Against Celsus 6.24

Next, after the account taken from the Mithraic rites, Celsus promises that anyone who wishes to investigate a certain Christian rite together with the Persian rite already described, comparing them with one another and laying bare the Christian one too, will thus see the difference between them. Where he knew names of sects to mention, he did not hesitate to set out those he thought he knew; but where he ought rather to have done so, if he knew it, and to have taught which sect uses the diagram he describes, this he has not done. It seems to me that here too he has set out the contents of the diagram in part from things half-heard about the utterly obscure sect of the Ophites, I believe. We ourselves, out of our love of learning, have come across this diagram, and in it we found the fictions of men who, as Paul put it, creep “into households” and captivate “silly women laden with sins, led away by various desires, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.” And the diagram was so wholly unconvincing that not even easily deceived “silly women,” nor the most boorish people who are ready to be led by anything plausible, would have assented to it. At any rate, though we have travelled through many parts of the earth and sought out those everywhere who profess to know something, we have never met anyone who upheld the teachings of the diagram.