The Men Jesus Chose

That Herod plotted against the newborn child — even if the Jew of Celsus does not believe it really happened — is no wonder. Wickedness is a blind thing, and it wants to beat destiny, as though it were the stronger of the two. That is what had happened to Herod. He believed that a king of the Jews had been born, and at the same time he gave his assent to something that contradicted that belief. He did not see that either the child certainly is a king and will reign, or he will not reign, and killing him is pointless. So he set out to kill him, his judgments at war with each other because of his wickedness, and moved by the blind and wicked devil, who had plotted against the Savior from the very beginning, imagining that he was, and would become, someone great. [a]

An angel, then — however little Celsus believes it — gave Joseph his instructions, watching how events were unfolding: he was to withdraw into Egypt with the child and his mother. And Herod killed all the children in Bethlehem and the territory around it, expecting to destroy along with them the one who had been born king of the Jews. He could not see the sleepless guardian power that surrounds those who deserve to be guarded and kept safe for the salvation of the human race — and of these Jesus was the first of all, greater in honor and in every kind of excellence. He was indeed to be a king, though not in the sense Herod supposed, but in the sense in which it befits God to give a kingdom: for the good of those who are ruled. He was to do his subjects no middling or indifferent good, so to speak, but to train them by laws that are truly God’s and to bring them under those laws.

Jesus knew this perfectly well. He denied that he was a king in the sense the crowd took the word, and taught instead what was distinctive about his own kingdom, when he said, “If my kingdom were from this world, my attendants would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from this world.”

If Celsus had seen that, he would not have said: “But if all this was done so that you would not grow up and reign in his place — then why, now that you have grown up, are you not a king? Why does God’s own son go around begging so ignobly, ducking his head in fear and drifting up and down the country in ruin?”

There is nothing ignoble in stepping around dangers by careful management instead of walking straight into them — not out of fear of death, but so that by staying alive he could be of use to others, until the right moment came for one who had taken up human nature to die a human death, a death with something in it that would be useful to people. This is plain to anyone who has understood that Jesus died for the sake of human beings, a point we have discussed as well as we could in the earlier pages.

After this — not even knowing how many the apostles were — he says: “Jesus attached to himself ten or eleven men of ill repute, the very worst sort of tax collectors and sailors, and ran away with them from one place to another, gathering his food in a shameful, scrounging way.” [f]

Come then, let us take this up too, as well as we can. It is obvious to anyone who has looked into the Gospel accounts — which Celsus does not appear even to have read — that Jesus chose twelve apostles, and that of these Matthew was the tax collector. When he lumps them together as sailors, he probably means James and John, since they left the boat and their father Zebedee and followed Jesus. Peter and his brother Andrew, who worked a casting net for the food they needed, must be counted not among sailors but, as the Scripture writes them down, among fishermen. Grant that Levi as well was a tax collector who followed Jesus; still he was not one of the number of the apostles, except according to some copies of the Gospel of Mark. As for the rest, we have not learned what their trades were, or where they got their food before they became disciples of Jesus.

So this is my answer to that as well. To anyone able to examine what has been reported about the apostles of Jesus sensibly and fair-mindedly, it is plain that these men taught Christianity by a divine power, and succeeded in bringing people under the word of God. It was no power of speaking in them, and no arrangement of the message according to the Greek arts of argument or oratory, that won their hearers over. In fact it seems to me that if Jesus had chosen men who counted as wise by the crowd’s estimate, men equipped to think and to speak in ways that please crowds, and had used them as the servants of his teaching, he would very reasonably have been suspected of preaching in the same manner as the philosophers who head a school. Then the claim that the word is divine would never have shown itself, since the word and the preaching would have rested on the persuasiveness of a wisdom that lies in phrasing and in the arrangement of words; and faith would have stood “in human wisdom” and not “in God’s power” — the same kind of faith the world’s philosophers have in their own doctrines.

But as it is: who could look at fishermen and tax collectors who had not even learned their first letters — as the Gospel records about them, and on this point Celsus has believed them, since they are telling the truth about their own lack of schooling — and see them speaking boldly not only among Jews about faith in Jesus, but preaching him among the other nations as well, and getting results, and not ask where their power to persuade came from? It was certainly not the kind of power people ordinarily recognize. Who would not say that Jesus fulfilled the promise, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men,” in his apostles by some divine power? Paul points to that power too, as we said a little earlier: “My speech and my preaching were not in the persuasive words of human wisdom but in a demonstration of Spirit and of power, so that our faith would not rest in human wisdom but in God’s power.”

For as the prophets said, announcing the preaching of the good news before it came, “The Lord gave a word with great power to those who bring the good news, the king of the powers of the beloved” — so that this prophecy might be fulfilled as well: “His word will run very swiftly.” And we can see it: “the sound of the apostles of Jesus has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the inhabited world.” This is why people who hear the word proclaimed with power are filled with power, and show it in their character, in their way of life, and in contending for the truth all the way to death; while others are hollow, whatever they profess about believing in God through Jesus, because they have no divine power and only look like people who have been brought over to the word of God.

I mentioned a saying of the Savior from the Gospels earlier, but I will use it again here, since the moment calls for it. It shows both our Savior’s foreknowledge about the preaching of the good news, made plain in the most divine way, and the strength of the word, which prevails without teachers over those who are convinced by a persuasion that carries divine power. Jesus says: “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. So ask the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest.”

Celsus also called the apostles of Jesus men of ill repute, the very worst sort of tax collectors and sailors. On this we will say that he seems to believe what is written wherever it suits him, so that he can bring his charge against the word, and to disbelieve the Gospels wherever accepting them would mean accepting the divinity those same books report. What he ought to do is see how much the writers love the truth: from their record of the discreditable things, he ought to believe them about the more divine things as well. [m]

Now it is written in the general Letter of Barnabas — and this is perhaps where Celsus got the idea of calling the apostles men of ill repute and the worst of men — that Jesus “chose his own apostles, men more lawless than any lawlessness.” And in the Gospel according to Luke, Peter says to Jesus, “Go away from me, because I am a sinful man, Lord.” And Paul, who himself became an apostle of Jesus later, says in his letter to Timothy, “This saying is trustworthy: Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, and I am the first of them.”

I do not know how Celsus came to forget Paul, or never thought to say anything about him — the man who, after Jesus, set up the churches that are in Christ. Probably he saw that anything said about Paul would need an answer from him: how a man who persecuted the church of God and fought bitterly against believers, so far as to want the disciples of Jesus handed over to death, afterward changed so completely that he “filled out the good news of Christ from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum,” and made it his ambition to preach where he would not be building “on someone else’s foundation,” but where God’s good news in Christ had not been proclaimed at all. So what is absurd here? Jesus wanted to show the human race how great a physician’s art for souls he commands; so he chose the men of ill repute and the very worst of men, and brought them so far forward that they became a pattern of the purest character to everyone whom they brought to the good news of Christ.

If we are going to reproach people who have changed with their earlier lives, then it is time to accuse Phaedo as well, philosopher though he became: as the story goes, Socrates brought him out of a brothel into a philosopher’s classroom. And we will throw the dissolute living of Polemo, the man who succeeded Xenocrates, in philosophy’s face — when in that case too we ought to be counting it to her credit that reason, in the mouths of the men who did the persuading, was able to move people out of evils that great when they were already in their grip. [q]

Among the Greeks there was one Phaedo — I do not know whether there was a second — and one Polemo, who turned from a dissolute and thoroughly wretched life and took up philosophy. With Jesus there were not only the twelve at that time but always, and many times as many, who have become a chorus of self-restrained men, and who say this about their earlier lives: “For we too were once senseless, disobedient, led astray, enslaved to cravings and to pleasures of every kind, spending our days in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another. But when the goodness and the love for humanity of God our Savior appeared, through a washing of rebirth and a renewal of the Spirit, which he poured out on us richly” — and so we became what we are. For “God sent out his word and healed them and rescued them out of their destruction,” as the prophet taught in the book of Psalms.

I would add this as well to what has been said. Chrysippus, in his Therapy of the Passions, is trying to put down the passions of the soul in people; and he does not pretend to settle which doctrine is the true one, but undertakes to treat those already in the grip of the passions along the lines of the various schools. He says: “If pleasure is the end, then the passions must be healed on that basis; and if there are three classes of good things, then on that account, just as much, the people held down by the passions must be freed from them in that way.”

Meanwhile the accusers of Christianity do not see how many people’s passions are put down because of this word, how many people’s flood of wickedness is checked, and how many savage characters are tamed. Since they never stop boasting about their concern for the common good, they ought to be acknowledging a debt of thanks to a word that has moved people out of many evils by a new method, and bearing it this much witness at least: that even if it is not the truth, it has at any rate been of benefit to the human race.

Jesus was teaching his disciples not to be reckless when he gave them this rule: “If they persecute you in this city, flee to the next; and if they persecute you in that one, flee again to another.” And as he taught it he became for them an example of a steady life — a life managed so as not to go straight at dangers pointlessly, at the wrong moment, or for no good reason. Celsus takes this and twists it into a slander: his Jew says to Jesus, “You run off here and there with your disciples.” [w]

To this slander against Jesus and his disciples we answer that what is told about Aristotle is much the same. Aristotle saw that a court was about to be convened against him as an impious man, on account of certain doctrines of his philosophy that the Athenians considered impious; so he withdrew from Athens and set up his lectures in Chalcis, defending the move to his friends in these words: “Let us leave Athens, so that we do not give the Athenians grounds for taking on a second pollution like the one over Socrates, and so that they do not commit a second sacrilege against philosophy.”

He also says that Jesus went around with his disciples gathering his food in a shameful, scrounging way. Let him report where he got the shame and the scrounging of that collection. For in the Gospels there were “certain women” who “had been healed of” their “illnesses,” Susanna among them, who supplied the disciples with food “out of what they owned.” And which of the philosophers, when he has given himself to the good of the people who follow him, has not taken from them what he needs? Or was it fitting and admirable when they did it, and when the disciples of Jesus do the same thing they are accused by Celsus of gathering their food in a shameful, scrounging way?