Against Celsus 2.17

Very stupid too is this: “What god, or daemon, or sensible man, foreseeing that such things would happen to him, would not avoid them if he could, instead of falling into what he knew beforehand?” Socrates, at any rate, knew that he would drink the hemlock and die, and he could, if he had listened to Crito, have escaped from prison and suffered none of these things; but he chose, according to what seemed reasonable to him, that it was better for him to die as a philosopher than to live unworthy of philosophy. Leonidas too, the general of the Lacedaemonians, knowing that he was about to die with those at Thermopylae, did not contrive to live shamefully, but said to those with him: “Let us breakfast as men who will dine in Hades.” Those who care to collect such stories will find many. What wonder, then, if Jesus, knowing what would happen, did not avoid it but met what he also knew beforehand? When Paul too, his disciple, heard what would happen to him if he went up to Jerusalem, he went to meet the dangers, rebuking those who wept around him and tried to keep him from going up to Jerusalem. And many in our own time, knowing that if they confessed Christianity they would die, but if they denied it they would be released and recover their property, have despised life and willingly chosen death for the sake of piety.