Against Celsus 1.16

I wonder how Celsus placed the Odrysians, Samothracians, Eleusinians, and Hyperboreans among the most ancient and wisest nations, but did not see fit to admit the Jews either among the wise or among the ancient, though many writings are current among Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Greeks testifying to their antiquity, which I have thought it superfluous to set out. For anyone who wishes can read what Flavius Josephus wrote on the antiquity of the Jews in two books, where he brings a great collection of writers testifying to the antiquity of the Jews. And there is the Oration to the Greeks of Tatian, a later writer, who sets out with great learning those who have written about the antiquity of the Jews and of Moses. Celsus seems, then, to say these things not truthfully but out of hostility, aiming to accuse the origin of Christianity, which depends on the Jews. Yet he says that Homer's Galactophagi, the Druids of the Gauls, and the Getae are very wise and ancient nations, holding views akin to the Jewish teachings—though I do not know whether any writings of theirs are extant—while he excludes the Hebrews alone, as far as it lies with him, from both antiquity and wisdom. And again, making a list of ancient and wise men who benefited their contemporaries, and their successors through writings, he excluded Moses from the list of the wise. Yet of Linus, whom Celsus put first among those he named, neither laws nor teachings are extant that have converted and healed nations; but a whole nation, scattered through all the world, carries the laws of Moses. See, then, whether he did not plainly act maliciously in excluding Moses too from the list of the wise, while saying that Linus, Musaeus, Orpheus, Pherecydes, the Persian Zoroaster, and Pythagoras had understood these matters, and that their doctrines were set down in books and have been preserved to this day. And he deliberately forgot the myth about the so-called gods as subject to human passions, recorded above all by Orpheus.