Against Celsus 7.13–7.27

Nor does God do or suffer the most shameful things, nor does he serve evil, as Celsus thinks; for nothing of the kind has been foretold. And if he says that it was foretold that God would serve evil or do or suffer the most shameful things, he should have cited the words of the prophets on this and not wished to defile his hearers to no purpose. The prophets did foretell what Christ would suffer, and they gave the reason why he would suffer; and God knew what his Christ would suffer. But where does it come from that these things were most abominable and most unclean, as Celsus says? He will seem to teach how the things he endured were most abominable and most unclean, when he says: For what else was it for a god to eat the flesh of sheep and to drink gall or vinegar but to eat dung? But in our view God did not eat the flesh of sheep. For even if he seems to have eaten, Jesus ate as one who bore a body. As for the gall and vinegar, prophesied in the words, “They gave me gall for my food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink,” we have spoken above and are forced by Celsus to repeat ourselves. Those who plot against the word of truth always bring to the Christ of God the gall of their own wickedness and the vinegar of their own turning to evil; and he, “having tasted it, would not drink.”

Then after this, wishing to overthrow the faith of those who have accepted what concerns Jesus because it was prophesied, he says: Suppose the prophets foretold that the great God, to say nothing more offensive, would be a slave or be sick or die; must God then die or be a slave or be sick, because it was foretold, so that by dying he may be believed to be God? But the prophets would not foretell this; for it is evil and unholy. Therefore one must consider neither whether they foretold it nor whether they did not, but whether the deed is worthy of God and good. And what is shameful and evil must be disbelieved, even if all men in their madness seem to foretell it. How, then, are the things done to this man, as to a god, holy? From this it appears that he suspected the argument that Jesus was prophesied is something strong for persuading hearers, and he tries to overthrow it by another plausible argument, saying: Therefore one must consider neither whether they foretold it nor whether they did not. But if he wished to oppose what is said by demonstration and not by fallacy, he ought to have said: Therefore it must be shown that they did not foretell it, or that what was said about Christ was not fulfilled in Jesus as they foretold it; and he should have added what seemed to him the proof. For so it would have appeared what the prophecies say that we refer to Jesus, and how he proves our interpretation false; and it would have been found whether he nobly overthrows what we adduce from the prophets for the account of Jesus, or whether he is caught shamelessly trying to force the clear evidence of truth into being not truth.

Since, positing hypothetically things impossible and unfitting for God, he says, If these things were prophesied about the God over all, must such things be believed about God because they are foretold?, and thinks he establishes that, even if the prophets had truly foretold such things about the Son of God, it would be impossible to believe the predictions that he would suffer or do them, it must be said that his hypothesis, being absurd, would produce conditionals ending in contradictory conclusions. This is shown as follows. If the true prophets of the God over all were to say that God would be a slave, or be sick, or die, these things will happen to God, for the prophets of the great God must speak truly. But also, if the true prophets of the God over all say these same things, since what is impossible by nature is not true, what the prophets say would not happen to God. And when two conditionals end in contradictory conclusions, by the theorem called “through two conditionals,” the antecedent common to both conditionals is refuted; here it is that the prophets foretell that the great God will be a slave or be sick or die. The conclusion, then, is that the prophets did not foretell that the great God would be a slave or be sick or die. The argument runs in this form: If the first, then the second; if the first, then not the second; therefore not the first. The Stoics also apply this form to a concrete case, saying: If you know that you are dead, you are dead; if you know that you are dead, you are not dead; it follows that you do not know that you are dead. They establish the conditionals in this way: If you know that you are dead, what you know is so; therefore it is so that you are dead. And again: if you know that you are dead, then, since there is something you know, you are not dead; for a dead man knows nothing. So it is plain that if you know that you are dead, you are not dead. And from both conditionals follows, as I said, the conclusion that you do not know that you are dead. Something of this sort holds for Celsus's hypothesis, stated in the words we quoted above.

But neither are the things we supposed hypothetically like the prophecies about Jesus. For the prophecies did not foretell that God would be crucified; they say of him who underwent death: “And we saw him, and he had no form nor beauty; but his form was without honour, failing beyond the sons of men; a man in affliction and pain, and knowing how to bear weakness.” See, then, how clearly they have called the one who suffered human things a man. And Jesus himself, knowing precisely that what was dying was a man, says to those plotting against him: “But now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth which I heard from God.” And if there was something divine in the man understood to be Jesus, namely the only-begotten of God and “the firstborn of all creation,” who says, “I am the truth,” and “I am the life,” and “I am the door,” and “I am the way,” and “I am the living bread that came down from heaven,” the account of him and of his being is surely different from that of the man understood to be Jesus. Therefore not even the very simplest Christians, who have not been brought up in rigorous arguments, would say that the truth has died, or the life, or the way, or the living bread that came down from heaven, or the resurrection; for the one who taught in the visible man Jesus says that he himself is the resurrection: “I am the resurrection.” None of us is so thunderstruck as to say, “The life has died,” or, “The resurrection has died.” Celsus's hypothesis would have had a place if we said that the prophets had foretold that God the Word, or the Truth, or the Life, or the Resurrection, or any of the other things the Son of God says he is, would die.

Celsus, then, speaks truly in this passage only in saying: But the prophets would not foretell this; for it is evil and unholy. And what is this but that the great God will be a slave or die? But what was prophesied by the prophets is worthy of God: that a certain “radiance” and “imprint” of the divine nature would come into life together with the holy soul of Jesus as it became man, to sow a word that would make the one who received it into his own soul, cultivated it, and brought it all to completion, akin to the God of the universe. This word has in itself the power of God the Word who would be in a human body and soul. And it will be so that his rays are not shut up in that one alone, nor is it said that the light which gives these rays, being God the Word, is nowhere else. The things concerning Jesus, then, in so far as they are understood as done by the divinity in him, are holy and do not conflict with the conception of the divine; and in so far as he was a man, adorned beyond every man by the highest participation in the Word himself and Wisdom itself, he endured as wise and perfect what the one who does everything for the whole human race, or even for all rational beings, had to endure. And there is nothing absurd in the man having died, and in his death not only being set forth as an example of dying for the sake of piety, but also having brought about the beginning and progress of the destruction of the evil one, the devil, who had taken possession of the whole earth. The signs of his overthrow are those who, because of the coming of Jesus, have everywhere escaped from the demons that held them, and, set free from slavery to them, dedicate themselves to God and to a piety toward him that grows purer day by day, as far as they can.

Next Celsus says this: Will they not consider this in turn? If the prophets of the God of the Jews foretold that this man would be his child, how is it that he gives laws through Moses to be rich and powerful, to fill the earth, to slaughter their enemies young and old and kill them with their whole families, which he himself does, as Moses says, before the eyes of the Jews, and besides this threatens them expressly, if they do not obey, to treat them as he treats their enemies; while his son, then, the man “of Nazareth,” gives contrary laws, that one who is rich or loves power or lays claim to wisdom or glory has no access to the Father, that one must care no more for food and storehouse than “the ravens” do, and less for clothing than “the lilies,” and must offer oneself to be struck again to the one who has struck once? Is it Moses or Jesus who lies? Or did the Father, when he sent him, forget what he had commanded Moses? Or did he condemn his own laws, change his mind, and send his messenger for the opposite purposes? Here Celsus, who professes to know everything, has had a most unlearned experience concerning the meaning of the Scriptures, supposing that there is no deeper sense in the law and the prophets than the words according to the letter. He does not see that the word would not have so plainly and implausibly promised bodily wealth to those who lived rightly, when the most righteous are shown to have lived in extreme poverty. The prophets, at any rate, who because of their pure life received the divine Spirit, “went about in sheepskins, in goatskins, destitute, afflicted, ill-treated, wandering in deserts and mountains and caves and the holes of the earth”; for “many are the afflictions of the righteous,” according to the psalmist. If Celsus read the law of Moses, he probably thought that the words “You will lend to many nations, but you will not borrow,” spoken to one who keeps the law, meant that the righteous man was promised that he would become so rich in blind wealth that because of the quantity of his money he would lend not only to the Jews, nor to one other nation or a second or a third, but to many. How much money, then, would the righteous man have had, receiving it according to the law as the reward of righteousness, so as to lend to “many nations”? It follows from such an interpretation that one must also suppose the righteous man never borrows, since it is written: “but you will not borrow.” Did the nation, then, remain for so long in the religion of Moses, while plainly seeing, according to Celsus, that the lawgiver was lying? For no one is recorded to have become so rich as to lend “to many nations.” It is not credible that, if they had been taught to understand the law as Celsus thought, and plainly saw that the promises in the law were false, they would have fought for the law. And if anyone brings forward the recorded sins of the people as an example of their contempt for the law, perhaps because they had condemned it as lying, it must be said to him that he must also read of the times in which the whole people is recorded, after doing evil before the Lord, to have changed for the better and returned to the religion of the law.

Moreover, if the law promised them power, saying, “You will rule over many nations, but they will not rule over you,” and nothing deeper is meant by these words, it is plain that the people would have condemned the promises of the law much more. Celsus paraphrases certain words that indicate that the whole earth would be filled with the seed of the Hebrews; which, as regards history, has happened after the coming of Jesus, rather as a sign of God's wrath, so to speak, than as his granting a blessing. And concerning the Jews being promised that they would slaughter their enemies, it must be said that anyone who reads carefully and attends to the words would find that the literal interpretation is impossible. For the present it is enough to cite from the Psalms how the righteous man is introduced as saying, among other things: “In the mornings I killed all the sinners of the land, to destroy from the city of the Lord all who work iniquity.” Consider the literal wording and the disposition of the speaker, whether, after first relating brave deeds, which anyone who wishes can read, he could add what would be possible according to the letter, that at no other time of day but in the morning he killed “all the sinners of the land,” so as to leave none of them alive, and whether he destroyed from Jerusalem every single man who worked “iniquity.” You will find many such things in the law too, like “We did not leave any of them alive.”

Celsus also brings forward that it was foretold to them that if they did not obey the law they would suffer the same things they did to their enemies. Before Celsus, setting beside these what he thinks are contradictions of the law from the teaching of Christ, makes use of them, something must be said about what has been stated. We say, then, that the law is twofold, one according to the letter and the other according to the meaning, as some before us have also taught. And the law according to the letter is said, not so much by us as by God speaking in one of the prophets, to be “statutes that are not good” and “ordinances that are not good”; while the law according to the meaning is said, according to the same prophet, in the person of God, to be “good statutes” and “good ordinances.” For the prophet does not plainly contradict himself in the same passage. Consistently with this, Paul too said that “the letter” kills, which is equivalent to the literal sense, but “the Spirit” gives life, which has the same force as the sense according to the meaning. One can find in Paul something corresponding to what might be thought contradictions in the prophet. For as Ezekiel says in one place, “I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances that were not good, by which they shall not live,” and in another, “I gave them good statutes and good ordinances, by which they shall live,” or words to that effect, so Paul too, where he wishes to disparage the letter of the law, says: “If the ministry of death, carved in letters on stones, came with glory, so that the children of Israel could not gaze at the face of Moses because of the glory of his face, which was passing away, how will the ministry of the Spirit not be even more glorious?” But where he admires and approves the law, he calls it spiritual, saying, “We know that the law is spiritual,” and approves it in the words, “So the law is holy, and the commandment holy and righteous and good.”

If, then, the wording of the law promises wealth to the righteous, let Celsus, according to the “letter” that kills, think that blind wealth is spoken of in the promise; but we think of the sharp-sighted wealth, by which one is rich “in all speech and all knowledge,” and in the sense in which we charge “those who are rich in this present age not to be haughty, nor to set their hope on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy; to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share.” For “the wealth” in true goods “is the ransom of a man's soul,” according to Solomon; while the poverty opposed to it is destructive, because of which “the poor man does not withstand threat.” As we have explained about wealth, so we must speak about power, by which “one” righteous man is said to pursue “a thousand, and two” to put to flight “ten thousand.” If these things are understood so in the matter of wealth, see whether it does not follow from God's promise that one who is rich “in all speech and all knowledge” and all wisdom and every good work lends “to many nations” out of his wealth in speech, wisdom, and knowledge, as Paul lent, fully preaching “the gospel of Christ” “from Jerusalem” and round about as far as “Illyricum” to all the nations he visited. And since divine things were made known to him by revelation, his soul being enlightened by the divinity of the Word, for this reason he did not borrow, nor did he need a man to minister the word to him. And since it is also written, “You will rule over many nations, but they will not rule over you,” by the power that comes from the Word he ruled over those from the Gentiles, subjecting them to the teaching of Christ Jesus, and was never placed under men as though they were his superiors. So too he filled the earth.

And if we must also explain the slaughtering, and at the same time the power of the righteous man in all things, it must be said that when he says, “In the mornings I killed all the sinners of the land, to destroy from the city of the Lord all who work iniquity,” he figuratively called the flesh “land,” whose “mind” “is enmity toward God,” and his own soul “the city of the Lord,” in which there was “a temple of God,” since he had received a right opinion and conception of God, admired by all who saw it. At the same time, then, as the rays of the sun “of righteousness” shone on his soul, empowered and strengthened as it were by them, he killed all “the mind of the flesh,” called “sinners of the land,” and destroyed from “the city of the Lord” in his soul “all who work iniquity,” the reasonings and thoughts hostile to the truth. So too the righteous destroy every “living thing” of the enemies and of those who come from wickedness, so that not even an infant evil that has just begun to sprout is left. In this way we also understand the saying in the hundred and thirty-sixth Psalm, which runs: “Wretched daughter of Babylon, blessed is he who will repay you the recompense you repaid us; blessed is he who will seize and dash your infants against the rock.” For the “infants of Babylon,” which means confusion, are the confusing thoughts that come from wickedness, just beginning to sprout and spring up in the soul. The one who seizes them, so as to dash their heads against the firmness and strength of the Word, dashes “the infants” of “Babylon” “against the rock,” and for this reason becomes “blessed.” Let God, then, command us to kill the things of wickedness young and old and with their whole families, teaching nothing contrary to what Jesus proclaimed; and let God bring about, before the eyes of the Jews “in secret,” the destruction of the enemies and of all that comes from wickedness. And let it be so that those who do not obey the law and word of God, having become like the enemies and shaped by wickedness, suffer what those who have abandoned the words of God deserve to suffer.

It is clear from this, then, how Jesus, the man “of Nazareth,” does not legislate against what was said about wealth and those who go beyond it, in saying that it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, whether one takes “rich” more simply as the one distracted by wealth and hindered by it, as by thorns, from bearing the fruits of the word, or as the one rich in false doctrines, of whom it is written in Proverbs: “Better a poor righteous man than a rich liar.” Celsus probably took from “Whoever wishes to be first among you, let him be servant of all,” and “The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them,” and “Those in authority over them are called benefactors,” that Jesus forbade love of power; but this must not be thought contrary to “You will rule over many nations, but they will not rule over you,” especially in view of our explanation of that saying. Next Celsus throws in something about wisdom, thinking that Jesus teaches that the wise man has no access to the Father. Let us say to him: What kind of wise man? If it is the one formed by what is called the wisdom “of this world,” which is foolishness “with God,” we too will say that the man wise in this way has no access to the Father. But if one understands Christ as wisdom, since Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, we say not only that the man wise in this way has access to the Father, but also that the one adorned with the gift called the word “of wisdom,” given through the Spirit, far surpasses those who are not.

Again, we say that laying claim to glory among men is forbidden not only by the teaching of Jesus but also by the Old Testament. At any rate, one of the prophets, calling a curse on himself if he should be guilty of sins, says that worldly glory too would befall him as one of the greatest evils. He speaks thus: “Lord my God, if I have done this, if there is injustice in my hands, if I have repaid those who repaid me with evil, then may I fall empty before my enemies; then may the enemy pursue my soul and overtake it, and trample my life to the ground, and lay my glory in the dust.” Nor are the words “Do not be anxious about what you will eat or what you will drink. Consider the birds of the heaven,” or “Consider the ravens, that they neither sow nor reap, and your heavenly Father feeds them; how much more are you worth than the birds?” and “Why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field,” and what follows, contrary to the blessings in the law that teach that the righteous man eats and is filled, or to what Solomon says in this way: “The righteous man eats and satisfies his soul, but the souls of the ungodly are in want.” For one must see that it is the food of the soul that is indicated in the blessing according to the law, by which not the composite man is filled but the soul alone. And from the Gospel one must perhaps take something deeper, perhaps something simpler: that one must not let one's soul be distracted by cares about food and clothing, but, practising frugality, be persuaded that one is provided for by God, if one cares only for necessities.

Celsus, without setting side by side the apparently contrary passages of the law and of the Gospel, also says: and must offer oneself to be struck again to the one who has struck once. We shall say that we know both the saying spoken to those of old, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” and have read, “But I say to you,” “To the one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.” But since Celsus, I think, having heard things from those who separate the divinity of the Gospel from the divinity of the law, sets out such things, it must be said to his argument that the ancient writings too know, “To the one who strikes you on the right cheek, offer the other also.” At any rate, it is written in the Lamentations of Jeremiah: “It is good for a man when he bears a yoke in his youth; he will sit alone and keep silent, because he has taken it upon himself. He will give his cheek to the one who strikes him, and he will be filled with reproaches.” The Gospel, then, does not set in opposition to the God of the law a God who legislates differently, not even concerning a literal blow on the cheek. Neither of the two is lying, neither Moses nor Jesus; nor did the Father, when he sent Jesus, forget what he had commanded Moses; nor did he condemn his own laws, change his mind, and send his messenger for the opposite purposes.

If we must say a few words about the different way of life which the Jews formerly followed according to Moses, and which the Christians now wish to achieve according to the teaching of Jesus, we shall say that it did not suit the calling of the Gentiles, who are subject to the Romans, to live according to the law of Moses in its letter; nor was it possible for the Jews of old to keep the structure of their commonwealth intact if, hypothetically, they had followed the way of life according to the Gospel. For Christians could not, according to the law of Moses, put to death enemies or those who had acted against the law and were judged to deserve death by fire or stoning, since not even the Jews, though they wish to, can carry these things out according to that law as the law commanded. Again, if you take away from the Jews of that time, who had their own commonwealth and land, the right to march against their enemies, to fight for their ancestral ways, and to put to death or otherwise punish adulterers or murderers or those who had done anything like this, nothing would remain but for them to be utterly destroyed all at once when their enemies attacked the nation, since they would have been unnerved by their own law and prevented from defending themselves against their enemies. And providence, which formerly gave the law and now the Gospel of Jesus Christ, not wishing the Jewish way of life to prevail any longer, destroyed their city and temple and the worship of God in the temple through sacrifices and the prescribed service. And just as it destroyed those things, not wishing them to be carried out any longer, in the same way it increased the Christian way of life, which has grown daily in numbers and now in freedom of speech too, although countless obstacles arose to prevent the teaching of Jesus from being sown in the world. But since it was God who wished the Gentiles too to be helped by the teaching of Jesus the Christ, every human plan against the Christians was overthrown; and the more kings and rulers of nations and peoples everywhere humbled them, the more numerous they became, “and they grew exceedingly strong.”

Next Celsus, setting out at length as said by us things not said by us about God, as though he were by nature a body and a body of human shape, wishes to overthrow things we have not asserted; it would be superfluous to quote them or their refutation. For if we said what he says we assert about God, and he opposed it, it would have been necessary for us to set out his words, establish our own position, and refute his. But if he strings together for himself things he heard from no one, or, granting that he heard them, from some simple and guileless people who do not know the meaning of the word, we need not busy ourselves about what is unnecessary. For the Scriptures clearly say that God is incorporeal; that is why “no one has ever seen God,” and “the firstborn of all creation” is said to be “the image of the invisible God,” as though it said “of the incorporeal.” We have discussed God adequately earlier too, when we examined how we understand “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”