The Law of Their Fathers

The first volume of what I have been dictating in answer to the treatise Celsus entitled A True Account has now taken in as much as it needed to, and it ended with the speech he composes for a Jew addressing Jesus. So I mean to put this next volume together as a reply to the charges he brings against those of the Jewish people who have come to believe in Jesus. And here is the first thing to stop over. Once Celsus had decided to write in character at all, why does he not compose a Jew speaking to the believers who came from the nations, instead of to those who came from the Jews? His argument would have looked far more persuasive if he had written it against us. But perhaps this man who claims to know everything did not see what the part called for when it came to writing in character. [a]

So we must take note of what he does say to those who came to faith from the Jews. He says they abandoned the law of their fathers, that their minds were charmed away by Jesus, that they were deceived in a thoroughly ridiculous way, and that they deserted to another name and another life. He never noticed even this much: that those from the Jews who believe in Jesus have not abandoned the law of their fathers. They live by it. Their very name has come from the poverty of the law as they take it, for among the Jews a poor man is called an ebion, and the Jews who have accepted Jesus as Christ go by the name Ebionites.

Peter too plainly kept the Jewish customs of the law of Moses for a long time, as a man who had not yet learned from Jesus to climb up from the law taken as letter to the law taken as spirit. We know this from the Acts of the Apostles. On the day after the angel of God was seen by Cornelius and told him to send to Joppa for Simon called Peter, this is what happened. “Peter went up to the upper room to pray around noon. He grew hungry and wanted something to eat. While they were getting it ready, a trance came over him, and he sees heaven opened and something like a great sheet coming down, let down to the earth by its four corners, and in it were all the four-footed animals and the creeping things of the earth and the birds of the sky. And a voice came to him: “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” But Peter said, “Never, Lord. I have never eaten anything common or unclean.” And a voice came to him a second time: “What God has made clean, you must not call common.”

Notice in this how Peter is presented as still keeping the Jewish customs about clean and unclean. And what follows makes it plain that he needed a vision before he would share the words of faith with Cornelius, who was not an Israelite by birth, and with the men who were with him — because he was still a Jew, living by the traditions of the Jews and looking down on people outside Judaism. In the letter to the Galatians as well, Paul shows that Peter, still afraid of the Jews, stopped eating with the Gentiles when James came to him, and “separated himself” from them, “afraid of those of the circumcision.” The rest of the Jews did the same as he did, and so did Barnabas.

And it followed naturally that the men sent to the circumcision should not stand back from Jewish customs, since “those reputed to be pillars gave Paul and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship” while they themselves went off to the circumcision, so that Paul and Barnabas might preach to the Gentiles. And why do I speak of the men preaching to the circumcision drawing back and separating themselves from the Gentiles, when Paul himself “became a Jew to the Jews, so that he might win Jews”? That is why, as it is also written in the Acts of the Apostles, he even brought an offering to the altar, to convince the Jews that he was no deserter from the law.

If Celsus had known all this, he would not have composed a Jew saying to those from Judaism who have believed: “What came over you, fellow citizens? You left the law of your fathers; you let the man we were just talking with charm your minds away; you were deceived in a thoroughly ridiculous way; and you deserted us for another name and another life.”

Since we are on the subject of Peter and of the men who taught Christianity to those in the circumcision, I think it is not out of place to set down a saying of Jesus from the Gospel according to John, and to work through it. It is written that he said: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot carry them now. But when that one comes, the Spirit of truth, he will lead you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but he will speak whatever he hears.” [h]

And we ask, at this point, what the many things were that Jesus had to say to his own disciples but that they could not carry at the time. Here is what I say. Since the apostles were Jews and had been brought up on the law of Moses taken as letter, he probably had things to say to them about what the true law is; about the heavenly things whose “copy and shadow” the worship carried on among the Jews was; and about the good things to come whose shadow the law of food and drink and festivals and new moons and sabbaths held. These were the many things he had to say to them.

But he saw how very hard it is to overturn out of a man’s soul convictions he was practically born with, was raised on until he was fully grown, and that have persuaded the men who took them up that these things are divine and that unsettling them is an offense against God — and how hard it is to show them up as “garbage and loss” by the surpassing worth of the knowledge that comes through Christ, that is, through the truth, in a way that would actually convince the hearers. So he put the work off to a fitter time, the time after his suffering and his rising. And it really was true that help brought at the wrong moment, to men who could not yet make room for it, would have overturned the view of Jesus they had already taken up, that he was the Christ and the Son of the living God. See, then, whether there is not a good deal of sense in hearing “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot carry them now” in this way. The explaining and clearing up of the law along spiritual lines is many things, and the disciples, born and raised among Jews, could not in any real way carry them then.

And I am of the opinion that, because those things were a pattern while the truth was what the Holy Spirit was going to teach them, this was said: “When that one comes, the Spirit of truth, he will lead you into all the truth” — as if he had said, into the whole truth about the things whose patterns you were living among when you thought you were offering God the true worship. And in keeping with Jesus’ promise the Spirit of truth came to Peter, saying to him about the four-footed animals and the creeping things of the earth and the birds of the sky, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” And the Spirit came to him while he was still scrupulous, for he answered even the divine voice with, “Never, Lord. I have never eaten anything common or unclean.” And the Spirit taught him the true and spiritual account of food in the words, “What God has made clean, you must not call common.” And after that vision the Spirit of truth, leading Peter into all the truth, told him the many things he could not carry while Jesus was still with him in the flesh. But there will be another time for going through these matters, the ones that have to do with how the law of Moses is taken.

What is before us now, though, is to expose Celsus’s ignorance. His Jew says to the citizens and Israelites who have believed in Jesus, “What came over you? You left the law of your fathers,” and the rest of it. But how have they abandoned the law of their fathers, when they are the very people who rebuke those who do not listen to it, saying, “Tell me, you who read the law, do you not hear the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons,” and on down to “these things are an allegory,” and what follows? And how have they abandoned the law of their fathers, when they never stop mentioning their fathers’ usages in their own arguments, saying, “Or does the law not say these things too? For it is written in the law of Moses: You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain. Is God concerned about oxen? Or does he say it entirely for our sake? For it was written for our sake” — and so on? [m]

And how confusedly Celsus’s Jew puts all this, when he could have said it far more persuasively: that some of you have abandoned the ancestral customs on the pretext of interpretations and allegories; that others of you, while interpreting them spiritually, as you profess to do, keep the ancestral customs just the same; and that others of you do not interpret at all, but are willing both to accept Jesus as the one the prophets spoke of and to keep the law of Moses according to the customs of the fathers, on the ground that you have the Spirit’s whole meaning right there in the words.

But where would Celsus get the means to make this subject clear? Later on he mentions godless sects that have nothing whatever to do with Jesus, and others that leave the Creator out altogether, and yet he never saw that there are Israelites who believe in Jesus and have not abandoned the law of their fathers. He had no intention of examining the whole subject honestly, so as to accept whatever he found useful in it. He wrote what he wrote as an enemy, a man wholly bent on overturning whatever he heard the moment he heard it.

Then Celsus’s Jew goes on addressing those of his own people who have believed: “Only yesterday and the day before, when we were punishing this man for leading you by the nose, you fell away from the law of your fathers.” He knew nothing exact about what he was saying there, as we have just shown. But what he brings up after this does seem to me to have some real force: “Or how is it that you begin from our sacred things, and then, as you get on, treat them with contempt — when you have no other beginning to name for your teaching than our law?” [q]

Now it is quite true that the way in, for Christians, is by the sacred things of Moses and the writings of the prophets; and that after the way in, progress for those who have been brought in lies in the interpreting and clearing up of those same writings, as they search out “the mystery according to revelation, kept in silence through long ages” but “now made plain” in the voices of the prophets and by the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ. And those who get on do not, as you claim, treat what is written in the law with contempt. They set more honor on it, showing what a depth of wise reasoning, not to be spoken of openly, those writings hold — writings the Jews have never really looked at, since they come to them too superficially and too much as to fable.

And what is absurd about the beginning of our teaching, that is, of the good news, being the law? Our Lord himself says to those who would not believe him, “If you believed Moses you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” And one of the evangelists, Mark, says: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet: Look, I am sending my messenger before your face, who will prepare your road ahead of you” — which shows that the beginning of the good news hangs on the Jewish writings.

So what is being said against us by Celsus’s Jew when he says, “If someone did foretell to you that the child of God would come to men, he was our prophet, and the prophet of our God”? And how is it a charge against Christianity if John, who baptized Jesus, was a Jew? It does not follow, because John was a Jew, that every believer — whether he comes to the word from the nations or from the Jews — must keep the law of Moses according to the letter.

After this, even though Celsus repeats himself about Jesus — this is now the second time he says that Jesus did wrong and paid the penalty among the Jews — we will not take up the defense again; what has already been said is enough. Then his Jew makes light of the teaching about the resurrection of the dead, and the judgment of God, and honor for the righteous and fire for the unrighteous, calling all of it stale; and by claiming that Christians are taught nothing new in these matters he thinks he is overturning Christianity. [v]

This must be said to him. Our Jesus saw the Jews doing nothing worthy of the lessons in the prophets, and so taught by a parable that “the kingdom of God will be taken” from them “and given” to those from the nations. That is why one can truly see that everything belonging to the Jews of today is myth and nonsense, since they do not have the light that comes from knowing the Scriptures, while what belongs to Christians is truth, able to lift a man’s soul and mind and raise them up, and to persuade him to hold a citizenship not like that of the Jews below, down here somewhere, but “in the heavens.” This shows itself in those who can see the greatness of the ideas in the law and the prophets, and can set them out for others as well.

But grant that Jesus kept every one of the Jewish customs, right down to their sacrifices. How does that help the case that we ought not to trust him as the Son of God? Jesus, then, is the Son of the God who gave the law and the prophets. And we who belong to the church do not go past him. We have run away from the myth-making of the Jews, but we are brought to our senses and trained by the hidden contemplation of the law and the prophets. [y]

For the prophets themselves do not let the meaning of what they say come to rest in the plain narrative they are telling, or in the legislation taken by its words and its letter. In one place, just when they are apparently about to lay out a piece of history, they put it like this: “I will open my mouth in parables; I will speak out riddles from the beginning.” And in another place, praying about the law because it is unclear and needs God if it is to be understood, they say in prayer: “Uncover my eyes, and I will take in the wonders out of your law.”

Let them show, further, where in Jesus even the appearance of a word spoken out of boastfulness is to be found. For how is the man a braggart who says, “Learn from me that I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls”? Or how is the man a braggart who, while supper was going on, took off his clothes in front of his disciples, tied a towel around himself, poured water into the basin, washed each man’s feet, and rebuked the one who did not want to hold them out, saying, “If I do not wash you, you have no share with me”? Or how is the man a braggart who says, “And I was in your midst, not as the one reclining at table, but as the one serving”? [ab]

And let someone convict him: what lies did he tell? Let him set out the great lies and the small ones, so as to show that Jesus told the great ones. There is another way to refute the man as well. One lie is no more a lie than another lie, nor is it a greater one; and in the same way one true thing is no more true than another true thing, nor more greatly true.

And what were the unholy acts of Jesus? Let someone report them — Celsus’s Jew above all. Or was it unholy to draw people away from bodily circumcision, from a bodily sabbath, from bodily festivals, from bodily new moons, and from clean and unclean foods, and to shift their minds over to a law worthy of God, and true, and spiritual — and this while the man who serves as an ambassador “on Christ’s behalf” knows how to become “a Jew to the Jews, so that he may win Jews,” and “to those under law as under law, so that he may win those under law”?