Against Celsus 8.47

But the Greeks will say these things are myths, although they are attested as true by two whole nations. Why are not the stories of the Greeks myths rather than these? And if someone, coming to close quarters with the argument so as not to seem to accept arbitrarily what is his own and disbelieve what is another's, were to say that the Greek wonders were done by certain demons, and the Jewish ones either by God through the prophets, or by the angels, or by God through the angels, and the Christian ones by Jesus and his power in the apostles, come, let us compare them all with one another and see the end of the intention of those who worked them, and the benefit or harm, or neither, to those who received the supposed benefits. Will he not see that the Jewish nation of old was philosophical, before they committed outrage against the divine, by whom they were abandoned because of their great wickedness; and that the Christians came together in a marvellous way, drawn at the beginning especially by miracles rather than by exhortations to leave their ancestral customs and choose what was foreign to them? For indeed, if one must use a probable argument about the first formation of the Christians, we shall say that it is not credible either that the apostles of Jesus, unlettered and simple men, took courage to proclaim Christianity to men from anything other than the power given them and the grace in their word for the things they declared; or that their hearers were moved from long-standing ancestral customs, unless some remarkable power and marvellous deeds had moved them to doctrines so strange and foreign to those in which they had been raised.