Against Celsus 3.28

For what purpose did providence bring about the marvels concerning Aristeas, and what did it wish to benefit the human race by displaying such great things, as you think? You cannot say. But we, when we relate what concerns Jesus, bring no ordinary defense of these things having happened: that God wished to establish the word through Jesus as saving for mankind, made firm on the apostles as on the foundations of the building of Christianity that was being laid, and growing also in the times that followed, in which not a few healings are performed in the name of Jesus, and certain other manifestations not to be despised. And what sort of being is Apollo, commanding the Metapontines to count Aristeas among the gods? For what purpose does he do this, and what benefit does he arrange for the Metapontines from the honor paid to him as a god, if they should reckon a man of a little while ago as now a god? But the recommendations about Aristeas by Apollo, who in our view is a daemon that has obtained the privilege “of libation and the savor of sacrifice,” seem to you worthy of note; while those of the God over all and his holy angels, proclaimed through prophets not after Jesus came but before he came to dwell in human life, do not move you to admire both the prophets who received a divine Spirit and the one prophesied by them? His coming into the world was proclaimed so many years before by so many that the whole Jewish nation, hanging on the expectation of the one hoped to come, came to dispute among themselves when Jesus came; and a great multitude of them confessed Christ and believed him to be the one prophesied, while those who did not believe, despising the gentleness of those who, because of Jesus' teachings, would not rebel even in the least, dared such things against Jesus as his disciples truthfully and fairly recorded, not stealing away from his marvelous story what seems to most to bring shame on the Christian teaching. For Jesus himself and his disciples wished those who came to them to believe not only in his divinity and his marvels, as if he had not shared in human nature or taken the flesh that among human beings desires “against the Spirit”; but they saw that the power which came down into human nature and human circumstances, and took a human soul and body, contributes, by being believed together with the more divine things, to the salvation of believers. For they see that from him the divine and human natures began to be woven together, so that the human, by communion with what is more divine, might become divine, not in Jesus alone but also in all who with faith take up the life Jesus taught, which leads to friendship and communion with God everyone who lives according to Jesus' precepts.