Against Celsus 3.2

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.