Against Celsus 2.30

Celsus also threw in this: “No one proves a god and son of God from such signs and misunderstandings, nor from such ignoble evidences.” But he ought to have set out the misunderstandings and refuted them, and to have shown by argument that the evidences were ignoble, so that, if the Christian seemed to say anything plausible, he might try to contend against it and overturn the argument. What he did say about Jesus, as though of something great, did in fact come to pass, but he would not see that it came to pass, as the evidence shows concerning Jesus. “For as the sun,” he says, “by illuminating everything else first shows itself, so the Son of God ought to have done.” We would say, then, that he did so. For “in his days righteousness dawned, and an abundance of peace” came about, beginning from his birth, as God prepared the nations for his teaching, so that they might come under one king of the Romans, and so that, through the lack of intercourse among nations caused by many kingdoms, it might not be harder for Jesus' apostles to do what Jesus commanded them when he said: “Go and make disciples of all the nations.” It is clear that Jesus was born in the reign of Augustus, who, so to speak, leveled the many peoples of the earth into one kingdom. The existence of many kingdoms would have been a hindrance to the spread of Jesus' teaching through the whole inhabited world, not only for the reasons stated but also because people everywhere were compelled to serve as soldiers and fight for their countries. This happened before the times of Augustus and still earlier, when there had to be war, as between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, so also between other peoples. How then could this peaceful teaching, which does not allow even revenge on enemies, have prevailed, if the state of the world had not everywhere been changed to a gentler one at Jesus' coming?