The Sign of the Virgin

There is something else here worth wondering at. Suppose, as the men who slander Jesus say, that his disciples never saw him raised from the dead and were never convinced that there was something more than human about him. Where, then, did it come from — the nerve not only to face the same sufferings as their teacher, but to go straight at the danger, leave their own countries behind, and teach, as Jesus wanted them to, the message he had handed on to them? I think that no one who examines the facts fairly would say that these men handed themselves over to a life of constant danger for the sake of Jesus’ teaching without some deep conviction he had produced in them — a conviction that taught them not only to hold to what he taught but to bring others around to it as well. And to bring others around when it was perfectly plain that ruin, as human life reckons ruin, hung over anyone who dared to introduce something new everywhere and to everyone, and who could keep as a friend no one who stayed with the old beliefs and customs. [a]

Did Jesus’ disciples not see this? They dared to prove, not only to Jews out of the words of the prophets that this was the man the prophets had spoken of, but to all the other nations as well, that the man crucified only yesterday or the day before took that death on himself willingly for the human race — a death like the deaths of those who have died for their countries to put out an epidemic that had taken hold, or a failure of the crops, or a season of disastrous voyages. For it is likely that there is in the nature of things, by certain reasons that are hidden and hard for most people to grasp, a power of this kind: that one righteous man, dying willingly for the common good, turns away the evil spirits that bring on plagues and crop failures and losses at sea and other such things.

So let those who want to disbelieve that Jesus died for human beings by way of a cross say whether they also refuse the many accounts, Greek and non-Greek alike, of people who died for the common good and so put an end to the evils that had seized cities and whole nations. Or will they say that those things really happened, but that there is nothing plausible in the case of the one who is reckoned a man dying to bring down a great demon, the ruler of demons, who had every human soul that ever came down to earth in subjection to him? Jesus’ disciples saw this, and much more besides — things they had likely learned from Jesus in private — and they were filled with a certain power. It was no virgin out of a poem who gave them their strength and courage, but the true understanding and wisdom of God. And so they set out to become known among all people, not among the Argives only but among all the Greeks and non-Greeks together, and to carry off noble glory for themselves.

But let us go back to the Jew Celsus puts on stage. In that speech Jesus’ mother is written up as having been thrown out by the carpenter who was engaged to her, convicted of adultery, and as bearing a child by a soldier named Panthera. Let us see whether the men who made up this tale — the virgin’s adultery with Panthera, the carpenter throwing her out — were not blindly inventing the whole thing in order to bring down the extraordinary account of her conception by the Holy Spirit. They could have falsified the story some other way, since it is so far outside the ordinary, and then they would not have conceded, almost against their will, that Jesus was not born from an ordinary human marriage. It followed that people who would not accept Jesus’ extraordinary birth would make up some lie. But they did not make it up plausibly. They kept the fact that the virgin conceived Jesus, and that she did not conceive him by Joseph — and to anyone able to hear an invention and see through it, the lie was obvious. [f]

Does it stand to reason? Here is a man who dared so much for the human race, so that all Greeks and non-Greeks, as far as it lay with him, might look for God’s judgment, turn away from wickedness, and do everything in a way that pleases the Maker of all things — and this man is supposed to have had no extraordinary birth, but the most lawless and shameful birth of all? I will put it as to Greeks, and above all to Celsus, who may or may not hold Plato’s views but who quotes them at any rate. Does the one who sends souls down into human bodies shove the man who was going to dare so much, teach so many, and pull so many out of the flood of wickedness into the most shameful birth of all, and not bring him into human life even through a lawful marriage? Or is it more reasonable that every soul, for certain hidden reasons — I am speaking now on the view of Pythagoras and Plato and Empedocles, whom Celsus names again and again — is put into a body, and put there according to its worth and its earlier habits? Then it is likely that this soul too, which by living among us was going to do more good than the souls of many people (I say “many” so as not to seem to be forcing the point by saying “all”), needed a body — one not only outstanding among human bodies, but better than every one of them.

Take a soul that, for certain hidden reasons, deserves not to be placed altogether in the body of an animal without reason, and yet not purely in the body of a rational creature either. It is clothed in a monstrous body, so that reason cannot come to its full growth in a thing shaped that way, with a head out of proportion to the rest of it and much too short. Another soul takes a body of a kind that leaves it a little more rational than the first; another more rational still, the nature of the body working against its grasp of reason to a greater or a lesser degree. Why, then, should there not also be some soul that takes an altogether extraordinary body — a body with something in common with other people’s, so that it can live alongside them, and something exceptional as well, so that the soul can go through life without ever tasting wickedness? [j]

And if there is anything in what the physiognomists hold — Zopyrus, or Loxus, or Polemon, or whoever else has written on the subject and professed to know, by some marvel, that every body is fitted to the character of its soul — then a body had to come into being for the soul that was going to live among us so extraordinarily and do great things. Not, as Celsus thinks, from Panthera’s adultery with the virgin! Out of unclean couplings like that, what had to come was some fool who would do people harm, a teacher of self-indulgence and injustice and every other evil, not of self-restraint and righteousness and the other virtues.

No — as the prophets also foretold, it was from a virgin, who by the promised sign gives birth to the one named for the thing itself, showing that at his birth God would be with human beings. And it seems to me fitting, against the Jew Celsus puts on stage, to set down Isaiah’s prophecy, which says that Immanuel would be born from a virgin. Celsus did not set it down. Either he did not know it — he who claims to know everything — or else he read it and deliberately kept quiet, so as not to look as though he were building up, against his will, an argument that ran against what he had set out to do. [l]

The wording runs like this. And the Lord went on speaking to Ahaz: “Ask for yourself a sign from the Lord your God, in the depth or in the height.” And Ahaz said, “I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test.” And he said, “Listen, then, house of David. Is it a small thing for you to make trouble for men? Must you make trouble for the Lord as well? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look: the virgin will conceive and bear a son, and you will call his name Immanuel” — which means “God with us.”

And that Celsus left the prophecy out with mischief in mind is clear to me from this: he quotes a great deal from the Gospel according to Matthew — the star that rose at Jesus’ birth, and other extraordinary things — and yet he never mentioned this at all. And if a Jew splits hairs and says the text is not “Look: the virgin” but “Look: the young woman,” we will answer him that the word aalma — which the Seventy rendered “virgin” and others “young woman” — stands, they say, in Deuteronomy as well, and there it is used of a virgin, in this passage: “If there is a girl, a virgin engaged to a man, and someone finds her in the city and sleeps with her, you shall bring them both out to the gate of their city, and they shall be stoned with stones and die: the young woman on this ground, that she did not cry out in the city, and the man on this ground, that he violated his neighbor’s wife.” And next: “But if a man finds the engaged girl out in open country, and the man forces her and sleeps with her, you shall put to death only the man who slept with her; and to the young woman you shall do nothing. There is in the young woman no sin deserving death.”

But I do not want to seem to be leaning on a Hebrew word, offering people who cannot judge whether to accept it or not that kind of support for the claim that the prophet said this man would be born from a virgin — the man at whose birth the words “God with us” were spoken. So let us make the case from the wording itself. The Lord is recorded as saying to Ahaz, “Ask for yourself a sign from the Lord your God, in the depth or in the height,” and next comes the sign that is given: “Look: the virgin will conceive and bear a son.” What sort of sign, then, would it be for a young woman who is not a virgin to give birth? And which of the two better fits the bearing of Immanuel, that is, “God with us” — a woman who has slept with a man and conceived through a woman’s desire, or one still pure and chaste and a virgin? It is the second who fits. She is the one to bear the child at whose birth it is said, “God with us.” [p]

And if he goes on splitting hairs and says that the words “Ask for yourself a sign from the Lord your God” were spoken to Ahaz, we will answer: in Ahaz’s own time, who was born at whose birth the word “Immanuel,” which is “God with us,” is used? If no one can be found, then plainly what was said to Ahaz was said to the house of David, since it is written that the Savior came “from the seed of David according to the flesh.” And this sign is said to be “in the depth or in the height,” since “the one who went down is the same one who went up above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.” I say all this as against a Jew who accepts prophecy. But let Celsus tell me, or any of those who think as he does, with what mind the prophet says these things about the future, or the rest of what stands written in the prophecies. Is it with foreknowledge of the future, or not? If it is with foreknowledge of the future, then the prophets had a divine spirit in them. If it is not, let him explain what is going on in a man who speaks so boldly about the future and is admired among the Jews for prophecy.

Since we have once come to the subject of the prophets, what follows will be of use not only to Jews, who believe the prophets spoke by a divine spirit, but to the fair-minded among the Greeks as well. To them we say this. You have to grant that the Jews had prophets, if they were going to be held together under the law given them, and to go on believing in the Maker, as they had received him, and to have no excuse, so far as the law went, for defecting to the many gods of the nations. [s]

Here is how we show that it was necessary. “The nations,” as it is written in the Jews’ own law, “will listen to omens and to divination”; but to that people it is said, “The Lord your God has not given it to you so.” And joined to this is the promise, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet from among your brothers.” The nations used divination — by chance words overheard, by signs, by birds, by belly-talkers, by men who profess to read a sacrifice, or by Chaldeans casting horoscopes — and every one of these was forbidden to the Jews. So if the Jews had no support at all for knowing the future, then, driven by the ordinary human appetite for knowing what is coming, they would have despised their own prophets as having nothing divine in them; they would not have received a single prophet after Moses, and would not have written their words down; and they would have deserted to the oracles and shrines of the nations, or tried to set up something of the kind among themselves.

So there is nothing strange in their prophets having predicted even ordinary matters, as a support to people who long for that kind of thing — Samuel prophesying about lost donkeys, and the prophet recorded in 1 Kings about the sickness of a king’s son. And how could the men who upheld the Jews’ law have rebuked anyone who wanted to get divination out of idols? — as Elijah is found rebuking Ahaziah and saying, “Is it because there is no God in Israel that you are going to inquire of Baal the Fly, the god of Ekron?”

I think, then, that a fair case has been made — not only that our Savior was to be born from a virgin, but also that there were prophets among the Jews, who foretold not only general things about the future (about Christ, about the kingdoms of the world, about what would happen to Israel, about the nations that would come to trust the Savior, and much else said about him), but particular things as well: how the lost donkeys of Kish would be found, and about the illness the son of the king of Israel fell into, and anything else of the kind that is written down. [x]

There is more to be said to the Greeks, who will not believe that Jesus was born from a virgin. The Maker showed, in the making of all the different kinds of animals, that what he had the power to do in one animal he could do, if he chose, in others and in human beings themselves. There are found to be females among the animals that have no union with a male — as the writers on animals say of vultures — and this animal keeps the succession of its kind going without any mating. So what is so extraordinary about this: that when God chose to send a divine teacher to the human race, he brought it about that, in place of the seed-principle that comes from the union of males with women, the principle of the one to be born should come into being in another way? And on the Greeks’ own showing, not all human beings came from a man and a woman. If the world came into being, as many of the Greeks are pleased to admit, then the first human beings must have come not from intercourse but out of the earth, with seed-principles taking form in the earth — which I consider harder to believe than that Jesus came to be, in half of his birth, like the rest of us.

And there is nothing out of place in using Greek histories against Greeks, so that we do not seem to be the only people who resort to a story of this kind. Some have seen fit to write — not about ancient and heroic tales, but about things that happened only yesterday or the day before — that Plato too was born of Amphictione, Ariston being kept from intercourse with her until she had given birth to the child sown in her by Apollo. But these really are myths, and what set them going was the impulse to invent something of the sort about a man they considered to have more wisdom and power than the crowd, and to have taken the beginning of his bodily makeup from better and more divine seed, since they thought that this suited people too great to be merely human. And since Celsus brought on his Jew arguing with Jesus and tearing to pieces, as he supposes, the pretense of his birth from a virgin, dragging in the Greek myths about Danaë and Melanippe and Auge and Antiope — our answer is that such talk suited a buffoon, and not a man writing in earnest.