Against Celsus 2.69

We wish to show how it was not more useful for the whole dispensation for him to have vanished bodily at once from the stake. What is recorded to have happened to Jesus does not have the whole contemplation of the truth in the bare text and the history; for each of these things is shown, to those who read Scripture more intelligently, to be also a symbol of something. Just as his being crucified has the truth shown in “I have been crucified with Christ” and signified by “But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of my Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world”; and his death was necessary because of “For the death he died, he died to sin once for all,” and because the righteous man says, “being conformed to his death,” and “For if we have died with him, we shall also live with him”; so also his burial extends to those conformed to his death, crucified with him and dying with him, as Paul too said: “For we were buried with him through baptism,” and we rose with him. What is recorded about the burial, the tomb, and the one who buried him we shall explain more fittingly and at greater length elsewhere, where it is our principal task to speak of these things. For now it is enough to mention the clean linen cloth, in which the pure body of Jesus had to be wrapped, and the new tomb, “which” Joseph “had hewn in the rock,” “where no one had yet been laid,” or, as John says, “in which no one had yet been placed.” And consider whether the agreement of the three evangelists, who took care to record that the tomb was hewn or cut in rock, may move someone who examines the meanings of what is written to see something worthy of reflection both in these things and in the newness of the tomb, which Matthew and John report, and in no dead man having been there, according to Luke and John. For he who was not like the other dead, but showed signs of life even in death, the water and the blood, and was, so to speak, a new kind of dead man, had to be in a new and clean tomb; so that, just as his birth was purer than every birth, since he was born not from intercourse but from a virgin, so his burial too might have purity, shown symbolically in his body's being laid in a new tomb, not built of gathered stones with no natural unity, but hewn and cut in one rock united throughout. The exposition, and the ascent from what is recorded to have happened to the realities of which the events were signs, one might set out more grandly and more divinely, presenting such things more fittingly in a work devoted to them. As to the letter, one might explain it thus: it belonged to one who had decided to endure hanging on the stake to keep also what followed from that undertaking, so that, having been taken down as a man, since he had died as a man, he should also be buried as a man. But if, hypothetically, it had been written in the Gospels that he vanished at once from the stake, Celsus and the unbelievers would have found fault with the text and accused it thus: “Why did he vanish after the cross, but not arrange this before suffering?” If, then, having learned from the Gospels that he did not vanish at once from the stake, they think they can accuse the teaching because it did not invent, as they demanded, his vanishing at once from the stake, but reported the truth, how is it not reasonable for them to believe also in his resurrection, and that, when he wished, he once “stood in the midst” of the disciples “when the doors were shut,” and another time, having given bread to two of his acquaintances, at once “vanished from their sight” after speaking certain words to them?