Against Celsus 1.26

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?