Judas and the Philosophers

Things like this also seem to me childish: “A good general, one who has commanded tens of thousands, was never once betrayed; and neither was a wicked robber chief, the leader of thoroughly wicked men, so long as he seemed useful to the men with him. But this man, betrayed by those under him, neither ruled as a good general does, nor, having deceived his disciples, produced in the men he had deceived even the goodwill people feel toward a robber chief — if I may put it that way.” One might find a great many accounts of generals betrayed by their own men, and of robber chiefs caught through people who did not keep their agreements with them. But grant that no general and no robber chief was ever betrayed. What does that contribute toward making it a charge against Jesus that one of his pupils became his betrayer? [a]

And since Celsus puts philosophy forward, we would ask him this. Was it a charge against Plato that Aristotle, after attending his lectures for twenty years, left and attacked his teaching about the immortality of the soul, and called Plato’s ideas “twitterings”? And, pressing the difficulty further, we might say this as well. Was Plato no longer strong in argument, no longer able to set out what he had thought, once Aristotle had walked away from him — and are Plato’s teachings false on that account? Or can it be that Plato is true, as those who follow his philosophy would say, and that Aristotle turned out wicked and ungrateful toward his teacher? Chrysippus too, in many places in his own writings, plainly goes after Cleanthes, making innovations against what Cleanthes held — and Cleanthes had been his teacher when he was still young and just beginning philosophy.

And yet Aristotle is said to have studied under Plato for twenty years, and Chrysippus spent no short time in Cleanthes’ school; while Judas spent not even three years with Jesus. From what is written in the lives of the philosophers one could gather many things like the ones Celsus uses to accuse Jesus on account of Judas. The Pythagoreans used to build empty tombs for men who, after being turned toward philosophy, ran back to the life of an ordinary man; and Pythagoras and his followers were not weak in argument and demonstration on that account.

After this the Jew in Celsus goes on like this: “Though I have many true things I could say about what happened in the case of Jesus — things not like what his disciples wrote — I willingly leave them out.” What, then, are these true things, unlike what is written in the Gospels, which the Jew in Celsus passes over? Or is he using what only looks like rhetorical force, pretending to have something to say when he had nothing to bring forward outside the Gospel that could strike a hearer as true and could plainly accuse Jesus and his teaching? [f]

He charges the disciples with having invented that Jesus foreknew and foretold everything that happened to him. This too is true, whether Celsus likes it or not, and we shall establish it from many other things the Savior said as a prophet, in which he foretold what would happen to Christians in later generations. Who would not be astonished at this prediction: “You will be brought before governors and kings for my sake, for a testimony to them and to the nations” — and at anything else he said beforehand about his disciples being persecuted? For on account of what other body of opinion that has arisen among men is anyone else punished, so that one of Jesus’ accusers could say that Jesus, seeing that his teachings were charged with being impious or false, decided to make even that impressive by supposedly predicting it in advance? If anyone had to be brought “before governors and kings” on account of opinions, who else should it have been but the Epicureans, who do away with providence altogether, and the men of the Peripatos, who say that prayers accomplish nothing, and neither do sacrifices offered to the divine?

But someone will say that the Samaritans too are persecuted for their own worship of God. To him we shall say this. The Sicarii are put to death on account of circumcision, as men mutilating themselves contrary to the established laws and to what is permitted to Jews alone. And you will never hear a judge asking whether a Sicarius who is struggling to live by this supposed worship of God will be released if he changes his mind and led off to death if he holds out. No — the circumcision, once it is shown, is enough to have the man who underwent it executed. But Christians alone, according to what their Savior said — “You will be brought before governors and kings for my sake” — are given leave by their judges, right up to their last breath, to swear off Christianity, sacrifice according to the common customs, take the oath, go home, and live out of danger.

And see whether it is not with great authority that this is spoken: “Everyone who confesses in me before men, I too will confess in him before my Father in heaven; and everyone who denies me before men…” — and what follows. Now go back with me in thought to Jesus as he says these things, and look at them as predictions that have not yet come about. Either you will disbelieve him and say that he is talking nonsense and speaking to no purpose, since what he says will never happen; or, hesitating whether to agree with his words, you will say that if these things are fulfilled and the teaching of Jesus’ words is established, so that governors and kings take trouble to destroy those who confess Jesus, then we shall believe that he says all this as one who has received great authority from God to sow this word in the human race, and who is convinced that it will prevail.

And who will not be astonished, going back in thought to the man who taught then and said, “This good news will be proclaimed in the whole world, for a testimony to them and to the nations” — and then looking and seeing, exactly as he said, the good news of Jesus Christ proclaimed under the whole sky, to “Greeks and barbarians, to the wise and the foolish”? For the word, spoken with power, has mastered every kind of human nature, and there is no race of men to be seen that has escaped receiving the teaching of Jesus.

But let this Jew of Celsus, who does not believe that Jesus foreknew everything that happened to him, consider how, while Jerusalem was still standing and the whole Jewish worship was still being carried on in it, Jesus foretold what would come upon it from the Romans. For they will surely not claim that Jesus’ own acquaintances and hearers handed down the teaching of the Gospels without writing, and left the disciples with no written memoirs about Jesus. It is written in them: “When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near.” And at that time there were no armies at all around Jerusalem, encircling and hemming in and besieging it. That began while Nero was still emperor and went on until the rule of Vespasian, whose son Titus pulled Jerusalem down — as Josephus writes, on account of James the Just, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ; but, as the truth shows, on account of Jesus the Christ of God.

Celsus could have accepted, or granted, that Jesus foreknew what would happen to him, and then made light of the admission, as he did with the works of power when he claimed they were done by sorcery. He could have said that many men have learned what was coming upon them from divination — from signs, or birds, or the inspection of sacrifices, or the casting of birth charts. But this he did not want to grant, as being too large a concession; and having somehow accepted that Jesus did the works of power, he seems to have slandered them on the pretext of sorcery. [p]

Phlegon, however, in the thirteenth or, I think, the fourteenth book of his Chronicles, both allowed Christ a foreknowledge of certain things to come — getting confused, and taking matters that belong to Peter as though they belonged to Jesus — and bore witness that things turned out according to what he had said. So he too, by these very admissions about foreknowledge, declared, as though against his will, that the word held among the fathers of our teachings was not empty of a more divine power.

Celsus says that the disciples of Jesus, in a matter plain for everyone to see and with nothing they could plead against it, thought this up: saying that he had foreknown everything. He did not attend — or did not want to attend — to the love of truth in the writers, who admitted that Jesus had told his disciples beforehand, “You will all be made to stumble tonight,” and that it came true when they were all made to stumble; and that he had prophesied to Peter, “Before the cock crows you will deny me three times” — and that Peter denied him three times. [r]

If they had not been lovers of truth but, as Celsus supposes, were writing down inventions, they would not have written of Peter denying, or of the disciples of Jesus being made to stumble. For even if these things did happen, who was there to convict the account of having turned out that way? By any reasonable reckoning, these were things that ought to have been kept quiet by men who wanted to teach the readers of the Gospels to despise death for the sake of confessing Christianity. But as it is, seeing that the word would master men by its own power, they set down even things like these — which somehow, I do not know how, were not going to harm their readers or hand anyone a pretext for denying.

It is a very simple-minded thing he says — that the disciples wrote such accounts about Jesus in order to excuse what happened to him: “As if,” he says, “someone were to call a man righteous and then show him doing wrong, or call him holy and show him committing murder, or call him immortal and show him dead — adding to all of it that he happened to have foretold these things.” His example is unlike at a glance. There is nothing absurd in one who had taken up being the mark set before men for how they ought to live, showing them also how they ought to die for the sake of reverence toward God — quite apart from the fact that his dying on behalf of men was of use to the whole world, as we showed in the preceding book. [t]

Then he thinks that our confessing the suffering in full confirms his charge instead of dissolving it. He is not acquainted with how much has been thought through about this by Paul and said by the prophets. And it escaped him that certain men in the sects have said that Jesus suffered these things in appearance and did not really suffer. Not knowing that, he said: “For you do not even say this — that he seemed to impious men to suffer these things and did not suffer. On the contrary, you admit that he plainly suffered.” But we do not put “seemed” on the suffering, so that his resurrection may not be false either, but true. For the man who really died, if he rose, really rose; but the one who only seemed to have died did not really rise.

And since unbelievers make a mockery of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we shall set beside it Plato’s account that Er the son of Armenius rose from the funeral pyre twelve days after he was laid on it and reported what he had seen among the dead; and, since we are answering unbelievers, the story in Heraclides about the woman who stopped breathing will not be altogether useless here. Many are on record as having come back from their tombs, not only on the same day but on the next as well.

What wonder is it, then, if the one who did many marvelous things — things beyond a man, and so plain that people who could not look them in the face abused them by lumping them in with acts of sorcery — had something more about his own end as well: that his soul might leave the body willingly, and, after arranging certain matters outside it, come back again whenever it wished? Something of that sort is what Jesus is recorded as saying in John: “No one takes my soul from me; I lay it down of myself. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority again to take it.” And perhaps this is why he went out from the body ahead of time — so as to preserve it, and to keep its legs from being broken, as the legs of the robbers crucified with him were broken. “For the soldiers broke the legs of the first, and of the other who was crucified with him; but when they came to Jesus and saw that he had breathed his last, they did not break his legs.”

So we have answered the question, “Where, then, does it become credible that he foretold these things?” As for “How is the dead man immortal?” — let anyone who wishes learn that it is not the dead man who is immortal, but the one who rose from the dead. Not only is the dead man not immortal: neither was the Jesus before the corpse, the composite one, immortal, since he was going to die. For no one who is going to die is immortal; a man is immortal when he will die no more. “But Christ, raised from the dead, dies no more; death no longer rules over him” — even if those who are unwilling cannot make room for how these things are said.

This is extremely foolish too: “What god, or spirit, or sensible man, foreseeing that such things were going to happen to him, would not have got out of the way if he could, instead of walking straight into what he knew beforehand?” And yet Socrates knew that he was going to drink the hemlock and die, and it was in his power, if he had let Crito persuade him, to slip out of the prison and suffer none of it. But he chose, on what seemed to him good reasoning, that it was better for him to die as a philosopher than to live unphilosophically. And Leonidas, the Spartan general, knowing that he and the men with him at Thermopylae were as good as dead already, made no effort to save his life by anything shameful, but said to his companions: “Let us have breakfast, as men who will be dining in Hades.” Anyone who cares to collect stories of this kind will find plenty of them. [z]

So where is the wonder if Jesus, knowing what was going to happen, did not get out of the way but walked into what he foreknew — when Paul, his own disciple, having heard what would happen to him when he went up to Jerusalem, went straight to meet the danger and rebuked the people who were weeping around him and trying to stop him from going up to Jerusalem? And many men of our own time, knowing perfectly well that they will die if they confess Christianity, and be released and get their property back if they deny it, have despised life and willingly chosen death for the sake of reverence toward God.

Next after this the Jew in Celsus says another silly thing: “If he pointed out beforehand both the man who would betray him and the man who would deny him, how is it that they did not fear him as a god, so that the one would not have gone on to betray him and the other would not have denied him?” Here the very wise Celsus did not see the contradiction in his own passage. If Jesus foreknew as a god, and it was not possible for his foreknowledge to prove false, then it was not possible for the man known to be going to betray him not to betray, or for the man convicted of being about to deny him not to deny. And if it had been possible for the one not to betray and the other not to deny — so that not betraying and not denying could actually have come about in men who had been told these things in advance — then the one who said that this man would betray and that man would deny was no longer telling the truth. [ac]

For if he foreknew the betrayer, he saw the wickedness the betrayal would come out of, and that wickedness was in no way overturned by the foreknowledge. And again, if he had made out the man who would deny him, it was because he saw the weakness the denial would come out of that he foretold the denial; and the weakness was not going to be overturned all at once like that by the foreknowledge.

And where does he get this — “but they betrayed and denied him without a thought for him”? For it was shown, in the case of the betrayer, that it is false to say he betrayed his teacher with no thought for him at all; and no less is this shown in the case of the man who denied him, who “went outside” after the denial and “wept bitterly.”