Against Celsus 1.66

Next after this, Celsus's Jew says to Jesus: "And why did you have to be carried off to Egypt while still an infant, so that you would not be slaughtered? For it was not likely that a god would be afraid of death. But an angel came from heaven, commanding you and your family to flee, lest you be left behind and die. Could not the great God, who had already sent two angels on your account, guard his own son there?" In this Celsus supposes that what was divine in Jesus could not have been in a human body and soul, but that his body too must have been such as Homer's myths portray. At any rate, mocking the blood of Jesus poured out on the cross, he says that it was not "ichor, such as flows in the blessed gods." But we, believing Jesus himself when he says of the divinity in him, "I am the way and the truth and the life," and anything similar, and when he says of his being in a human body, "But now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth," say that he was a certain composite being. And it was necessary that one who provided for his own coming into life as a man should not rush into danger of death out of season. So too it was necessary that he be led by those who brought him up, who were guided by a divine angel. First the one giving the warning said, "Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife; for what is begotten in her is of the Holy Spirit"; and second, "Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you; for Herod is about to seek the child to destroy him." In these things what is recorded seems to me not at all extraordinary. For in both places of Scripture the angel is said to have said these things to Joseph in a dream; and it happens to many others to be shown in a dream to do certain things, whether an angel or anyone else gives the soul the vision. What is absurd, then, in one who had once become man being guided also in a human way to avoid dangers—not because it was impossible to happen otherwise, but because what was possible had to be managed by way and order concerning the safety of Jesus? It was better for the child Jesus to escape Herod's plot and go away with those who brought him up "to Egypt" "until the death" of the plotter, than for providence for Jesus to hinder the free will of Herod, who wished to kill the child, or to put around Jesus what the poets call "the helmet of Hades" or something similar, or to strike those who came to kill him as those in Sodom were struck. For help given to him that was wholly extraordinary and too manifest would not have been useful for his purpose of teaching that, as a man attested by God, he had something more divine in the man who was seen. That was, in the proper sense, the Son of God, God the Word, the power of God and the wisdom of God, the one called Christ. But this is not the time to explain the composite, and the elements of which Jesus, who became man, was composed; that is, so to speak, a special question for believers.