Moses Among the Wise Nations

Celsus thinks that one and the same body of teaching can be traced across many nations, and he names every people he takes to have started some strand of it. But for some reason he brings a malicious charge against the Jews alone, and leaves their nation off the list — as though they had never worked at the same questions and come to the same conclusions as the rest, or held views close to theirs on a great many points. It is fair, then, to ask him this. Why does he trust the histories of foreign peoples and of Greeks about how ancient the nations he names are, and yet stamp the histories of this one nation as false? If each people set down what happened among them out of a love of truth, why do we distrust the prophets of the Jews and no one else? And if Moses and the prophets wrote much of their history to gratify their own system, why should we not say the same of the historians of every other country? [a]

Or is this how it goes? When the Egyptians speak evil of the Jews in their own histories, they are to be believed about the Jews; but when the Jews say the same things about the Egyptians — recording that they suffered a great deal of injustice at their hands, and that the Egyptians were punished by God for it — then the Jews are lying. And this does not apply to the Egyptians only. We will find that the Assyrians had dealings with the Jews, and that this too is recorded in the ancient histories of the Assyrians; and in the same way the writers of the Jews recorded that the Assyrians were their enemies. I say “the writers of the Jews” so as not to look as if I were settling the question in advance by saying “the prophets.”

Notice at once, then, how self-serving the man is: he trusts one set of nations as wise, and condemns the other as utterly senseless. Listen to Celsus himself: “There is an ancient account, going back to the beginning, which the wisest nations and cities and wise men have always busied themselves with.” And yet he was not willing to call the Jews a most wise nation, even alongside the Egyptians, Assyrians, Indians, Persians, Odrysians, Samothracians, and Eleusinians.

How much fairer than Celsus is Numenius the Pythagorean — a man who has shown in a great deal of writing that he is thoroughly worth listening to, who has put many teachings to the test and gathered from many sources whatever struck him as true. In the first book of his work On the Good, discussing the nations that have taken God to be without a body, he counts the Jews in among them, and he did not shrink from using the words of their prophets in his book and reading them figuratively. Hermippus, too, is said to have recorded in the first book of his On Lawgivers that Pythagoras brought over from the Jews to the Greeks the philosophy he introduced. And there is a book about the Jews in circulation by the historian Hecataeus, in which so much is granted to that nation for its wisdom that Herennius Philo, in his own treatise on the Jews, first doubts whether the book is really the historian’s, and then says that if it is, Hecataeus was probably carried away by how convincing he found the Jews, and gave his assent to their account. [d]

I am amazed that Celsus should rank the Odrysians and Samothracians and Eleusinians and Hyperboreans among the most ancient and the wisest nations, and yet not think the Jews worth admitting either among the wise or among the ancient. There are plenty of books in circulation among the Egyptians and Phoenicians and Greeks that testify to how old this people is; I have thought it unnecessary to quote them. Anyone who wants to may read what Flavius Josephus wrote in his two books on the antiquity of the Jews, where he brings together a large collection of writers who testify to it; and there is also the Address to the Greeks by Tatian the younger, which sets out with enormous learning the historians who have written about the antiquity of the Jews and of Moses. [e]

So it seems that Celsus says these things not out of any love for truth, but out of a taste for making enemies — his aim being to attack the origin of Christianity, which hangs on the Jews. He calls Homer’s milk-eaters, and the Druids of the Gauls, and the Getae most wise and ancient nations, because what they hold runs close to the Jewish teachings, though I do not know whether any writings of theirs survive at all. The Hebrews alone, so far as it lies with him, he throws out of both honors: antiquity and wisdom.

And again, when he draws up a list of ancient and wise men who benefited the people of their own day, and later generations through their books, he threw Moses off the list of the wise. Yet of Linus, whom Celsus put first among the names he gave, there survive neither laws nor discourses that ever turned a nation around and healed it — while a whole nation, scattered across the whole inhabited world, carries the laws of Moses. Ask yourself, then, whether he did not throw Moses off his list of wise men out of open malice, when he says that Linus and Musaeus and Orpheus and Pherecydes and Zoroaster the Persian and Pythagoras discussed these matters, that their teachings were deposited in books, and that the books have been kept safe down to this day. And he deliberately forgot the myth about the gods people believe in — that they are subject to human passions — which Orpheus above all set down in writing.

In what follows, Celsus attacks the history Moses wrote, and finds fault with those who read it figuratively and allegorically. One might well say to this most excellent gentleman, who titled his own book A True Account: “Why, my good man, do you speak with reverence of gods who fall into disasters of the sort your wise poets and philosophers write down — gods who couple in ways that pollute them, who make war on their own fathers, who cut off their fathers’ genitals — and boast that such things were dared and done and suffered? And when Moses says nothing of the kind about God, nor even about the holy angels, and far less about human beings — for in his books nobody ever dared what Kronos dared against Uranus, or Zeus against his own father, or what ‘the father of men and gods’ did when he lay with his own daughter — do you then think Moses deceived the people he gave laws to, and that they were taken in?” [g]

Celsus seems to me to be doing much what Thrasymachus does in Plato, when he will not let Socrates answer about justice as he wants to, but says: “Take care you do not say that the useful is the just, or the fitting, or anything else of that kind.” For in the same way Celsus, once he has accused the histories in Moses — as he supposes — and blamed those who read them allegorically, while at the same time paying them a certain compliment, that they are the more reasonable ones, then, having made his accusation as he pleased, blocks the people who are able from making the defense the facts themselves call for.

And, challenging him to set book against book, I would say: “Come now, my good man, take up the poems of Linus and Musaeus and Orpheus, and the writing of Pherecydes, and examine them alongside the laws of Moses — histories against histories, moral discourses against laws and commands. Then see which of the two can turn the hearers around on the spot, and which of them can actually ruin the listener. And notice this: the whole company of your writers gave little thought to people who would read them just as they stand; they wrote their philosophy, as you call it, for those alone who are able to read it figuratively and allegorically. [k]

“Moses, on the other hand, worked like a fine orator practicing a figure of speech, who takes care everywhere to bring out the double fold of his language. He did this through all five of his books. He gave the mass of the Jews under his law no opening for harm in the matter of morals, and he did not leave the few who could read with more understanding, and who were able to search out what he meant, a text with nothing in it to look into.

“Of your wise poets, even the books seem no longer to survive — and they would have been kept safe, if the reader had felt any benefit in them. But the writings of Moses have stirred many people who were strangers to the Jewish way of life into believing that, as those writings claim for themselves, the one who first laid down these laws and handed them over to Moses was God, the maker of the world. For it was fitting that the maker of the whole world, having laid down laws for the whole world, should give his words a power able to master people everywhere. And I say all this without yet examining the question of Jesus, but still showing that Moses — who is far less than the Lord — is, as the argument will make plain, far greater than your wise poets and philosophers.”

After this, Celsus, wanting quietly to discredit the account of the world’s making that Moses gives — which shows the world to be not yet ten thousand years old, but a good deal less than that — hides what he is after and sides with those who say the world was never made at all. For when he maintains that from all eternity there have been many burnings of the world and many floods, and that the flood in Deucalion’s time happened only lately, he makes it plain enough to anyone able to follow him that in his own view the world was never made. [n]

But let this man who brings charges against the faith of Christians tell us what demonstrative arguments forced him to accept that there have been many burnings and many floods, and that the most recent of all were the flood in Deucalion’s time and the fire in Phaethon’s. And if he puts forward Plato’s dialogues on these matters, we will say to him that we too are free to believe that a divine spirit made its home in the pure and reverent soul of Moses — a man who climbed above everything that was made and hung his whole self on the maker of all things, and who set out what belongs to God far more clearly than Plato, or than the other wise men among the Greeks and among the foreign nations. And if he demands from us our reasons for such a belief, let him first give his own for the things he has asserted without proof; and then, in turn, we will show that our position is the true one.

And yet, against his will, Celsus stumbles into testifying that the world is comparatively recent and not yet ten thousand years old, when he says that the Greeks think these things ancient because, owing to the floods and the burnings, they have neither seen nor kept any record of older events. But let Celsus keep, as his teachers in the myth of the burnings and the floodings, the men he takes to be the wisest of the Egyptians — men the traces of whose wisdom are animals without reason being worshiped, and arguments proving that such worship of God is reasonable, and withdrawn, and full of mystery. [p]

So when the Egyptians talk grandly about the divinity of animals and dress up their own account, they are wise. But if a man who has thrown in his lot with the law and the lawgiver of the Jews traces everything back to the maker of all things, the one God, then in the judgment of Celsus and men like him he ranks below the man who drags divinity down not only to reasoning, mortal creatures but even to creatures without reason — going beyond even the myth of passing from body to body, in which the soul falls from the arches of heaven and comes down as far as the animals without reason, the tame ones and the wildest alike. And if it is Egyptians telling the tale, they are credited with having philosophized in riddles and secrets; but if Moses writes histories for a whole nation and leaves them laws, then his words are counted empty myths that will not even bear an allegorical reading.

For that is what Celsus and the Epicureans think. [q]

He says: “Moses heard this teaching, the one found among the wise nations and among men worth listening to, and so got himself the name of something divine.” To this we have to answer — granting him, for the sake of argument, that Moses did hear an older teaching and hand it on to the Hebrews — that if the teaching he heard was false, and neither wise nor worthy of respect, and he took it up all the same and passed it on to the people under him, then he is open to blame. But if, as you yourself say, he gave his assent to teachings that were wise and true, and educated his own people by means of them, what has he done that deserves condemnation?

I could wish that Epicurus had heard that teaching, and Aristotle, whose views on providence are less irreverent than Epicurus’, and the Stoics, who say that God is a body. Then the world would not have been filled with a doctrine that either sets providence aside, or cuts it short, or brings in a corruptible first principle, the bodily one — by which the God of the Stoics is a body. They are not ashamed to say that he turns, and can be altered and changed through and through, and, in a word, is capable of being destroyed if there is anything to destroy him, but has the good luck not to be destroyed because there is nothing that can destroy him.

Meanwhile the teaching of the Jews and of the Christians, which guards God from turning and from being altered, is reckoned irreverent — because it will not join in the irreverence of people whose thoughts about God are irreverent, and because in its prayers to God it says, “But you are the same,” and because it holds as settled that God has said, “I have not changed.”

After this, Celsus, without condemning the circumcision of the genitals as the Jews practice it, claims that the custom came to them from the Egyptians — believing the Egyptians rather than Moses, who says that Abraham was the first man to be circumcised. And it is not Moses alone who records Abraham’s name and makes him a close friend of God. Many of the people who chant spells over demons use in their formulas the phrase “the God of Abraham,” and they do it because of the name and because of that righteous man’s closeness to God — which is why they take the phrase up at all — though they have no idea who Abraham is. [u]

The same has to be said of Isaac and Jacob and Israel. These names are admittedly Hebrew, and yet they are sown all through the lore of those Egyptians who claim to be able to produce some effect by it. As for the account of circumcision — which began with Abraham and is stopped by Jesus, who did not want his own disciples to do it — it is not our business to explain that now. The present moment is not for teaching about such things, but for a contest that pulls down the charges Celsus brings against the teaching of the Jews. He supposes that he will prove Christianity false more quickly if he can attack its origin, which lies in the writings of the Jews, and show that they are false as well.

Next Celsus says that “goatherds and shepherds, following Moses their leader, were led along by clumsy country tricks and so supposed there was one God.” Let him show us, then, how — now that the goatherds and shepherds have left off worshiping gods, which he takes to be an unreasonable thing to have done — he himself can establish the crowd of gods found among the Greeks, or among the other, foreign nations. Let him show the real existence and substance of Mnemosyne bearing the Muses to Zeus, or of Themis bearing the Hours; or let him prove that the Graces, forever naked, can exist as real beings. He will not be able to show, from anything they have ever done, that these Greek fabrications, which look as though they had been given bodies, are gods. [w]

For why should the Greek myths about the gods be any truer than, say, the Egyptian ones? The Egyptians know nothing in their own language of a Mnemosyne who is mother of nine Muses, or of a Themis who is mother of the Hours, or of a Eurynome as one of the Graces, or of any of the rest of these names.

How much more effective is this — and how much better than all these fabrications: to be persuaded by what we can see, by the good order of the world, and so to worship its maker, one maker of a work that is one; a work that breathes together with the whole of itself, and for that reason cannot have been made by many makers, just as the whole heaven is not held together by many souls setting it moving. One soul is enough: the one that carries the whole fixed sphere from east to west, and takes in, inside itself, everything the world has need of that is not complete in itself. For all of these are parts of the world, and God is no part of the whole; God must not be incomplete, the way a part is incomplete. And perhaps a deeper argument will show that God, properly speaking, is no more the whole than he is a part, since a whole is made up of parts — and reason will not let us accept that the God who is over all is made up of parts, no one of which can do what the other parts can.