Against Celsus 1.18

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.