Against Celsus 1.12

Next, since Celsus says in these very words: "If they are willing to answer me—not as one who is testing them (for I know everything), but as one who cares equally for all—it will be well. But if they are unwilling and say, as they usually do, 'Do not examine,'" and so on, "they must," he says, "teach me what kind of things they are that they say, and from where they have flowed," and so on. To the words "for I know everything," which he has most boastfully ventured, we must say that if he had read the prophets especially, which are admittedly full of riddles and of words obscure to the many, and if he had met the parables of the Gospels, and the rest of the writing of the law and of Jewish history, and the utterances of the apostles, and after reading them had wished in good faith to enter into the meaning of the words, he would not have been so bold, nor said, "for I know everything." Not even we who have spent our time in these writings would say, "for I know everything"—for truth is dear to us. None of us will say, "I know everything of Epicurus," or will be confident that he knows everything of Plato, since there are so many disagreements even among those who expound them. Who is so bold as to say, "I know all the Stoic teaching," or "all the Peripatetic"? Unless perhaps, having heard this "for I know everything" from some stupid ordinary people who do not perceive their own ignorance, he thought that, having used such teachers, he knew everything. He seems to me to have done something like a man who visited Egypt, where the wise men of the Egyptians philosophize much, according to their ancestral writings, about what they hold to be divine, while the ordinary people, hearing certain myths whose meanings they do not understand, pride themselves on them—and who thought he knew everything about the Egyptians, having been the disciple of their ordinary people, without associating with any of the priests or learning the Egyptian secrets from any of them. What I have said about the wise and the ordinary people of the Egyptians can be seen also of the Persians, among whom there are rites honored rationally by the learned among them but performed symbolically by the many and more superficial among them. The same must be said of the Syrians and Indians and all who have both myths and writings.