Against Celsus 2.16

He says, very foolishly, that the disciples wrote such things about Jesus to excuse what had happened to him: “As if,” he says, “someone who said that a man was just were to show him doing wrong, and who said he was holy were to show him committing murder, and who said he was immortal were to show him dead, adding to all this that he had foretold it.” His illustration is plainly unlike the case, since there is nothing absurd in one who had taken upon himself the task of setting before human beings a pattern of how they ought to live showing them how one ought to die for the sake of piety; quite apart from the fact that his dying for human beings was of some benefit to the whole universe, as we showed in the preceding book. Next he thinks that the whole admission of the passion confirms his refutation rather than dissolving it. For he has not seen all that Paul set out philosophically on this subject and what the prophets said. And it escaped him that one of those in the heresies said that Jesus underwent these things in appearance, not in reality. For he did not know this when he said: “For you do not even say that he seemed to impious men to suffer these things but did not suffer them; you openly admit that he suffered.” But we do not put “seeming” in the case of his suffering, so that his resurrection too may not be false but true. For if one who truly died rose, he truly rose; but one who only seemed to have died did not truly rise. And since unbelievers mock the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we shall cite Plato as well, who says that Er the son of Armenius rose from the pyre after twelve days and reported what he had seen in Hades; and, since we are addressing unbelievers, what Heraclides tells of the woman who lay without breath will not be wholly useless for the subject. Many are also recorded to have come back from their tombs, not only on the same day but even on the next. What wonder, then, if one who did many marvelous things beyond human power, and so evident that those who could not deny they had happened disparaged them by lumping them together with sorceries, had something more also in his own death, so that his soul left the body of its own will and, having accomplished certain things outside it, returned again when it wished? Such a word is recorded in John as spoken by Jesus: “No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.” And perhaps it was for this reason that he departed from the body beforehand, so as to preserve it and so that his legs should not be broken like those of the robbers crucified with him: “For the soldiers broke the legs of the first and of the other who was crucified with him; but when they came to Jesus and saw that he had breathed his last, they did not break his legs.” We have already answered the question, “How then is it credible that he foretold it?” As to “How is a dead man immortal?”, let anyone who wishes learn that it is not the dead man who is immortal but the one who rose from the dead. Not only is the dead man not immortal, but not even the composite Jesus before his death was immortal, since he was going to die. For no one who is going to die is immortal, but only when he will die no more. “But Christ, being raised from the dead, dies no more; death no longer has dominion over him,” even if those who cannot grasp how this is said do not wish to understand it.