The Dove at the Baptism

Then, taking up the account written in the Gospel according to Matthew of Jesus’ going away into Egypt, he refuses to believe the marvels attached to it — that an angel gave the direction, and that there was anything hinted at in Jesus’ leaving Judea and living in Egypt. Instead he makes up something else of his own. He somehow grants the marvelous works of power Jesus did, by which he persuaded the crowds to follow him as Christ; but he wants to slander them as done by magic and not by divine power. For he says that Jesus was brought up in secret, that he hired himself out in Egypt, that he came to know certain powers there and went back home from there, and that on the strength of those powers he proclaimed himself a god. [a]

For my part, I do not see how a magician would have taken such trouble to teach a message that persuades people to do everything as though God will judge each one for all he has done — and to train his own disciples in it, the men he meant to use as servants of his teaching. So did they, taught in that way, win their hearers by doing works of power? Or did they do no works of power at all? To say that they did none, but that they came to believe with no supply of arguments to compare with the wisdom found in Greek dialectic, and then gave themselves to teaching a new message to whatever people they settled among, is completely unreasonable. What were they relying on when they taught the message and broke new ground? And if they too were doing works of power, what is there to convince anyone that magicians threw themselves into such dangers for the sake of a teaching that forbids magic?

I do not think it worth arguing against a statement made not in earnest but in mockery — this, for instance: “If the mother of Jesus was beautiful, then the god had intercourse with her because she was beautiful, though it is not in his nature to be in love with a perishable body.” Or this: “It was not even likely that the god would fall in love with her, since she was neither well off nor royal, seeing that not even her neighbors knew her.” And he is joking again when he says that when she was hated by the carpenter and thrown out, no divine power saved her, and no convincing word either. “None of this,” he says, “has anything to do with the kingdom of God.” How would talk like that differ from the abuse people trade at the crossroads, who say nothing worth taking seriously? [f]

Next after this, he takes from Matthew’s Gospel — and perhaps from the rest of the Gospels too — the account of the dove that flew down on the Savior as he was being baptized by John, and he wants to discredit what is said there as an invention. Having torn to pieces, as he supposed, the account of our Savior’s birth from a virgin, he does not then set out what follows it in order. Anger and hatred keep no order: angry and hostile men slander the people they hate as it occurs to them, and their feeling will not let them arrange their charges with care or in sequence. If he had kept to the order, he would have taken up the Gospel, and, having set out to accuse it, would have spoken against the first account, then gone on to the second, and so to the rest. As it is, after the birth from a virgin, this Celsus, who has undertaken to know everything about us, attacks the Holy Spirit’s appearing at the baptism in the form of a dove. Then after that he tries to discredit the fact that our Savior’s coming was foretold. And after that he runs back to what was written next after the birth of Jesus — the story of the star, and of the magi who came from the east “to worship” the child. [h]

You could find a great many things said in a jumble by Celsus all through his book, if you watched for them yourself. So even by this he stands convicted, before people who know how to keep order and how to inquire, of great presumption and boasting, in having titled his book A True Account — something no philosopher of any standing has ever done. Plato says it is not the mark of a man in his right mind to insist strongly about matters of this kind, which are far from clear; and Chrysippus, in many places, after setting out what moved him, sends us on to people we may find speaking better than he does. This man, then, wiser than these and than all the other Greeks, consistently with his claim to know everything, titled his book A True Account.

But so that we may not look as though we are deliberately passing over his headings because we have no answer to them, we have decided to take up each of the things he puts forward and settle it as best we can, attending not to the connection and sequence of the things themselves but to the order in which they are written down in his book. [j]

So let us see what he actually says in attacking the Holy Spirit, seen by the Savior as it were bodily in the form of a dove. It is still his Jew who says the following to the one we confess to be our Lord Jesus: “When you were washing beside John,” he says, “you say that a phantom of a bird flew down on you out of the air.” Then this Jew of his goes on questioning: “What witness worth trusting saw this apparition? Or who heard a voice from heaven adopting you as a son to God? There is nothing for it except your own word, and one man you bring forward from among those who were punished along with you.”

Before we begin our defense, it has to be said that wanting to establish almost any piece of history — even a true one — as having actually happened, and to produce an impression of it that really grips, is one of the very hardest things there is, and in some cases impossible. Suppose someone were to say that the Trojan war never happened, chiefly because an impossible story has been woven into it about a certain Achilles being the son of a sea goddess, Thetis, and of a man, Peleus; or Sarpedon the son of Zeus; or Ascalaphus and Ialmenus the sons of Ares; or Aeneas the son of Aphrodite. How would we establish that it did happen — especially under the weight of the fiction that has somehow been woven in alongside the opinion, held by everyone, that there really was a war at Ilium between Greeks and Trojans? Or suppose someone disbelieved the story of Oedipus and Jocasta and the two sons born to them, Eteocles and Polynices, because the Sphinx, a creature half maiden, has been woven into the account. How would we prove such a thing? And so too with the story of the Epigoni, though nothing of the sort is woven into that one, or with the return of the Heracleidae, or with countless other events. [l]

But a man who reads histories fair-mindedly, and who wants to keep himself from being taken in by them as well, will use his judgment about which statements he will agree to, which he will take figuratively — searching out what the men who made up such things meant — and which he will refuse to believe, as written to please somebody. And we have said this in advance about the whole history of Jesus carried in the Gospels. We are not calling the quicker-witted to a bare and unreasoning faith. We want to show that those who are going to read need fair-mindedness, and a great deal of examination, and, if I may put it this way, a way in to what the writers meant, so that it may be found out with what purpose each thing was written.

So we shall say, first, that if the man who disbelieves the appearance of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove had been written down as an Epicurean, or a follower of Democritus, or a Peripatetic, what he says would have suited the part he was given to play. As it is, this Celsus, wisest of men, did not even see that he has fastened such an argument on a Jew — a man who believes more things, and stranger things, out of the prophetic writings than the account of the dove. [o]

For one might say to this Jew, who disbelieves the appearance and thinks he is convicting it of being an invention: “And where would you get your proof, sir, that the Lord God said to Adam, or to Eve, or to Cain, or to Noah, or to Abraham, or to Isaac, or to Jacob the things he is recorded as having said to those men?” And to set history alongside history, I would say to the Jew: “Your own Ezekiel wrote this down: “The heavens were opened, and I saw a vision of God.” And after telling it he adds: “This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord; and he said to me…” Now if what is written about Jesus is false, since we cannot, as you suppose, plainly establish that it is true — it having been seen or heard by him alone, and, as you seem to have noticed, by one of those who were punished — why should we not rather say that Ezekiel too was telling tall tales when he said ‘The heavens were opened,’ and the rest? And even if Isaiah says: “I saw the Lord of Sabaoth sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the seraphim stood around him, six wings to the one and six wings to the other” — and the rest — where do we get it that he really saw them? For you have believed these things, Jew, as free of falsehood, and as not only shown to the prophet by a more divine Spirit but also spoken and written down by the same Spirit.”

And which of them is the more worth believing, when he says that the heavens were opened to him and that he heard a voice, or that he saw the Lord of Sabaoth sitting on a throne, high and lifted up — Isaiah and Ezekiel, or Jesus? No deed of theirs is found that is anything like as great. But Jesus’ great deed did not belong only to the years when he was in a body; his power is still at work down to this day, producing the turning around and the bettering of those who through him believe in God. And the plain proof that these things happen by his power is this: as he himself says, and as anyone can see, there are not enough workers to work the harvest of souls — and yet the harvest is so large, all of it gathered in and brought together into God’s threshing floors and churches everywhere.

And I say these things to the Jew not as a Christian disbelieving Ezekiel and Isaiah, but in order to shame him, out of what we both believe, into admitting that this man is far more worth believing than they are when he says he saw such a sight, and, as is likely, told his disciples the vision he saw and the voice he heard. [r]

But someone else might say that not all the men who wrote down the appearance of the dove and the voice from heaven heard Jesus telling it. Rather, the Spirit that taught Moses the history older than himself — beginning from the world’s coming to be and going down as far as Abraham his father — this same Spirit also taught the writers of the Gospel the marvel that happened at the time of Jesus’ baptism. And the man furnished with the gift called “a word of wisdom” will also explain the reason for the heavens opening, and for the form of the dove, and why the Holy Spirit appeared to Jesus in the form of no other living thing than that one. But our subject does not require us to explain that now. What is before us is to convict Celsus of being unsound in fastening on a Jew, with arguments like these, a disbelief about a matter more likely to have happened than the things that Jew believes.

I remember once, in a debate with men who are called wise among the Jews, using an argument like this, with a good many people there judging what was said. “Tell me, sirs,” I said. “Two men have come to visit the human race, and about both of them marvels beyond human nature are on record: Moses, your own lawgiver, who wrote about himself; and Jesus, our teacher, who left behind no writing of his own about himself, but is testified to by his disciples in the Gospels. What is the arbitrary pick, that Moses is to be believed as telling the truth — even though the Egyptians slander him as a sorcerer, and as only seeming to have done his works of power, by trickery — while Jesus is not to be believed, because you are his accusers? Whole nations bear witness to both: the Jews to Moses, and the Christians, who do not deny that Moses prophesied but actually prove the things about Jesus out of that very source, and so accept as true the marvels his disciples wrote down about him. [t]

“If you demand an account from us about Jesus, then give yours first about Moses, who came before him, and after that we will give ours about Jesus. But since you back out and run from proofs about him, then for the present we do the same as you and offer none either. All the same, admit that you have no demonstration for Moses, and then listen to the proofs about Jesus from the law and the prophets. And here is the surprising thing: it is out of the proofs about Jesus in the law and the prophets that both Moses and the prophets are shown to have been prophets of God.”

For the law and the prophets are full of marvels like the one recorded about Jesus at his baptism, about the dove and the voice from heaven. And I think the marvels done by Jesus are themselves a sign that the Holy Spirit did appear then in the form of a dove — although Celsus, to discredit them, says he did them after learning them among the Egyptians. And I will not use only those; naturally I will use what the apostles of Jesus did as well. For without works of power and marvels they could not have moved people who were hearing new teachings and new lessons to leave behind their ancestral ways and to take up the lessons of these men at the risk of death. [u]

And traces of that Holy Spirit which appeared in the form of a dove are preserved among Christians still. They drive out demons, and perform many cures, and see certain things about what is coming, as the Word wills. And even if Celsus laughs at what I am about to say, or the Jew he has brought on stage, I will say it all the same: many have come over to Christianity as though against their will, some spirit having suddenly turned the ruling part of their minds from hating the message to dying for it, and having shown itself to them waking or in a dream. We have known many such cases; and if we write them down, having been present at them and seen them ourselves, we shall bring broad laughter down on us from unbelievers, who will suppose that we, like the people they think made these things up, are making them up too. But God is witness to our conscience, which wants to establish the divine teaching of Jesus not by false reports but by clear evidence of various kinds.

And since it is a Jew who is at a loss about the record of the Holy Spirit coming down on Jesus in the form of a dove, this is what should be said to him: Sir, who is it that says in Isaiah, “And now the Lord has sent me, and his Spirit”? In that sentence the wording is ambiguous — whether the Father and the Holy Spirit sent Jesus, or the Father sent both the Christ and the Holy Spirit. The second is the true one. And since the Savior was sent, and after him the Holy Spirit, so that what the prophet said might be fulfilled — and since the fulfillment of the prophecy had to be known to those who came after — that is why the disciples of Jesus wrote down what had happened.

I would have liked to say to Celsus, who has put on stage a Jew who somehow accepts John as a baptizer and as having baptized Jesus, that John’s having been a baptizer, baptizing for the forgiveness of sins, is recorded by a man who lived not long after John and Jesus. For in the eighteenth book of his Jewish Antiquities, Josephus bears witness that John was a baptizer and that he promised purification to those who were baptized. [y]

And this same man — though he does not believe in Jesus as the Christ — while looking for the cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the pulling down of the temple, ought to have said that the plot against Jesus was the cause of these things coming on the people, since they killed the Christ who had been foretold. Instead he says, as though unwillingly, and not far from the truth, that these things happened to the Jews as vengeance for James the Just, who was the brother of “Jesus, called Christ” — because they killed him, most righteous man that he was. This James is the one Paul, Jesus’ genuine disciple, says he saw, calling him “the Lord’s brother” — not so much for their kinship by blood, or their having been brought up together, as for his character and his teaching.

If, then, Josephus says that what happened at the desolation of Jerusalem came on the Jews on account of James, how much more reasonable is it to say that it happened on account of Jesus the Christ? Witnesses to his divinity are all these churches of people who have turned away from the flood of evils, who depend on the Maker, and who refer everything they do to what pleases him.