands above written law§37

37There are, then, two laws set before us in general terms. One is the law of nature, the law God would lay down; the other is the written law in cities. Where the written law does not oppose the law of God, it is right not to trouble the citizens on the pretext of foreign laws. But where the law of nature, that is, of God, commands things contrary to the written law, consider whether reason does not require us to bid a long farewell to what is written and to the intention of the lawgivers, and to give ourselves to God the lawgiver and choose to live according to His word, even if this must be done amid dangers and countless toils, deaths and disgrace.

For it is absurd, when the things that please God are different from those that please some of the laws in cities, and when it is impossible to please both God and those who uphold such laws, to despise the actions by which one will please the Creator of the universe and to choose those by which one will be displeasing to God, but pleasing to laws that are no laws and to their friends. And if in other matters it is reasonable to prefer the law of nature, since it is the law of God, to the law that is written and enacted by men contrary to the law of God, how much more must this be done in the laws that concern God?

So we will not, like the Ethiopians who live around Meroe, worship Zeus and Dionysus alone, as pleases them; no, we will not honour Ethiopian gods in Ethiopian fashion at all. Nor, like the Arabians, will we regard Urania and Dionysus alone as gods; no, we will not regard them as gods at all, gods in whom female and male have been glorified (for the Arabians worship Urania as female and Dionysus as male). Nor will we, like all the Egyptians, hold Osiris and Isis to be gods; nor will we rank Athena with them, as the people of Sais think fit. And if the older people of Naucratis saw fit to revere other objects of worship, while those who began only yesterday or the day before chose to worship Serapis, who never at any time was a god, we will not on that account say, for our part, that there is a new god, one who did not exist before and was not known to men.

For the Son of God, “the firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15), even if He was seen to have become man only lately, is not for that reason new. For the divine words know Him as the most ancient of all the works of creation, and know that it was to Him that God said concerning the making of man, “Let us make man in our image and likeness” (Genesis 1:26).

Where Celsus’s rule of ancestral worship leads§38

38I wish to show how unreasonable Celsus is in saying that each one should worship what is his own and ancestral. He says that the Ethiopians who live at Meroe know only two gods, Zeus and Dionysus, and worship these alone, and that the Arabians likewise know only two, Dionysus, as the Ethiopians do, and Urania, who is their own. By his account, then, the Ethiopians do not worship Urania, nor do the Arabians worship Zeus.

Suppose, then, that an Ethiopian, through some turn of events, finds himself among the Arabians and is thought impious for not worshipping Urania, and on this account is in danger of death. Will it be fitting for the Ethiopian to die, or to act against his ancestral customs and worship Urania? If it will be fitting for him to act against his ancestral customs, he will do what is not holy, so far as Celsus’s arguments go. But if he should be led away to death, let Celsus show what is reasonable about choosing death; for I do not know whether the Ethiopians’ teaching instructs them to reflect as philosophers on the immortality of the soul and on the honour that piety earns, if they worship the gods recognised by their ancestral laws.

The same can be said of the Arabians, if through some turn of events they come to stay among the Ethiopians around Meroe. These too, having been taught to worship only Urania and Dionysus, will not worship Zeus with the Ethiopians; and if, being thought impious, they should be led away to death, let Celsus say what they would reasonably do.

As for the myths about Osiris and Isis, it is needless, and not the right moment, for us to recount them now. And even if the myths are interpreted figuratively, they will teach us to worship lifeless water and the earth that lies beneath men and all animals; for so, I think, they reinterpret Osiris as water and Isis as earth. About Serapis there is a long and conflicting story. He came into public view only yesterday or the day before, through certain sorceries of Ptolemy, who wished to show the people of Alexandria a god, as it were, made manifest. We have read in Numenius the Pythagorean about how he was fashioned, namely that he shares in the substance of all the animals and plants that nature governs. The aim was that, with the help of unhallowed rites and of sorceries that summon demons, he should seem to be fashioned into a god not only by makers of statues but also by magicians and sorcerers, and by the demons charmed by their incantations.

Crocodiles, virtue and the second God§39

39We must therefore inquire what is fit to be eaten and what is not, in a way that befits a rational and gentle living being that does everything by reason, and not worship sheep or goats or cows arbitrarily. To abstain from these is within reason, for much that is useful comes to human beings from these animals. But to spare even crocodiles, and to hold them sacred to some mythical god, I know not which, how is this not the most foolish thing of all? For it is the mark of people quite out of their senses to spare animals that do not spare, and to cherish animals that feast on human beings.

Yet Celsus is pleased with those who worship and cherish crocodiles according to some ancestral custom, and he has not written a single word against them. It is the Christians who seem to him to deserve blame, though they are taught to loathe vice and to turn away from the works that come from vice, and to revere and honour virtue as begotten by God and as being the Son of God. For we must not suppose that wisdom and righteousness are female in their essence because their names are feminine; and in our teaching these are the Son of God, as his genuine disciple made plain when he said of him: “who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30).

So even if we speak of a second God, let them know that by the second God we mean nothing other than the virtue that contains all virtues, and the Word that contains every rational principle whatever of the things that have come into being according to nature, by primary intent, and for the benefit of the whole. This Word, we say, has been joined to the soul of Jesus as its own and united with it, more closely than with any other soul, since he alone was able to receive perfectly the highest share in the very Word, the very Wisdom and the very Righteousness.

Which law is king of all§40

40After saying such things about the different laws, Celsus adds: “Pindar seems to me to have been right when he wrote that law is king of all” (Pindar, fragment 169). Come, then, let us discuss this too. What law, my friend, do you say is king of all? If you mean the laws of the several cities, the statement is false, for not all people are ruled by the same law. In that case it ought to have been said, if at all, “Laws are kings of all,” since over each nation of them all some law is king.

But if you take law in its proper sense, this law is by nature king of all, even if some, like robbers who have revolted from the law, deny it and live like robbers and wrongdoers. We Christians, then, having come to know the law that is by nature king of all, which is the same as the law of God, try to live according to it, and have bidden a long farewell to the laws that are not laws.

Celsus denies that the Jews have anything special§41

41Let us also look at what Celsus says next. In it, very little concerns the Christians and most concerns the Jews. He says, then:

“If, then, the Jews were to guard their own law on these grounds, they are not to be blamed for it; rather, those are to be blamed who have abandoned their own ways and taken up those of the Jews. But if they pride themselves on knowing something wiser, and turn away from fellowship with others as not equally pure, they have already heard that not even their doctrine about heaven is their own; but, to pass over everything else, it was held long ago by the Persians too, as Herodotus somewhere shows. ‘For they are accustomed,’ he says, ‘to go up to the highest peaks of the mountains and offer sacrifices to Zeus, calling the whole circle of heaven Zeus’ (Herodotus 1.131). I think, then, that it makes no difference whether one calls Zeus the Most High, or Zen, or Adonai, or Sabaoth, or Amoun, as the Egyptians do, or Papaeus, as the Scythians do.

“Nor, indeed, would they be holier than the others on these grounds: because they are circumcised, for the Egyptians and the Colchians did this before them; nor because they abstain from swine, for the Egyptians do this too, and besides that they abstain from goats and sheep and oxen and fish; and Pythagoras and his disciples abstain from beans, and from everything that has a soul. Nor is it likely that these people are in good standing with God or loved by him in any way differently from the others, or that angels are sent from there to them alone, as though they had been allotted some land of the blessed. For we see what both they and their land have been thought worthy of.

“So let this band depart, having paid the penalty for its boasting. It did not know the great God, but was led astray and deceived by the sorcery of Moses, and it became a pupil of that sorcery to no good end.”

The wise way of life of the Jews§42

42It is clear that in these words he accuses the Jews of falsely supposing that they are a chosen portion of the God over all, above all the nations. He charges them, at any rate, with boasting, as people who glory in the great God and yet do not know him, but were led astray by the sorcery of Moses and deceived by him, and became his disciples to no good end.

In part, then, we have already spoken in earlier passages of the venerable and exceptional commonwealth of the Jews, at the time when there stood among them the symbol of the city of God, and of his temple, and of the priestly worship at the temple and the altar. But if anyone fixed his mind on the intention of the lawgiver and on the commonwealth he set up, and examined their life and compared it with the present conduct of the other nations, he would admire no people more, as people who, so far as human beings can, had removed everything that is of no use to the human race and accepted only what is of real use. That is why there were among them no athletic contests, no stage contests, no horse races, and no women selling the bloom of their youth to anyone who wished to sow in vain and to outrage the nature of human seed.

What a thing it was among them to be taught, from their earliest years, to rise above the whole of nature that the senses perceive and never to think that God has his seat anywhere in it, but to seek him above, beyond all bodies! How great a thing that, almost as soon as their reason came into being and reached completion, they were taught the immortality of the soul, the places of judgment beneath the earth, and the honours of those who have lived well! These things were still proclaimed in a more mythical form to children and to those who think as children do. But for those who were already seeking the meaning and wished to advance in it, what had until then been myths, if I may call them so, were transformed into the truth hidden within them.

And I think that, in a manner worthy of their being called the portion of God (Deuteronomy 32:9), they despised all divination, as something that bewitches people to no purpose and that comes from wicked demons rather than from any better nature; and they sought knowledge of what is to come in souls that, because of their utmost purity, had received the Spirit of the God over all.

A pattern of the heavenly city§43

43As for the rule that one who holds the same beliefs may not be kept a slave for more than six years (Exodus 21:2; Deuteronomy 15:12), what need is there to say how reasonable it is, and how it wrongs neither the master nor the slave? So the Jews would not guard their own law on the same grounds as the other nations. For it would be blameworthy in them, and would bring on them a charge of being blind to the superiority of their laws, if they thought these laws had been written in the same way as the others that the nations have.

And even if Celsus does not like it, the Jews do know something wiser, not only than the multitude, but also than those who are thought to be philosophers. For the philosophers, after their solemn discourses in philosophy, sink down to idols and demons, whereas even the least of the Jews looks to the God over all, and to him alone. And so far as this goes, they rightly pride themselves and turn away from fellowship with others as defiled and impious.

Would that they had not sinned by breaking the law, first killing “the prophets” and later plotting against Jesus too (1 Thessalonians 2:15)! Then we would have a pattern of a heavenly city, which Plato too sought to sketch (Plato, Republic 592b). Yet I do not know whether he was able to do as much as Moses and those after him achieved, who nurtured “a chosen race” and “a holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9; Exodus 19:6), dedicated to God, on words pure of all superstition.

One God, one temple, and the heaven of heavens§44

44Since Celsus wants to put the solemn institutions of the Jews on a level with the laws of certain nations, come, let us examine these points too. He thinks, then, that the doctrine about heaven is no different from the doctrine about God, and he says that the Persians, like the Jews, offer sacrifices to Zeus, going up to the highest peaks of the mountains. He does not see that, as the Jews knew one God, so they had one holy house of prayer, one altar for whole burnt offerings, one altar for incense, and one high priest of God.

The Jews, then, had nothing in common with the Persians, who go up to the highest peaks of the mountains, of which there are many, and offer sacrifices that bear no likeness to those under the law of Moses. Under that law the priests of the Jews served “a copy and shadow of the heavenly things” (Hebrews 8:5), and they explained in secret the intention of the law concerning the sacrifices, and of what things these sacrifices were symbols.

So let the Persians call the whole circle of heaven Zeus. We, however, say that heaven is neither Zeus nor God, since we know that even one of the beings lower than God has risen above the heavens and above the whole of nature that the senses perceive. And this is how we understand the words: “Praise God, you heavens of heavens, and the water that is above the heavens; let them praise the name of the Lord” (Psalm 148:4–5).

Holy names lose their power in translation§45

45But since Celsus thinks it makes no difference whether one calls the Most High Zeus, or Zen, or Adonaeus, or Sabaoth, or Amoun, as the Egyptians do, or Papaeus, as the Scythians do, let us say a little about these matters as well. At the same time we remind the reader of what was said earlier on a question of this kind, when the words of Celsus led us to such subjects.

Now, then, we say again that the nature of names is not a matter of rules laid down by those who give them, as Aristotle thinks (Aristotle, On Interpretation 16a). For the languages spoken among men do not have their origin from men. This is clear to those who are able to attend to the nature of incantations, which, according to the different languages and the different sounds of the names, belong to the fathers of those languages. We treated these things briefly above, where we said that words which by nature have power in a given language no longer accomplish anything when they are translated into another language, as they did in their own sounds.

This is found even in the case of men. Take someone who from his birth has been called by a certain name in the Greek language: if we translated his name into the language of the Egyptians, or of the Romans, or of any other people, we could not make him suffer or do what he would suffer or do if he were called by the name first given to him. Nor, if we translated into Greek the name of someone called from the beginning in the Roman tongue, would we accomplish what the incantation promises to accomplish while it keeps the name first given to him.

If these things said about human names are true, what must we think about the names that, for whatever cause, are referred to the divine? For example, the name Abraham is translated into something in Greek, the name Isaac signifies something, and the word Jacob makes something known. Now if the one who invokes or adjures names “the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6), he would accomplish this or that, either through the nature of these names or through their power, and demons are overcome and made subject to the one who says them. But if he says, “the God of the chosen father of sound, and the God of laughter, and the God of the supplanter,” what he names does nothing, just like anything else that has no power.

So too, if we translate the name Israel into Greek or into another language, we shall accomplish nothing; but if we keep it, and attach it to the words with which those skilled in these matters have thought fit to join it, then something might happen from that word, as invocations of this kind promise. We shall say the same about the word Sabaoth, which is used in many places in incantations: if we translate the name as “Lord of the powers,” or “Lord of hosts,” or “Almighty” (for those who translate it have rendered it in different ways), we shall accomplish nothing; but if we keep it in its own sounds, we shall accomplish something, as those skilled in these matters say. And we shall say the same about Adonai. If, then, neither Sabaoth nor Adonai accomplishes anything when translated into what they seem to mean in Greek speech, how much less would it do anything, or have any power, among those who think it makes no difference whether one calls the Most High Zeus, or Zen, or Adonaeus, or Sabaoth?

Why Christians will not call God Zeus§46

46It is because they knew these secret things, and others like them, that Moses and the prophets forbid anyone to speak “the name of other gods” (Exodus 23:13) with a mouth that has learned to pray only to the God over all, or to call them to mind in a heart taught to keep itself pure from all vanity of thoughts and words. And for such reasons we choose to endure every kind of torture rather than confess that Zeus is a god. For we do not suppose that Zeus and Sabaoth are the same; indeed, we do not suppose Zeus to be anything divine at all, but some demon who delights in being called by that name, and who is no friend either to men or to the true God.

And if the Egyptians hold Amoun out to us and threaten us with punishment, we shall die rather than proclaim Amoun a god, a name that is probably used in certain Egyptian incantations that call upon this demon. Let the Scythians, too, say that Papaeus is the God over all; but we shall not be persuaded. We do hold that there is a God over all; but we do not name God by Papaeus as a proper name, as pleases the one who was allotted the Scythian wilderness, together with their nation and their language. For whoever names God by the common word for God, in Scythian or in Egyptian or in any language in which he was brought up, will not sin.

The same rite can have different meanings§47

47The reason for the circumcision of the Jews is not the same as the reason for the circumcision of the Egyptians or of the Colchians, and so it could not be thought the same circumcision. Just as one who sacrifices does not sacrifice to the same being, even if he seems to sacrifice in the same way, and one who prays does not pray to the same being, even if he asks for the same things in his prayers, so too, when someone is circumcised, it is not in every case the same as circumcision directed to another. For the purpose, the law and the intention of the one who circumcises make the act different.

To make the point of this subject still clearer, it must be said that the name of justice is the same among all the Greeks; yet it is shown that justice according to Epicurus is one thing; justice according to the Stoics, who deny that the soul has three parts, is another; and justice according to the Platonists, who say that justice is each part of the soul doing its own work, is another again. So too the courage of Epicurus, who endures pains to escape greater pains, is one thing; the courage of the Stoic, who chooses every virtue for its own sake, is another; and courage according to Plato, who says that it is the virtue of the spirited part of the soul and assigns to it a place about the chest, is another again.

In the same way circumcision would differ according to the different doctrines of those who are circumcised. About this it is not necessary to speak now in a work of this kind; whoever wishes to see what moved us on this subject may read what we have written about it in our treatment of Paul's Epistle to the Romans.

Circumcision and the hostile angel§48

48So if the Jews do take pride in circumcision, they will distinguish it not only from the circumcision of the Colchians and Egyptians but also from that of the Ishmaelite Arabs, although Ishmael was born of their forefather Abraham and was circumcised together with him (Genesis 17:23–26). The Jews say that circumcision on the eighth day (Genesis 17:12) is the principal kind, and that circumcision not done in this way comes from force of circumstance.

And perhaps circumcision was performed because of some angel hostile to the Jewish nation, who was able to harm those of them who were not circumcised but was powerless against those who were. Someone will say that this is shown by what is written in Exodus, where before the circumcision of Eliezer the angel was able to act against Moses, but once Eliezer had been circumcised he could do nothing (Exodus 4:24–26). And having learned such things, “Zipporah took a pebble and circumcised” her child (Exodus 4:25). According to the common copies she is recorded as saying, “The blood of my child's circumcision has stopped” (Exodus 4:25–26), but according to the Hebrew, “You are a bridegroom of blood to me” (Exodus 4:25). For she knew the account of this sort of angel, who had power before the blood but ceased because of the blood of circumcision; and for this reason it was said to him, “You are a bridegroom of blood to me.”

But let this much be said, at some risk, about these matters, which seem rather over-curious and not suited to the ears of most people. To them I shall add one more point, as befits a Christian, and then pass on to what follows. For this angel, I think, had power against the uncircumcised among the people, and in a word among all who worshipped the Creator alone; and he had that power for as long as Jesus had not taken a body. But when Jesus had taken one, and His body was circumcised (Luke 2:21), all the angel's power against those circumcised in this worship of God was overthrown; for Jesus brought him down by His unspeakable divinity. That is why His disciples are forbidden to be circumcised, and it is said to them, “If you are circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing” (Galatians 5:2).

Abstaining from food for the right reason§49

49Nor do the Jews take pride in abstaining from swine as if it were some great thing. Their pride is rather that, having learned the nature of clean and unclean animals, they know the reason for the distinction and that the swine is ranked among the unclean (Leviticus 11:7). These things, too, were symbols of certain realities until the coming of Jesus. After Him it was said to His disciple, who did not yet understand the meaning of these things and said, “Nothing common or unclean has entered my mouth” (Acts 11:8), “What God has cleansed, you must not call common” (Acts 10:15).

So it is nothing to the Jews or to us that the priests of the Egyptians abstain not only from swine but also from goats, sheep, oxen and fish. But since “it is not what enters the mouth that defiles a man” (Matthew 15:11), and “food will not commend us to God” (1 Corinthians 8:8), we do not think highly of ourselves for not eating, nor do we come to eating out of gluttony. Therefore, so far as we are concerned, let the followers of Pythagoras, who abstain from living things, go their way.

But notice the difference between the reason why the followers of Pythagoras abstain from living things and the reason why the ascetics among us do so. They abstain from living things because of the myth about the soul passing from one body into another: “And who will lift up his dear son and slay him with a prayer, the great fool?” (Empedocles, fragment 137 Diels–Kranz). But if we do such a thing, we do it because we discipline “the body” and bring it into subjection (1 Corinthians 9:27), and wish to put to death “the members that are on the earth: fornication, uncleanness, licentiousness, passion, evil desire” (Colossians 3:5); and we do everything so that we may put to death “the deeds of the body” (Romans 8:13).

God’s favour passes from the Jews to the Gentiles§50

50Pronouncing further on the Jews, Celsus says: “Nor is it likely that they stand in good repute with God, or are loved by Him in any way differently from others, or that angels are sent from there to them alone, as though they had been allotted some land of the blessed; for we see what they and their land have been thought worthy of.”

We shall refute this too. We say that this nation's good standing with God is shown also by the fact that the God over all is called the God of the Hebrews even by those who are strangers to our faith. And because they stood in good repute, so long as they were not forsaken, they continued to be guarded by divine power, though they were few in number. So it was that not even under Alexander of Macedon did they suffer anything at his hands, although, because of certain agreements and oaths, they had refused to take up arms against Darius. At that time, they say, when the high priest of the Jews had put on his priestly robe, Alexander even bowed down before him, saying that he had seen someone in this very dress who promised him “in his sleep” that he would make the whole of Asia subject to him (see Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 11.8.5).

We Christians, then, say that standing in good repute with God, and being loved in a way different from others, did indeed belong to them in full. But we say that this dispensation and the grace have passed over to us, since Jesus moved the power that was among the Jews to those from the Gentiles who believed in Him. That is why the Romans, though they wished to do much against the Christians to stop them existing any longer, have not been able to do so; for a divine hand was fighting for them, wishing to sow the word of God from one corner, the land of Judea, through the whole race of mankind.

We commend the Teacher, not ourselves§51

51But since we have answered, as far as we could, what Celsus set out in accusing the Jews and their teaching, come, let us set out what follows and show that we are not boasting when we profess to know the great God, and that we have not been led astray, as Celsus thinks, by the sorcery of Moses, or even of our Saviour Jesus himself. Rather, it is for a good end that we listen to the God made known in Moses and have received Jesus as the Son of God, Jesus to whom that God bears witness as God, hoping for the best when we live according to his word.

We shall willingly refrain from speaking about what we set out earlier, when we taught where we have come from, whom we have as our founder, and what law comes from him. And if Celsus would have it that we differ in nothing from the Egyptians who worship the goat, or the ram, or the crocodile, or the ox, or the hippopotamus, or the dog-headed baboon, or the cat, that is for him to know, and for anyone who shares his opinion on this. For our part, we have defended at length in what came before, as far as we were able, the honour we give to Jesus, showing that we have found something better. And when we alone declare that the truth, pure and unmixed with falsehood, is found in the teaching of Jesus Christ, we are commending not ourselves but the Teacher, to whom the God over all has borne witness in many ways: both by the prophetic words among the Jews and by the plain evidence itself. For it is shown that he could not have done such great things without God.

Celsus asks whether Jesus was the only angel§52

52The passage of Celsus that we now wish to examine runs as follows: “And indeed we pass over all the points on which they are refuted about their teacher. Let him be taken to be truly an angel. But did he come first and alone, or did others come before him too? If they should say that he alone came, they would be convicted of lying and contradicting themselves. For they say that others too have often come, and indeed sixty or seventy together; that these became wicked and are punished by being put in bonds in the earth; and that this is why the hot springs are their tears. What is more, they say that an angel came to the very tomb of this man (some say one, others two), the ones who answered the women that he had risen (Matthew 28:5–6; Luke 24:4–6). For the child of God, it seems, could not open the tomb, but needed someone else to move the rock away (Matthew 28:2).

“Again, concerning Mary when she was with child, an angel came to the carpenter (Matthew 1:20), and another angel came so that they might snatch up the baby and flee (Matthew 2:13). And why need one go through everything in detail and count up those said to have been sent to Moses and to others of theirs? If, then, others too were sent, it is clear that this one also was sent by the same God. But let him be taken, if you like, to bring some greater message, as though the Jews were doing wrong, or debasing piety, or doing unholy things; for this is what they hint at.”

The Angel of Great Counsel§53

53What we said earlier, in the parts where we dealt separately with our Saviour Jesus Christ in reply to Celsus's statements, would have been enough. But so that we may not seem to pass over any passage of his writing on purpose, as though we could not answer it, come, even if we are going to repeat ourselves, since Celsus challenges us to it, let us treat the matter as briefly as we can, and see whether anything clearer or newer on the same matters occurs to us.

He says, then, that he passes over all the points on which Christians are refuted about their teacher, though he has passed over nothing that he could say, as is clear from what he said earlier; he does this merely by following a rhetorical device. But that we are not refuted about so great a Saviour as ours, even if our accuser seems to refute us, will be clear to those who read closely, with a love of truth, all that was prophesied and recorded about him.

Next, since he is thought to be speaking by way of concession when he says of the Saviour, “Let this man be taken to be truly an angel,” we say that we do not take this as something Celsus concedes; we take it from looking at the work of him who has visited the whole human race with his own word and teaching, as far as each of those who received him had room for it. That was the work of one who was not simply an angel but, as the prophecy about him named him, the Angel “of great counsel” (Isaiah 9:6). For he announced to men the great counsel of God, the Father of all things, concerning them: that those who yield to it by living in pure godliness are going up to God through great deeds, while those who do not receive him are putting themselves far from God (Psalm 73:27) and travelling toward destruction through their unbelief concerning God.

Then next he says: “Even if this man came to men as an angel, did he come first and alone, or did others come before him too?” And he thinks he meets each alternative at length, though no one who is truly a Christian says that Christ alone has visited the human race. And Celsus says that others too have appeared to men: “If they should say that he alone …”

Who says he came alone§54

54Then he answers himself as he pleases. But in fact Christ is not recorded as the only one to have visited the human race. So true is this that even those who, using the teaching of the name of Jesus as a pretext, have turned away from the Creator as lesser and gone over to some God as greater and as Father of the one who came, say that even before him some visited the human race from the Creator.

But since we are examining this passage with a love of truth, we will say that Apelles, the disciple of Marcion, who became the father of a certain heresy and regarded the writings of the Jews as myth, says that this one alone has visited the human race. So not even against him, though he says that Jesus alone has come from God to men, could Celsus reasonably bring the argument that others too have come; for, as we said before, Apelles does not believe the Jewish Scriptures, which report rather marvellous things. Much less will he accept what Celsus seems to have set down after mishearing what is written in Enoch.

No one, then, convicts us of lying and of asserting contradictory things, as though we said both that our Saviour alone came and that many others have often come. But in his inquiry into the angels who have come to men, Celsus sets down in great confusion what reached him indistinctly from what is written in Enoch. He does not appear even to have read these writings, nor to have known that in the churches the books inscribed with Enoch's name are not generally received as divine. That is why he might be thought to have tossed out the claim that sixty or seventy came down together, having become wicked.

The sons of God and the tears of angels§55

55But let us be more generous and grant him what he did not see in what is written in Genesis, that “the sons of God, seeing that the daughters of men were beautiful, took wives for themselves from all whom they chose” (Genesis 6:2). Even so, we shall persuade those who can hear the intention of prophecy that about these things too one of those before us referred these words to the teaching about souls, souls that had come to desire the life of men in the body; and he said, interpreting figuratively, that this is what is meant by “daughters of men.” Yet however things may stand with the sons of God who desired the daughters of men, the passage does nothing to help Celsus show that Jesus was not the only one to have visited men as an angel, Jesus, who has plainly become the Saviour and benefactor of all who turn away from the flood of wickedness.

Then, mixing up and confusing what he heard, however he heard it, and things written wherever they were written, whether held by Christians to be divine or not, he says that the sixty or seventy who came down together are punished by being put in bonds in the earth. And he cites as from Enoch, though without naming him, the words “that is why the hot springs are their tears,” a thing neither said nor heard in the churches of God. For no one was so foolish as to give the angels who came down from heaven bodily tears like those of men. And if we must jest in answer to what Celsus labours at so earnestly against us, it must be said that no one would have called the hot springs, most of which are sweet, the tears of the angels, since the nature of tears is salty; unless, of course, Celsus's angels weep sweet tears.

One angel at the tomb, or two§56

56Then next, mixing things that do not mix and making alike things that are unlike, he adds to his story of the sixty or seventy angels who, as he says, came down and, according to him, wept springs of hot water, that two angels are reported by some to have come to the tomb of Jesus himself, and one by others. He did not notice, I think, that Matthew and Mark reported one (Matthew 28:2–5; Mark 16:5), and Luke and John two (Luke 24:4; John 20:12). These accounts were not contradictory. For those who recorded one say that this was the one who rolled away “the stone” from the tomb (Matthew 28:2); while the others say that the two are those who, “in dazzling clothing” (Luke 24:4), stood by the women who had come to the tomb, or those who were seen inside “sitting in white” (John 20:12).

To show now that each of these is both possible and actually happened, and that it points to a figurative meaning about the things that appear beforehand to those prepared to behold the resurrection of the Word, does not belong to the present treatise but rather to commentaries on the Gospel.

Marvels told by Greeks and by Christians§57

57That marvellous things have at times appeared to men has been reported among the Greeks too, not only by those who might be suspected of making up myths, but also by those who have given great proof that they pursue philosophy genuinely and set out truthfully what has come down to them. We have read such things in Chrysippus of Soli, and some in Pythagoras, and also in some more recent writers who lived only yesterday or the day before, such as Plutarch of Chaeronea in his work On the Soul and Numenius the Pythagorean in the second book of On the Incorruptibility of the Soul.

Or is it that when Greeks tell such things, and above all those among them who are philosophers, what they say is no matter for mockery or laughter, nor fictions and myths; but when those who are devoted to the God of all things, and who, rather than speak a falsehood about God even in a word, undergo every outrage even to death, report appearances of angels as eyewitnesses, they are judged unworthy of belief and their words are not ranked among things that are true? But it is not reasonable to judge in this way who speaks the truth and who lies. For those who train themselves not to be deceived pronounce slowly and with caution, after much exact inquiry and examination of each matter, that these men tell the truth and those men lie in the marvels they report; since not all show themselves worthy of belief, nor are all clearly proved to have handed down fictions and myths to mankind.

Further, about the resurrection of Jesus from the dead this too must be said: that at that time one angel or two should have been seen announcing that he had been raised (Matthew 28:6; Luke 24:4–6) and that he cares for those who believe this for their own benefit, is no wonder. But that at all times those who believe in this way that Jesus has been raised, and who show as no small fruit of their faith a vigorous life and a change from the flood of evils, are not without angels who take hold of them and help them in their turning to God, does not seem to me unreasonable.

The angel who rolled away the stone§58

58Celsus also finds fault with the account which says that an angel rolled away “the stone” (Matthew 28:2) from the tomb where the body of Jesus lay. He goes about it like a schoolboy who has been set, as a classroom exercise, to accuse someone from the stock headings of rhetoric. And as though he had hit upon something clever against the account, he says: “The child of God, it seems, could not open the tomb, but needed someone else to move the rock away.”

I do not want to labour over the details of the passage, nor to seem to philosophize out of season by setting out a figurative interpretation at this point. So I will speak of the narrative itself. On its face it appears more dignified that the lesser one, the servant, should have rolled away “the stone” than that he who was rising for the benefit of human beings should have done it himself. Not to mention that those who plotted against the Word, who wanted to kill him and to show everyone that he was dead and nothing at all, wanted his tomb never to be opened, so that no one might see the Word alive after their plot. But the angel of God, who comes for the salvation of human beings as fellow worker of the Angel, is stronger than the plotters and rolls away the heavy stone. He does this so that those who think the Word is dead may be persuaded that he “is not among the dead” (Luke 24:5–6) but lives and “goes before” (Matthew 28:7) those who wish to follow him. And he goes before them in order to show them what follows on from what he showed them earlier, when, in the first stage of their instruction, they could not yet take in things greater than those.

Then, after this, he somehow throws in, though I do not know what use he thinks it serves his purpose, the story that an angel came to Joseph about Mary when she was with child (Matthew 1:20), and again an angel came so that they would snatch away the newborn child, who was being plotted against, and flee into Egypt (Matthew 2:13). We have already discussed these matters above, in answer to what he said.

And what is Celsus driving at with the fact that the Scriptures record angels being sent to Moses and to the others? It seems to me to contribute nothing to what he wants, especially since none of those angels contended on behalf of the human race to turn it, as far as was possible, from its sins. Grant, then, that others too were sent from God. Let this one proclaim something more. And since the Jews were going astray, debasing true religion, and doing what is unholy, let him hand over the kingdom of God to “other farmers” (Matthew 21:41, 43): to those who everywhere in the churches keep watch over themselves and do everything they can, by a pure life and by words that agree with that life, to bring to the God of all the starting points they have drawn from the teaching of Jesus.

What we hold in common with the Jews§59

59Next Celsus says: “So the same God belongs to the Jews and to these people,” plainly meaning the Christians. And as if he were drawing a conclusion that would never be conceded, he says this: “Clearly so, since those of the great church admit this, and accept as true the account of the world’s making that is current among the Jews, at least about the six days and the seventh.” On that seventh day, as Scripture says, God “ceased from his works” (Genesis 2:2), withdrawing into his own exalted contemplation. But according to Celsus, who neither attended to what is written nor understood it, God “rested,” which is not written. About the making of the world, and the Sabbath rest that remains after it for the people of God (Hebrews 4:9), there would be “much to say,” and it would be mystical and deep and “hard to explain” (Hebrews 5:11).

Then, wanting to fill out his book and to make it look large, he seems to me to add certain things at random, such as the matter of the first man: that we say he is the same man the Jews speak of, and that we trace the line of descent from him in the same way they do. But we know of no plotting of brothers against one another. We know that Cain plotted against Abel (Genesis 4:8), and Esau against Jacob (Genesis 27:41); but Abel did not plot against Cain, nor Jacob against Esau. Had that happened, Celsus would have been right to say that we tell the same stories as the Jews about brothers plotting against one another.

Grant too that we speak, as they do, of the same going down into Egypt (Genesis 46:6) and of the return from there (Exodus 12:41), and not of a flight, as Celsus supposes. What, then, do these things contribute to the charge against us or against the Jews? Where he thought he would mock us in the account of the Hebrews, he called it a flight. But where the real business was to examine the scourges which are recorded to have come upon Egypt from God (Exodus 7:14–12:30), that he deliberately passed over in silence.

The veil over the reading of Moses§60

60If we must answer Celsus precisely, since he thinks that we hold the same opinions as the Jews on the matters set out, we will say this. We both agree that the books were written by the divine Spirit; but about the interpretation of what is in the books we no longer say the same things. We do not even live as the Jews do, because we judge that the literal interpretation of the laws is not the one that contains the intention of the legislation.

And we say that “whenever Moses is read, a veil lies upon the heart” (2 Corinthians 3:15), because the intention of the law of Moses has been hidden from those who have not embraced the way that comes through Jesus Christ. But we know that “if anyone turns to the Lord” (and “the Lord is the Spirit”) (2 Corinthians 3:16–17), then, with “the veil” taken away, he beholds as in a mirror, “with unveiled face,” “the glory of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18) that lies in the thoughts hidden beneath the letter, and receives a share of what is called the divine glory, for his own glory. Here “face” is said figuratively; to name it more plainly, as one might, it is the mind. In the mind is the face of the “inner man” (Romans 7:22), filled with light and glory from the truth about what is in the laws.

Sects are no charge against the Church§61

61Next after this he says: “Let no one suppose that I do not know that some of them will agree that their God is the same as the God of the Jews, while others hold to another God, to whom this one is opposed, and say that the Son came from that other.”

If he thinks that the existence of several sects among Christians is a charge against Christianity, why, by the same reasoning, should not the disagreement among the sects of the philosophers be thought a charge against philosophy, a disagreement not about small or chance matters but about the most essential ones? It would be time, too, for medicine to be accused because of the sects within it.

Grant, then, that there are among us those who do not say that their God is the same as the God of the Jews. Yet those who prove from the same writings that one and the same God is God of Jews and of Gentiles (Romans 3:29–30) are not to be accused on that account. So Paul too, who came over to Christianity from the Jews, says plainly: “I thank my God, whom I serve, as my forefathers did, with a pure conscience” (2 Timothy 1:3).

Grant too that there is a third kind, of those who call some people “natural” and others “spiritual.” I think he means the followers of Valentinus. And what is this to us who belong to the Church, who condemn those who bring in natures saved by their very make-up or lost by their very make-up?

Grant too that there are some who profess to be Gnostics, just as the Epicureans proclaim themselves philosophers. But neither would those who abolish providence truly be philosophers, nor would those who have brought in strange fictions, displeasing to those who stand in the succession from Jesus, be Christians.

Grant too that there are some who accept Jesus and on that ground boast that they are Christians, but still wish to live according to the law of the Jews, as the mass of the Jews do. These are the two kinds of Ebionites: those who confess, as we do, that Jesus was born of a virgin, and those who say he was not born so, but like the rest of human beings. What charge does this bring against those of the Church, whom Celsus named for their great number?

He also said that there are some “Sibyllists.” Perhaps he misheard certain people who reproach those who think the Sibyl was a prophetess, and who call such people Sibyllists.

Names of sects we have never met§62

62Then, pouring a heap of names over us, he says that he knows also of some Simonians, who are called Helenians because they revere Helen, or else a teacher named Helenus. But Celsus fails to notice that the Simonians by no means confess Jesus to be the Son of God. They say that Simon is the power of God (Acts 8:10), and tell marvels about him. Simon had supposed that if he laid claim to things like those he imagined Jesus had laid claim to, he too would have as much power among human beings as Jesus has with the many.

But neither Celsus nor Simon could grasp how Jesus, like a good “farmer” of the word of God, has been able to sow much of Greece and much of the barbarian world, and to fill them with words that turn the soul away from all evil and lead it up to the Creator of all.

Celsus, then, knows also of Marcellians, from Marcellina, and Harpocratians, from Salome, and others from Mariamme, and others from Martha. But we, who out of love of learning, as far as we are able, have examined not only what is in our teaching and the differences among those within it, but have also, as far as possible, searched out with love of truth the views of those who have practised philosophy, have never once met with these people. Celsus also made mention of the Marcionites, who set Marcion at their head.

Reviled, we bless§63

63Then, so that he may seem to know of others besides those he named, he says, in his usual way, that “some have one teacher and demon and some another, wandering wretchedly and wallowing in deep darkness, more lawless and more foul than the devotees of Antinous in Egypt.” And it seems to me that here, touching on the facts, he has said something true: that some, wandering wretchedly and wallowing in the deep darkness of ignorance, have found themselves one demon as patron, and others another. As for Antinous, who is compared with our Jesus, we have spoken of him before and will not repeat ourselves.

“And these people,” he says, “hurl at one another every dreadful blasphemy, speakable and unspeakable; and they would not give way in the least toward concord, since they utterly loathe one another.” To this too we have already given our answer: in philosophy as well one can find sects at war with sects, and in medicine also.

We, however, who follow the word of Jesus and have trained ourselves to think and speak and act by his words, “when reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we entreat” (1 Corinthians 4:12–13). Nor would we say things speakable and unspeakable against those whose opinions differ from what we hold. Rather, if we can, we would do everything to bring them over to what is better, by their holding fast to the Creator alone and doing everything as people who will be judged. But if those of other opinions are not persuaded, we keep the word that gave such commands about them: “After a first and second admonition, have nothing more to do with a heretic, knowing that such a one is perverted and sins, being self-condemned” (Titus 3:10–11).

Further, those who have understood “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Matthew 5:9) and “Blessed are the meek” (Matthew 5:5) would not loathe those who debase the things of Christianity, nor would they call those who have gone astray “Circes” and “wily agitators.”

Names Celsus misheard§64

64He seems to me to have misheard both the apostle’s words, which say: “In later times some will fall away from the faith, devoting themselves to deceiving spirits and teachings of demons, through the hypocrisy of liars whose own conscience has been seared with a branding iron, who forbid marriage and demand abstinence from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by the faithful” (1 Timothy 4:1–3), and also those who used these words of the apostle against people who had counterfeited Christianity. That is why Celsus said that among Christians some are called “branding irons of the ear.”

He himself says that some are called “riddles,” something we have never come across. It is true that the word “stumbling block” occurs often in these writings, and we commonly use it of those who turn the simpler and the easily deceived away from sound teaching. But we know of no one called “Sirens who dance and play the sophist, who seal up the ears and give swine’s heads to those who believe them”; and I think no one else does either, whether within our teaching or in the sects.

But this man, who professes to know everything, says this as well: “You will hear all of them,” he says, “who are so far divided and convict one another most shamefully in their quarrels, saying: ‘The world has been crucified to me, and I to the world’ (Galatians 6:14).” For this seems to be the only saying of Paul that Celsus remembered. For do we not also say countless other things that are written, such as: “For though we live in the flesh, we do not wage war according to the flesh; for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but mighty before God for the pulling down of strongholds, as we pull down arguments and every height that lifts itself up against the knowledge of God” (2 Corinthians 10:3–5)?

Not every sect quotes Paul§65

65Since he says that “you will hear all those who are so far divided saying, ‘The world has been crucified to me, and I to the world’ ” (Galatians 6:14), we shall show that this too is false. For there are some sects that do not accept the epistles of Paul the apostle, such as the Ebionites of both kinds and those called Encratites. Those, then, who do not treat the apostle as a blessed and wise man would not say: “The world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Galatians 6:14). So in this too Celsus lies.

He also spends a long time denouncing the differences among the sects. But he does not seem to me at all to set out clearly what he says, nor to have studied these things carefully, nor to have understood how the Christians who are well grounded in the teachings say that they know more than the Jews, and whether they do so while accepting the books but giving their meaning a rival interpretation, or without even accepting the Jews’ writings. For we would find both among the sects.

After this he says: “Come, then: even if they have no basis for their doctrine, let us examine the teaching itself. But first we must speak of all the things they have misheard and corrupt through ignorance, since right from the start they speak with ill-judged arrogance about things they do not know. These are as follows.” And at once he sets passages from the philosophers against certain expressions that those who believe the Christians’ teaching use constantly. He wants to make out that whatever good things Celsus supposes are said among Christians have been said both better and more clearly by those who practise philosophy, so that he may draw away to philosophy those who are won over by doctrines that show at first sight what is noble and godly.

And so, bringing the fifth book to a close at this point, let us begin the sixth with what comes next.