Against Celsus 1.20

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.