The Lowest of the Seriphians

After this Celsus says that “these goatherds and shepherds supposed there was one God — Most High, or Adonai, or Heavenly, or Sabaoth, or whatever else they enjoy calling this world of ours — and they knew nothing beyond that.” And a little further on he says that it makes no difference whether a man calls the God who is over all by the name the Greeks use, Zeus, or by such and such a name among the Indians, or such and such among the Egyptians. [a]

In answer to this we have to say that a deep and hidden subject drops into the argument here: the nature of names. Are names ours by agreement, as Aristotle thinks? Or do they belong to things by nature, as the Stoics hold — the first sounds imitating the things they name, which is how the Stoics bring in the elements of their etymology? Or are they by nature in a different sense, as Epicurus teaches: that the first human beings burst out certain sounds at the things in front of them?

Suppose, then, that in a treatment of its own we can set out the nature of names that actually work — some of which are used by the learned among the Egyptians, by the scholars among the Persian Magi, and, among the philosophers of India, by the Brahmans or the Samanaeans, and so on nation by nation. And suppose we can establish that what people call magic is not, as the followers of Epicurus and Aristotle suppose, a thing with no substance to it at all, but is, as those skilled in it show, something that holds together, with reasons behind it that very few men know. Then we will say this: the name Sabaoth, and the name Adonai, and all the other names handed down among the Hebrews with such solemnity, are not laid on ordinary created things. They belong to a hidden teaching about God, and they refer back to the Maker of all things.

That is why these names have power when they are spoken along with the sequence of words woven together with them. Other names, carried in the Egyptian tongue, are taken up for certain purposes over certain demons that can do only certain things; and others in the Persian language over other powers; and so it goes, nation by nation. So it will be found that the demons on earth, each allotted his own region, carry names that fit the speech of that place and people.

Anyone, then, who has taken in even a little of this, and has a mind above the common, will be careful about fitting names of one kind to things of another. He will not want to end up like the men who wrongly carry the name “God” over to lifeless matter, or who drag the title “the Good” down from the first cause, or down from virtue and beauty, and hand it to blind wealth, or to a well-proportioned mixture of flesh and blood and bones in good health and condition, or to what passes for noble birth.

And perhaps the man who drags the name “God,” or the name “the Good,” down to things it does not belong to is in no less danger than the man who exchanges names on some hidden system, carrying the names of lesser beings over to greater ones and the names of the greater to the lesser. I will not even dwell on this: that when you say “Zeus” you hear along with it the son of Kronos and Rhea, the husband of Hera, the brother of Poseidon, the father of Athena and Artemis, the one who lay with his own daughter Persephone; or that when you say “Apollo” you hear the son of Leto and Zeus, the brother of Artemis, the half-brother of Hermes by the same father — and all the rest of what Celsus’ wise men bring in, the fathers of these opinions, the ancient theologians of the Greeks. [f]

For on what arbitrary basis is Zeus properly called by that name, and yet Kronos is not his father and Rhea his mother? The same has to be done with all the rest of those called gods. But this charge does not touch in the least those who, on some hidden principle, set the name Sabaoth on God, or Adonai, or any of the other names.

When a man is able to reason about names in that hidden way, he will find much to say about what the angels of God are called. One of them is called Michael, another Gabriel, another Raphael, each named for the work he carries out in the universe by the will of the God of all. And our own Jesus belongs to the same philosophy of names. His name has already been plainly seen to drive countless demons out of souls and bodies, and it had its effect on the ones it drove them out of.

Still on the subject of names, this has to be added. Men skilled in the use of spells report that the same spell said in its own language can do what the spell promises, but that once it is put into any other language at all, it can be seen to go slack and do nothing. So it is not the things the words stand for, but the qualities and peculiarities of the sounds themselves, that hold some power for this purpose or that.

On such grounds as these we will also defend Christians who fight to the death rather than call Zeus God, or name him in any other language. They either say the common name, “God,” with nothing added to define it, or they add something — “the Maker of all things,” “the maker of heaven and earth,” “the one who sent these particular wise men down to the human race” — since the name “God,” fitted onto a man’s name, accomplishes a certain power among people.

Much more could be said on the subject of names, against those who think we ought to be indifferent about how we use them. Plato is admired for saying in the Philebus, “My own fear about the names of the gods, Protarchus, is no small one,” and he said it because Philebus, in his conversation with Socrates, had called pleasure a god. How, then, can we not think better still of the caution of Christians, who attach none of the names taken from the myth-makers to the Maker of the universe? But enough of this for now.

Now let us see in what way this Celsus, who claims to know everything, brings a false charge against the Jews. He says they worship angels and are given to sorcery, and that Moses was their instructor in it. Where in the writings of Moses did he find the lawgiver handing down the worship of angels? Let him say — he who claims to know all about Christians and Jews. And how can there be sorcery among people who have taken up the law of Moses and have read this command? “You shall not attach yourselves to enchanters, to be defiled by them.” [j]

He also promises to show later on how the Jews were tripped up by ignorance and led astray. Now if he had found that the Jews’ ignorance about Jesus the Christ came of their not having listened to the prophecies about him, he would truly have shown how the Jews were tripped up. As it is, he has no wish even to picture that, and he takes what are not the Jews’ mistakes to be their mistakes.

Having promised to teach us about the Jews later, Celsus first speaks about our Savior — as the man who became the leader of the birth by which we are Christians. He says that a very few years ago Jesus began teaching this doctrine, and that Christians consider him the Son of God. On this very point, that he came only a few years ago, here is what we say. Could it have happened without God that Jesus, wanting to sow his word and teaching in so few years, was able to do so much — that in many parts of our inhabited world not a few people, Greeks and foreigners, the wise and the foolish, were won over to his word, so that they fight to the death for Christianity rather than deny him? No one is on record as doing that for any other body of teaching.

For my part — and I am not flattering the message, but trying to look at the facts and see them as they are — I would say this. Even the men who heal great numbers of sick bodies do not reach their end, the body’s health, without God. And suppose someone could set souls free from the flood of wickedness, from acts of self-indulgence and injustice and from contempt for the divine, and could point, as evidence of the work, to a hundred people made better — let the number stand at a hundred. No one could reasonably say that he had planted in those hundred, without God, a message able to take away so many evils.

And if a man who considers this fairly agrees that nothing better has ever come about among human beings without God, how much more confidently will he say it about Jesus. Let him set the earlier lives of the many who come to his word beside their later ones. Let him consider what self-indulgence, what injustice, what greed each of them was living in before they were — as Celsus and those who think like him put it — deceived, and took up a message that ruins human life, so they say. And then let him consider how, from the time they received that message, they have become more considerate, more dignified, steadier — so that some of them, out of a longing for a purity beyond the ordinary and a wish to worship the divine more purely, will not touch even the sexual relations the law allows them.

Anyone who examines the facts will see that Jesus attempted what was beyond human nature, and having attempted it, brought it off. From the very beginning everything worked against his word being sown through the whole inhabited world: the emperors of each period, the commanders and governors under them, everyone, one may say, who had been handed any authority at all, and besides these the magistrates in the cities, the soldiers, and the people. And still it won, because it is the Word of God and its nature is not to be stopped. It became stronger than all those opponents; it took hold of the whole of Greece and of more than that among foreign lands, and it turned countless souls to the worship of God as he taught it. [m]

Now in a crowd of people won over by the message, it was bound to happen that the untrained and countrified would outnumber the more intelligent many times over, since they always do. But Celsus refuses to take note of this. He thinks that the message’s love for humanity, which reaches every soul “from the rising of the sun,” is the stuff of amateurs, and that being amateurish, with no strength in argument at all, it took hold of the untrained only. And yet not even he says that the untrained alone were brought by the message to the worship of God as Jesus taught it. He admits that there are among them some who are moderate, and considerate, and intelligent, and ready for allegory.

He also puts on a character — much the way a teacher of rhetoric puts up a schoolboy for an exercise — and brings on a Jew who says things to Jesus in a childish way, nothing worthy of a philosopher’s gray hairs. So let me examine what he says, as far as I am able, and show that he has nowhere kept the character of the Jew consistent through the speech he gives him. [p]

After that he has this Jew talk to Jesus himself and refute him, as he supposes, on many counts. First he charges that Jesus made up his own birth from a virgin. He also throws it in his face that he was born in a Jewish village, and from a local woman, poor, who worked with her hands for a living. He says she was thrown out by the man who had married her, a carpenter by trade, when she was convicted of adultery; that after being driven out by her husband and wandering about in disgrace she gave birth to Jesus in the dark; and that Jesus, because of his poverty, hired himself out in Egypt, and having tried out there certain powers that the Egyptians pride themselves on, came home full of himself over those powers and on their account announced that he was a god.

Now to a man who cannot let anything the unbelievers say go untested, but examines a matter from the beginning, all of this seems to me to fit exactly with Jesus having proved worthy of the prophecy that he is the Son of God.

For with human beings, what helps a man become distinguished and famous and get his name talked about is his family — when his parents happen to hold high position and advancement — and money, in those who brought him up and could spend it on their son’s education, and a homeland that is great and well known. But when a man who has the opposite of all these is nevertheless able to lift his head above what is holding him back, to be known, to shake those who hear about him, and to become plain and visible to the whole inhabited world, which talks about him in a way nothing like that — how can we help admiring such a nature? It is great in itself; it throws itself at great things; and it has an outspokenness that no one can look down on. [r]

And if a man looks further into such a life, how can he not ask this: how did someone brought up in a lowly home and in poverty, who was given no regular schooling and learned no arguments or doctrines that might have made him persuasive enough to address crowds and play the popular leader and draw more hearers to himself — how did he give himself to teaching new doctrines, and bring into the human race a message that both broke down the customs of the Jews, while still holding their prophets in honor, and pulled down the laws of the Greeks, above all their laws about the divine?

And how could such a man, brought up in such a way, who learned nothing worth respect from any human being — as even those who slander him admit — have been able to speak, in a way not at all to be looked down on, about the judgment of God, and the punishments that fall on wickedness, and the honors given for what is good? So well that not only country people and the untrained were carried along by what he said, but also not a few of the more intelligent, men able to look inside the plainer-seeming stories in circulation and see that they hold within them, so to speak, something more hidden still.

The Seriphian in Plato reproached Themistocles, who had become famous for his generalship, saying that the glory he had taken up was not from his own character but from the good luck of a homeland that was the most distinguished in all Greece. And he heard back from a fair-minded Themistocles, who could see that his homeland had in fact contributed to his fame: “I would never have become so famous if I had been a Seriphian — and you would never have become a Themistocles even if you had had the good luck to be an Athenian.”

But our own Jesus is reproached for having come from a village, and not a Greek one, and from a nation that most people hold in no esteem. He is spoken against for being the son of a poor woman who worked with her hands, and for leaving his homeland because of poverty and hiring himself out in Egypt. To keep to the example just taken, he was not only a Seriphian, from the smallest and least noticed of islands, but, one might say, the lowest born of the Seriphians. And this man has been able to shake the whole inhabited world of human beings — not only more than Themistocles the Athenian, but more than Pythagoras, or Plato, or any of the other wise men or kings or generals anywhere in the world.

Who, then, searching out the nature of these facts with any care at all, would not be struck at this man’s victory — at his having been able, by his fame, to climb above everything that makes for a bad name, and above every famous man who ever lived? And in fact, among people who become famous, it is rare for anyone to be able to take up fame for several things at once. One man is admired for wisdom, another for generalship; some foreigners for the astonishing powers they get through spells; and others for other things. Not many are admired and become famous for many things at the same time. But this man, on top of everything else, is admired for his wisdom, and for his powers, and for his rule. [v]

For he persuaded some people to break away from their laws and come over to him — not the way a tyrant does, nor the way a bandit does who oils his followers up for a fight against other people, nor the way a rich man does who supplies what those who come to him need, nor as any of the men everyone agrees deserve blame. He did it as a teacher of the account of the God of all things, and of the worship that belongs to him, and of every way of living that can make a man who lives by it at home with the God who is over all.

And for Themistocles, or any other famous man, nothing arose that stood in the way of his fame. But for this man, on top of what we have already listed — and that was enough to bury even a very gifted man’s soul in disgrace — there was also the death that looks like the death of a man without honor: he was crucified. That was enough to blot out the fame that had already come to him and taken hold, and enough to make those who had earlier been deceived, as the people who do not accept his teaching suppose, stand back from the deception and pass judgment on the man who deceived them.