Foreknowledge and the Cup

This too is shallow: “It happens all the time. When a man is being plotted against and gets wind of it, if he tells the plotters in advance that he knows, they turn away from it and put themselves on guard.” For plenty of people have gone on plotting against men who knew about the plot beforehand. Then, as though he were bringing in the conclusion of his argument, he says: “So it is not because these things were foretold that they happened — that is impossible. It is because they happened that the claim to have foretold them is convicted of being false. For it is altogether beyond doing that men who had heard beforehand should still go on to betray and to deny.” [a]

But once his premises are overturned, his conclusion goes down along with them — the conclusion that it is not because these things were foretold that they happened. What we say is that they did happen, since they could happen, and that because they happened, the foretelling is shown to be true; for the truth about things still to come is judged by how they turn out. So it is false, as he puts it, that the foretelling is convicted of being false; and Celsus has said for nothing that “it is altogether beyond doing that men who had heard beforehand should still go on to betray and to deny.”

Let us see what he says next. “He foretold these things as being a god, and what was foretold had to happen by all means. So God led his own disciples and prophets, the men he ate and drank with, to the point of becoming godless and unholy men — he who above all others ought to have done good to all men, and most of all to those at his own table. Or would a man who had shared another man’s table not go on to plot against him, and yet a man who had feasted with a god became a plotter? And what is stranger still, the god himself plotted against the men at his table, and made them traitors and godless men.” [c]

Since you want me to meet even those arguments of Celsus that strike me as cheap, here is what we say to this. Celsus supposes that what some foreknowledge has foretold comes about because it was foretold. We do not grant that. We say that the one who foretold it is not the cause of what is going to be, merely because he said in advance that it would happen. Rather the thing that was going to be — and would have been even if no one had foretold it — is what supplied the ground, to the one who foreknew it, for foretelling it.

And this whole thing is present in the foreknowledge of the one who foretells: given that some particular thing can happen and can also not happen, one of the two will be the case. We do not say that the man who foreknows quietly takes away the possibility of its happening or not happening, and then declares something like this: “This will happen by all means, and it is impossible for it to turn out otherwise.” And that holds for all foreknowledge of anything that is up to us, whether in the divine Scriptures or in the histories of the Greeks. What the dialecticians call the “idle argument” is a sophism; as far as Celsus is concerned it will not be one, but by sound reasoning it is.

To make this clear, I will take from Scripture the prophecies about Judas, or our Savior’s foreknowledge of him as the man who would betray him; and from the Greek histories, the oracle given to Laius — granting for the moment that it is true, since that does the argument no harm. About Judas, then, this is said in the hundred and eighth psalm, spoken in the person of the Savior. It begins: “O God, do not pass over my praise in silence; for the mouth of a sinner and the mouth of a deceitful man have been opened against me.” If you watch what is written in that psalm, you will find that just as Judas was foreknown as the man who would betray the Savior, so he was also himself the cause of the betrayal, and deserved the curses the prophecy speaks, because of his own wickedness. Let him suffer these things — “because,” it says, “he did not remember to show mercy, but hunted down a man poor and needy.” So it was open to him to remember to show mercy and not to hunt down the man he hunted down. He could have, and did not; he handed him over instead, and so he deserves the curses the prophecy speaks against him.

And against the Greeks we will use what was said to Laius in this way — whether the tragic poet wrote down the oracle’s own words or something with the same force. This is what is said to him by the one who foreknew what was coming:

This makes it plain that it was possible for Laius not to sow “the furrow of children” — the oracle would not have ordered him to do something he could not do — and that it was also possible for him to sow it; neither course was forced on him. And what followed for the man who did not guard against sowing was that, from his having sown, he suffered what the tragedies about Oedipus and Jocasta and their sons describe.

Now the so-called idle argument is a sophism, and it runs like this. Suppose it is put to a sick man, to argue him out of calling in a doctor to get well: “If it is fated that you get up from this illness, you will get up whether you call in the doctor or not. And if it is fated that you do not get up from this illness, you will not get up whether you call in the doctor or not. Now either it is fated that you get up or it is fated that you do not. So you call in the doctor for nothing.” But a neat thing can be set beside this argument: “If it is fated that you have children, you will have them whether you sleep with a woman or not. And if it is fated that you do not have children, you will not have them whether you sleep with a woman or not. Now either it is fated that you have children or that you do not. So you sleep with a woman for nothing.” As in the second case, since it is beyond doing and impossible for a man who has not slept with a woman to have children, sleeping with a woman is not brought in for nothing — so in the first, if getting up from an illness comes about by the road medicine takes, the doctor is brought in of necessity, and “you call in the doctor for nothing” is false.

We have taken all this up because of what Celsus, in all his wisdom, put forward when he said, “He foretold these things as being a god, and what was foretold had to happen by all means.” If he takes “by all means” to stand for “under compulsion,” we will not grant it to him; it was possible for these things not to happen. But if he says “by all means” in place of “it will be” — which nothing stops from being true, even though it was possible for it not to happen — then he does our argument no harm. It did not follow, from Jesus having truly foretold what concerned the traitor and what concerned the man who denied him, that he became for them the cause of godlessness and of an unholy act. He who, as we hold, knew “what was in a man” saw the bad character in him, and saw what he would dare, out of being a lover of money and out of not holding steadily about his Teacher what he ought to have held. And so, along with much else, he said this: “The one who has dipped his hand in the dish with me — that man will betray me.”

Look at how shallow, and how flatly false, this statement of Celsus is. He declares that a man who has shared another man’s table would not plot against him, and that if he would not plot against a man, much less would a man who had feasted with a god become a plotter against him. For who does not know that plenty of people who have shared salt and table have plotted against the men who fed them? The history of Greeks and foreigners is full of such examples. The iambic poet of Paros, reproaching Lycambes for setting aside an agreement made over “salt and table,” says to him: [i]

And those who care about learning history, who have given themselves wholly to it and left aside the more necessary lessons about how one ought to live, can put forward plenty more, showing men who had shared a table plotting against the men whose table it was.

Then, as though he had put his argument together out of proofs and consequences that fit tightly, he said: “And what is stranger still, the god himself plotted against the men at his table, and made them traitors and godless men.” But how Jesus either plotted, or made his disciples traitors and godless men, he would have no way of showing — except out of the consequence he supposed he had, which the first man you met could refute with the greatest ease. [k]

After this he says: “If he had decided on these things, and was being punished in obedience to his Father, then plainly, since he was a god and willing it, what was done according to his own mind was neither painful nor distressing.” He did not see that he had contradicted himself on the spot. For if he granted that Jesus was being punished, since he had decided on these things and was handing himself over in obedience to his Father, then plainly he was being punished, and it was not possible for what his punishers brought on him not to be painful; pain is not a thing anyone chooses. But if, because he was willing, what was brought on him was neither painful nor distressing, how did Celsus grant that “he was being punished”? [l]

He did not see that once Jesus had taken up the body that comes by birth, he took up a body able to receive pains, and the distresses that come to people who are in bodies — if we are not taking “distress” to be something chosen. So, just as he took up a body willingly, a body not of a wholly different nature from human flesh, in the same way he took up along with the body its pains and its distresses as well. He was not in control of these, so as to avoid suffering them: it lay with the men handling him to bring the distressing and painful things on him. We have already answered, further back, that if he had willed not to come into men’s hands he would not have come. But he did come, because he willed to, on account of what has already been shown — that his dying on behalf of men was of use to the whole.

Next, wanting to establish that what happened to Jesus was painful and distressing, and that it was not possible for him to make it otherwise by willing it, he says: “Why, then, does he cry out and wail and pray to run clear of the fear of destruction, saying something like this: ‘O Father, if this cup can pass by …’?” [n]

In this too, see Celsus’ malice. He will not accept the love of truth in the men who wrote the Gospels. They could have kept silent about what Celsus thinks is open to charge, and did not keep silent, for many reasons that someone expounding the Gospel will give at the proper time. Instead he brings a charge against the Gospel’s own wording, playing it up like a tragedy and setting down what is not written; nowhere is it found that Jesus wails. And he paraphrases “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass by,” but he does not go on to quote what stands written immediately after, the words that show at once his reverence toward the Father and his greatness of soul: “Yet not as I will, but as you will.” Nor does Jesus’ readiness toward his Father’s will, in the things it had been decided he should suffer — shown in the words “If this cannot pass unless I drink it, let your will be done” — get any acknowledgment from him; he acts as though he had never read them.

In this he does what godless men do who listen to the divine Scriptures with an eye for the worst and “speak unrighteousness on high.” They seem to have heard “I will kill,” and they throw it at us again and again, while they do not so much as remember “and I will make alive.” The whole saying shows that those who live for the common harm and work at wickedness are put to death by God, and that a better life is brought in for them in its place, the life God would give to those who have died to sin. In the same way these men heard “I will strike,” but they no longer see “and I will heal.” That is like what is said of a doctor who has cut bodies open and made hard wounds in them, in order to take out what harms them and stands in the way of health, and who does not stop at the pains and the cutting, but by his treatment sets the body back on the health he had in view for it. And they have not heard the whole of “For he himself causes pain, and again he restores,” but only “he causes pain.”

So too the Jew Celsus puts up has set out “O Father, if only this cup could pass by,” and not what follows, the words that show Jesus’ preparedness for the suffering and his firmness. These matters carry a long exposition, drawn from the wisdom of God, which could reasonably be handed on to those Paul named “the mature” when he said, “We speak wisdom among the mature.” We set that aside for the present, and will briefly recall what is useful for the matter in hand.

We said further back that some of the sayings belong to the one in Jesus who is “firstborn of all creation” — such as “I am the way and the truth and the life,” and others like them — and others belong to the man who is understood in him, such as “But now you are seeking to kill me, a man who has spoken to you the truth I heard from the Father.” Here too, then, he traces in his human side both the weakness of human flesh and the willingness of the spirit: the weakness in “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass by me,” the willingness of the spirit in “Yet not as I will, but as you will.” [u]

And if we ought to keep the order in which the words were said, notice that what one might call the single saying belonging to the weakness of the flesh comes first, and that the sayings belonging to the willingness of the spirit come afterward, and are more than one. There is the one: “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass by me.” There are the several others: “Not as I will, but as you will,” and “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, let your will be done.” It should also be noted that he did not say, “Let this cup go away from me.” The whole thing is said reverently, and with a qualification: “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass by me.”

I know another explanation of this passage as well. The Savior saw what the people and Jerusalem would suffer when what the Jews had dared against him was avenged; and for no other reason than his love for those very people, wishing them not to suffer what they were about to suffer, he says, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass by me.” It is as if he were saying: “Since a whole nation will be abandoned by you as a result of my drinking this cup of punishment, I pray that, if it is possible, this cup may pass by me — so that your own portion, which has dared this against me, may not be abandoned by you altogether.” But if, as Celsus says, nothing painful or distressing was happening to Jesus at that time, how could people afterward use Jesus as their example of holding out under what is hard for the sake of reverence toward God, if he did not suffer what human beings suffer, but only seemed to have suffered?

The Jew Celsus puts up goes on to say to the disciples of Jesus, as men who made these things up: “Not even in your lying were you able to cover your inventions over convincingly.” To this it will be said that there was an easy road to covering such things over: not to write them down in the first place. If the Gospels had not contained them, who could have reproached us for Jesus having said such things in the course of the plan he was carrying out? What Celsus did not see is that the same men cannot both have been deceived about Jesus, taking him for God and for the one the prophets spoke of, and also have made things up about him while knowing perfectly well that what they made up was not true. So either they did not make anything up, but really thought this, and wrote it down without lying; or they lied when they wrote it, and did not think these things, and were not deceived into supposing him God. [x]