Against Celsus 7.35

We have no need, then, as people who seek God in this way, to go where Celsus sends us, to the shrines of Trophonius, Amphiaraus, and Mopsus, where he says gods in human form are seen, and, as Celsus says, not deceptive but even clearly visible. For we know that these are demons, fed on the savour of burnt fat, on blood, and on the fumes rising from the sacrifices, and so held fast in the prisons built by their own desire, which the Greeks have supposed to be temples of gods. But we know that such places are the dwellings of deceiving demons. After this Celsus says maliciously of the gods in human form he has just mentioned that one will see them “not slipping by once, like the one who deceived these people, but always conversing with those who wish.” By this he seems to have supposed that Jesus was a phantom when he appeared to his disciples after the resurrection from the dead, as though he slipped by in order to be seen by them; whereas those whom he named gods in human form he thinks always converse with those who wish. But how can a phantom, as he himself says, slipping by to deceive those who saw it, after that sight accomplish so much, turn the souls of such people, and persuade them that they must do everything in a way pleasing to God, as those who will be judged? And how does what he names a phantom drive out demons and accomplish other workings not to be despised, not confined to one allotted place like his gods in human form, but reaching through the whole inhabited world, and gathering and drawing by its own divinity whomever it finds inclined toward the good life?