Against Celsus 7.18

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.