Against Celsus 2.3

Now our task is to refute the ignorance of Celsus, whose Jew says to his fellow citizens and Israelites who have believed in Jesus: "What happened to you that you abandoned the law of your fathers?" and so on. But how have those abandoned the ancestral law who rebuke those who do not listen to it, saying: "Tell me, you who read the law, do you not hear the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons," up to "which are allegorized," and what follows? And how have those abandoned the ancestral law who always mention in their words their ancestral writings, saying: "Or does not the law also say these things? For it is written in the law of Moses: You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain. Is it for oxen that God cares? Or does he speak entirely for our sake? It was written for our sake," and so on? And how confusedly Celsus's Jew says these things, when he could have said more plausibly: "Some of you have abandoned the customs on the pretext of interpretations and allegories; some of you, while interpreting spiritually, as you profess, nonetheless keep the ancestral customs; and some of you, without even interpreting, wish both to accept Jesus as the one prophesied and to keep the law of Moses according to the ancestral customs, as having the whole meaning of the Spirit in the letter." But how could Celsus make the matter clear—he who in what follows mentioned godless sects wholly alien to Jesus, and others that abandon the Creator, but did not know that there are also Israelites who believe in Jesus and have not abandoned the ancestral law? For it was not his purpose to examine the whole subject with love of truth, so as to accept whatever useful thing he might find; but he wrote such things as an enemy, wholly bent on overturning them as soon as he heard them.