Against Celsus 5.3

See, then, how the man who throughout his treatise did not admit to being an Epicurean is shown, in wishing to destroy our teaching, to be deserting to Epicurus. Now is the time, then, for you who read Celsus's words and agree with what he puts forward either to do away with God's coming to watch over individual human beings, or, if you hold such a thing, to show Celsus's argument to be false. If, then, you do away with providence altogether, you will show his words to be false in which he posits gods and providence, so that you may say these things are true; but if you nonetheless posit providence, as not agreeing with Celsus when he says that neither a god nor a child of God has come down or comes down to human beings, why will you not examine carefully, from what we have said about Jesus and what was prophesied about him, whom one should rather believe to be God and a child of God who came down to human beings: Jesus, who arranged and did so many things, or those who, on the pretext of oracles and divinations, do not reform the characters of those they heal, and who moreover have fallen away from the sincere and pure reverence toward the Maker of the universe, and split the souls of those who attend to them, on the pretext of honouring many gods, away from the one and only manifest and true God?