The Servant and the Star

Celsus claims to know everything there is to know about our teaching, and then throws the Savior’s suffering in his face, saying that he got no help from the Father and could not help himself. So this has to be set down: his suffering was foretold, and so was the reason for it. It was of use to people that he should die for them, and that he should bear the bruise that came with being condemned. It was foretold as well that people from the nations would understand him — nations among whom no prophets had arisen — and it was said that when he was seen he would have an appearance without honor among men. The words run like this: [a]

I remember using these prophecies once, in a debate with men the Jews call wise. My Jewish opponent answered that they had been prophesied about the whole people as though it were a single person — a people living in the dispersion and beaten — so that many might become proselytes, on the occasion of the Jews being sown among the rest of the nations. That is how he explained “your appearance will lose all its honor among men,” and “those who were never told about him will see,” and “a man in affliction.” [e]

A great deal was said in that discussion to prove that they are wrong to take prophecies spoken about one particular person and refer them to the whole people. I asked whose character it is that says, “This man carries our sins and is in pain for us,” and, “But he was wounded because of our sins, and made sick because of our acts of lawlessness”; and whose character it was that said, “By his bruise we were healed.” Plainly it is the people who had been in their sins and were healed by the Savior’s suffering — whether from that people or from the nations — who say these words in the prophet, who saw it all beforehand and who, from the Holy Spirit, gave the words to that speaker.

But where we seemed to press them hardest was the line that says, “Because of the acts of lawlessness of my people he was led to death.” For if the people are the ones prophesied about, as they hold, how is this man said to be led to death because of the lawlessness of the people of God, unless he is someone other than the people of God? And who is he but Jesus Christ, by whose bruise we who believe in him were healed — the one who stripped off the rulers and authorities that were in us and made a public show of them openly on the wood? Explaining every part of the prophecy and leaving none of it untested belongs to another occasion. I have gone on at some length here, and necessarily, I think, on account of the words Celsus sets down for his Jew.

It escaped Celsus, and the Jew he brings on, and everyone who has not trusted Jesus, that the prophecies speak of two comings of Christ. The first is more subject to human suffering and more lowly, so that Christ, being among people, might teach the way that leads to God and leave no one in this life any room for the excuse that he did not know about the judgment to come. The second is glorious and divine only, with nothing subject to human suffering woven into its divinity. To set out the prophecies at length would take a long time. For the present, what comes from the forty-fourth psalm is enough — the psalm whose title, among other things, is “a song for the beloved,” where he is plainly called God in these words: [g]

But attend carefully to what comes next, where he is called God:

Now notice this. The prophet is speaking with God — the God whose throne is forever and ever, and the scepter of whose kingdom is a scepter of uprightness — and he says that this God has been anointed by a God who was his God, and anointed because, beyond his companions, he loved righteousness and hated lawlessness. I remember pressing the Jew who was thought to be learned very hard with this passage. He was at a loss before it, and gave the answer that followed from his own Judaism: that the words “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever; a scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom” are spoken to the God of all things, while “You loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; therefore God, your God, anointed you,” and what follows, are spoken to the Christ.

Further on, his Jew addresses the Savior like this: “If you say this — that every man who has come to be by divine providence is a son of God — how would you be any different from anyone else?” [k]

To him we will say that every man who, as Paul put it, is no longer being kept in line by fear like a boy with his attendant, but chooses what is good for its own sake, is a son of God. But this man is different, by a very long way, from everyone who is called a son of God on account of his virtue, since he is a kind of spring and beginning of all such people. Paul’s words run like this: “You did not receive a spirit of slavery, to fall back into fear; you received a spirit of adoption, in which we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’”

But according to the Jew in Celsus, countless people will convict Jesus of lying, claiming that the things prophesied about him were said about themselves. Now we do not know whether Celsus knew of anyone who came into this life, wanted to do what Jesus did, and announced himself a son of God or a power of God. But since we examine each passage in a love of the truth, we will say that there was a certain Theudas among the Jews before Jesus was born, who said he was somebody great; when he died, the people he had deceived scattered. After him, in the days of the registration, when Jesus seems to have been born, a certain Judas the Galilean drew many of the Jewish people into revolt along with him, passing as a wise man with something new to teach. When he too had paid the penalty, his teaching was pulled down, surviving among very few people, and those of the humblest sort. And after the time of Jesus, Dositheus the Samaritan also wanted to persuade the Samaritans that he was the Christ that Moses prophesied, and he seems to have won some over to his teaching.

But it is not out of place to set down the very wise remark of Gamaliel, recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, and to show how those men were strangers to the promise, being neither sons of God nor powers of God, while Christ Jesus truly was the Son of God. Gamaliel said there: “If this plan and this word is from men, it will be brought to nothing” — as the work of those men was brought to nothing once they were dead — “but if it is from God, you will not be able to overthrow this man’s teaching, and you may even be found fighting against God.”

Simon the Samaritan magician also wanted to steal people away by his magic. At the time he did deceive them; but today you cannot find thirty Simonians in the whole inhabited world — and I suspect I have named more than there are. There are very few of them around Palestine, and in the rest of the world his name is nowhere, though that was where he wanted to spread his own fame. Wherever his name is still passed on, it is passed on out of the Acts of the Apostles; it is Christians who say these things about him. The plain facts have borne witness that there was nothing divine about Simon.

After this, the Jew in Celsus puts Chaldeans in place of the Magi of the Gospel. He says Jesus spoke of Chaldeans who were stirred up at his birth and came to worship him as a god while he was still an infant, and who made this known to Herod the tetrarch; and that Herod sent men and killed the children born at the same time, thinking he would destroy this one along with them, in case he lived long enough to reign. [o]

See the blunder in this. He cannot tell Magi from Chaldeans, he has not noticed that what the two profess is different, and so he has misreported what the Gospel says. And I do not know why he also passed over in silence what it was that stirred the Magi, and did not say that it was a star, seen by them in the east, as it is written. So let us see what should be said to this as well. We consider the star that was seen in the east to have been a new one, like none of the familiar ones — not one of those in the sphere of the fixed stars, nor one of those in the spheres below — but of the kind that come at certain times: comets, or beams, or bearded ones, or jars, or whatever else the Greeks like to call their different shapes. Here is how we make the case.

It has been observed that stars of this sort rise at great events and at the greatest changes in things on earth, signalling either the shifting of kingdoms, or wars, or whatever can happen among people that is able to shake things on earth. And we have read, in the book On Comets by Chaeremon the Stoic, how comets have sometimes risen when good things were about to happen; and he sets out the record of these. So if a comet, as it is called, or some star like it, rises on earth at new kingdoms or at other great occurrences, why should it be surprising that a star rose at the birth of the one who was going to bring something new into the human race and to introduce a teaching not only to Jews but also to Greeks, and to many of the nations of the barbarians as well? [r]

This is what I would say. About comets, there is no prophecy in circulation to the effect that such and such a comet will rise for a particular kingdom or at particular times. But about the star that rose at Jesus’ birth, Balaam prophesied, as Moses recorded, saying: “A star will rise out of Jacob, and a man will stand up out of Israel.” And if it should be necessary to examine what is recorded about the Magi at Jesus’ birth and about the star being seen, this is the sort of thing we would say — part of it to the Greeks and part to the Jews.

To the Greeks, then: the Magi keep company with demons and call on them for whatever they have learned and want, and they bring off that sort of thing only so long as nothing more divine and stronger than the demons and than the spell that summons them either appears or is spoken. But if some more divine appearance does occur, the demons’ workings are pulled down, since they cannot look back at the light of divinity. [u]

So it is likely that at the birth of Jesus, when “a multitude of the heavenly army” — as Luke recorded, and as I believe — praised God and said, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will among men,” the demons for that reason went slack and lost their strength. Their trickery was exposed and their working undone, and they were pulled down not only by the angels who came to stay in the region around the earth on account of the birth of Jesus, but also by the soul of Jesus and by the divinity in him.

So the Magi, wanting to do what they usually did — the things they used to bring off before by certain spells and conjuring tricks — looked for the cause of the failure, reckoning it to be a great one; and when they saw a sign from God in the sky, they wanted to see what it meant. I think, then, that they had the prophecies of Balaam that Moses also recorded, seeing that Balaam himself was formidable at such things; and when they found among them the words about the star, and the words, “I will show him to him, though not now; I call him blessed, though he will not come near,” they guessed that the man prophesied along with the star had come into the world. Having settled beforehand that he was greater than all demons and than the things that habitually appeared to them and worked for them, they resolved to worship him.

So they came to Judea, persuaded that some king had been born, but not knowing what kingdom he was going to rule, and not knowing where he was to be born. They brought gifts, which they offered to one who was — if I may put it this way — something put together out of God and a mortal man: symbols, gold as to a king, myrrh as to one who would die, and frankincense as to a god. And they offered them once they had learned the place of his birth. But since he was God, the Savior of the human race, existing above the angels who help people, an angel repaid the reverence of the Magi in worshiping Jesus by warning them not to go to Herod, but to return home by another road.