Against Celsus 1.13–1.27

Since Celsus has set down as a saying of many Christians, "The wisdom in life is an evil, and foolishness a good," we must say that he slanders the teaching, not quoting the actual text found in Paul, which runs thus: "If anyone among you thinks he is wise in this age, let him become a fool, that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God." So the apostle does not say simply, "Wisdom is foolishness with God," but "the wisdom of this world." And again, not "If anyone among you thinks he is wise, let him become a fool" without qualification, but "let him become a fool in this age, that he may become wise." So by "the wisdom of this age" we mean all philosophy holding false opinions, which according to the Scriptures is brought to nothing; and we call foolishness good not absolutely, but when someone becomes "a fool" to this age. It is as if we were to say that the Platonist, who believes in the immortality of the soul and in what is said about it concerning transmigration, has taken up foolishness in the eyes of the Stoics, who ridicule assent to these things, and of the Peripatetics, who harp on Plato's "twitterings," and of the Epicureans, who charge with superstition those who introduce providence and set God over the universe. Further, that even according to the mind of the Word it is far better to assent to doctrines with reason and wisdom than with simple faith, and that the Word wished this latter too only by force of circumstances, so as not to leave human beings entirely without help, is shown by Jesus' genuine disciple Paul, who said: "For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not know God, God was pleased through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe." It is clearly shown by these words that God ought to have been known in the wisdom of God; and since this did not happen, God was pleased, as a second course, to save those who believe, not by foolishness simply, but by foolishness so far as preaching is concerned. For Jesus Christ crucified, when preached at the outset, is the foolishness of preaching, as Paul too, perceiving this, says: "But we preach Jesus Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God."

Celsus, thinking that among many of the nations there is a kinship of the same teaching, names all the nations as having originated such a doctrine; but, I do not know why, he slanders the Jews alone, not counting their nation among the rest as having either labored together with them and shared their views, or taught similar doctrines on many points. It is fair, then, to ask him why he has believed the histories of barbarians and Greeks about the antiquity of the nations he named, but treats as false the histories of this nation alone. For if each people set out its own affairs truthfully, why do we distrust only the prophets of the Jews? And if Moses and the prophets wrote many things about their own people to favor their own teaching, why shall we not say the same about the writers among the other nations? Or are the Egyptians, when they speak ill of the Jews in their histories, trustworthy about the Jews, while the Jews, saying the same about the Egyptians—recording that they suffered much unjustly and saying that for this reason the Egyptians were punished by God—are lying? And this must be said not only about the Egyptians; for we shall find a conflict of the Assyrians with the Jews, and this recorded in the Assyrian antiquities. So also the Jewish writers—not to seem to beg the question by saying "the prophets"—recorded the Assyrians as their enemies. See, then, at once the self-love of one who believes some nations as wise and condemns others as altogether foolish. For hear Celsus saying that "there is an ancient teaching from the beginning, with which the wisest nations and cities and wise men have always been occupied." And he would not call the Jews a very wise nation, even on a par with the Egyptians, Assyrians, Indians, Persians, Odrysians, Samothracians, and Eleusinians.

How much better than Celsus—and he showed himself most eminent in many ways, tested more doctrines, and gathered from more sources what he thought true—is the Pythagorean Numenius! In the first book of his On the Good, speaking of the nations that have held God to be incorporeal, he included the Jews among them, not hesitating to use even the prophetic words in his treatise and to interpret them figuratively. It is also said that Hermippus, in the first book of On Lawgivers, recorded that Pythagoras brought his own philosophy from the Jews to the Greeks. And a book on the Jews is attributed to Hecataeus the historian, in which he is so inclined to regard the nation as wise that Herennius Philo, in his treatise on the Jews, first doubts whether the treatise is by the historian, and second says that if it is his, he was probably carried away by the persuasiveness of the Jews and assented to their teaching.

I wonder how Celsus placed the Odrysians, Samothracians, Eleusinians, and Hyperboreans among the most ancient and wisest nations, but did not see fit to admit the Jews either among the wise or among the ancient, though many writings are current among Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Greeks testifying to their antiquity, which I have thought it superfluous to set out. For anyone who wishes can read what Flavius Josephus wrote on the antiquity of the Jews in two books, where he brings a great collection of writers testifying to the antiquity of the Jews. And there is the Oration to the Greeks of Tatian, a later writer, who sets out with great learning those who have written about the antiquity of the Jews and of Moses. Celsus seems, then, to say these things not truthfully but out of hostility, aiming to accuse the origin of Christianity, which depends on the Jews. Yet he says that Homer's Galactophagi, the Druids of the Gauls, and the Getae are very wise and ancient nations, holding views akin to the Jewish teachings—though I do not know whether any writings of theirs are extant—while he excludes the Hebrews alone, as far as it lies with him, from both antiquity and wisdom. And again, making a list of ancient and wise men who benefited their contemporaries, and their successors through writings, he excluded Moses from the list of the wise. Yet of Linus, whom Celsus put first among those he named, neither laws nor teachings are extant that have converted and healed nations; but a whole nation, scattered through all the world, carries the laws of Moses. See, then, whether he did not plainly act maliciously in excluding Moses too from the list of the wise, while saying that Linus, Musaeus, Orpheus, Pherecydes, the Persian Zoroaster, and Pythagoras had understood these matters, and that their doctrines were set down in books and have been preserved to this day. And he deliberately forgot the myth about the so-called gods as subject to human passions, recorded above all by Orpheus.

In what follows, accusing the history of Moses, he blames those who interpret it figuratively and allegorize it. One might say to this most noble author, who entitled his book The True Word: Why, sir, do you speak solemnly of the gods, who, as your wise poets and philosophers record, fall into such great misfortunes, engage in accursed unions, make war on their fathers, and cut off their private parts—as having been recorded to have dared, done, and suffered such things; but when Moses says no such thing about God, nor even about holy angels, but far lesser things about human beings (for with him no one dared what Cronus did against Uranus, or what Zeus did against his father, nor did "the father of men and gods" have intercourse with his own daughter), you all think that those who received laws from him were deceived and led astray? Celsus seems to me to do something like Plato's Thrasymachus, who does not allow Socrates to answer as he wishes about justice but says: "See that you do not say that the just is the advantageous, or the needful, or anything else of that sort." For he too, having accused, as he thinks, the histories in Moses, and having blamed those who allegorize them—while also giving them a kind of praise, that they are the more reasonable—in effect prevents, after accusing as he wishes, those who are able from defending them as the facts naturally are.

We would say, challenging him to compare book with book: Come, sir, bring the poems of Linus, Musaeus, and Orpheus and the writing of Pherecydes, and examine them alongside the laws of Moses, setting histories beside histories and moral discourses beside laws and commandments; and see which are more able to convert their hearers at once, and which of them might even ruin the listener. And consider how the band of your writers took little thought for those who would read them at face value, but wrote their own philosophy, as you say, only for those able to interpret figuratively and allegorize; whereas Moses, in his five books, has acted like a noble orator who studies his form and everywhere carefully presents the double meaning of his words: he has given neither the mass of the Jews who received his laws any occasion of harm in moral matters, nor the few who can read with more understanding a writing that is not full of speculation for those able to search out his meaning. And the books of your wise poets seem no longer even to be preserved, though they would have been kept if the reader had perceived any benefit; but the writings of Moses have moved many even of those who are strangers to the Jewish way of life to believe that, as the writings proclaim, the one who first gave them as law and handed them to Moses was God, the creator of the world. For it was fitting that the maker of the whole world, having laid down laws for the whole world, should give his words a power able to prevail over people everywhere. And I say this not yet examining the case of Jesus, but still showing that Moses, who is far inferior to the Lord, is, as the argument will prove, far superior to your wise poets and philosophers.

After this Celsus, secretly wishing to slander the account of the making of the world according to Moses, which shows that the world is not yet ten thousand years old but much short of that, sides with those who say that the world is uncreated, while concealing his intention. For in saying that there have been many conflagrations from all eternity and many floods, and that the flood in the time of Deucalion is the more recent, having happened lately, he clearly shows those able to understand him that in his view the world is uncreated. Let the one who finds fault with the faith of Christians tell us by what demonstrative arguments he was compelled to accept that there have been many conflagrations and many floods, and that the most recent of all are the flood in the time of Deucalion and the conflagration in the time of Phaethon. But if he puts forward Plato's dialogues on these matters, we will tell him that we too may believe that in the pure and devout soul of Moses—who rose above everything created and attached himself to the maker of the universe—a divine spirit dwelt, which set forth the things of God far more clearly than Plato and the wise men among Greeks and barbarians. And if he demands of us reasons for such a faith, let him first give reasons for what he himself asserted without proof, and then we will establish that our views are so.

Yet Celsus, even unwillingly, has fallen into testifying that the world is rather recent and not yet ten thousand years old, when he says that the Greeks too consider these things ancient because, on account of the floods and conflagrations, they have not seen or remembered older things. Let Celsus have as teachers of the myth of conflagrations and floods the Egyptians, in his view the wisest of men—traces of whose wisdom are irrational animals worshiped, and arguments showing that such worship of God is reasonable and recondite and mystical. If the Egyptians, glorifying their teaching about animals, bring forth theologies, they are wise; but if one who has assented to the law and lawgiver of the Jews refers everything to the only God, the maker of the universe, he is reckoned by Celsus and those like him inferior to one who brings down divinity not only into rational and mortal animals but even into irrational ones—beyond the mythical transmigration about the soul that falls from the vault of heaven and descends even to irrational animals, not only tame but also the wildest. And if the Egyptians tell myths, they are believed to have philosophized through riddles and secrets; but if Moses, writing for a whole nation, leaves them histories and laws, his words are thought to be empty myths not even admitting allegory.

for this is the view of Celsus and the Epicureans. "Moses," he says, "having heard this teaching that was current among the wise nations and eminent men, gained a name for divine inspiration." To this too we must say—granting him that Moses heard an older teaching and handed it on to the Hebrews—that if he heard a false teaching, neither wise nor venerable, and accepted it and handed it on to those under him, he is blameworthy; but if, as you say, he assented to wise and true doctrines and educated his own people by them, what has he done that deserves accusation? Would that Epicurus, and Aristotle, who is less impious than he about providence, and the Stoics, who said that God is a body, had heard this teaching! Then the world would not have been filled with a teaching that sets providence aside, or cuts it short, or introduces a corruptible, bodily first principle, according to which even God is a body for the Stoics, who are not ashamed to say that he is changeable, altered and transformed throughout, and in a word able to perish if there is something to destroy him, but fortunate enough not to perish because there is nothing to destroy him. But the teaching of Jews and Christians, which preserves the unchangeableness and unalterableness of God, is thought impious, because it does not join in impiety with those who hold impious views about God, saying in its prayers to the Divine: "But you are the same." And God is believed to have said: "I have not changed."

After this Celsus, without slandering the circumcision of the private parts practiced by the Jews, says that it came from the Egyptians, believing the Egyptians rather than Moses, who says that Abraham was the first among human beings to be circumcised. And it is not only Moses who records the name of Abraham, associating him closely with God; many of those who charm demons also use in their formulas "the God of Abraham," achieving results through the name and through God's close relation to the righteous man. That is why they adopt the phrase "the God of Abraham," though they do not know who Abraham is. The same must be said of Isaac, Jacob, and Israel: these names, admittedly Hebrew, are sown in many places in the lore of the Egyptians who profess to work some effect. But the meaning of circumcision, which began with Abraham and was stopped by Jesus, who did not wish his disciples to do the same, is not our business to explain now. For the present occasion is not for teaching about these matters, but for a contest that pulls down the charges Celsus brings against the Jewish teaching, since he thinks he will more quickly prove Christianity false if, by accusing its origin, which lies in the Jewish writings, he shows that too to be false.

Next Celsus says that "the goatherds and shepherds who followed Moses as their leader, beguiled by rustic deceits, thought there was one God." Let him show, then, since the goatherds and shepherds, as he thinks, abandoned the worship of the gods without reason, how he himself can establish the multitude of gods among the Greeks or the other barbarians. Let him show the subsistence and being of Mnemosyne, who bore the Muses to Zeus, or of Themis, who bore the Hours; or let him show that the Graces, always naked, can have real existence. But he will not be able to show from the facts that the fictions of the Greeks, which seem to be given bodies, are gods. For why are the Greek myths about the gods truer than, say, those of the Egyptians, who in their language know neither Mnemosyne as mother of the nine Muses, nor Themis of the Hours, nor Eurynome as one of the Graces, nor their other names? How much more effective, and better than all these fictions, it is to be persuaded from what is seen, by the good order of the world, to worship its maker as one, since it is one and wholly in harmony with itself, and therefore cannot have come to be by many makers, just as the whole heaven is not held together by many souls moving it. For one is enough, which carries the whole sphere of fixed stars from east to west and embraces within it all the things the world needs, which are not self-sufficient. For all are parts of the world, but God is no part of a whole; for God must not be incomplete, as a part is incomplete. And perhaps a deeper account will show that God, strictly speaking, just as he is not a part, so also is not a whole, since a whole is made of parts; and reason does not allow us to accept that the God over all is made of parts, each of which cannot do what the other parts do.

After this he says that "the goatherds and shepherds thought there was one God, whether they call him the Most High, or Adonai, or the Heavenly One, or Sabaoth, or however and in whatever way they like to name this world; and they knew nothing more." And next he says that it makes no difference to call the God over all by the name current among the Greeks, Zeus, or by such-and-such a name, say, among the Indians, or such-and-such among the Egyptians. To this we must say that a deep and secret question arises here, the one about the nature of names: whether, as Aristotle thinks, names are by convention; or, as those of the Stoa believe, by nature, the first sounds imitating the things of which the names are names—on which ground they also introduce certain elements of etymology; or, as Epicurus teaches, differently from what the Stoics think, names are by nature, the first human beings having burst out with certain sounds about things. If, then, we can establish in a special treatise the nature of effective names, some of which the wise men of the Egyptians use, or the learned among the Persian magi, or the Brahmans or Samanaeans among the philosophers of India, and so on for each of the nations; and if we can prove that so-called magic is not, as the followers of Epicurus and Aristotle think, something altogether incoherent, but, as those skilled in it demonstrate, coherent, though having reasons known to very few—then we will say that the name Sabaoth, and Adonai, and the other names handed down among the Hebrews with great reverence, are not applied to ordinary and created things but to a certain secret theology that refers to the maker of the universe. That is why these names, when spoken with the sequence that is woven together with them, can be employed for certain purposes; while others, current in the Egyptian tongue, apply to certain demons who can do only such-and-such things, and others in the Persian language to other powers, and so on for each of the nations. And so it will be found that the names of the demons on earth, who have been allotted different places, are current in the languages proper to each place and nation. So one who has gained a nobler understanding of these things, even a little, will take care not to apply different names to different things wrongly, lest he suffer the same as those who wrongly give the name "god" to lifeless matter, or drag down the title "good" from the first cause, or from virtue and the beautiful, to blind wealth, or to the proportion of flesh and blood and bones in health and fitness, or to what is thought noble birth.

And perhaps the danger is no less for one who brings down the name of God, or the name of the good, to things to which it should not be applied, than for one who exchanges names that belong to some secret doctrine, applying those of lesser things to greater and those of greater things to lesser. And I do not say that with the name Zeus there is at once heard also the son of Cronus and Rhea, the husband of Hera, the brother of Poseidon, the father of Athena and Artemis, the one who had intercourse with his daughter Persephone; or that with Apollo there is heard the son of Leto and Zeus, the brother of Artemis, and half-brother of Hermes on his father's side—and all the other things brought forward by Celsus's wise fathers of doctrine and the ancient theologians of the Greeks. For what arbitrary choice is it that Zeus should be named properly, but that his father should not be Cronus and his mother Rhea? The same must be done with the other so-called gods. But this charge in no way touches those who, according to some secret doctrine, apply Sabaoth to God, or Adonai, or any of the other names. And when someone can philosophize about the secret teachings on names, he may find much also about the naming of God's angels, of whom one is called Michael, another Gabriel, and another Raphael, in accordance with the tasks they serve in the universe by the will of the God of all. The name of our Jesus also belongs to the same philosophy of names; it has already been clearly seen to drive countless demons out of souls and bodies, exerting its power on those from whom they were driven out. Further, on the subject of names, we must say that those skilled in the use of incantations report that when the same incantation is spoken in its own language it can accomplish what the incantation promises, but when translated into any other language whatever it can be seen to be weak and powerless. So it is not the things signified but the qualities and properties of the sounds that have some power in themselves for this or that. In this way we will also defend Christians who struggle even to death rather than proclaim Zeus as god or name him in another language. For they confess either the common name "God" without further qualification, or with the addition: "the maker of the universe, the creator of heaven and earth, who sent down to the human race such-and-such wise men"—so that the name "God," when joined to this name, accomplishes a certain power among human beings. Much else could be said on names against those who think we should be indifferent about using them. And if Plato is admired for saying in the Philebus, "My fear, Protarchus, about the names of the gods is not small," because Philebus, Socrates' partner in conversation, had called pleasure a god, how much more shall we approve the reverence of Christians who attach to the maker of the universe none of the names used in the making of myths? But enough of this for now.

Let us see how Celsus, who professes to know everything, slanders the Jews, saying that they worship angels and are devoted to sorcery, of which Moses became their instructor. Where in the writings of Moses did he find the lawgiver teaching them to worship angels? Let him who professes to know the affairs of Christians and Jews tell us that, and how sorcery exists among those who have received the law of Moses and have read: "You shall not attach yourselves to enchanters, to be defiled by them." He promises to teach next how the Jews too went astray through ignorance and were deceived. If he had discovered the ignorance of the Jews about Jesus the Christ, in not listening to the prophecies about him, he would truly have taught how the Jews went astray; but as it is, not even wishing to imagine this, he supposes things that are not errors of the Jews to be errors. Having promised to teach later about the Jews, Celsus first speaks about our Savior, as the leader of our birth insofar as we are Christians; and he says that "a very few years ago he became the leader of this teaching, being thought by Christians to be the Son of God." About the claim that he lived a few years ago we will say this: is it without God that Jesus, wishing in so few years to sow his word and teaching, was able to do so much that in many parts of our world not a few Greeks and barbarians, wise and foolish, were so disposed toward his teaching that they struggled even to death for Christianity so as not to forswear it—something that no one is recorded to have done for any other doctrine? I, for my part, not flattering the teaching but trying to examine the facts with reflection, would say that not even those who heal many sick bodies attain the goal of bodily health without God. And if someone could free souls from the flood of wickedness, from licentious and unjust deeds, and from contempt of the Divine, and could give proof of such a work in, say, a hundred people improved (let the argument run on that number), would not one reasonably say that it was not without God that he implanted in the hundred a teaching that freed them from so many evils? And if one who considers these things fairly agrees that nothing better has happened among human beings without God, how much more confidently will he declare this of Jesus, comparing the former lives of many who come to his teaching with their later lives, and considering in how much licentiousness, injustice, and greed each of them lived before—as Celsus and those who think like him say—they were deceived and accepted a teaching that, as they say, ruins human life; and in what way, from the time they received the teaching, they have become more reasonable, more serious, and more stable, so that some of them, out of love of surpassing purity and in order to worship the Divine more purely, do not even touch the sexual relations permitted by the law?

Anyone examining the facts will see that Jesus attempted things greater than human nature, and having attempted them, accomplished them. For although from the beginning everyone opposed the sowing of his teaching over the whole world—the emperors of each period, the commanders and governors under them, and, so to speak, all who had been entrusted with any authority whatever, and further the rulers in the cities, the soldiers, and the peoples—it conquered, since as the Word of God it could not by nature be hindered. And having become stronger than so many adversaries, it prevailed over all Greece and still more of the barbarian world, and converted countless souls to the worship of God that he taught. And since among the multitude conquered by the teaching the ordinary and more rustic people are many times more numerous than those trained in learning, it was inevitable that the ordinary and rustic should be many times more numerous than the more intelligent. But Celsus, not wishing to consider this, thinks that the love of humanity of the teaching, which reaches every soul "from the rising of the sun," is vulgar, and that because of its vulgarity and its complete lack of power in argument it has prevailed over the uneducated alone. Yet not even he says that only the uneducated have been brought by the teaching to the worship of God according to Jesus; for he admits that there are among them some who are moderate, reasonable, and intelligent, and ready for allegory.