Against Celsus 2.78–3.16

After this the Jew says: “Or did he come down for this, that we should disbelieve?” To him it will be said: he did not come to produce unbelief in the Jews; but foreknowing that it would happen, he foretold it, and made use of the Jews' unbelief for the calling of the nations. For by their “trespass salvation has come to the nations,” of whom the Christ in the prophets says: “A people whom I did not know served me; at the hearing of the ear they obeyed me,” and “I was found by those who did not seek me; I became manifest to those who did not ask for me.” And it is clear that the Jews also suffered punishment in this life, after doing to Jesus what they did. Let the Jews speak, if they accuse us, saying: “Wonderful indeed is God's providence and love for mankind toward you, who have been punished and deprived of Jerusalem, of what is called the sanctuary, and of the most solemn worship.” Whatever they say in defense of God's providence, we shall establish more fully and better, saying that God's providence has been wonderful, making use of that people's sin so that those of the nations should be called through Jesus into God's kingdom, those who were strangers to “the covenants” and aliens to the promises. The prophets foretold this too: that because of the sins of the Hebrew people God would choose not a nation but select persons from everywhere, and, having chosen “the foolish things of the world,” would make the nation without understanding come to be in the divine oracles, the kingdom of God being taken from those and given to these. For the present it is enough, out of many, to cite the prophecy from the song of Deuteronomy about the calling of the nations, spoken in the person of the Lord: “They made me jealous with what is no god, they provoked me with their idols; and I will make them jealous with what is no nation, I will provoke them with a nation without understanding.”

Then, as the Jew's conclusion to all this, he says of Jesus: “He, then, was a man, and such a man as the truth itself makes plain and reason shows.” I do not know whether a man who dared to sow throughout the whole world the worship of God and the teaching that he brought could, without God, do what he wishes and prevail over all who opposed the spread of his teaching: kings, governors, the Roman senate, rulers everywhere, and the people. And how could a human nature having nothing greater in itself convert so great a multitude? And it is no wonder if it converted the sensible; but it converted also the most irrational and those given over to their passions, who because of their irrationality are harder to change to a more self-controlled life. But since Christ was the power of God and the wisdom of the Father, for this reason he has done these things and still does them, even if neither Jews nor Greeks, who disbelieve his word, wish it. We then shall not cease believing in God according to the precepts of Jesus Christ and wishing to turn those who are blind concerning the worship of God, even if those who are truly blind revile us as blind, and those who lead astray, whether Jews or Greeks, accuse us, who seek to bring people to agree with us, of leading people astray. A fine leading astray indeed, that from being licentious they become self-controlled, or at least make progress toward self-control; from unjust, just, or making progress toward justice; from foolish, wise, or on the way to wisdom; and from cowardly, ignoble, and unmanly, brave and steadfast, showing this especially in their contests for piety toward God, who created all things. Jesus Christ, then, came, proclaimed beforehand not by one prophet but by all. And this too belonged to Celsus's ignorance, to make the Jewish character say that one prophet foretold the Christ. And since the Jew in Celsus is introduced saying these things, supposedly according to his own law, and there somewhere ended his speech, after saying other things not worth remembering, I too shall here end the second book dictated by me in reply to his treatise. God granting, and the power of Christ dwelling in our soul, we shall try in the third to deal with what Celsus wrote next.

In the first book of our reply to the boastful title of Celsus, who entitled the book he composed against us True Discourse, we treated, as you commanded, most faithful Ambrose, and as well as we could, his preface, and then examined each of his statements in turn, until we came to the speech of the Jew in his book, fashioned against Jesus. In the second we answered, as best we were able, the whole speech of his Jew against us who believe in God through Christ. We now begin this third book, in which we are to contend with what he sets out in his own person. He says that Christians and Jews quarrel with each other most foolishly, and that our dialogue with one another about Christ is no different from what the proverb calls a fight over the shadow of an ass; and he thinks there is nothing worthy of respect in the inquiry of Jews and Christians with each other, since both believe that it was prophesied by a divine Spirit that a Savior would come to the human race, but no longer agree whether the one prophesied has come or not. For we Christians have believed in Jesus as having come according to the prophecies; but most of the Jews are so far from believing in him that those of that time plotted against Jesus, and those of the present day, approving what the Jews then dared against him, malign Jesus as one who by some sorcery pretended to be the one proclaimed by the prophets as coming, who according to the ancestral custom of the Jews is called Christ.

Let Celsus and those who approve what he says against us tell us whether it is like the shadow of an ass that the prophets of the Jews foretold the place of birth of the one who would lead those who have lived well and are called God's portion; and a virgin who would conceive Emmanuel; and such signs and wonders to be done by the one prophesied; and that “his word will run swiftly,” so that the voice of his apostles went out “into all the earth”; and what he would suffer when condemned by the Jews, and how he would rise. Did the prophets say these things at random, with no plausibility to move them not only to speak but to think what they said worth recording? And did so great a nation as the Jews, long settled in its own land, with no plausible grounds proclaim some as prophets and reject others as false prophets? And was there nothing among them to lead them to number the words of those later held to be prophets with the books of Moses, believed to be sacred? And can those who charge Jews and Christians with foolishness show us that the Jewish nation could have held together with no promise of foreknowledge among them; and that, while the nations around them each believed, according to their ancestral customs, that they received oracles and divinations from those they considered gods, these alone, taught to despise all the gods worshiped among the nations as not gods but demons (since their prophets said, “All the gods of the nations are demons”), had no one who professed to prophesy and was able to hold back those who, from desire to foreknow the future, (wished) to desert to the demons of the others? Consider, then, whether it is not necessary that a whole nation taught to despise the gods of the rest should have had an abundance of prophets, who showed on their own something greater that surpassed the oracles everywhere.

Next, miracles occurred everywhere or in many places, as Celsus himself later cites: Asclepius doing good and foretelling the future to whole cities dedicated to him, such as Tricca, Epidaurus, Cos, and Pergamum; and Aristeas of Proconnesus, a certain man of Clazomenae, and Cleomedes of Astypalaea. Was there, then, among the Jews alone, who say they are dedicated to the God of the universe, no sign or wonder to help and confirm their faith in the Creator of all things, together with the hope of another, greater life? How could that be? They would at once have gone over to worshiping the daemons who gave oracles and healings, abandoning the God they believed would help them only in word, who never showed his own manifestation. But if this did not happen, but they endured countless sufferings rather than forswear Judaism and its law, suffering now in Assyria, now in Persia, now under Antiochus, how is it not established with probability, for those who disbelieve the marvelous histories and prophecies, that these things were not fictions, but that some divine Spirit, dwelling in the pure souls of the prophets, who had undertaken every labor for virtue, moved them to prophesy some things to their contemporaries and others to later generations, and especially about a Savior who would come to the human race?

If this is so, how is it a question about the shadow of an ass that Jews and Christians debate with each other, examining from the prophecies both believe whether the one prophesied has come, or has not come at all but is still expected? Even if it were granted to Celsus, for the sake of argument, that Jesus is not the one the prophets proclaimed, even so the inquiry into the meaning of the prophetic writings is no less not about the shadow of an ass: so that the one proclaimed beforehand may be clearly shown, what sort of person he was prophesied to be and what he would do, and, if possible, when he would come. Above we set out a few prophecies out of many to show that Jesus is the prophesied Christ. Neither Jews nor Christians, then, err in accepting that the prophets spoke from God; but those who err about the one prophesied and expected, as to who and what kind of person he was proclaimed to be according to the true meaning of the prophets, hold false opinions.

Next Celsus, thinking that the Jews were Egyptians by race who left Egypt after rebelling against the Egyptian state and despising the customary religion of Egypt, says that they suffered at the hands of those who followed Jesus and believed in him as Christ what they had done to the Egyptians, and that for both the cause of their innovation was rebellion against the state. We must consider what Celsus has done in this passage. The ancient Egyptians, who treated the Hebrew race badly after they came to live in Egypt because of a famine that struck Judea, suffered, for wronging strangers and suppliants, what a whole nation had to suffer at the hands of divine providence, since it had conspired against the whole race of its guests, who had done it no wrong. And struck by God's scourges, they reluctantly, and after not long, let go where they wished those who were being unjustly enslaved. Being then self-loving, and preferring those of their own race, whatever they were like, even to more righteous foreigners, there is no accusation they have not made against Moses and the Hebrews: not wholly denying the wonders done through Moses, but saying they were done by sorcery and not by divine power. But Moses, as no sorcerer but a pious man, dedicated to the God of the universe and sharing in a more divine Spirit, both gave laws to the Hebrews as the divine prompted him and recorded what happened as it truly was.

Celsus, then, not being a fair examiner of what the Egyptians say one way and the Hebrews another, but prejudiced in favor of the Egyptians as dearer to him, agreed with those who wronged the strangers, as though they spoke the truth, and said that the wronged Hebrews left Egypt after rebelling. He did not see how so great a rebellious multitude of Egyptians, beginning in rebellion, could not become a nation at the same time as it rebelled and changed its language, so that those who until then spoke the Egyptian tongue suddenly completed a Hebrew language. Suppose, for argument's sake, that having left Egypt they came to hate the language they had grown up with: why then did they not afterward use the Syrian or the Phoenician language, but establish Hebrew, different from both? My argument means to conclude that it is false that some who were Egyptians by race rebelled against the Egyptians, left Egypt, came to Palestine, and settled in what is now called Judea. For the Hebrews had an ancestral language before their descent into Egypt, and Hebrew letters were different from those of the Egyptians; Moses used them to write the five books believed by the Jews to be sacred.

Equally false is it that the Hebrews, being Egyptians, originated from a rebellion, and that others, being Jews, rebelled in Jesus' time against the Jewish state and followed Jesus. For neither Celsus nor those who agree with him will be able to point to any act of rebellion by Christians. Indeed, if rebellion were the cause of the formation of Christians, who took their origin from the Jews, for whom it was lawful to take up arms for their own people and kill enemies, the lawgiver of Christians would not have entirely forbidden the killing of a human being, teaching that his disciples' violence against a man is never just, even if he is most unjust (for he did not think it fitting for his divinely inspired legislation to permit the killing of any human being whatever); nor would Christians, if they began in rebellion, have accepted such gentle laws, by which it befell them to be killed “like sheep” and never to be able to defend themselves against their persecutors. And indeed, examining things more deeply, one can say of those who came out of the land of Egypt that, marvelously, the whole people took up at once, as a gift of God, as it were, the language called Hebrew; as one of their prophets said: “When they came out of the land of Egypt, he heard a language which he did not know.”

It must also be established in this way that those who left Egypt with Moses were not Egyptians. If they were Egyptians, their names would have had to be Egyptian, since the names in each language are akin to it. But if it is clear from their names, which are Hebrew, that they were not Egyptians (for Scripture is full of Hebrew names, including those given to their sons by people in Egypt), it is evident that what the Egyptians say is false, that they were Egyptians driven out of Egypt with Moses. And it is plainly clear that, having their descent from Hebrew ancestors according to the history recorded by Moses, they used (their own) language, from which they also gave names to their sons. As for Christians, since, taught not to defend themselves against enemies, they kept the gentle and humane legislation, they have for this reason received from God what they would not have achieved if they had been given the right to make war, even if they had been very powerful: God has always fought for them and at times stopped those who rose against Christians and wished to kill them. For the sake of reminder, so that by seeing a few contending for piety others might become more approved and despise death, a few at times, and very easily numbered, have died for the Christian worship of God, while God prevented their whole nation from being destroyed by war; for he wished it to stand firm and the whole earth to be filled with this saving and most pious teaching. And again, so that the weaker might breathe freely from anxiety about death, God provided for believers, scattering by his will alone every plot against them, so that neither kings, nor local governors, nor the people could be inflamed against them any further. So much in reply to what Celsus said about rebellion having been the origin, long ago, of the formation of the Jews, and later of the Christians' coming to be.

Since in what follows he plainly lies, let us set out his very words: “If all people wished to be Christians, these people would no longer wish it.” That this is false is clear from the fact that, as far as lies in them, Christians do not neglect to sow the word in every part of the world. Some, at any rate, have made it their work to travel around not only cities but also villages and farmsteads, so as to make others pious toward God too. And no one could say that they do this for the sake of wealth, since sometimes they do not even accept what they need for food, and if ever they are compelled by their want of it, they are content with what is needed alone, even if many wish to share with them and give them more than they need. Now, perhaps, when because of the number of those coming to the word even rich men, some persons of rank, and delicate, well-born women welcome those who come from the word, someone will dare to say that some lead in Christian teaching for the sake of a little glory. But at the beginning, when the danger was great, especially for teachers, it was not possible reasonably to suspect such a thing. And even now the disrepute among the rest is greater than what is thought to be glory among fellow believers, and not all have even that. It is therefore plainly false that “if all people wished to be Christians, these people would no longer wish it.”

See also what he says is the proof of this: “When they began,” he says, “they were few and of one mind; but having spread into a multitude, they are divided and split again and again, and each wish to have their own factions; for this is what they wanted from the beginning.” That Christians at the beginning were few compared with the later multitude is clear; yet they were not altogether few. For what stirred envy against Jesus and provoked the Jews to plot against him was the multitude of those who followed him into the deserts, five thousand and four thousand men following him, not counting women and children. For there was such a charm in Jesus' words that not only men wished to follow him into the deserts, but also women, not heeding their womanly weakness and appearances in following the Teacher into the deserts; and children too, least affected by such things, followed with their parents, either following those who begot them or perhaps also led by his divinity, so that divinity might be sown in them. But grant that there were few at the beginning: how does this contribute to showing that Christians would not wish to bring all people to be persuaded of the word?

He says also that they were all of one mind, not seeing even in this that from the beginning there have been disagreements among believers about the interpretation of the books believed to be divine. While the apostles were still preaching, and the eyewitnesses of Jesus were teaching his lessons, there was no small dispute among the believers from the Jews about those from the nations who were coming to the word: whether they must keep the Jewish customs, or whether the “burden” concerning clean and unclean foods should be removed, as not binding, from those among the nations who had left their ancestral customs and believed in Jesus. Moreover, in the letters of Paul, who lived in the time of those who had seen Jesus, things are found said as if some questions had been raised about the resurrection and about its “having already taken place,” and about the day of the Lord, whether it “has come” or not. And the words, “avoiding the profane empty talk and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge, which some have professed” and “have made shipwreck concerning the faith,” show that from the beginning there were some misinterpretations, when believers had not yet become many, as Celsus thinks.

Then, since as if accusing our teaching he reproaches us with the heresies in Christianity, saying, “But having spread into a multitude, they are split and divided again and again, and each wish to have their own factions”; and he says that “being again divided by their multitude they refute one another, still sharing, so to speak, only one thing, if indeed they share it, the name; and this alone they are nevertheless ashamed to abandon; but in everything else they are ranged on different sides”: to this too we shall say that there have been different schools in no matter whose origin is not serious and useful to life. For since medicine is useful and necessary to the human race, and there are many questions in it about the method of treating bodies, schools are admittedly found in medicine among the Greeks, and I think also among the barbarians, as many (at least) as profess to use medicine. Again, since philosophy, which professes truth and the knowledge of what exists, sets forth how one ought to live and tries to teach what is beneficial to our race, and the questions it investigates allow great divergence, a great many schools have formed in philosophy, some more famous than others. Judaism too had an occasion for the rise of sects in the different interpretation of the writings of Moses and the words of the prophets. So, since Christianity appeared something worthy of respect to people, not only, as Celsus thinks, to the more servile, but also to many of the learned among the Greeks, heresies necessarily arose, not at all because of factions and contentiousness, but because many of the learned too were eager to understand the teachings of Christianity. From this it followed that, as they interpreted differently the words all believed to be divine, there arose heresies named after those who admired the origin of the teaching but were moved, in one way or another, by certain plausible arguments to disagree with one another. But no one would reasonably shun medicine because of its schools, nor would anyone who aims at what is fitting hate philosophy, making its many schools a pretext for hating it. So neither should the sacred books of Moses and the prophets be condemned because of the sects among the Jews.

If this is consistent, how shall we not make the same defense concerning the heresies among Christians? About them Paul seems to me to have said, very wonderfully: “For there must also be heresies among you, so that those who are approved may become manifest (among you).” For just as he is approved in medicine who, having trained himself in various schools and examined most of them fairly, has chosen the best; and as the one who makes great progress in philosophy is he who, by knowing more of them, has trained himself in them and attached himself to the prevailing doctrine; so I would say that one who has carefully examined the sects of Judaism and Christianity becomes a very wise Christian. And one who accuses the teaching because of the heresies would also accuse the teaching of Socrates, from whose school many schools of people not holding the same views have come; and one might also accuse the doctrines of Plato because of Aristotle, who left his school with innovations, of whom we have spoken above. It seems to me that Celsus has known certain heresies that do not even share the name of Jesus with us. Perhaps he had heard of the so-called Ophites and Cainites, or any other such opinion that has arisen, having departed from Jesus altogether. But this has nothing to do with the Christian teaching being blameworthy.

After this he says: “Their association is the more marvelous, the more it can be shown to rest on no worthwhile foundation. But rebellion is a worthwhile foundation, and the advantage it brings, and fear of those outside; these confirm their faith.” To this we shall say that our association rests on a foundation, or rather not a foundation but divine working, so that its origin is God, who in the prophets taught people to hope for the coming of the Christ, who would save them. For insofar as this is not truly refuted, even if unbelievers think it is, to that extent the teaching is established as God's word, and Jesus is shown to be the Son of God, both before he became man and when he had become man. And I say that even after his becoming man he is always found, by those who have the most sharp-sighted eyes of the soul, most worthy of God and truly come down to us from God, having his origin and what followed it not from human intelligence but from the manifestation of God, who with manifold wisdom and manifold powers established first Judaism and after it Christianity. And the idea that rebellion and the advantage from rebellion are the origin of the teaching that has converted and improved so many people has been refuted.

That fear of those outside does not hold our association together either is clear from the fact that, by God's will, this too has now ceased for a considerable time. And it is likely that the freedom from fear, as far as this life goes, that believers now enjoy will cease, when those who slander the teaching in every way again think the cause of the present great rebellion, as they call it, to be the multitude of believers and their not being attacked by the rulers as in former times. For we have learned from the teaching neither to grow slack in peace and give ourselves up to ease, nor, when the world makes war on us, to lose heart and fall away from the love of the God of the universe in Jesus Christ. We clearly show, and do not hide, as Celsus thinks, the dignity of our origin, when we instill in those first being introduced a contempt for idols and all images, and in addition, raising their thoughts from serving created things instead of God, lead them up to the Creator of all things; plainly showing the one prophesied both from the prophecies about him (and they are many) and from what is handed down with careful examination, to those able to hear more intelligently, from the Gospels and the apostolic words.

What manifold things we use to draw people, or what terrors we invent, as Celsus writes without proof, let anyone who wishes show; unless Celsus means by invented terrors the teaching about God as judge and about human beings judged for all they have done, set out with various arguments, some from the Scriptures and some from probable reasoning. And yet (for truth is dear) Celsus says toward the end that “neither these people nor I nor any other human being should reject the doctrine that the unjust will be punished and the just deemed worthy of rewards.” What terrors, then, apart from the teaching about punishment, do we invent to draw people? And when he says that “inventing misunderstandings of the ancient doctrine, we play the flute to people beforehand and fill their ears, like those who make a din around people in Corybantic frenzy,” we shall say to him: “Misunderstandings of what ancient doctrine?” For whether he means the Greek doctrine, which taught about the courts beneath the earth, or the Jewish, which among other things prophesied about the life after this one, he could not show that we who try to believe with reason live by such doctrines because we have misunderstood the truth.