The Body of a God

After this, Celsus’ Jew goes on speaking to Jesus: “And why did you have to be carried off into Egypt while you were still an infant — to keep from being butchered? It was not likely that a god would be afraid of death. And yet an angel did come from heaven, ordering you and your household to run, so that you would not be left behind and killed. Could the great God, who had already sent two angels on your account, not have kept you safe where you were — his own son?” From these words Celsus seems to think that there is nothing divine in the human body and soul of Jesus, and that his body was not even the kind Homer’s stories bring in. At any rate he makes a joke of the blood that poured out on the cross, and says it was not [a]

But we believe Jesus himself. About the divinity in him he says, “I am the way and the truth and the life,” and other things much like it; and about his being in a human body he says, “But now you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth.” So we say that what he became was something put together. And it was fitting that one who was making provision for his own stay in this life as a man should not go to meet the danger of death at the wrong time. In the same way, he had to be taken away by those who were bringing him up, and they were being directed by an angel from God. The first time the angel said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for what has been conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit,” and the second time, “Get up, take the child and his mother and flee into Egypt, and stay there until I tell you; for Herod is going to look for the child, to destroy him.”

In all this, what is written down does not seem to me strange at all. In both places the text says it was in a dream that the angel spoke to Joseph; and it happens to a great many other people as well that in a dream they are shown things to do — whether it is an angel that puts the picture before the soul, or something else. So what is odd about it if the one who had once become a human being was also managed by human means, so as to get out of the way of dangers? Not that it could not have been otherwise, but that what could be done had to be arranged for the rescue of Jesus by ordinary ways and means.

And it was certainly better for the child Jesus to slip out of Herod’s plot and to go abroad with those who were raising him “into Egypt”, and stay there “until the death” of the man who was plotting against him, than for the providence watching over Jesus to interfere with what is up to us, when Herod wanted the child killed; or for the “cap of Hades” that the poets talk about, or something like it, to be brought in for Jesus; or for the men who came to kill him to be struck as the men at Sodom were struck. For help given to him in a way altogether beyond expectation, and out in the open besides, would have been of no use to him. What he wanted was to teach that, as a man to whom God bore witness, he had something more divine inside the man people could see — which was what is properly the Son of God, God the Word, the power of God and the wisdom of God, the one called Christ. But this is not the moment to explain about that composite, and what the Jesus who became man was put together out of. It is an inquiry, if I may call it that, belonging to the household of those who believe.

After this, Celsus’ Jew talks like some Greek with a taste for learning, a man schooled in Greek letters: “The old stories handed out a divine begetting to Perseus and Amphion and Aeacus and Minos — and we did not believe those either. Still, so that they should not seem past believing, they set out great deeds of these men, wonderful deeds, truly beyond a man. But you — what fine or wonderful thing have you done, in deed or in word? You showed us nothing, though they challenged you in the temple to produce some plain mark that you were the son of God.” To this we have to say: let the Greeks show us, for any one of the men on that list, a single deed useful to human life, brilliant, reaching on into later generations, and big enough to lend some plausibility to the story told about them — the story that says they came from a divine begetting. In fact, about the men he listed, they will not be able to show us anything at all — not even something a little inferior to what Jesus accomplished. Unless, of course, the Greeks take us back to their myths and their own histories, wanting us to believe those with no reason given, and to disbelieve these even after so much plain evidence. [k]

So we say that the whole inhabited world of men holds the work of Jesus: the churches of God, made through Jesus out of people who turned away from countless evils, live in it as resident foreigners. And still today the name of Jesus drives derangement out of people’s minds, and demons too, and by now diseases as well. It produces a remarkable gentleness, and a steadiness of character, and a love of people, and goodness and mildness — in those who are not playing a part for the sake of a living or of some human need, but have genuinely taken in the message about God and Christ and the judgment that is coming.

Next after this, Celsus suspects that the great things done by Jesus will be brought forward — we have mentioned a few of them out of many — and so he pretends to grant that the accounts are true: the cures, or a resurrection, or the few loaves that fed many, with a great deal of it left over, or whatever else he thinks the disciples wrote up as marvels. And he says to them: “Come, let us believe that you did these things.” Then at once he puts them in the same class as the works of sorcerers, who promise still more astonishing things, and as the performances of men taught by Egyptians. In the middle of the marketplace these men sell their solemn learning for a few obols; they drive demons out of people, and blow diseases away, and call up the souls of heroes, and display expensive dinners and tables and cakes and delicacies that are not there, and set things moving as though they were animals, when they are not really animals but only look like it as far as appearance goes. And he asks: “Since those men do such things, will we have to think of them as sons of God? Or should we say that these are the practices of wicked men with an evil spirit in them?” [p]

You see how by this he as good as admits that magic exists. I do not know whether he is the same man as the one who wrote several books against magic. At any rate, since it suited his purpose, he likens what is recorded about Jesus to what magic produces. And there would be a likeness, if Jesus had gone no further than a display, as the conjurors do. But as it is, there is not one sorcerer who by what he does calls the people watching him to set their characters straight; not one who trains those stunned by the show in the fear of God; not one who tries to persuade the onlookers to live as men who are going to be counted righteous by God. Sorcerers do none of these things, because they cannot, and do not even intend to, and have no wish to take any trouble about putting people right — being themselves full of the most shameful and most notorious sins.

But he, who by the marvels he did called the people watching to set their characters straight — is it not likely that he offered himself, not only to his genuine disciples but to everyone else as well, as a pattern of the best kind of life? The disciples would then be urged on to teach people according to God’s will; and the rest, taught how they must live more by his word than by his character and the marvels, would do everything with a view to pleasing the God who is over all. And if that was what the life of Jesus was like, how could anyone reasonably compare him with the sorcerers’ trade, instead of believing, as had been announced beforehand, that he was God, appearing in a human body for the good of our race?

After this he muddles his argument together. He takes what is said by one sect and brings it against everyone who belongs to the divine word, as though these were charges Christians hold in common. He says: “A body like yours could not belong to a god.” In answer to this we say that he took a body — coming into this life from a female — a human body, one able to receive a human death. That is why, among other things, we say that he was also a great contender: because of his human body he was “tested in every way” as all people are, but no longer, as people are, with sin following; he was altogether “without sin.” For it is plain to us that “he did no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth”; and God handed him over as pure, on behalf of all who had sinned — the one who “knew no sin.” [t]

Then Celsus says: “A body sown the way you were sown, Jesus, could not be a god’s body.” Yet he suspected that if Jesus had been born as it is written, his body might somehow be more divine than most people’s, and in one sense of the words a god’s body. But he does not believe what has been written about his conception from the Holy Spirit. He believes instead that Jesus was fathered by a certain Panthera, who had violated the virgin — which is why he said, “A body sown the way you were sown could not be a god’s body.” But we have said more about these things in the pages above.

He says as well: “A god’s body is not fed on food like that.” He says it as though he could show from the Gospel writings that Jesus was fed, and what he was fed on. Well, let that stand. Let him say that Jesus ate the Passover with his disciples — that he not only said, “I have longed with longing to eat this Passover with you,” but actually ate it. And let him say that Jesus was thirsty beside Jacob’s spring and drank from it. What does that have to do with what we say about his body? And plainly he is seen to have eaten a piece of fish after the resurrection; for as we hold it, he took a body, having come “from a woman.” [w]

Celsus objects again: “Nor does a god’s body use a voice like that, or that kind of persuasion.” These objections are cheap, and thoroughly contemptible. Here is what will be said to him. The one the Greeks believe to be a god — the Pythian, and the Didymaean — uses just such a voice: the voice of the Pythia, or of the prophetess who was at Miletus. And the Greeks do not on that account charge that the Pythian or the Didymaean is no god, nor any other Greek god of that kind who is set up in a single place. And it was far better than that for God to use a voice which, because it was delivered with power, produced an indescribable persuasion in those who heard it.

Then, heaping abuse on Jesus, the man who — for his own impiety and his wretched opinions — is himself, if I may put it that way, the one hated by God, says that “these were the doings of some God-hated and wicked sorcerer.” And yet, if the words and the things themselves are examined strictly, there can be no such thing as a man hated by God, since God loves everything that exists and “loathes nothing that he has made.” He made nothing in hatred. And if some phrases in the prophets do say such a thing, they will find their explanation in this general rule: that Scripture uses expressions about God as though he had human feelings. [y]

And what defense needs to be made against a man who thinks that, in arguments he advertises as convincing, he ought to use slander and abuse, as though Jesus were a wicked man and a sorcerer? That is not the work of someone proving anything, but of someone in the grip of a feeling that is untrained and unphilosophical. What he ought to do is set the matter out, examine it fair-mindedly, and say about it, as far as he is able, whatever occurs to him.

But since Celsus’ Jew has brought his speech against Jesus to an end here, we too will bring the outline of our first book against him to an end at about this point. And if God grants the truth that destroys false arguments — as the prayer says, “In your truth destroy them” — we will begin, in what follows, the second speech in character, in which Celsus has his Jew speak to those who have been won over to Jesus.