Against Celsus

Contra Celsum · Κατὰ Κέλσου

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0.1Origen tells his patron Ambrose that Jesus kept silent before false witnesses, trusting his life to speak for him, and quotes Matthew's account of the trial.
0.2Jesus could have defended himself and been released, but he chose silence; now he is defended by the lives of his true disciples.
0.3Origen writes his reply reluctantly, since no true believer should be shaken by Celsus; Paul's list of things that cannot separate us from God's love does not even include arguments.
0.4The apostles are above all danger to faith; yet because some believers may be shaken by Celsus, Origen agrees to answer his book, which is no "true word" at all.
0.5Paul warned against the empty deceit of philosophy, but Celsus's book does not even rise to the level of philosophical deceit.
0.6Origen explains that the preface was written later, that the book is for unbelievers and the weak in faith, and that its opening chapters are only brief notes.
1.1Celsus accuses Christians of illegal secret associations; Origen replies that secret agreements against unjust laws, like a plot against a tyrant, are right.
1.2Christianity's Jewish origins are "barbarian," but its truth rests on a divine demonstration of the Spirit (prophecy) and of power (miracles still seen).
1.3Unlike the persecution of Socrates or Pythagoras, the persecution of Christians came from every power in the empire, and only divine power let the faith survive and conquer.
1.4Christian ethics resembles philosophy's because God wrote the moral law on every heart; the broken and rewritten tablets symbolize sin and renewal.
1.5Celsus notes that philosophers also rejected idols; Origen agrees, because God wrote this truth too on human hearts.
1.6Christians cast out demons not by spells but by the name of Jesus and the telling of his story; Celsus wrongly calls Jesus a sorcerer.
1.7Christian preaching is known everywhere, not secret; like philosophy and the mysteries it has deeper teachings for the prepared, which is no fault.
1.8Celsus praises constancy under persecution, yet hides his own Epicurean views to seem more credible, and so contradicts himself.
1.9Celsus mocks Christians for believing without reasons; Origen replies that Christianity also examines its beliefs deeply, but simple faith is the best way to help the many who cannot study philosophy.
1.10Philosophers too choose their schools by an unreasoned faith before examining all the arguments, so Celsus cannot fault Christians for faith.
1.11All human life—sailing, marrying, farming—rests on faith, so it is far more reasonable to trust God and Christ, who died for humanity and sent his disciples through the world.
1.12Celsus boasts "I know everything" about Christianity, but he has learned only from ordinary believers, like a traveler who judges Egyptian religion by its common people rather than its priests.
1.13Paul did not call all wisdom evil but only "the wisdom of this world"; reasoned faith is better than simple faith, but God saves through the "foolishness" of preaching Christ crucified.
1.14Celsus trusts the ancient histories of every nation but the Jews, and leaves the Jews out of his list of wise peoples.
1.15Numenius, Hermippus, and Hecataeus, unlike Celsus, recognized the wisdom of the Jews.
1.16Celsus counts obscure peoples and poets like Linus and Orpheus among the ancient sages but leaves out the Jews and Moses, whose antiquity Josephus and Tatian proved and whose laws a whole nation still keeps.
1.17Celsus attacks allegorical reading of Moses though Greek myths about the gods are far more shameful; like Plato's Thrasymachus, he forbids his opponents their true answer.
1.18Compared book with book, Moses' laws help ordinary readers and reward deeper study, and they have spread through the world, while the Greek poets are forgotten.
1.19Celsus implies the world is eternal with repeated floods and fires, but gives no proof; Moses, inspired by God's Spirit, deserves more trust than Plato.
1.20Celsus honors Egyptian animal worship and myths as hidden wisdom but dismisses Moses' histories and laws as empty myths.
1.21Even if Moses learned from older wisdom, he taught true doctrine; unlike the Stoics' bodily, changeable god, the Bible's God does not change.
1.22Celsus says circumcision came from Egypt, but Moses says it began with Abraham, whose name even exorcists use; its deeper meaning is left for another time.
1.23Celsus mocks the Hebrews' faith in one God, but the Greek gods are fictions; the order of the one world points to one Maker, who is neither a part nor a whole.
1.24Celsus says the name of God does not matter, but Origen holds that names have real power, so the Hebrew divine names cannot be swapped for Zeus or the names of other nations' gods.
1.25Divine names carry meanings and power—the angels' names, and above all the name of Jesus—so Christians rightly die rather than call God "Zeus."
1.26Celsus falsely says the Jews worship angels and practice sorcery; and the swift spread of Christ's teaching, which has transformed many lives, shows that it is from God.
1.27The faith spread worldwide against every power; naturally most converts are simple people, but, as Celsus admits, some are educated.
1.28Celsus's imaginary Jew claims Jesus invented the virgin birth, that Mary was a poor adulteress, and that Jesus learned magic in Egypt; Origen begins his reply.
1.29Jesus had none of the advantages of birth, wealth, or education, yet he stirred the whole world more than any sage, king, or general.
1.30Jesus is uniquely admired for wisdom, miracles, and leadership together, and even his shameful death by crucifixion did not destroy his fame.
1.31The apostles' readiness to die makes sense only if they saw Christ risen; his death, like that of heroes who died for their cities, defeated the ruler of demons for all humanity.
1.32The Jewish story that Mary bore Jesus by a soldier named Panthera betrays that Jesus was not Joseph's son; even on Platonic assumptions, so great a soul would have a pure and exceptional birth.
1.33If bodies suit the souls that inhabit them, the soul of Jesus would need an extraordinary body, not one born of adultery.
1.34Celsus ignored Isaiah's prophecy that a virgin would bear Emmanuel; Origen quotes it and defends the translation "virgin" against the rendering "young woman."
1.35From Isaiah's own words: a birth to a young wife would be no sign; the sign fits a virgin birth, given to the house of David and fulfilled in Christ, who descended and ascended.
1.36God gave Israel prophets, even for small matters, so that they would not turn to pagan divination, which the law forbade.
1.37Nature and Greek stories show that birth without a father is not impossible; the Jew's comparison of Mary with the mothers of Greek myth is buffoonery.
1.38Celsus says Jesus learned magic in Egypt, but a magician would not teach God's judgment, and the apostles would not have risked death for a teaching that forbids magic.
1.39Celsus's jokes about Mary's beauty and poverty are mere street abuse, not argument.
1.40Celsus attacks the Gospel stories out of order, as anger does, and arrogantly calls his book "The True Word," which no real philosopher would have done.
1.41Origen will answer Celsus point by point in Celsus's order; the Jew mocks the dove at Jesus' baptism and asks who witnessed it.
1.42Almost no history can be strictly proved, and even true stories may contain things to be read figuratively; the Gospels must be read with care and discernment.
1.43A Jew who believes the visions of Ezekiel and Isaiah cannot reject the dove at Jesus' baptism; Jesus' power, still at work in the churches, makes him more credible than the prophets.
1.44The same Spirit that taught Moses about events before his time taught the evangelists about Jesus' baptism; the deeper meaning of the dove is left for another occasion.
1.45Origen recalls telling Jewish scholars that they cannot believe Moses' miracles while rejecting Jesus'; indeed the prophecies of Jesus prove Moses a true prophet.
1.46The Spirit who came on Jesus at his baptism still works among Christians in exorcisms, healings, prophecies, and sudden conversions; Isaiah foretold that the Father would send both Christ and the Spirit.
1.47Josephus confirms that John was a baptizer and links the fall of Jerusalem to the killing of James, the Lord's brother—more reasonably it was because of Jesus himself.
1.48The prophets' visions and Jesus' opened heavens are perceived by a spiritual "divine sense," not the bodily senses; and Jesus did not boast of his own baptismal vision, which John witnessed.
1.49Celsus ignores the many prophecies of Christ and has his Jew speak of one prophet in Jerusalem announcing a "son of God," which no Jew would say.
1.50The prophets foretold Christ's birthplace, sufferings, resurrection, and miracles, not merely that a judge would come; Origen will cite some of these prophecies.
1.51Micah foretold Bethlehem as the Messiah's birthplace, the cave of the nativity is still shown there, and the Jewish teachers knew the prophecy until they suppressed it after Christ came.
1.52Habit and prejudice explain why many Jews rejected clear prophecies, just as Egyptians cling to their animal gods.
1.53Jacob's prophecy that rule would not leave Judah until the one came who is the nations' expectation is fulfilled in Christ, in whom the nations now hope.
1.54Against Celsus's mockery of Christ's suffering, Origen quotes Isaiah's prophecy of the Servant who would suffer and die for others' sins.
1.55In debate with Jewish scholars who applied Isaiah's Servant to the people of Israel, Origen argued that the Servant who dies for "my people" must be someone else—Jesus Christ.
1.56The prophets foretold two comings of Christ, one humble and one glorious; Psalm 45 calls the anointed one God, anointed by his God.
1.57Jesus is Son of God in a unique sense, the source of all adoption; the would-be messiahs Theudas, Judas the Galilean, Dositheus, and Simon Magus all came to nothing, as Gamaliel foresaw.
1.58Celsus confuses the magi with Chaldean astrologers and omits the star; Origen takes the star of Bethlehem to have been a new, comet-like star.
1.59Comets were thought to mark great events, and Balaam prophesied a star at the Messiah's birth, so the star of Bethlehem is fitting.
1.60At Christ's birth the angels' praise broke the power of the magi's demons; guided by Balaam's prophecy of the star, the magi came to worship a greater power, with gifts fit for a king, a mortal, and God.
1.61Herod's plot and the flight to Egypt reflect blind wickedness moved by the devil; Christ's kingdom is not of this world, and avoiding danger until his appointed time was not cowardice.
1.62Celsus does not even know there were twelve apostles; that uneducated fishermen and tax collectors converted the world shows divine power, not human eloquence.
1.63Scripture itself admits that the apostles, and Paul the persecutor, were sinners; Christ chose such men to show his power to heal souls.
1.64Philosophy too reformed a few wicked men like Phaedo and Polemon, but Christ has transformed multitudes, as Paul's words to Titus describe.
1.65Jesus' avoiding of danger was prudence, like Aristotle's leaving Athens, and his support from grateful women was no more shameful than philosophers' support from their pupils.
1.66Celsus mocks the flight to Egypt; Origen answers that Christ, being truly man as well as God, was protected by ordinary human means, which suited his purpose better than a spectacular rescue.
1.67The sons of gods in Greek myth did nothing to compare with the work of Jesus, whose churches fill the world and whose name still heals and transforms.
1.68Celsus likens Jesus' miracles to street magic, but magicians never call anyone to moral reform or the fear of God, as Jesus' works and life did.
1.69Christ truly took a human body, born of a woman and tempted like us but without sin; Celsus's objection rests on his belief in the Panthera story.
1.70Jesus' eating and speaking are no argument against his divinity, since he truly took a human body; the Greek gods too spoke through human prophetesses.
1.71No one is truly hateful to God, who loves all he made; Celsus's abuse is not argument. The first book ends with the Jew's speech to Jesus.
2.1Celsus's Jew accuses Jewish Christians of abandoning the law, but Jewish believers such as the Ebionites keep it, as Peter did for a long time and as Paul did among Jews.
2.2The "many things" Jesus could not yet tell his Jewish disciples were the spiritual meaning of the law, which the Spirit later taught, as in Peter's vision.
2.3Jewish Christians like Paul constantly appeal to the law, reading it spiritually; Celsus, writing as an enemy, did not trouble to distinguish the different groups.
2.4Christians begin from the Jewish Scriptures and honor them more by uncovering their deeper meaning; the gospel's roots in the law, as Jesus and Mark say, do not bind believers to its letter.
2.5The Jew says the resurrection and judgment are nothing new, but Jesus taught that the kingdom would pass to the nations, and Christians read the prophets as pointing to a heavenly citizenship.
2.6Even if Jesus kept the Jewish customs, he is still the Son of the God who gave the law, which the prophets themselves teach has a hidden meaning.
2.7Jesus, who washed his disciples' feet, was not boastful or a liar, and turning the law's bodily observances into spiritual ones is not unholy.
2.8No one like Jesus has appeared; the Jews' rejection of him was foretold by Isaiah, and Origen sees their loss of Jerusalem as a consequence.
2.9Christians do not call Jesus' visible body or human soul God, but the divine Word who spoke in him, who created all things at the Father's command and is not confined to Jesus' body, though united with it.
2.10Jesus was not caught as a fugitive but gave himself up willingly, as John and Matthew record; the disciples' readiness to die shows they believed what they wrote.
2.11Only one disciple, Judas, betrayed Jesus, and even he was not wholly lost to Jesus' teaching, as his repentance shows; the betrayal was prophesied in the Psalms.
2.12Betrayal by a follower proves nothing against a teacher: Aristotle turned on Plato and Chrysippus on Cleanthes, yet no one blames their teachers.
2.13Jesus foretold that his followers would be brought before rulers for his name alone—as Christians uniquely are—that the gospel would reach the whole world, and that Jerusalem would be besieged, all of which came true.
2.14Celsus refuses to grant Jesus foreknowledge, but even the pagan historian Phlegon admitted that Christ's predictions came true.
2.15The evangelists honestly recorded Peter's denial and the disciples' failure, which they would have hidden if they were inventing stories.
2.16Origen answers Celsus that Jesus' death did not contradict his teaching, that his suffering and resurrection were real rather than apparent, and that he is immortal as the one risen from the dead.
2.17Like Socrates, Leonidas, Paul, and many Christian martyrs, Jesus knowingly went to meet the death he foresaw rather than avoiding it.
2.18Origen argues that if Jesus truly foreknew the betrayal and denial, they had to happen, and that neither Judas nor Peter acted with complete indifference to him.
2.19Origen rejects Celsus's argument that the betrayal and denial could not have been foretold, since a prediction is shown true by its fulfilment.
2.20Against Celsus's charge that a foreknowing God made his disciples traitors, Origen argues that foreknowledge does not cause what it foresees, using Judas, the oracle to Laius, and the Stoic “idle argument.”
2.21Origen answers that history is full of people who plotted against those whose table they had shared.
2.22Origen dismisses Celsus's claim that Jesus plotted against his own disciples and made them traitors.
2.23Origen replies that Jesus, having truly taken a human body, truly felt pain, even though he freely chose to suffer for the benefit of all.
2.24Origen accuses Celsus of quoting Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane selectively, omitting his submission to the Father's will, as the impious quote “I will kill” without “I will make alive.”
2.25Origen explains that in Gethsemane Jesus spoke as a man, showing both the weakness of the flesh and the eagerness of the spirit, and that his real suffering is an example to believers.
2.26Origen replies that the disciples could easily have hidden Jesus' distress by not recording it, and that they cannot have been both sincere believers and conscious liars.
2.27Origen answers Celsus's charge that Christians rewrote the Gospels: only heretics such as the followers of Marcion and Valentinus did so, and they no more discredit Christianity than bad philosophers discredit philosophy.
2.28Origen criticizes Celsus for dismissing the argument from prophecy without examining a single prophecy, and for putting into a Jew's mouth what no Jew would say.
2.29Since Christ's two comings have been explained, Origen answers only the insult that Jesus was a “pest”: no pest turns so many people from vice to virtue.
2.30Answering Celsus that the Son of God should have shone like the sun, Origen says he did, for the peace of Augustus's empire prepared the world for the spread of Jesus' teaching.
2.31Origen defends calling the Son of God the Word, who took a human body and soul, and notes that no Jew he has met actually approves that the Word is God's Son, as Celsus's Jew claims.
2.32Origen answers Celsus's objection to Jesus' royal genealogy: poor people can descend from kings, and Celsus ignores the real difficulties about the genealogies that Christians themselves discuss.
2.33Origen points to the signs at Jesus' death recorded in the Gospels and by the historian Phlegon, and to healings still done in Jesus' name, as his noble deeds.
2.34Origen answers Celsus's taunts drawn from Euripides' Bacchae, pointing to the miraculous freeing of Peter and Paul, the judgment on the Jewish nation, Pilate's wife's dream, and Jesus' patient endurance of mockery.
2.35Origen answers that the Greeks face the same question about why God does not punish blasphemers, and that divine signs at the crucifixion did show that Jesus was more than a man.
2.36To Celsus's jibe about divine “ichor,” Origen answers with the blood and water from Jesus' side and the centurion's confession.
2.37Origen answers Celsus's mockery of the vinegar and gall by pointing to Psalm 69, which foretold them.
2.38Origen explains what Christians charge the Jews with: not answering the proof from prophecy, attributing Jesus' exorcisms to Beelzebul, and slandering his tireless preaching as vagrancy.
2.39Origen denies that Jesus persuaded no one: crowds followed him, and his disciples, though frightened, did not abandon their faith and were strengthened by his resurrection appearances.
2.40Origen says Celsus wrongly thinks greatness means escaping death, whereas Jesus' death became an example for those who die for true piety.
2.41Origen answers that poverty and persecution are not true evils, as the examples of Socrates, Democritus, Crates, and Diogenes show; Celsus cannot point to any wickedness in Jesus.
2.42Origen says no witness records anything blameworthy in Jesus, his fulfilled predictions confirm faith, and his sufferings are a noble example, not a disgrace, except to one who thinks pain the greatest evil.
2.43Origen affirms that Jesus persuaded many during his life and that after death, as a soul without a body, he preached to the souls of the dead.
2.44Origen rejects Celsus's comparison of Jesus with condemned sorcerers and robbers: Jesus was indeed crucified among robbers, as foretold, and his martyrs share his unjust condemnation.
2.45Origen answers that the disciples' early failure is balanced by their later bold preaching, suffering, and martyrdom, which Celsus ignores.
2.46Origen refutes the claim that Jesus won only ten disreputable followers, pointing to the crowds of thousands, and argues that if his disciples persuaded many, he must have persuaded far more.
2.47Origen denies that Christians believe Jesus is God's Son merely because he was punished; they have countless reasons, and they do not worship everyone who was crucified.
2.48Origen defends Jesus' healings and raisings of the dead as foretold by Isaiah and credibly reported, and says the disciples do greater works in healing souls.
2.49Origen shows that Jesus warned not against wonder-workers in general but against false christs, and that his warning, far from reducing his own miracles to sorcery, presupposes their divine character.
2.50Origen shows from 2 Thessalonians that the deceptive signs foretold belong to the Antichrist, and that Christ's miracles, like Moses' against Egypt's magicians, are proven divine by their fruit in changed lives.
2.51Origen argues that if magic worked by demons exists, genuine miracles by divine power must exist too, and that the two are told apart by the life of the worker and the moral fruit, as the nations formed by Moses and Jesus show.
2.52Origen asks Celsus's Jew why he accepts Moses' miracles as divine but rejects Jesus', when Jesus did a greater work in founding a new way of life among the nations.
2.53Origen shows that every objection Celsus's Jew raises against Jesus' warning about false wonder-workers can be turned against Moses, who gave a similar warning in Deuteronomy.
2.54Origen replies that Celsus's Jew mocks Jesus' foretelling of his resurrection, yet Moses too wrote of his own mysterious, unknown burial.
2.55Celsus's Jew compares the resurrection to Greek tales of heroes returning from Hades and dismisses its witnesses; Origen answers that the same objections could be made against Moses, so that defending Moses defends Jesus even more.
2.56Origen argues that Jesus' public crucifixion rules out comparison with heroes who merely disappeared and reappeared, and that the disciples' willingness to die shows they did not invent the resurrection.
2.57Origen notes that a Jew could not deny bodily resurrection, since Scripture tells of boys raised by Elijah and Elisha, and suggests Jesus came to the Jews because they were prepared for such marvels.
2.58Origen replies that Christians count the Greek tales as myths but the shared Scriptures as true, and that Jesus' resurrection, worked by the Father himself, has had far greater effects than those worked by Elijah and Elisha.
2.59Origen answers that Jesus did help himself in the way that matters, by keeping silent and virtuous in suffering as Isaiah foretold, and notes that Celsus disparages Mary Magdalene and the other witnesses of the resurrection.
2.60Origen replies to Celsus's claim that the resurrection appearances were waking dreams: even appearances of the dead imply that the soul survives, and nothing in the Gospel suggests the witnesses were deranged.
2.61Against Celsus's view that the risen Jesus was an apparition, Origen points to Thomas, who doubted a bodily resurrection until Jesus invited him to touch his wounds.
2.62Origen explains that the risen Jesus was in a state between an ordinary body and a disembodied soul, entering through shut doors and vanishing at Emmaus, as the Gospels record.
2.63Origen grants that the risen Jesus did not appear publicly to all, citing Acts, the Gospels, and Paul's list of witnesses, and proposes to explain why.
2.64Origen teaches that Jesus appeared differently to different people according to their capacity, as at the Transfiguration, and that after his victory over the powers not everyone could bear to see him.
2.65Origen explains that even the apostles could not always behold the risen Christ, whose appearances were given to those able to see them, and that Christ died and rose to be Lord of both dead and living.
2.66Just as Paul gave the Corinthians only what they could receive, and God appeared to Abraham only at times, so the risen Christ appeared by divine judgment only to those fitted to see him.
2.67Origen argues that Jesus spared his judges and persecutors by not appearing to them, as the men of Sodom were struck blind, and that he came both to be known and to remain partly hidden.
2.68Origen answers that Celsus, like critics of providence, imagines a better world than the real one, and notes that Jesus could and did vanish at will, as at Emmaus.
2.69Origen explains that Jesus' death and burial carry symbolic meaning for believers, who die and are buried with him in baptism, that his new rock-hewn tomb signifies his purity, and that vanishing from the cross would only have drawn other objections.
2.70Origen denies that Jesus hid himself or appeared only to one woman after rising, citing Matthew's account of the two Marys, and points out the absurdity of Celsus's claim that the opposite should have happened.
2.71Origen says Jesus revealed the Father who sent him, as John's Gospel and letters show, and that the purposes of his mission are set out by prophets, evangelists, and apostles.
2.72Origen answers that God's voice at Jesus' baptism and Transfiguration was heard only by those meant to hear it, since the divine voice is perceived by spiritual, not bodily, hearing.
2.73Origen replies that Jesus had already called all to the light and taught why he came, in the Sermon on the Mount, the parables, his disputes, and John's Gospel.
2.74Answering the claim that no god present among people is disbelieved, Origen points out that Israel disbelieved God's own manifest presence in the Exodus and made the golden calf, so their unbelief toward Jesus is in character.
2.75Origen argues that the Jews' rejection of Jesus matches their ancestors' unbelief in the wilderness, fulfilling Jesus' words and the prophecy of Deuteronomy about “your life hanging before your eyes.”
2.76Origen answers that Jesus' “woes” are no different from God's in the prophets and the curses of the Law, spoken to bring people to repentance, and that even Greek sages could not persuade everyone.
2.77Origen notes that the Jew in Celsus himself believes in bodily resurrection, yet ignores that Jesus is “the firstborn from the dead,” and answers his demand to see Jesus by asking where the God of the prophets can now be seen.
2.78Origen replies that Jesus did not come to cause the Jews' unbelief but foresaw it, and that God's providence used it to call the Gentiles, as the prophets and Paul foretold.
2.79Origen closes Book 2 by arguing that no mere man could have spread his teaching across the world against all opposition and transformed so many lives, since Christ is the power and wisdom of God.
3.1Opening Book 3, Origen addresses Celsus's own claim that the dispute between Jews and Christians over whether the prophesied Savior has come is a quarrel over nothing.
3.2Origen argues that the Jewish prophecies of Christ are no trifle, and that a nation taught to reject pagan oracles must have had genuine prophets to keep it from turning to them.
3.3Origen argues that Israel's faithfulness under persecution shows it had genuine signs and prophecies from God, since otherwise it would have turned to the pagan oracles and healing gods.
3.4Origen insists that the debate over the meaning of the prophecies is serious, since both Jews and Christians rightly accept that the prophets spoke from God.
3.5Origen rejects Celsus's claim that the Jews were rebel Egyptians, replying that the Egyptians oppressed the Hebrew guests, were punished by God, and slandered Moses, who was a pious lawgiver and truthful historian.
3.6Origen argues that the Hebrews cannot have been rebel Egyptians, since they had their own language and script before going to Egypt, in which Moses wrote the Pentateuch.
3.7Origen denies that Christianity arose from rebellion, since Christ forbade his followers to kill anyone and they accepted death like sheep; and he suggests the Hebrew language was God's gift at the Exodus.
3.8Origen argues from Hebrew names that the Israelites were not Egyptians, and says that Christians, forbidden to fight, have been protected by God, who has allowed only a few martyrs as examples while preserving the church.
3.9Against Celsus's claim that Christians would not want everyone to become Christian, Origen points to missionaries who travel through cities and villages without seeking wealth or glory.
3.10Origen answers Celsus's claim that Christians were few and united at first: even then crowds of thousands, including women and children, followed Jesus, and being few says nothing about unwillingness to persuade all.
3.11Origen replies that Christians disagreed from the beginning, as the apostolic dispute over Gentile believers and Paul's letters show, so divisions are not a later corruption caused by numbers.
3.12Origen answers Celsus's taunt about Christian divisions: every serious and useful discipline, such as medicine, philosophy, and Judaism, has its schools, so heresies are no argument against Christianity.
3.13Origen cites Paul's word that heresies must exist so that the approved may be revealed, and notes that Socrates' and Plato's schools also divided; groups like the Ophites and Cainites, who reject Jesus altogether, are not Christian at all.
3.14Origen replies that the Christian community rests not on rebellion or self-interest but on God's working, who foretold Christ through the prophets and established first Judaism and then Christianity.
3.15Origen says Christianity is not held together by fear of outsiders, since persecution has ceased for some time and may return, and that Christians openly teach converts to reject idols and worship the Creator.
3.16Origen answers that the only “terrors” Christians teach are the doctrine of God's judgment, which Celsus himself admits must not be rejected, and that it is not a misunderstanding of ancient teaching.
3.17Celsus compares Christianity to Egyptian temples that are grand outside but worship animals within; Origen replies that even Christ's human sufferings served the salvation of the whole world.
3.18Origen says Celsus credits Egyptian animal worship with hidden meaning but knows nothing of the wisdom and knowledge given by the Spirit to learned Christians.
3.19Origen objects that Celsus allows hidden meanings in Egyptian animal cults but denies any in Christian teaching, though Paul speaks of hidden wisdom taught to the mature.
3.20Origen challenges Celsus to read Paul's letters attentively, confident that he would either admire Paul's profound thought in plain language or make himself ridiculous.
3.21Origen points to the depth of the Gospels, with parables explained only to those “in the house” and Jesus' ascents of the mountain, as proof that Christianity's inner teaching is nothing like Egyptian animal worship.
3.22Celsus contrasts the deified Greek heroes with the risen Jesus; Origen asks whether Celsus thinks those heroes exist at all, and argues from their own stories that they could not have become gods.
3.23Origen contrasts the blameless life and real death of Jesus with the scandalous stories of the Greek demigods, and asks why Celsus trusts those myths but not the eyewitness disciples who died for their testimony.
3.24Origen replies that if Celsus credits the many witnesses to Asclepius, far more witness to Jesus, and that Christians still heal the sick and insane by invoking God and Jesus' name, as Origen himself has seen.
3.25Origen argues that healing and prophecy do not prove divinity, since Apollo's oracles honored a boxer and the licentious poet Archilochus, and the Pythia's inspiration was indecent, unlike anything Christians hold of Jesus.
3.26Origen quotes Herodotus's account of Aristeas of Proconnesus, who vanished, reappeared, and was honored at Metapontum by command of Apollo, a story Celsus accepts without question.
3.27Origen asks why Celsus believes the story of Aristeas on the word of Herodotus and Pindar, but dismisses the Gospel accounts written by disciples who died for them, when the moral fruit points to Jesus.
3.28Origen contrasts the pointless marvels of Aristeas with the saving purpose of Jesus' miracles, foretold by the prophets, and explains that in Christ divine and human nature began to be woven together so that believers too might become divine.
3.29Origen explains that demons opposed the spread of the gospel because it ended their sacrifices, but God made churches arise everywhere, which even at their worst are better than the civic assemblies around them.
3.30Origen compares the churches of Athens, Corinth, and Alexandria, and their councils and leaders, with the civic assemblies and magistrates of those cities, finding the church's members, even the weaker ones, morally superior.
3.31Origen contrasts the purposeless marvel of Abaris riding an arrow with Jesus' ascension in glory, which served to commend his teaching and turn people to God.
3.32Against the tale of Hermotimus of Clazomenae, whose soul left his body, Origen sets Jesus' own authority to lay down his life and take it again, shown in his death and resurrection as foretold.
3.33Origen argues that the tale of Cleomedes vanishing from a chest, even if true, served no purpose, whereas Jesus' divinity is shown by the churches, the prophecies, the healings, and the wisdom found in Scripture.
3.34Origen rejects Celsus's comparison of Christian worship with the hero cults of Zamolxis, Mopsus, and others: Christians build no temples or statues but, through Jesus as mediator and high priest, pray to the God over all.
3.35Origen presses Celsus: either the hero-shrines have no power, making Celsus an Epicurean, or they do, in which case Jesus, who forbids their worship as demons, must be more powerful than all of them.
3.36Origen rejects Celsus's comparison of Jesus with Hadrian's favorite Antinous, whose cult was set up by royal command and sustained by Egyptian sorcery, whereas God himself commended Jesus, whose name still drives out demons.
3.37Origen says Christians refuse to compare Jesus with Zeus or Apollo, whom they know to be demons that feed on sacrifices, and explains that some fallen spirits, like deluded philosophers, proclaim themselves gods, so that one should trust only the God over all and Christ.
3.38Origen reflects that what people believe often depends on the “fortune” of their teachers and upbringing, whose causes lie hidden in providence, and that faith in Jesus is well-founded, whether lucky for the many or tested by a few.
3.39Origen agrees that faith produces Christian assent, but argues that the plain, guileless Gospel writers could not have invented such a teaching, and that Jesus chose them so that their power would clearly be divine, not rhetorical.
3.40Origen argues that Christian teaching agrees with the common human notion that God is not a material image, so that the rational soul, hearing it, recognizes its Creator, abandons idols, and welcomes Christ.
3.41Origen answers that the eternal Son is the Word himself, and that his human body and soul, united with him, were changed into something divine, just as philosophers say matter can take on new qualities.
3.42Origen replies that the body is not defiled by nature, only by vice, and that the pagan heroes Asclepius, Dionysus, and Heracles made no one better and lived immorally, so they have no better claim than Jesus to divinity.
3.43Origen turns Celsus's defense of Zeus's tomb in Crete against him, citing Callimachus, who called the Cretans liars yet admitted Zeus was born, while Celsus accepts Jesus' burial but denies his resurrection.
3.44Celsus claims Christians invite only the ignorant; Origen answers that the ignorance of a few Christians must not be blamed on the teaching itself, which invites people to wisdom.
3.45Origen shows from the Old Testament, from David, Solomon, Hosea, Daniel, and Ezekiel, that God's word wants believers to be wise.
3.46The New Testament too values wisdom: Jesus explained the parables privately to his disciples, promised to send wise men, and Paul ranked the word of wisdom first among the gifts, while Stephen praised Moses' learning.
3.47Paul's criticism of the “wisdom of the world” targets materialist doctrines, not wisdom itself; he even admits that Greek sages knew God from the created world.
3.48“Not many wise” does not mean none; Paul requires a bishop to be able to teach and refute opponents, so the church welcomes the educated as well as the ignorant.
3.49Christ is Savior of all, the wise as well as the simple; true education is a road to virtue and helps, rather than hinders, the knowledge of God.
3.50Celsus likens Christian teachers to marketplace showmen who avoid the wise; Origen replies that Christians exhort people to piety and virtue, as Cynic philosophers also preached publicly without blame.
3.51Unlike philosophers who preach to anyone, Christians examine and instruct inquirers before admitting them, expel the immoral, readmit the penitent only after a long probation, and bar the lapsed from church office.
3.52Origen denies Celsus's comparison: Christians seek intelligent hearers and share their deeper teaching with them, while giving only “milk” to the simpler.
3.53Paul distinguished milk for beginners from solid food for the mature, which shows that Christians do not parade their highest teachings before the ignorant.
3.54Christians seek to heal the souls even of the foolish, as Wisdom invites them in Proverbs, just as philosophers like Pythagoras and Zeno taught slaves.
3.55Celsus caricatures Christian teachers as uneducated wool-workers, cobblers, and fullers who secretly lure children and women away from fathers and teachers.
3.56Christian teachers draw women away from licentiousness, the theater, and superstition, and train boys in chastity, rather than leading them into evil.
3.57Christians do not draw people away from good teachers; they openly promise blessedness to those who live by God's word as in his sight.
3.58Christians speak freely before good fathers and teachers; they turn youths away only from immoral teachers, and they build on a good philosophical education to lead students to the deeper wisdom of the prophets and apostles.
3.59Celsus mocks Christians for inviting sinners, unlike the pagan mysteries; Origen answers that the sick are first called to healing, and only those purified are then initiated into the deeper mysteries.
3.60Origen adapts the formulas of the mysteries: those with clean hands, wise speech, and a long-purified soul are admitted to Christianity's deeper mysteries, while the wicked are first called to healing.
3.61Christians call the wicked not to the mysteries but to healing, as a physician calls the sick; unlike a robber, they call sinners in order to bind up their wounds.
3.62Christ came as physician to sinners and as teacher to the purified; no one except Jesus has been sinless from the beginning, and God receives the sinner who repents and lives well.
3.63God is not swayed by flattery; the penitent's humble confession turns sinners back, and since all sin, Christ calls all who labor to find rest in him.
3.64A repentant sinner is preferred only to a self-satisfied man who thinks himself righteous, as in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector.
3.65Origen denies that Christians attract only the worst people: most converts come from decent lives, while hardened sinners, held by conscience and habit, find conversion harder.
3.66Both philosophy and Scripture record people who were completely changed, like Heracles, Odysseus, Socrates, and Musonius, so Celsus is wrong that habitual sinners cannot change.
3.67Philosophy itself refutes Celsus: Phaedo, once forced into a brothel, became Plato's narrator of Socrates' death, and the drunken Polemo became head of Xenocrates' school.
3.68The apostles' simple preaching, powered by the Spirit, changed whole multitudes from vice to virtue and even to contempt of death, far beyond what philosophy achieved.
3.69All rational souls share one nature and none was created evil; habits of vice can be changed through God's word, as practice enables even rope-walkers' feats, and no one becomes sinless without the Word.
3.70God can do all things consistent with being God, good, and wise; he cannot do injustice, just as sweetness cannot make bitter or light cannot darken.
3.71God does not pardon the wicked out of mere pity; he accepts those who condemn their sins and truly change, as virtue or real progress drives out their former wickedness.
3.72True wisdom, defined as knowledge of divine and human things or as the radiance of God's glory, never leads people away from Christ; only sophistry falsely called wisdom does.
3.73Like lawgivers who legislated for ordinary people too, God through Jesus leads even the unintelligent to better lives, while the “wise” who fell into idolatry are put to shame.
3.74Every philosopher, like Christians, seeks to win “fools” in the sense of the morally bad, as a doctor seeks the sick; but Christians especially seek sharp minds able to grasp the hidden meanings of Scripture.
3.75The only “physicians” Christians turn people from are philosophers with harmful doctrines, such as Epicureans, Peripatetics, Stoics, and believers in transmigration; Christians never despise knowledge and point pupils to God and Jesus, not to themselves.
3.76Christian teachers are not drunkards accusing the sober; rather, those who pray to lifeless images and worship statues or animals are drunk, and even mad.
3.77Those truly blind are not Christians but those who fail to rise from the beauty of creation to worship its Creator alone, and who turn to temples, statues, and festivals.
3.78Christianity attracts mainly simple people, not the wicked; moved by fear of punishment, they practice self-control, generosity, and even endure torture and death, which no wicked will could produce.
3.79Like a wise lawgiver, God gave the many the best teaching they could receive, including real, corrective punishments whose purpose is partly concealed from them.
3.80If Christian hope of blessed life is empty, so are the hopes of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle about the soul; only an Epicurean, who expects the soul to perish, could say so, and his own hope rests on pleasure of the flesh.
3.81The blessed life belongs to those who worship God through Jesus, and nothing is better than to entrust oneself to God through his living Word; so ends the third book.
4.1Origen opens Book 4 with a prayer, asking for words like Jeremiah's to uproot Celsus's errors and to build up the truth, and turns to Celsus's attack on the prophecies of Christ.
4.2Celsus mocks both Christians and Jews for expecting a divine judge to come to earth, but he never engages the actual prophecies about Christ; and Jews do not say the coming Messiah is God.
4.3Christ came to call back the lost sheep of Israel and give the kingdom to others; God does not correct people by force, since virtue must be freely chosen, and he always corrects the willing through his Word.
4.4Celsus's objection applies equally to his own belief in providence; God always sends correctors like Moses and the prophets, and above all Jesus, Savior of all people everywhere.
4.5God fills heaven and earth, so his coming in Jesus does not mean leaving his place; he “departs” only from the wicked soul and fills the virtuous one, and the only change he brings is moral transformation.
4.6God does not seek recognition out of vanity like the newly rich; he makes himself known because knowing him frees people from misery and leaves unbelievers without excuse.
4.7God did not neglect humanity before Christ: in every generation his wisdom entered holy souls and made them friends of God and prophets.
4.8Why Christ came at a particular time is a deep mystery, tied to God's allotment of the nations to angels and of Israel to himself, and to his later gift of all nations to the Son.
4.9Christ came after the prophets to correct the whole world by teaching rather than punishment; the learned must prove the doctrine of the end and judgment, while simpler believers may trust the Savior's word.
4.10Christians do not frighten people with bogeymen like the Bacchic mysteries; they seek to correct humanity by warning of real punishments and promising the kingdom of God to the good.
4.11Celsus claims Jews and Christians borrowed the idea of world floods and conflagrations from the Greeks; Origen answers that Moses is far older than the Greek sources, as Josephus showed.
4.12The flood and the coming conflagration are caused by overflowing wickedness, not by star cycles; and when Scripture says God “comes down,” it speaks figuratively of his condescension to human affairs.
4.13God is a “consuming fire” that burns up wickedness, the “wood, hay, and straw” built by the wicked, and refines the soul like gold and silver.
4.14Celsus argues that God cannot descend without changing for the worse; Origen replies that God remains unchangeable in his being while descending by providence, unlike the Epicurean and Stoic gods, which are bodily and changeable.
4.15Christ emptied himself in the form of God without sinning or losing his blessedness, as a physician touches disease out of kindness; the Word remains unchanged and becomes “flesh” for those who cannot yet see his divine glory.
4.16The Word appears differently to each person according to their spiritual progress, as at the Transfiguration, where only those who went up the mountain saw his glory.
4.17The Christian account of Christ's descent is far nobler than Greek myths like that of Dionysus torn by the Titans, which the Greeks allegorize; Christ came down in love to seek the lost sheep.
4.18The Word does not deceive but adapts himself to each person as milk, vegetables, or solid food; and the soul of Jesus freely entered human misfortunes out of love, as Philippians 2 describes.
4.19Christians hold that Christ's incarnation was real, not an illusion; yet even on Celsus's terms, a healing deception would not be absurd, since Christ came for sinners and enemies to make them God's friends.
4.20There is nothing absurd in God sending one to purify a world overflowing with wickedness; the Greeks too, like Plato, speak of periodic purification by flood.
4.21Moses' account of the tower of Babel and of Sodom is far older than the Greek myths of the Aloadae and Phaethon that Celsus says he copied; the prophets, proved true about the past, are to be trusted about the purifying fire to come.
4.22Origen sees the destruction of Jerusalem about forty years after the crucifixion, and the Jews' long exile from their temple worship, as evidence of Jesus' divine significance and of God's call passing to the Christians.
4.23Celsus mocks Jews and Christians as bats, ants, frogs, and worms arguing in the mud, each claiming that God cares for them alone and made the world for their sake.
4.24Human greatness is not measured by bodily size, or elephants would surpass humans; rational beings excel by reason, and angels by perfected reason and virtue.
4.25If wickedness makes one a worm, then wicked pagans, even famous orators, are as much worms as wicked Christians; but no rational being, bearing the seeds of virtue from God's Word, should be likened to such animals.
4.26If anyone deserves to be called worms, it is idolaters and the sexually licentious, not Christians who rise from creation to the Creator, pray to him, endure death, and keep their bodies chaste as temples of God.
4.27True Christians who share in the church's common prayers are free of the vices common elsewhere; only those who are pure in heart, gentle, peacemakers, and willing to suffer may say God has revealed all things to them.
4.28Christians do not claim God cares for them alone: Scripture teaches that God loves all he made, shows mercy to all flesh, sends sun and rain on all, and that Christ died for the sins of the whole world.
4.29Christians know that angels and heavenly powers surpass humans, though the righteous hope to become like angels and like God; if anyone says “after God come we,” it can only mean rational and virtuous beings.
4.30Humanity was made in God's image but not yet in his likeness, so Christians do not claim to be wholly like God; and Origen refuses to mock the philosophers as Celsus mocks Christians, while noting that they knew God yet fell into idolatry.
4.31Against Celsus's claim that the Jews were insignificant runaways, Origen praises ancient Israel as a shadow of heavenly life: worshiping one God, banning images, prostitutes, and effeminacy, with just judges and Sabbaths devoted to hearing God's law.
4.32Providence transferred the dignity of Israel's law to believers from all nations through Jesus, whose word prevailed despite demon-inspired persecution by rulers and peoples; Israel was protected while faithful and forsaken after killing Jesus.
4.33Celsus obscurely mocks the Jews' descent from “sorcerers”; Origen notes that the patriarchs' names, in the formula “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” are used even by pagan magicians against demons, showing their holiness.
4.34The power of the patriarchs' names in exorcism can only be explained from Genesis, and their Hebrew names prove that the Jewish nation truly descends from them.
4.35Celsus should have argued properly against the Jewish genealogy instead of hinting; no one can prove the patriarchs contemptible or claim their Hebrew names for another people.
4.36Celsus ridicules Genesis's creation of man and woman as tasteless compared with Hesiod, but Moses is far older than Hesiod, and even Plato banished such poets from his ideal state.
4.37Genesis never speaks of God's “hands” in creating man; such expressions, like God's wings, are figurative, and God's “breathing” into Adam means sharing his incorruptible Spirit.
4.38Celsus mocks the creation of Eve from Adam's rib but admires Hesiod's myth of Pandora as allegory; Origen quotes Hesiod at length to show which story is more laughable read literally, and asks why only the Jews may not speak in allegory.
4.39Origen sets the story of paradise and the serpent beside Plato's myth of Eros born of Poros and Penia in the garden of Zeus, arguing that both must be read for their hidden meaning, and suggests Plato may have learned from Jewish teaching in Egypt.
4.40The story of Adam concerns human nature as a whole: “Adam” means “man,” and in him all die; the garments of skin carry a mystical meaning deeper than Plato's image of the soul losing its wings.
4.41Celsus calls Noah's ark monstrous but does not even know its true objection; Origen describes the ark as a marvel, built over a hundred years, tapering to a single cubit, vast in area, and preserving the seeds of all animals.
4.42Celsus garbles the raven of Genesis into a crow and claims the flood story was copied from Deucalion's, yet the Jewish Scriptures were meant to come to light, as Jesus himself foretold.
4.43Celsus sneers at Genesis's family stories and at Jacob's flocks, but these events happened as types written for Christians; Jacob's marked flocks signify believers from the nations.
4.44The patriarchs' wells, marriages, and unions with maidservants carry spiritual meaning, as Paul himself allegorized Sarah and Hagar in Galatians, though the wells were also real.
4.45Celsus calls Lot and his daughters worse than Thyestes; Origen, noting that Scripture neither praises nor blames them, observes that the Stoics defend such an act in a hypothetical end of the world, which Lot's daughters believed had come.
4.46Celsus picks out the discreditable family stories of Genesis but ignores Joseph's chastity, which surpasses Bellerophon's, as he chose prison rather than sin and silently left his cause to God.
4.47Celsus lists the story of Joseph, his dreams, his kindness to his brothers, and the settlement in Goshen as if they were shameful, but gives no argument against any of it.
4.48If any stories deserve shame, it is the Greek myths of gods castrating and devouring one another, which even Chrysippus allegorized obscenely; Christians therefore refuse to call God “Zeus” or give the sun and moon divine names.
4.49The biblical writers themselves read their histories figuratively: Paul allegorizes the ox, marriage, the Red Sea, the manna, and the rock, and the psalmist calls Israel's history parables and riddles.
4.50The psalmist's prayer to see the wonders of God's law and the strange images of the prophets, like Ezekiel's dragon of Egypt, show that Scripture has hidden meanings; the Greek myths, by contrast, are silly and impious.
4.51Celsus evidently never read the Jewish allegorists Philo and Aristobulus, whose work would impress Greek philosophers; even the Pythagorean Numenius quoted and allegorized Moses, the prophets, and a story about Jesus.
4.52Celsus singles out the simple Dialogue of Jason and Papiscus as contemptible, and offers his own view that God made only immortal things and that human bodies do not differ from those of bats or frogs; Origen invites readers to judge the dialogue themselves.
4.53Celsus contradicts himself in calling the dialogue worthy of both pity and hatred; Scripture's writers were sincere witnesses, and no teaching improves people as effectively as faith that God sees every word, deed, and thought.
4.54Celsus borrows from Plato's Timaeus the claim that God made only souls and lesser gods made bodies, but he gives no argument, whereas the Stoics and reason point to one God who made all things for a purpose.
4.55Had Celsus read Genesis carefully, he would have noticed that “God made” is used for some creatures and not others, and asked to whom God's creative commands were addressed, rather than dismissing the account as meaningless.
4.56If all bodies are the same because they share one matter, then human bodies are no different from the sun and stars, which the Greeks call gods; unless Celsus adopts Aristotle's fifth element, which Platonists and Stoics reject and which Scripture's perishing heavens contradict.
4.57Paul teaches that bodies differ in glory and that the resurrection body is raised in incorruption and power; God can change the qualities of matter, and even the popular belief that animals arise from corpses does not prove that bodies are not God's work.
4.58Celsus does not say whether every soul or only the rational soul is God's work; either way, since each body corresponds to its soul, a human body must differ from that of a bat or frog.
4.59Just as buildings differ according to their use, so bodies differ according to the souls that dwell in them; no wise person would bury Socrates and his accuser Anytus with equal honor.
4.60Celsus's claim that all bodies share one changing nature applies equally to the heavenly bodies; whether matter itself endures depends on whether it is unbegotten or created, a question of natural philosophy Origen leaves aside.
4.61If nothing born of matter is immortal, then the world is either not born of matter or not immortal; either way Celsus's position leads to contradictions he cannot resolve.
4.62Celsus claims the amount of evil in the world never changes, paraphrasing Plato's Theaetetus, but Plato's Timaeus implies that evils diminish after the earth is purified by flood.
4.63Origen rejects Celsus's claim that the amount of evil is fixed, citing Chrysippus's history of how prostitution spread step by step into the cities.
4.64Though the nature of the universe is one, its states vary, as a man's moral state varies, so evils increase and decrease, and providence cleanses the world by flood and fire.
4.65Against Celsus's claim that philosophers can explain evil, Origen says its origin can be known only by God's revelation, including the fall of the devil and his angels.
4.66Evil does not come from God, but neither from matter: the only true evil is the vice each person's own mind produces, and the deeds that flow from it.
4.67If history repeats itself exactly in cycles, as Celsus claims, free will and moral praise and blame disappear, and Celsus himself must write his book endlessly again.
4.68Origen notes that the Stoics extend the doctrine of endlessly repeating world-cycles even to the gods, and mocks their attempt to say each cycle has only 'indistinguishable' copies.
4.69God does not repair the world like a clumsy craftsman, but like a farmer through the seasons he heals vice in each age as it requires.
4.70God may use the wicked for the good of the whole, as a city uses condemned criminals for public works, but they remain blameworthy, as Paul's vessels of honor and dishonor show.
4.71As we speak simply to small children, God's Word in Scripture speaks of God in human terms for the weak, while the spiritual find a deeper sense in the same words.
4.72God's 'wrath' is not a passion but a figure for his stern discipline of sinners, as comparison of Scripture shows, just as his 'sleep' is not literal.
4.73Celsus mocks the idea of an angry God sending his Son to suffer; Origen answers that the Jews' ruin came from the wrath they stored up for themselves, and that the Son suffered willingly for our salvation.
4.74Against Celsus's claim that the world was made no more for humans than for animals, Origen sides with the Stoics: providence cares chiefly for rational beings, and animals benefit incidentally, like dogs in a market.
4.75Celsus speaks like an Epicurean who denies providence; Christians thank the Creator for preparing the earth for humans and their animals, as the Psalm and Sirach say.
4.76God made humans needier than animals on purpose, so that want would drive them to invent the arts of farming, building, weaving, and navigation.
4.77Celsus attacks Euripides' line that sun and night serve mortals; Origen defends it: day and night exist for rational beings, and ants and flies only share in them.
4.78Celsus says animals hunt us as much as we hunt them; Origen replies that human understanding, stronger than any weapon, has made all animals serve us, even the wild ones by exercising our courage.
4.79Celsus says early humans were prey to beasts before cities and arts existed; Origen notes this contradicts Celsus's own eternal world and argues that providence protected the first humans, who even associated with the divine.
4.80Scripture shows the first humans guided by God's voice and angels until they could manage on their own; God did not subject humans to beasts but gave them the understanding to master them.
4.81Celsus says bees and ants have cities and governments like humans; Origen replies that they act by instinct, not reason, and that God gave them this likeness of order to teach and shame rational beings.
4.82The bees' orderly 'wars' may teach humans to wage only just wars, but bees exist for humanity's sake, and it is man who works together with God's providence.
4.83Celsus's praise of ants that share burdens would undermine human compassion and imply that human and animal souls are alike, but Christians hold that the human soul is made in God's image.
4.84Celsus's praise of ants' burials only magnifies the Word who ordered nature, and his claim that ants converse with reason and speech is absurd.
4.85One looking down from heaven would see not bodies but minds, and would see how far rational humans, made in God's image, surpass ants and even elephants.
4.86Celsus says snakes and eagles are wiser than humans because they know natural remedies, but they act by instinct, while humans discovered and use the same remedies by reason.
4.87Animals' fixed instincts show nature, not reason, at work; even Solomon's praise of the wise ants in Proverbs is a riddle with a hidden sense, as Jesus spoke in 'proverbs.'
4.88Celsus claims birds and elephants know God better than humans because they give omens and keep oaths; Origen notes that even the philosophers dispute whether augury exists at all.
4.89Celsus should have proved bird-divination before claiming birds know God better than people; on his view birds outrank Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato, and he should take them as his teachers.
4.90Even granting that augury exists, birds that could foresee the future would avoid snares and arrows, so they cannot be wiser or more divine than humans.
4.91Homer's own omen stories, of a snake devouring sparrows and an eagle wounded by a snake, show that the animals themselves foresee nothing; on the poet's view a god sends the sign.
4.92Fallen demons, able to foresee some things, enter savage and cunning animals and steer their movements to draw people away from the true God through divination.
4.93Moses wisely declared unclean the very animals pagans use for divination, since particular demons are linked with particular animals; it is unclean spirits, not God, that move them.
4.94If birds are divine because they give omens, so must be the maidservant in Homer whose words became an omen, and even anyone who sneezes, since sneezes too were taken as omens.
4.95True foreknowledge comes through God inspiring pure human prophets, not through animals; Moses forbade augury, and Christians guard their hearts so that only God's Spirit shapes their imagination.
4.96Foreknowledge is not in itself divine, since wicked doctors and sailors have it too; only the truly wise and pious, like Moses and the prophets, draw near to God.
4.97Celsus's claim that animals are dearer to God and hold holier conversations than humans would rank them above Socrates and Plato; any real bird-omens are demonic deceptions.
4.98Elephants keep no oaths, and storks feeding their parents and the phoenix burying its father act by nature, not piety; providence made them to teach humans and to point to the Creator.
4.99Against Celsus, Origen holds that the world was made chiefly for rational beings, whom God cares for, warns, and corrects so that he may turn the whole creation back to himself; Book 4 ends with a prayer.
5.1Opening Book 5, Origen tells his patron Ambrose he will answer every argument of Celsus, and prays that God, not human wisdom, will make his words effective.
5.2Celsus's claim that no god or son of God ever comes down would also rule out Apollo and Asclepius, whom pagans believe visit earth, or reduce them to demons.
5.3Celsus's denial that any god comes down is Epicurean; anyone who does believe in providence should ask whether Jesus or the oracle-giving gods better fits the description of a God who came down.
5.4Christians believe in angels who carry prayers up and blessings down, and who are sometimes called 'gods' in Scripture, but prayer and worship go to God alone through Christ the High Priest.
5.5Angels need not be invoked; prayer goes to God through the Son, and the angels favor those who imitate them; 'demons,' unlike 'angels,' always means evil powers.
5.6Celsus charges the Jews with worshipping heaven and angels but not the sun and stars; Origen replies that the Law forbids worshipping any created thing, heavenly bodies and angels alike.
5.7Neither Jews nor Christians call heaven God, and Celsus's principle that the parts of a divine whole must be divine would make even flies and worms gods, which no Greek would admit.
5.8Worship of heaven and angels is not Judaism but a violation of it, as Jeremiah, Stephen in Acts, and Paul in Colossians show.
5.9Magical invocation of angels is also forbidden by the Law, so Celsus cannot consistently say the Jews keep the Law against star-worship yet worship heaven and angels.
5.10God allotted the heavenly bodies to the nations but chose Israel for himself; his people, promised to shine like stars in the resurrection and possessing the true light of Christ, have no reason to worship sun, moon, or stars.
5.11Those who know God and his Son as the true light will not worship sun and stars, which themselves pray to God through the Son; as Jesus sent praise on to the Father, so the sun would say, 'Worship God alone.'
5.12God is present everywhere by providence, and Christ is always with his disciples, so it is absurd to pray to the stars; even if they announce the weather, their Lord, not his heralds, deserves worship.
5.13Christians do not regard the heavenly bodies as nothing: Scripture calls them to praise God and says they too await creation's liberation, but they are not to be worshipped.
5.14Celsus ridicules the Christian hope of bodily resurrection as 'the hope of worms,' calling it impossible and unworthy of God, who cannot act against reason.
5.15The final fire is not God cooking the world but a purifying and healing fire that burns away only the 'wood, hay, and straw' of sin, as Paul, Malachi, Ezekiel, and Isaiah indicate.
5.16Simple believers take the fire of judgment literally, which suits them as fear suits children; in truth only the fully purified escape the fire, and the rest pass through it toward an end fitting creatures made in God's image.
5.17Celsus misunderstood the Christian teaching on the last day; Paul's words in 1 Corinthians and 1 Thessalonians about the dead raised and the living changed carry a hidden meaning.
5.18Christians do not teach that the dead rise in the same unchanged flesh; Paul compares the resurrection to a seed that dies and is given a new body by God.
5.19Paul teaches that the resurrection body is spiritual, incorruptible, and glorious, not the rotted flesh, and speaks of it as a 'mystery'; Christians hope that the mortal will be clothed with immortality and death's sting destroyed.
5.20The Stoic doctrine of endlessly repeated world-cycles, in which Socrates is born, tried, and condemned again and again, is far more absurd than the Christian resurrection, yet Celsus does not mock it.
5.21Pythagoreans and Platonists teach that when the stars return to the same positions history, including Socrates' trial, repeats itself; yet Celsus mocks only the Christians, who hold that God guides free creatures toward the better.
5.22Origen distances himself from Christians who deny the resurrection: following Paul's seed image, he holds that God raises a transformed, incorruptible body, and that the 'words' of things, rooted in the divine Word, never pass away.
5.23Christians do not claim the decayed body returns as it was, as the Stoics do; like wheat from a grain, a new incorruptible body rises from a principle in the old; and God's power, though limitless, never acts shamefully or against reason.
5.24Origen agrees that God does nothing shameful and gives the soul eternal life; human corpses deserve honorable burial because of the soul that lived in them, and what God makes eternal is the new body raised from the seed.
5.25Celsus says the Jews, like every nation, rightly keep their ancestral laws, since each land has its own divine overseers who guided its lawgivers.
5.26Origen asks Celsus who allotted the nations to their overseers: if Zeus, did he approve Jewish law or not? And if no one did, providence is denied.
5.27If every nation's customs are right as Celsus says, then parricide, incest, human sacrifice, and animal worship would all be holy, and holiness would be mere convention, which is absurd.
5.28If holiness depends only on local custom, all virtues become relative, which is absurd; Origen now turns to a deeper, mystical account of how the nations were allotted to angelic overseers.
5.29The allotting of lands to gods, half-remembered in Greek and Egyptian lore, is taught truly by Moses: God divided the nations among his angels at Babel but kept Israel as his own portion; the deeper meaning is a mystery not to be exposed.
5.30Origen reads Babel as a hidden account of souls that leave the 'east' of divine light, build pridefully with material things, and are handed over, according to their guilt, to angels who assign them languages and lands.
5.31Continuing the allegory, Israel is the people that stayed in the 'east' under the Lord's own care; their growing sins led to exile among other nations, after which their Lord in turn drew people from the nations to himself.
5.32Christ, the Lord who kept Israel, is mightier than the angels of the nations and frees people from their bondage; so it is holy, not unholy, for Christians to leave ancestral customs for his better law.
5.33Celsus asks where Christians come from and who founded their laws; Origen answers with Isaiah's prophecy of the nations streaming to the Lord's mountain: Christians are a people of peace founded by Jesus, who came from the Jews.
5.34Celsus cites Herodotus to show that every nation clings to its own customs, however strange, and endorses Pindar's line that 'custom is king of all.'
5.35If philosophers may rightly abandon superstitious ancestral taboos, so may Christians; to keep them anyway would make a philosopher as ridiculous as an Egyptian who fears to eat an onion.
5.36Ammon's ban on eating cows is arbitrary, unlike the Jewish laws about animals, which carry a deeper meaning; and Celsus's principle would excuse Scythian cannibalism and Indians who eat their fathers.
5.37When a city's law contradicts God's natural law, God's law must be obeyed even at the cost of death; so Christians reject the local gods, and Christ, unlike the newly invented Sarapis, is older than all creation.
5.38Celsus's rule fails when people of different customs meet: must an Ethiopian among Arabians die or betray his gods? The Egyptian gods are nature allegories, and Sarapis a recent magical invention.
5.39Celsus approves of Egyptians who revere man-eating crocodiles but blames Christians who honor Virtue itself, the Son of God, who is God's Wisdom and Righteousness, uniquely united with the soul of Jesus.
5.40Pindar's 'law is king of all' is true only of the natural law of God, not of the many laws of cities; Christians live by God's law and reject laws that are no laws.
5.41Celsus says the Jews have no special claim: others worship the heavens as God under different names, and others also practise circumcision and food taboos; their ruined state shows God has no special favor for them.
5.42Against Celsus, Origen praises the ancient Jewish commonwealth: no games or prostitution, children taught to seek God beyond the material world and to believe in the soul's immortality and judgment, and prophecy instead of divination.
5.43The Jewish law, such as its release of slaves after six years, is far better than other nations' laws; even the least Jew worships the one God while philosophers bow to idols, and had Israel not killed the prophets and plotted against Jesus it would model the heavenly city Plato sought.
5.44Jewish worship, with its one temple, altar, and high priest, has nothing in common with Persian mountain-top sacrifices, and neither Jews nor Christians identify heaven with God.
5.45Against Celsus's view that divine names are interchangeable, Origen argues that names have power by nature, not convention: 'the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob' works against demons, but translated or replaced names do not.
5.46Moses forbids naming other gods; Christians would die rather than call Zeus or Amoun God, since these are names of demons, though one may call God by the common word for 'God' in any language.
5.47Jewish circumcision differs from that of Egyptians and Colchians because its purpose and law differ, just as 'justice' and 'courage' mean different things to Epicureans, Stoics, and Platonists.
5.48Jewish circumcision on the eighth day differs even from Ishmaelite practice; Origen suggests, from Zipporah's story, that it guarded against a hostile angel whose power Christ destroyed by his own circumcision, so Christians need not be circumcised.
5.49The Jewish food laws were symbols until Christ declared all foods clean; Christians, unlike Pythagoreans who fear eating reincarnated kin, abstain from meat only as a discipline to master the body.
5.50The Jews were once favored and protected by God, as Alexander's homage to the high priest shows; that favor has now passed to Christians, whom Rome cannot destroy because God defends them.
5.51Christians do not boast and were not bewitched; they follow the God who spoke through Moses and honor Jesus, attested by prophecy and by his mighty works, as the Son of God.
5.52Celsus asks whether Jesus, granted to be an angel, was the first or one of many, citing the fallen angels of Enoch, the angels at the tomb, and those who appeared to Joseph.
5.53Origen will answer briefly: Christ is not merely an angel but, as Isaiah says, the 'angel of great counsel' who announced God's plan for humanity, and no Christian claims he was the only messenger ever sent.
5.54Only heretics like Apelles, Marcion's pupil, say Jesus alone came from God; Celsus garbled his story of the fallen angels from the Book of Enoch, which the churches do not accept as divine Scripture.
5.55Origen mentions an earlier interpreter who read the 'sons of God' and 'daughters of men' of Genesis 6 as souls desiring bodies, and mocks Celsus's claim that hot springs are fallen angels' tears, since tears are salty.
5.56The Gospels' one angel and two angels at Jesus' tomb do not contradict each other, since they describe different moments; their deeper meaning belongs to commentary on the Gospels.
5.57Greek philosophers like Chrysippus, Plutarch, and Numenius report supernatural appearances and are believed; Christians who would rather die than lie about God deserve at least equal credence when they report angels.
5.58It is more fitting that a servant angel, not the risen Lord himself, rolled away the stone; the other angels Celsus mentions do nothing for his case, since Christ alone came to turn all humanity from sin and gave God's kingdom to the church.
5.59Celsus notes that the 'great church' shares the Jews' God and Genesis; Origen agrees, corrects Celsus's reading of God's 'rest' on the seventh day, and notes his silence about the plagues of Egypt.
5.60Christians and Jews agree the Scriptures are inspired but differ in interpretation: for Christians the literal law is veiled until one turns to the Lord, who is the Spirit, and sees its hidden glory.
5.61Divisions among Christian sects no more discredit Christianity than rival schools discredit philosophy or medicine; Origen distinguishes the church from Valentinians, Gnostics, and the two kinds of Ebionites.
5.62Celsus lists many sects, including Simonians, who are not Christians at all since they exalt Simon rather than Jesus, and others Origen has never even encountered.
5.63Celsus says Christian sects curse and hate one another; true followers of Jesus bless those who revile them, try to win back those in error, and only avoid a persistent heretic, as Paul commands.
5.64Celsus garbled Christian polemical terms, such as 'seared consciences' from 1 Timothy, and claims all sects quote 'the world is crucified to me'; as if Paul had written nothing else.
5.65Not all sects quote Paul, since the Ebionites and Encratites reject him; Celsus next claims that Christianity's best ideas were said better by the philosophers, which Origen will answer in Book 6.
6.1Origen explains that his sixth book will not fight Plato's philosophy as such, and that a teacher who wants to help everyone, not only the educated, must speak plainly.
6.2Plain Scripture has helped far more people than Plato's polished prose, because God gives power to those who preach, as Paul and the Psalms say.
6.3Plato rightly said that the highest good cannot be put into words but dawns on the soul like a spark, yet, as Paul says in Romans, those who know the truth about God without worshipping him rightly are without excuse.
6.4The philosophers who wrote nobly about the highest good still worshipped idols, so God chose the simple, while Moses and the prophets taught that God is seen by the pure in heart.
6.5The Bible spoke of God's light kindled in the soul long before Plato, and unlike Plato's words its plain speech has actually made readers devout.
6.6Like Plato, who said the deepest truths cannot be written for the many, the prophets, Paul, and Jesus himself knew things they deliberately did not write down.
6.7Moses and the prophets could not have borrowed from Plato, who lived later, and Scripture itself commends searching inquiry and argument.
6.8Celsus praises Plato for not telling marvels or demanding faith in a Son of God, but Origen points to the marvellous legends told of Plato, Pythagoras, and Socrates, and to Plato's own mention of a Father of the world's ruler.
6.9Origen compares Plato's five steps to knowledge (name, definition, image, knowledge, the thing itself) with John the Baptist, Christ the Word, Christ formed in the soul, and Christ as wisdom.
6.10Celsus says Plato gives reasons and makes no boastful claims, but Origen answers that Plato's Zeus boasts in the Timaeus, that Scripture condemns thoughtless belief, and that Christians suit their teaching to each hearer, often with reasoned argument.
6.11Celsus asks how a seeker could choose among rival Christian saviours, but Origen replies that only Jesus is preached worldwide as Son of God, while pretenders like Simon Magus, Dositheus, Theudas, and Judas the Galilean came to nothing.
6.12Celsus claims Paul's contrast between worldly and divine wisdom was borrowed from Heraclitus and Plato; Origen notes that Plato himself distinguished true wisdom from merely human wisdom.
6.13Origen distinguishes human wisdom, a training for the soul, from divine wisdom, a gift of God given only to the mature, and ranks wisdom, knowledge, and faith as gifts of the Spirit.
6.14Origen replies that the truly uneducated are those who pray to idols, and that the Church, like Moses and Daniel of old, includes learned people who have moved on from human to divine wisdom.
6.15Celsus says Christian humility is a garbled borrowing from Plato's Laws, but Origen shows it is older, from the Psalms, and was taught above all by Christ, who humbled himself to death on a cross.
6.16Celsus claims Jesus garbled Plato's saying about the rich, but Origen finds it absurd that the unlettered Jesus read Plato, and hints at the deeper meaning of the camel and the needle.
6.17Against Plato's lofty words Origen sets the Scriptures' teaching that God hides in darkness and depth, known fully only by the Son and by those to whom the Son reveals him.
6.18Origen says the prophets hold loftier thoughts about God than the passage from Plato Celsus quotes, but declines to expound the mysteries of the seraphim and cherubim here.
6.19Christians did not borrow the idea of a realm above the heavens from Plato; David, Paul, and the prophets spoke of it first, and Plato may even have learned it from the Hebrews.
6.20Paul, longing for unseen eternal things, found all affliction light, and Christians hope through Jesus, the high priest who passed through the heavens, to contemplate God face to face.
6.21Scripture speaks of “heavens” but never of seven; for the soul's passage between earth and heaven Origen points to Jacob's ladder rather than to the planetary path of Plato and Celsus.
6.22Celsus describes the Mithraic seven-gated ladder of the planets, but Origen asks why he drags this, rather than any other mystery cult, into an attack on Christians and Jews.
6.23For a deeper teaching on the soul's ascent Origen points to Ezekiel's temple gates, the heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation, and Israel's camps in Numbers, and insists Scripture never mentions seven heavens.
6.24Celsus compares Mithraism with a Christian “diagram,” which Origen identifies as belonging to the obscure Ophite sect, a teaching he has never found anyone actually holding.
6.25Origen describes the Ophite diagram, with its world-soul called Leviathan, and explains the biblical meaning of Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom, as pointing to purifying punishment.
6.26Origen says the deeper teaching on punishment is not for everyone, since most people need the simple fear of eternal punishment, and he refuses to defend the Ophite diagram, which no Christian holds.
6.27Celsus invents a rite of the Christian “seal” and says Christians call the Creator accursed; Origen rejects this as slander like the old tales of child-eating and orgies spread about Christians.
6.28Celsus confuses Christians with the Ophites, who side with the serpent against the Creator, curse Jesus, and cannot be called Christians at all.
6.29Celsus accuses Christians of both honouring and cursing the Creator; Origen answers that Christians always worship the one God of the Jews, and that the resurrection body is not the same flesh and blood that was sown.
6.30Origen compares Celsus's list of seven animal-faced ruling demons with the Ophite diagram he himself had seen, to show that these are not Christian teachings.
6.31Origen quotes the passwords that the Ophites taught their members to say to each of the seven archons as the soul ascends through their gates.
6.32Origen explains that he describes these Ophite teachings only to expose them, and that their archons mix names from magic with Hebrew names that all belong to the one God.
6.33Origen describes more of the Ophite diagram, including a picture of the flaming sword guarding paradise, and says he has given their formulas to show how alien they are to Christianity.
6.34Celsus mocks a jumble of sayings he attributes to Christians, including resurrection “from the tree” because Jesus was crucified and a carpenter; Origen says he is stringing together half-heard scraps from various sects.
6.35Origen tries to trace Celsus's jumbled phrases to particular sects, such as the Valentinians' fallen Wisdom, and suspects Celsus invented some of them.
6.36Origen gives biblical meanings for some of Celsus's phrases, such as death being destroyed and the gates of righteousness, and points out that the tree of life comes from Genesis, not from Jesus' trade.
6.37Celsus's jibe about a “cliff of life” fits only the inventors of the Ophite myths, not the Church, whose teachings are understood by those who give their lives to studying Scripture.
6.38Origen describes further inscriptions in the Ophite diagram, such as circles labelled Father and Son, Love, Life, and Wisdom, to show that he knows it better than Celsus and rejects it.
6.39Origen disputes Celsus's claim, taken from Herodotus, that different nations merely give different names to the same gods, and declines to answer for magic charms that have nothing to do with Christians.
6.40Celsus's claim to have seen Christian presbyters with magic books is a slander like the old tales of Christian cannibalism, easily disproved by anyone who has lived among Christians.
6.41Celsus says magic cannot touch philosophers, but Origen notes that philosophers fell under Apollonius's spell, whereas Christians who pray faithfully are protected by God's angels from magic and demons.
6.42Celsus mocks the Christian belief in Satan as a garbled version of Greek myths of divine war in Heraclitus, Pherecydes, Homer, and the Titans, which he reads as allegories.
6.43Origen replies that the Bible, older than all the Greek writers, already taught about the fallen evil one: the serpent of Genesis, the destroyer of Exodus, Azazel, Belial, Satan in Job, and the figures lamented in Ezekiel and Isaiah.
6.44Only God is good by nature; creatures who neglect the bread of life fall, and Satan, the “adversary,” is the first being who fell from blessedness, as Ezekiel describes.
6.45Just as Jesus is the height of goodness, the Antichrist will be the height of evil, working false wonders with the devil's help, as the prophets and Paul foretold.
6.46Origen quotes Paul on the “man of sin” and Daniel's prophecy of a fierce king and the abomination of desolation as the Scripture's teaching on the Antichrist.
6.47Celsus says Christians took the idea of a Son of God from pagan talk of the world as God's child, but Origen replies that the prophets spoke of the Son long before, and that Jesus' soul is so united with the Word that they are not two.
6.48Celsus accepts the Stoic claim that a wise man equals God in happiness yet mocks the Christian teaching that Jesus is one with the Word, which Origen illustrates by the Church as Christ's body animated by the Word.
6.49Celsus dismisses the Genesis creation story as silly without argument; Origen points to his own commentaries on Genesis and insists that Moses wrote with deep meaning, not as a comic poet.
6.50Celsus calls the creation account nonsense without argument; Origen notes that Moses himself shows the six “days” are not ordinary days, since light and the sun came after the first day.
6.51Origen declines to repeat his earlier commentary on the six days and dismisses Celsus's jibes about the Creator borrowing light as attacks on heretical sects that Christians themselves reject.
6.52Origen leaves aside the question of the world's origin and rejects as heretical, not Christian, the idea of a lower Creator to whom the high God lent his Spirit, which Celsus attacks.
6.53Celsus confuses the church's arguments against Marcion with Christianity itself, and then charges Christians with making God the author of evil, a charge that applies equally to his own views.
6.54In Scripture, good and evil in the proper sense are virtue and vice of the soul, as the Psalm “Turn away from evil and do good” shows.
6.55Scripture sometimes calls hardships “evils” sent by God, but God does not make moral evil; at most, some evils follow incidentally from his good works, as shavings fall from a carpenter's work.
6.56When God sends suffering, it is like a parent's discipline or a surgeon's knife, meant to correct and heal those who would not learn otherwise.
6.57God does admonish and persuade through Scripture and teachers, but being persuaded requires the hearer's own free consent, as Paul, Isaiah, and Deuteronomy show.
6.58Celsus misrepresents the flood story as God repenting and hating his work; Origen says the threat was meant to convert and the flood purified the earth, as even Plato said.
6.59Those who died in the flood were taken not out of the universe but out of earthly life, for Scripture often calls the earth “the world.”
6.60Celsus again mocks the six days of creation, and Origen again answers that the Father made the world through the Word and that the “days” are not literal periods of time.
6.61God's “rest” on the seventh day does not mean he was tired; it points to the eternal sabbath of the blessed, and God's “hands” and “commands” are figurative expressions.
6.62God has no literal mouth or voice; his “voice” is perceived spiritually, and none of our categories fit him, for, as the prophets say, God does not change.
6.63Celsus denies man is God's image, but Origen explains that Christ alone is God's image, and man is made “according to” that image in the inner self, renewed by becoming holy and like God.
6.64God has no shape, colour, or motion; he is not a partaker of being but is partaken of, and Origen raises the question whether God is even beyond being, with the Son as the being of beings.
6.65Origen qualifies Celsus's claims that God cannot be reached by reason or named: God is known through the divine Word, and though no name captures him, words can point toward him.
6.66Celsus imagines a seeker blinded by the light of true teaching, but Origen replies that it is idol-worshippers who sit in darkness, while Christians, following Christ the way, already know God.
6.67It is Celsus who plunges people into darkness; Christ, the true light, opens the eyes of the soul, as he healed the blind who cried to him for mercy.
6.68The Word became flesh so that those bound to the flesh might receive him, and then leads them up, as on the mount of Transfiguration, to see his divine glory.
6.69The Son shares the Father's greatness and is as hard to see as the Father, who can be seen only by the pure in heart; the Son did not come as an easier substitute for an invisible God.
6.70God's Spirit is not a body but is shared with the worthy; Scripture calls God fire and spirit figuratively, and Jesus taught worship in spirit and truth rather than through bodily rites.
6.71When Christians call God “spirit” they do not mean, like the Stoics, a bodily breath pervading the world; God, the Word, and even the rational soul are incorporeal and imperishable.
6.72Celsus attacks views Christians do not hold, such as that the Son's spirit would be defiled by a body; God is a “consuming fire” only in that he burns away sin.
6.73Celsus asks why God's Spirit needed a virgin's womb, but Origen answers that the pure divine nature is not defiled by a body, as sunlight is not defiled by mud, and that a body formed without birth would not have looked any different.
6.74Celsus rehearses Marcion's views and ridicules the idea of rival sons of rival gods fighting like quails, but Origen says such buffoonery only shows that Celsus lacks serious arguments.
6.75Celsus says a divine being would have looked impressive, whereas Jesus was said to be small and ugly; Origen notes Isaiah says he had no beauty, but a Psalm speaks of his beauty too.
6.76Celsus accepts Isaiah's prophecy of Jesus' plain appearance but ignores the Transfiguration and the Psalm on his beauty, and in accepting the prophecy he concedes that Jesus fulfilled it.
6.77Jesus appeared differently to different people according to what they could bear, and this points to the Word of God and the Scriptures, which seem plain to the many but are transfigured in glory for those who climb higher.
6.78Celsus mocks God for waking up, like Zeus in comedy, and sending his Son to one small corner; Origen answers that God has always done good to mankind, and Christ came first to the people who had the prophets, whence his word spread worldwide.
6.79One Christ rising from Judaea was enough to enlighten the world, and those who teach his word faithfully are themselves “anointed ones” sharing in his anointing, as the oil runs down from Aaron's head.
6.80Celsus praises Chaldeans, Magi, Egyptians, Persians, and Indians as inspired nations while predicting the Jews' ruin, not seeing God's plan by which Israel's stumbling brought salvation to the Gentiles until all Israel is saved.
6.81Celsus says an all-knowing God would not have sent his Son to men who would kill him, forgetting that the prophets foretold Christ's sufferings; Origen ends his sixth book here.
7.1Origen opens his seventh book with a prayer that God's truth may destroy the arguments opposed to it, so that all may offer God a spiritual sacrifice.
7.2Celsus claims that Christians who keep the God of the Jews can only fall back on prophecy, and Origen turns to defend the prophets.
7.3Celsus prefers the Greek oracles to the Hebrew prophets, but Origen argues that even if the oracles are genuine they come from evil spirits, since the Pythian priestess received her spirit in a shameful way and prophesied in frenzy.
7.4The Hebrew prophets were made clearer in mind and soul by the Holy Spirit, whereas the Pythia's frenzy shows a demonic spirit, the kind that even simple Christians drive out by prayer.
7.5The spirits behind the oracles resemble evil souls that haunt tombs and feed on sacrifices; a true god at Delphi would have chosen a wise man, not an ordinary woman, as his prophet.
7.6Apollo chose no wise person as his prophet and praised Socrates less for wisdom than for his sacrifices, and Homer's Chryses shows that such powers answer bribes of sacrifice, marks of demons, not gods.
7.7The Hebrew prophets were chosen for their courageous, self-denying lives, suffering for the truth, and their prophecies of Christ come from God's Spirit, unlike the demonic oracles.
7.8The Hebrew prophets spoke long before Christ, no true prophets have arisen among the Jews since, and the Holy Spirit's signs, abundant in the apostolic age, remain now among a few purified Christians.
7.9Celsus claims to have heard wandering prophets in Phoenicia and Palestine who called themselves God or God's son, threatened fire, promised salvation, and then babbled nonsense.
7.10The prophets spoke plainly what was needed for moral reform, and veiled their deeper teaching in riddles and parables for diligent seekers; Celsus calls them madmen because he did not understand them.
7.11Origen has explained the obscure prophecies in his commentaries; the prophets can be understood by those wise in Christ, and Celsus's claim to have heard and exposed such prophets himself is unsupported.
7.12Christians do not merely appeal to fulfilled prophecy but also explain apparent difficulties in Scripture; Celsus charges the prophets with shameful things without quoting a single example.
7.13The prophets foretold Christ's sufferings with their purpose, but nothing shameful; the gall and vinegar offered him stand for the wickedness of those who oppose the truth.
7.14Celsus says fulfilled prophecy proves nothing if what is foretold is unworthy of God; Origen replies that he should instead have tried to show that the prophecies were not in fact fulfilled in Jesus.
7.15Using a Stoic form of argument, Origen shows that Celsus's hypothesis contradicts itself: true prophets could not have foretold that the supreme God himself would be enslaved, fall sick, or die.
7.16The prophets foretold the death of a man, not of God; what died was the man Jesus, not the divine Word, who is the Life and the Resurrection and cannot die.
7.17What the prophets foretold was worthy of God: the divine Word came with the human soul of Jesus, and his human death gave an example of dying for piety and began the defeat of the devil.
7.18Celsus sets Moses' promises of wealth and conquest against Jesus' teaching on poverty and non-retaliation, but Origen replies that the law's promises were never meant literally, since the righteous prophets lived in poverty.
7.19The law's promises of rule and the slaughter of enemies cannot be meant literally, as a Psalm about killing all sinners every morning shows.
7.20The law is twofold, the letter and the spiritual meaning; as Ezekiel and Paul show, the letter kills but the spiritual sense gives life, and so the law is both “not good” and “holy.”
7.21The law's promise of wealth and rule is fulfilled spiritually in people like Paul, rich in knowledge, who “lent” the gospel to many nations and ruled them by the Word.
7.22The commands to kill enemies are to be read spiritually: the righteous destroy sinful thoughts, and the “infants of Babylon” dashed on the rock are the first stirrings of sin crushed against Christ.
7.23Jesus' warnings against wealth, power, and wisdom refer to wealth that distracts, domineering rule, and worldly wisdom, not to the spiritual riches and wisdom that the law promises.
7.24Scripture's warnings against seeking glory and its promises that the righteous will be fed do not contradict Jesus' teaching on not worrying about food and clothing, since the promised food is nourishment of the soul.
7.25Jesus' command to turn the other cheek is not opposed to the Old Testament, which already teaches it in Lamentations; the same God speaks in both.
7.26The law of Moses suited a nation with its own state and wars, while the Gospel suits people from all nations under Roman rule; providence ended the temple worship and has made Christianity grow despite persecution.
7.27Celsus attacks the idea that God has a human-shaped body, but Christians hold that God is incorporeal, as Scripture says.
7.28Celsus claims Christians borrowed their hope of a better land from Homer's Elysian plain and Plato's pure earth, but Origen answers that Moses, older than all Greek writing, promised a good land that is not earthly Judaea.
7.29The good land promised by Moses is not earthly Judaea, which shares in the curse on the earth, but the heavenly Jerusalem that the Psalms promise to the meek and righteous.
7.30Plato's picture of precious stones in the higher earth probably came from Isaiah's description of God's jewelled city; Christians did not borrow from Plato, and Haggai distinguishes “the earth” from the “dry land” we live on.
7.31Like Celsus with Plato's myth, Origen defers the full explanation of the holy land to his commentaries, noting that Scripture uses the same names for true, heavenly realities as for their earthly counterparts.
7.32The resurrection is not a borrowing from reincarnation: the incorporeal soul receives a body suited to each place, and at the resurrection the mortal “puts on” incorruption and immortality like a garment.
7.33God is known not by bodily eyes but by the mind made in his image, and seen by a pure heart, which God himself must create in us.
7.34Christians do not expect to see, hear, or touch God with bodily senses; Scripture speaks of spiritual eyes, ears, and hands, and of a “divine sense.”
7.35Origen refuses Celsus's oracle-shrines as seats of demons, and asks how a mere phantom, as Celsus calls the risen Jesus, could transform souls and drive out demons across the world.
7.36Celsus puts into Christians' mouths the claim that God can only be known by the senses and tells them to see God with the mind; Origen replies that a good speech-writer must keep his characters true to life.
7.37Origen argues that Celsus's imagined Christian speaker is inconsistent: simple believers would not talk like Stoics, and educated Christians know from Paul that God's invisible things are understood through creation.
7.38God, who is mind or beyond mind, is known only by what is made in his image, the mind; the Christian does not speak with the voice of the flesh but seeks to live in the Spirit.
7.39Celsus insults martyrs as cowards and body-lovers, and thinks the idea of the soul's eye is Greek; Origen shows it already in Genesis and in Jesus' words about the blind seeing and the seeing becoming blind.
7.40Celsus confuses Christians with the Ophite sect, whose magical names for the doorkeepers of the heavens Christians reject; those sectarians do not die for their faith, as Christians do.
7.41Celsus points Christians to unnamed inspired poets and philosophers; Origen asks how Orpheus, Homer, or the philosophers are better guides than Moses, the prophets, and Jesus, who teaches both the learned and the simple.
7.42Celsus quotes Plato's Timaeus that the maker of the universe is hard to find and impossible to declare to all; Origen answers that the Word became flesh to reach everyone, and that God can only be found with God's own help.
7.43Plato does not say God is nameless, only hard to declare to many; Christians say God is seen by the pure in heart and through Christ, the image of the invisible God, not by bodily sight.
7.44Celsus thinks God is known by the philosophers' methods; the Word says God is known by revelation and grace, and God chose the simple over proud philosophers who still worship images, while the humblest Christian rises in prayer above the world.
7.45Celsus sets out Plato's teaching on being and becoming and on the Good as the sun of the intelligible world, and tells Christians, whom he calls lame in soul, to be silent if they cannot follow it.
7.46Origen accepts what is well said by outsiders, but warns that those who revile humble worshippers maim their own souls; Christians bless when reviled, and rise from creation to God's invisible power, while some philosophers suppress the truth they know.
7.47Paul's words in Romans 1 describe the philosophers who knew God through such doctrines yet worshipped images and fell into impurity.
7.48Many simple Christians keep complete chastity without the hemlock used by the Athenian hierophant, and Christian virgins keep virginity not for honour or pay but out of devotion to God.
7.49Scripture contains all the best Greek teaching and more, and even simple believers in God and his Son often live more purely than philosophers who practise vice with boys.
7.50Scripture teaches more clearly than Celsus that becoming involves error: newborns need a sin offering, creation is subject to vanity, and the soul's life here is lowly compared with life with the Lord.
7.51Celsus ignores the distinction between the spirit given to all and the fuller gift of the Holy Spirit; Christians, seeing with the soul's eyes, pray to guide the blind to the Word and be light to the world.
7.52Those who run to temples made by craftsmen are the lame ones; Christians run the race and fight the fight, living by the Spirit and not by the dead body.
7.53Celsus mocks Christians for choosing Jesus instead of heroes like Heracles, Orpheus, Anaxarchus, Epictetus, the Sibyl, or even Jonah and Daniel.
7.54Origen replies that Heracles' deeds were disgraceful, Orpheus told worse myths than Homer, and Anaxarchus and Epictetus, however brave, cannot be compared with Jesus, whose words still convert people.
7.55Jesus' silence under scourging and his gentleness when mocked show more fortitude than any Greek hero; his prayer in Gethsemane was not cowardice but submission to providence.
7.56Celsus gives no proof that Christians altered the Sibyl or that Jesus' life was infamous, and Jesus' death was no more pitiable than Socrates'; Celsus seems moved by a demon that Jesus overthrew.
7.57Jonah preached to one city and fled his mission, while Jesus preached to the whole world and died for humankind; Jesus gave his followers authority over all the enemy's power, greater than Daniel's deliverance.
7.58Celsus claims the command to turn the other cheek is an old teaching better stated by Plato's Socrates in the Crito, that one must never return wrong for wrong.
7.59A true doctrine is not discredited because Greeks also said it; as a wholesome food prepared for the many does more good than a delicacy for the few, so plain teaching for all is better than refined teaching for a few.
7.60The prophets and apostles, like Plato learning a foreign tongue to help foreigners, spoke plainly so as to reach the multitudes, while their words still hold deeper meanings for those who study them.
7.61Jesus' plain words on turning the other cheek teach patient endurance more usefully for ordinary people than Plato's Crito, and they do not corrupt the teaching as Celsus claims.
7.62Celsus says Christians' refusal of temples and images is shared by barbarian peoples and taught better by Heraclitus, and that Christians contradict themselves by saying man is God's image.
7.63The same act can spring from different doctrines, as Stoics, Epicureans, and the uneducated all avoid adultery for very different reasons, so Christians' refusal of images must be judged by its reasons.
7.64Jews and Christians reject temples and images for different reasons from the barbarians: because of God's commandments against other gods and idols, for which they will even die.
7.65The Persians worship the sun and creation, which Christians may not do, since creation awaits its liberation; one can know God and those he calls gods, but cannot both know God and pray to images.
7.66Even pretending to worship images, as some philosophers do, misleads the crowd; Christians do not picture the invisible God, and man is “according to God's image” in the virtuous rational soul, not in bodily form.
7.67Christians rightly refuse to serve demons; far from serving them, they drive them out by prayer and Scripture from souls, places, and even animals.
7.68Celsus argues that demons, as appointed administrators under the greatest God, should be served; Origen replies that not everything, including sin, is God's will or providence, and wicked demons transgress God's law.
7.69All demons have fallen from the good, as their use in love charms and spells shows, and the worship of the pagan gods at altars and temples is the service of demons, which Christians flee.
7.70Whether demons are appointed by God like executioners or organize themselves like robber bands requires deep knowledge of Scripture; Origen will take up Celsus's argument on serving many masters in Book 8.
8.1Origen begins Book 8 with a prayer that God and his Word will help him refute Celsus's “True Word” and act as an ambassador for Christ.
8.2Celsus calls Christians' refusal to serve many masters a seditious voice, arguing that God, unlike a human master, cannot be harmed when those who belong to him are also honoured.
8.3Jesus' saying that no one can serve two masters is sound; Scripture speaks of an assembly of gods, not the demons of the nations, over whom the one God rules as God of gods.
8.4Scripture distinguishes the one God and one Lord from the many so-called gods and lords; Christians ascend to the God of gods through the Son alone, while Plato's picture of a host of gods and demons following Zeus came from the devil.
8.5Christians rise above the gods of the nations and even the “gods” of Scripture, serving the one Lord Jesus Christ; separating from those outside God's covenants to belong to the heavenly Jerusalem is not sedition.
8.6Christians refuse to serve anyone but God not to protect God but to avoid harming themselves; like the Spartan envoys who would not bow to the Persian king, Christ's ambassadors bow to no ruler but Christ.
8.7Origen challenges Celsus to say what heroes and demons are and how they could be harmed by divided service, and what harm a human master suffers if his servant serves another.
8.8As Socrates said, the good cannot be harmed by the wicked, so Celsus's analogy of harm fails; Christians serve God not because God needs it but because they are benefited and freed from passion.
8.9Celsus cannot prove that God granted honour to the gods, heroes, or deified Antinous; honour to Jesus was granted by God, foretold by the prophets and confirmed by his works, and honouring him as Word and Truth makes people better.
8.10Honour to God and to his Son consists in a sound life, since breaking the law dishonours God; only the wise belong to God, which answers Celsus's claim that honouring all God's beings cannot grieve him.
8.11Celsus says belief in one Lord divides God's kingdom; Origen replies that Christians pray to be ruled by God alone, and it is Celsus's many gods that would make a kingdom of gods, while God has no rivals.
8.12Celsus charges Christians with worshipping a recent man; Origen answers that Father and Son are one, two in subsistence but one in concord and will, and the Son who is the Truth existed before Abraham.
8.13Christians do not serve the pagan gods, who are servants of the devil, not of God; they reverence the one God and his Son, offering prayer to the Father through the Son as high priest.
8.14Christians know from Scripture that Jesus is truly the Son of the Father, the radiance of his glory; he is the leader of peace, not sedition, and the Father is greater than the Son.
8.15Celsus quotes an obscure “heavenly dialogue” claiming the Son of Man is lord of God; Origen replies that no Christian he knows says this, since the Son is inferior to the Father and rules only those who willingly obey him.
8.16The sayings Celsus quotes come from another heresy, not from the church; Christians worship the Creator, not a new god invented as greater than him, and serve only the Son, the Word of God.
8.17Christians do have altars, images, and temples: the righteous soul is the altar whose incense is prayer, and the virtues formed by the Word are images of God, far surpassing Phidias's Zeus, and best of all in Christ.
8.18The virtues formed in Christians are living images in which God's Spirit dwells, as God promised to dwell in the righteous; unlike statues, they last as long as the soul wills.
8.19Christians' temples are their bodies, and above all Christ's body, which he raised; believers are living precious stones in God's temple, as Peter, Paul, and Isaiah teach.
8.20The righteous are the precious stones of God's temple; Christians refuse pagan altars, images, and temples not as a secret sign but because Jesus has shown them the true way of piety.
8.21Celsus asks why Christians do not join the public festivals; Origen answers that those festivals rest on human myths, and the true festival is doing one's duty and praying always, as Paul warns against observing days.
8.22Christians do keep the Lord's day, Preparation days, Easter, and Pentecost, but for the perfect every day is the Lord's day, a preparation, a passing-over to God, and a Pentecost of prayer and the Spirit.
8.23Set feast days are reminders for ordinary believers, a “part” of the festival that the perfect keep always; Christian feasts are far more dignified than pagan festivals of drunkenness, and the feasts of God's law involve humbling the flesh.
8.24Celsus says that eating sacrificial meat is harmless or that demons belong to God and should be honoured; Origen answers from 1 Corinthians that eating idol offerings harms weaker brothers and that one cannot share both the Lord's table and the table of demons.
8.25Only the good are said to belong to God, like the men and angels of God; since all demons are wicked, they do not belong to God but to their ruler Beelzebul.
8.26Christians must die rather than obey or sacrifice to demons; city laws that command it are not true laws, and prayer belongs to God alone, offered through the Son as high priest.
8.27Christians need not win the demons' favour, since God guards them by his angels and they can say with the psalmist, “The Lord is my light; whom shall I fear?”
8.28Celsus says Christians should either abstain from all meat like Pythagoras, or admit that all food, drink, and air come from demons; Origen notes that Scripture itself commends abstaining from meat for a brother's sake.
8.29Jesus set aside the Jewish food laws so as not to hinder anyone from coming to God, teaching that defilement comes from within, while the apostles forbade Gentile believers only idol offerings, strangled meat, and blood.
8.30The apostles forbade idol offerings and blood because they feed demons; Christians may abstain from meat for self-control, not because of Pythagorean transmigration, and they honour the bodies of the dead with burial because of the resurrection.
8.31Food, water, and air are managed by God's angels, not by demons; if demons have any part, it is as executioners of famine and plague, permitted by God to turn sinners back and to test the faithful.
8.32Evil angels may carry out God's judgments, which are hard to fathom; but Christians who eat and drink to God's glory with thanksgiving share their table with God's angels, not with demons.
8.33Christians live and use God's gifts with thanksgiving to the Creator, not to demons, whose rule extends only over those who submit to wickedness; they eat the eucharistic bread, which through prayer becomes a holy body that sanctifies.
8.34Christians offer first-fruits and prayers to the Creator through Jesus the high priest, and have the friendship of countless angels who help those who pray; demons have power only over the wicked, not over those armed with God's armour.
8.35Celsus warns that the demons, like imperial officials, will harm those who neglect them; Origen replies that even Lycurgus and Zeno did not take revenge, and Jesus taught love of enemies.
8.36God's angels do not harm those who insult them; demons harm only those who submit to them, while the true Christian is guarded by his angel, who carries his prayers to God through Christ the high priest.
8.37Christians do not invoke powers by barbarian names; each prays to God in his own language, and God, Lord of every language, hears them all as one voice.
8.38Celsus imagines Christians mocking statues, but God's law forbids reviling even the gods; the real harm to atheists who deny providence is not bodily but blindness to the Creator.
8.39Celsus retorts that Christ's persecutors go unpunished; Origen says the retort fails, since Christians do not mock statues, Christ is God's Word and not a demon, and judgment will come on the incurably wicked in due time.
8.40Celsus's pagan priests threaten that the gods punish descendants late; Scripture teaches better, through Ezekiel and Deuteronomy, that each person dies for his own sin.
8.41Celsus taunts that the gods punish blasphemers while Jesus' executioners went unpunished and his Father abandoned him; Origen answers that Christians revile no one, not even statues or demons.
8.42Celsus's vengeful gods prove wicked; and it is false that Jesus' killers went unpunished, since Jerusalem, where he was condemned, was soon besieged and destroyed.
8.43Since Jesus' death a whole new nation of Christians has arisen; like a grain of wheat his death bore much fruit, and the Father gave his Son willingly for the world, while the demons avenge themselves on Christians who expel them.
8.44The martyrs' deaths break the demons' power, which is why persecution pauses and resumes; the demons and the judges rejoice when a Christian denies under torture, and a Christian who flees does so in obedience to Christ, not from cowardice.
8.45Celsus lists the benefits and punishments said to come from pagan oracles and shrines; Origen asks why these should be believed and the biblical miracles called myths, when even Greek philosophers doubted the oracles.
8.46Scripture records better-attested versions of everything Celsus claims for oracles: the Exodus led by prophecy, children given to Abraham and Sarah, Hezekiah, and the Shunammite, healings by Jesus, and punishment of those who profaned the temple.
8.47If one weighs the wonders of Greeks, Jews, and Christians by their purpose and results, the Christian ones stand out: unlettered apostles could not have converted people from ancestral customs without real divine power and miracles.
8.48Celsus says the mystery priests threaten eternal punishment just as Christians do; Origen replies that the true teaching is the one that actually leads people to live righteously, and that the prophets' foreknowledge proves God's Spirit was in them.
8.49Celsus mocks Christians for both longing for the body's resurrection and consigning bodies to punishment, but agrees that the righteous will be happy and the wicked punished for ever; Origen answers that Christians value the rational soul above the body, and God is not a body as the Stoics say.
8.50Christians long only for what God promises the righteous, including the resurrection; the body is honoured when it suffers for virtue and dishonoured by vice, and a true lover of mankind would reason even with the simple rather than despise them.
8.51Celsus agrees that the righteous will be happy and the wicked punished for ever, yet his attack on Christianity would destroy that belief in Christians; Chrysippus more wisely healed people using even doctrines he rejected.
8.52Christians try to win everyone to their whole teaching, but at least try to persuade outsiders of reward and punishment, since all can see the Creator's order in the world and all share common notions of right and wrong.
8.53Celsus cautiously leaves open several views of why souls are imprisoned in bodies, quoting Empedocles; Origen says he should have been equally cautious before reviling Moses, the prophets, and Jesus, whose followers God surely did not ignore.
8.54Christians need not obey Celsus's prison overseers, since Jesus came to free those bound by Satan, like the woman he healed; Christians expose the demons' deceptions and die for piety not at random but as a death precious to God.
8.55Celsus says Christians must either leave life altogether or honour the demons who govern it; Origen answers that the only reasonable death is martyrdom, that Christians may marry and must raise their children, and that they resist the demons with God's armour.
8.56Christians will live in God's world by his laws, may marry and have children, and will bear hardships as trials; but they will not honour the demons, since they worship God alone, as Christ did, and cannot serve God and mammon.
8.57Christians show proper gratitude not to demons but to God, whose gifts fill them, and their eucharistic bread is a symbol of that thanksgiving; they honour but do not worship the angels who oversee nature.
8.58Celsus cites the Egyptian belief that thirty-six demons each govern a part of the body and can heal it when invoked by name; Origen answers that God alone suffices, and the name of Jesus has healed many.
8.59Celsus would have Christians turn from God through Jesus, at whose name every knee bows, to thirty-six Egyptian demons invoked by magicians; but Jesus has spread true worship through the whole world.
8.60Celsus himself warns that service of the earthly demons, bound to blood and incense, leads to love of the body and forgetfulness of higher things; Origen concludes it is better to trust God through Christ and to seek healing from medicine or, better, from prayer.
8.61God accepts the simple person devoted to him, not one who dabbles in demons' names, spells, herbs, and engraved stones for bodily benefit; such demons cannot even be trusted to keep faith with those who serve them.
8.62Celsus finally admits that oracles are works of earthly demons bound to blood and incense, as Christians said; Christians would rather be sick and unfortunate with a pure conscience than healthy through serving demons.
8.63Celsus contradicts himself, now saying the demons need nothing and that God must never be abandoned, then urging Christians to win the favour of rulers and kings as appointed by demonic power.
8.64Winning God's favour brings with it the favour of all his angels and holy spirits, who pray alongside Christians and help them against the demons, as Jesus destroyed demons and healed the oppressed.
8.65Christians will not win rulers' favour by sin or servility, but neither do they provoke them, obeying Paul's command to be subject to the authorities; yet they will die rather than swear by the emperor's Fortune, which is either nothing or a demon.
8.66Celsus rightly says one must die rather than blaspheme God, but then urges hymning the Sun and Athena; Origen answers that Christians praise the sun as God's creature, which itself praises God, but reject Athena and her myths.
8.67Christians hymn only God and his Son, as sun, moon, and stars do, not Athena; nor will they swear by the emperor, since whatever they rightly receive, like bread, wine, and oil, comes from God's providence.
8.68Celsus quotes Homer that kings are given by Zeus and warns that if all behaved like Christians the empire would fall to barbarians; Origen replies that kings are set up by God, Christians honour the king, and if all believed, even barbarians would become peaceable.
8.69Celsus mocks the hope that God would defend a Christian Rome, pointing to the Jews' loss of their land and the persecution of Christians; Origen answers that if all Romans prayed together, God would fight for them as for Moses, and God's promises were conditional.
8.70A Christian Rome would be protected by God, as ten righteous men would have saved Sodom's cities, for Christians are the salt of the earth; persecution comes only when God permits it, and Christ has overcome the world.
8.71Celsus imagines Christians converting one set of rulers after another until some government wipes them out; Origen says no Christian claims this and Celsus has invented it.
8.72Celsus thinks it impossible for all peoples to agree under one law; Origen answers that the Word will one day heal every rational soul and destroy wickedness, as Zephaniah foretells one tongue and one yoke, perhaps after this bodily life.
8.73Celsus urges Christians to serve in the emperor's army; Origen answers that Christians help the emperor more by praying for him and for just wars, like pagan priests who keep their hands free of blood, forming an army of prayer against the demons who cause wars.
8.74Christians serve their country as commanders of prayer, offered in secret, and benefit it more than others by teaching piety and preparing citizens for the heavenly city.
8.75Instead of holding civic office, Christians serve in the church, the other country founded by God's Word in every city, whose rulers are chosen for ability and good life and serve under compulsion from Christ, caring for those within and without.
8.76Origen closes his eight books against Celsus, addressed to his patron Ambrose, inviting readers to judge which work breathes more of the true God, and asking Ambrose to send Celsus's promised second treatise if it exists.

About this work

Author: Origen
Attribution: authentic · Undisputed work of Origen, written at the request of Ambrose; Eusebius knew it (Church History 6.36). It preserves much of Celsus's lost True Doctrine (ca. 175–180) in quotation.
Older English translation: Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4 (1885) (public domain, at CCEL; for comparison: our translation is made from the original first and checked against it afterwards)
Date: ca. 248 (approximate) · Eusebius (Church History 6.36) places it under Philip the Arab (244–249), when Origen was over sixty; it is usually dated about 248.
Written at: Caesarea, Palestine (probable)
Addressed to: Ambrose (preface 1)
Language: Greek
Genre: apology
Reference system: book.chapter (8 books, Koetschau's chapters); the preface is 0.1–0.6
SBL abbreviation: Cels.
Clavis: CPG 1476 (unverified)
Text from: Paul Koetschau, ed., Origenes Werke 1–2: Gegen Celsus, GCS 2–3 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1899) (Printed edition in the public domain; digital text CC BY-SA 4.0)
Critical editions: Marcel Borret, Origène: Contre Celse, 5 vols., SC 132, 136, 147, 150, 227 (Paris: Cerf, 1967–1976); Miroslav Marcovich, Origenes: Contra Celsum libri VIII, VCSup 54 (Leiden: Brill, 2001) (cited, not reproduced)
CTS URN: urn:cts:greekLit:tlg2042.tlg001

Against Celsus

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About this work