He Gave Himself Up Willingly

Celsus says further that many others too would turn up of the same sort Jesus was — to people who are willing to be deceived. Then let this Jew of Celsus show us one man of the sort Jesus was. Not many, not even a few: one. One who brought into the human race a message and settled teachings useful for living, with the power that was in him, and who turns people back from a flood of sins. He says as well that this charge is brought against the Jews by those who believe in Christ: that they have not believed in Jesus as God. We have already offered a preliminary defense on that point in the earlier pages, showing at the same time in what sense we understand him to be God and in what sense we call him a man. [a]

He also asks this: How were we — we who made known to everyone that someone would come from God to punish the unrighteous — how were we to dishonor him when he came? It does not seem to me reasonable to answer that, since it is so silly. It is as if someone else said: how could we, who taught people self-restraint, have done anything unrestrained? Or how could we, who serve as ambassadors for righteousness, have done anything unjust? Those inconsistencies are found among human beings; and in the same way it was thoroughly human to claim to have believed the prophets when they spoke of a Christ who was coming, and then to refuse belief to the one who came exactly as they had prophesied.

And if another reason has to be added, we will say that the prophets foretold this very thing. Isaiah says it plainly: Hearing you will hear and will not understand; and seeing you will see and will not perceive. For the heart of this people has grown fat. And so on. Let them tell us what it is the Jews hear and what it is they see, about which it is prophesied that they will not understand what is said and will not see what is shown to them in the way they should. It is plain enough that when they saw Jesus they did not see who he was, and when they heard him they did not understand from his words the divinity that was in him — the divinity that was moving God’s watchful care away from the Jews and onto those from the nations who came to believe in him.

So you can see that after Jesus came the Jews were left behind entirely. They hold none of what they used to count as their glories, and there is no sign at all of any divinity among them. There are no prophets any longer and no wonders — and traces of these are still found among Christians to some degree, and some of them greater. If we are to be trusted when we say so, we have seen them ourselves.

But the Jew of Celsus cries out: Why did we dishonor the one we had announced beforehand? Was it so that we might be punished more than everyone else? To this we can answer that the Jews will suffer more than others because of their unbelief toward Jesus and all the other outrages they committed against him — and not only in the judgment we believe is coming. They have suffered already. What other nation is an exile from its own mother city, and from the place that belongs to its ancestral worship? The Jews alone. They have suffered it as the basest of peoples: they sinned in many ways, but for none of those sins have they been punished as they have been for what they dared against our Jesus.

After this the Jew says: How were we to think this man a god? In everything else, as the report went, he displayed none of what he promised; and when we had convicted him and condemned him and judged him to deserve punishment, he was caught hiding and running away in the most shameful manner, and was betrayed by the very men he called disciples. And yet, if he was a god, it was not possible for him either to run away or to be bound and led off. Least of all could a man taken for a savior, and a son of the greatest God, and an angel, be abandoned and handed over by the men who kept company with him, who had shared everything with him in private, and who treated him as their teacher. To this we will say that not even we suppose the body of Jesus — the body that was then seen and touched — to be God. And why do I speak of the body? Not even his soul, of which it was said, “My soul is deeply grieved, to the point of death.” [f]

But just as, in the way the Jews speak, the one who says “I am the Lord, the God of all flesh,” and “Before me no other god came to be, and after me there will be none,” is believed to be God, using the soul and body of the prophet as his instrument — and just as, in the way the Greeks speak, there is the one who says this:

The one who says that is held to be a god, speaking and being heard through the Pythian priestess. In the same way, as we see it, it was the Word — God, and Son of the God of all things — who said in Jesus, “I am the way and the truth and the life,” and “I am the door,” and “I am the living bread that came down from heaven,” and whatever else is like these.

So our charge against the Jews is that they did not think him God — the one to whom the prophets bore witness in many places as a great power, and God, in the rank that comes after the God and Father of all things. For we say it was to him that the Father gave the command, in Moses’ account of the making of the world, when he said “Let there be light” and “Let there be a firmament,” and the rest of what God commanded to come into being; and it was to him that he said, “Let us make man according to our image and likeness.” The Word, once commanded, did everything the Father ordered him to do. And we say this not out of our own invention, but because we trust the prophecies that circulate among the Jews. In them it is said of God and of the things he made, in these very words: “He spoke, and they came to be; he commanded, and they were created.” Now if God commanded and the things he made were created, then who — in the mind of the prophetic Spirit — could be the one able to carry out so great a command of the Father, except the one who is, if I may put it this way, the Word alive, and the Truth?

And the Gospels do not know the one who said in Jesus, “I am the way and the truth and the life,” to have been something bounded, present nowhere outside the soul and body of Jesus. That is clear from many things, and from these few that we will set down. John the Baptist, prophesying that the Son of God was about to be here at any moment — not confined to that body and soul, but reaching everywhere — says of him: There stands among you one you do not know, who is coming after me. If he had thought the Son of God was only where the visible body of Jesus was, how could he have said, “There stands among you one you do not know”? And Jesus himself, lifting the minds of those who were learning from him so that they would think greater things about the Son of God, says: Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them. And his promise to the disciples is of the same kind: And look — I am with you all the days, to the completion of the age.

We say all this without separating the Son of God from Jesus. For after the plan was carried out, the soul and body of Jesus became one, above all else, with the Word of God. If, according to Paul’s teaching — “the one who is joined to the Lord is one spirit” — anyone who has understood what it is to be joined to the Lord, and has been joined to him, is one spirit with the Lord, then how is what was once a composite thing not one with the Word of God in a far more divine and far greater way? This is the one who showed among the Jews that he was the power of God, by the astonishing things he did. Celsus supposed they were done by sorcery. The Jews of that time — and I do not know where they learned what they say about Beelzebub — said that he cast out demons “by Beelzebub, the ruler of the demons.” Our Savior showed them there that what they were saying was completely absurd, since the kingdom of evil had not yet come to an end. That will be clear to anyone who reads the Gospel writing with good sense, and this is not the time to explain it.

But what did Jesus promise that he did not do? Let Celsus bring it forward and prove it. He will not be able to — especially since he thinks he can get what he says against Jesus, or against us, out of things half heard, or out of readings in the Gospels, or out of Jewish stories. And since the Jew says again that they convicted him and condemned him and judged him to deserve punishment, let them show how the men who were trying to manufacture false testimony against him convicted him — unless the great proof against Jesus was the one his accusers stated: This man said: I am able to tear down the temple of God and raise it up in three days. But he was speaking about the temple of his body, while they, not knowing how to hear a speaker according to what he means, thought his words were about the temple of stone — the temple the Jews honored more than they honored the one who ought to have been honored as the true temple of God: the Word, and the Wisdom, and the Truth. And let someone tell us how Jesus was hiding and running away “in the most shameful manner.” Let him point to the thing that deserves to be called shameful. [p]

Then, since he says as well that Jesus “was caught,” I would answer this: if being caught means something done against a man’s will, then Jesus was not caught. At the right moment he did not stop himself from falling into human hands, as “the Lamb of God,” so that he might “take away the sin of the world.” Knowing everything that was coming upon him, he went out and said to them: Whom are you looking for? Jesus the Nazarene. I am he. And Judas, who was betraying him, was standing with them. So when he said to them, “I am he,” they drew back and fell to the ground. Then he asked them again: Whom are you looking for? Jesus the Nazarene. I told you that I am he. So if you are looking for me, let these men go.

And to the man who wanted to help him, and who struck the high priest’s slave and cut off his ear, he said: Put your sword back in its place. All who take up the sword will die by the sword. Or do you think I cannot call on my Father right now, and he will supply me here with more than twelve legions of angels? But then how would the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must happen this way?

And if anyone thinks these things are inventions of the men who wrote the Gospels, why are the inventions not on the other side instead — the things said by men who speak out of enmity and hatred toward Jesus and toward Christians — and the truth on the side of those who proved that their attachment to Jesus was genuine by enduring anything whatever for the sake of his words? For that the disciples of Jesus should have taken up such endurance and such firmness, all the way to death, and done it with a frame of mind that was inventing about their teacher things that never happened … To fair-minded people the evidence is overwhelming that they were convinced of what they wrote, since they endured so many things, and such great ones, for the one they believed to be the Son of God.

Next: that he was betrayed by men he called disciples. The Jew of Celsus learned this from the Gospels, though he calls the one Judas “disciples,” in the plural, so that the accusation will look larger. He did not trouble himself to look into everything that is written about Judas — that Judas, falling into conflicting and opposite judgments about his teacher, neither turned against him with his whole soul nor with his whole soul kept the respect a pupil owes a teacher. For “the man who betrayed him gave a sign” to the crowd that had come to seize Jesus, saying, “The one I kiss is he; take hold of him” — still saving something of his respect for him. If he had not been saving it, he would have handed him over openly, without the pretense of a kiss. [u]

Will this not convince everyone about what Judas deliberately chose — that along with his love of money, and along with his wretched choice to betray his teacher, he had something mixed into his soul that had come to be there from the words of Jesus, something with the look of a remnant, if I may call it that, of goodness? For it is written that when Judas, who betrayed him, saw that he had been condemned, he was filled with regret and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying: I have sinned in betraying innocent blood. But they said: What is that to us? See to it yourself. And he threw the silver into the temple and withdrew, and went away and hanged himself.

Now if this money-loving Judas, who also used to steal what was put into the money box for the poor, was filled with regret and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, it is clear that the teachings of Jesus were able to produce some regret in him, and that the traitor had not entirely despised them and spat them out. And the words “I have sinned in betraying innocent blood” were the words of a man confessing what he had done wrong. See, too, how burning and violent the grief was that came to him out of that regret over his sins — so violent that he could not bear to go on living. He threw the silver into the temple, withdrew, went away, and hanged himself. He passed sentence on himself. And in doing it he showed how much power the teaching of Jesus had, even in the sinner Judas, the thief and the traitor, who could not entirely despise what he had learned from Jesus.

Or will Celsus and his friends say that everything which shows Judas was not entirely a deserter, even after what he dared against his teacher, is an invention, and that this alone is true — that one of his disciples betrayed him? And will they add to what is written that he betrayed him with his whole soul as well? That is unconvincing: to handle the same writings at every point the way an enemy would, both believing and disbelieving.

And if we must set down an argument about Judas that will put our opponents to shame, we will say that in the book of Psalms the whole of the hundred and eighth psalm contains the prophecy about Judas. It begins, “God, do not keep silent at my praise, for the mouth of the sinner and the mouth of the deceitful man have been opened against me.” And it is prophesied in that psalm both that Judas separated himself from the number of the apostles because of his sin, and that another was chosen in his place; that is shown by the words, “And let another take his office of oversight.”

But come — suppose he had been betrayed by one of the disciples who was worse disposed than Judas, one who had poured out, as it were, every word he had heard from Jesus. What would that contribute to an accusation against Jesus or against Christianity? And how would it prove the teaching false? We have already answered what comes after this, in the pages before these, showing that Jesus was not caught while running away, but gave himself up willingly for the sake of us all. It follows that even if he was bound, he was bound willingly — teaching us that we should not take up such things unwillingly for the sake of godliness.