Against Celsus 8.42

I do not know how Celsus unwittingly fell into showing, in fact, that the demons or gods he praised a little before are most wicked, and take vengeance in retaliation rather than punish for correction, whenever someone reviles them. For he says: “If you had reviled Dionysus himself or Heracles in person, perhaps you would not have got off lightly.” Let whoever wishes explain how one who is not present hears anything, and why he is sometimes present and sometimes not, and what business the demons have in moving from place to place. Next he says, thinking that we call God the body of Jesus that was stretched out and punished, and not the divinity in him, and that he was considered God when he was stretched out and punished: “But those who stretched out and punished your god in person have suffered nothing.” Having said a good deal above about the human sufferings he underwent, we now willingly pass over the subject, so as not to seem to repeat ourselves. But since he says that those who punished Jesus suffered nothing afterwards in all this time, we shall show him and all who wish to learn that the city in which the Jewish people demanded that Jesus be crucified, saying, “Crucify, crucify him” (for they preferred that the robber cast “into prison for insurrection and murder” be released, and that “Jesus,” handed over “out of envy,” be crucified), not long afterwards was attacked and besieged for so long a time that it was overthrown from its foundations and made desolate, since God judged those who lived in that place unworthy of the common life of men. And, to speak paradoxically, sparing them, and seeing them incurable as regards a change for the better and growing daily in the flood of wickedness, he handed them over to their enemies. This happened because of the blood of Jesus shed on their land by their plotting, a land which could no longer hold those who had dared so great a crime against Jesus.