Against Celsus 1.63

Since Celsus also called Jesus' apostles notorious men, saying they were tax collectors and the most wicked sailors, we will say about this too that, in order to find fault with the teaching, he seems to believe what is written where he wishes, but, so as not to accept the divinity that appears and is proclaimed in the same books, to disbelieve the Gospels. He ought rather, seeing the writers' love of truth in their recording of worse things, to believe them also about the more divine. Now it is written in the catholic epistle of Barnabas—from which Celsus perhaps took his saying that the apostles were notorious and most wicked—that Jesus "chose his own apostles, who were lawless beyond all lawlessness." And in the Gospel according to Luke, Peter says to Jesus: "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord." And Paul too, who later himself became an apostle of Jesus, says in the letter to Timothy: "The saying is trustworthy, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost." I do not know how he forgot, or did not think, to say something about Paul, who after Jesus founded the churches in Christ. Probably he saw that the account of Paul would need an explanation from him: how one who persecuted the church of God and fought bitterly against believers, so as even to wish to hand Jesus' disciples over to death, later changed so much that "from Jerusalem as far as Illyricum he fully preached the gospel of Christ," and made it his "ambition to preach the gospel" so as not to build "on another's foundation," but where the gospel of God in Christ had not been preached at all. What, then, is absurd in Jesus, wishing to show the human race how great a healing of souls he possesses, choosing notorious and most wicked men and bringing them so far forward that they became an example of the purest character to those brought through them to the gospel of Christ?