The Signs at the Cross

After this he says that some of the believers, like men who come out of a drinking bout and turn on themselves, restamp the Gospel from its first written form — three times over, four times over, many times over — and remake it, so that when they are refuted they will have something to deny with. I know of no others who have restamped the Gospel except the followers of Marcion, the followers of Valentinus, and, I think, the followers of Lucanus. But saying this is no charge against the teaching itself. It is a charge against the men who dared to tamper with the Gospels. Sophists, Epicureans, Peripatetics, or anyone else at all who holds false opinions, are no charge against philosophy; and in the same way the men who restamp the Gospels and bring in schools of thought foreign to the intent of Jesus’ teaching are no charge against genuine Christianity. [a]

After this the Jew in Celsus’ book makes it a reproach that Christians use the prophets, who announced beforehand what would happen to Jesus. Besides what we have already said on the point, we say this: he ought — sparing people, as he puts it — to have set out the prophecies themselves, to have spoken for whatever is plausible in them, and only then to have set out what he takes to be the overturning of the Christians’ use of the prophetic writings. That way he would not look as if he were carrying off so large a question with a few small phrases. And this especially, since he claims that the prophecies can be fitted to countless other things far more plausibly than to Jesus. He ought to have taken his stand carefully against this argument of the Christians, which has carried the day and which they put forward as their strongest, and to have set out, prophecy by prophecy, how each one can be fitted to other things far more plausibly than to Jesus. [d]

But he did not see that if this was a plausible thing for anyone to say against Christians, it was plausible only in the mouth of a man who has nothing to do with the prophetic writings. As it is, Celsus has hung on his Jew a statement no Jew would have made. A Jew will not concede that the prophecies can be fitted to countless other things far more plausibly than to Jesus. He will give what he takes to be the meaning of each one, and then try to stand against the Christian reading — saying nothing at all convincing, but at least trying to.

We have already said, in the pages above, that the Christ was prophesied as making two comings to the human race. So there is no further need for us to answer what is put in the Jew’s mouth: “The prophets say that the one who is to come is great, a ruler, lord of all the earth and of all the nations and armies.” But it was in a Jewish spirit, I think, and in keeping with their bile, and along with abusing Jesus without proof and without even plausibility, that he adds: “And they announced no such plague.” Yet neither the Jews, nor Celsus, nor anyone else can show with proof that a plague turns so many people away from the flood of evils to the life lived according to nature, with moderation and the rest of the virtues. [f]

Celsus also tosses in this: “Nobody establishes that a man is a god, and a son of a god, out of such tokens and such misheard reports, or out of evidence as paltry as this.” He ought to have set out these alleged misheard reports and refuted them, and to have shown by argument that the evidence is paltry, so that if the Christian seemed to have anything plausible to say, Celsus could try to fight it and overturn the argument. As for what he said about Jesus, it did come true, and it came true of someone great; he simply refused to see that it came true, though the plain evidence about Jesus shows that it did. For he says: “As the sun, which lights up everything else, first shows itself, so the Son of God ought to have done.” We would answer that he did. For “in his days righteousness sprang up, and abundance of peace” — and it began at his birth, when God was making the nations ready for his teaching, so that they would come under one Roman emperor. Otherwise the nations, unmixed with one another on the pretext of many kingdoms, would have made it harder for Jesus’ apostles to do what Jesus told them to do when he said, “Go and make disciples of all nations.” [i]

And it is clear that Jesus was born in the reign of Augustus, who — to put it this way — leveled the many peoples of the earth into one kingdom. Many kingdoms would have been an obstacle to Jesus’ teaching spreading over the whole inhabited world, not only for the reasons already given, but because men everywhere would have been forced to serve as soldiers and to fight for their homelands. That is how it was before Augustus’ time, and further back still, when war was a necessity — the Peloponnesians against the Athenians, and others in the same way against others. How, then, could this peaceable teaching, which does not even allow a man to defend himself against enemies, have prevailed, if at Jesus’ coming the affairs of the world had not everywhere been changed into something gentler?

After this he charges Christians with playing the sophist when they say that the Son of God is the Word himself. And he thinks he strengthens the charge like this: that although we announce a Word to be the Son of God, what we exhibit is not a pure and holy Word but a man led off in utter dishonor and clubbed to death. On this too we have answered Celsus’ charges briefly in the pages above, where it was shown that the firstborn of all creation took on a body and a human soul; that God gave the command about the making of so many things in the world, and they were created; and that the one who received the command was God the Word. And since it is a Jew who says these things in Celsus’ book, it will not be out of place to use the words, “He sent out his word and healed them, and rescued them out of their ruins” — a verse we mentioned a little earlier. For my own part, I have met many Jews who claimed to be learned men, and I never heard one of them approve the statement that the Son of God is the Word, as Celsus says they do when he hangs these words on his Jew: “If for you the Word is the Son of God, we approve of that too.” [m]

We have already said that Jesus can be neither a braggart nor a sorcerer, so there is no need to take up what we said before — otherwise we too would be repeating ourselves in answer to Celsus’ repetitions. In finding fault with the genealogy, he never once mentions the things that Christians themselves ask about, the points that some people bring forward as charges because the genealogies disagree. For Celsus — who really is the braggart, and who claims to know everything about Christian affairs — does not know how to raise an intelligent difficulty about the Scripture. What he says instead is that the men who drew up the genealogies presumed to trace Jesus back to the first man who was born and to the kings of the Jews. [q]

And he thinks he is bringing in something impressive when he adds that the carpenter’s wife could not have been ignorant of it, if she came from a family as great as that. What has that to do with the argument? Grant that she was not ignorant of it — how does that damage the case? Or let her be ignorant. How does it follow, from her not knowing, that she was not descended from the first man, and that her line did not go back to the men who had been kings among the Jews? Does Celsus think it must be that poorer people come from ancestors who were all poor, or that kings come from kings? It seems to me a waste of time to go on about this, since it is obvious that even in our own day some people poorer than Mary have come from wealthy and distinguished families, and that rulers of nations and kings have come from people of no note at all.

He says: “And what noble thing did Jesus do, such as a god would do — looking down on men, laughing them off, and making sport of what was happening to him?” To a man asking that, where could our answer come from — even granting that we can point to what was noble and astonishing in what happened to him — except from the Gospels? They say that “the earth shook and the rocks were split and the tombs were opened,” and “the curtain of the temple was torn from top to bottom,” and “darkness came” in the daytime, “the sun failing.” [s]

But if Celsus believes the Gospels where he thinks he can bring a charge against Christians, and disbelieves them where they establish the divinity in Jesus, we will say to him: You there — either disbelieve all of it, and stop supposing you have any grounds for a charge; or believe all of it, and marvel at God’s Word, who became a human being and wanted to do good to the whole human race. And this is a noble work of Jesus: that to this day those whom God wills are healed by his name. As for the eclipse under Tiberius Caesar, in whose reign Jesus appears to have been crucified, and the great earthquakes that happened at that time, Phlegon too has written of them, in the thirteenth or the fourteenth book of his Chronicles, I think.

The Jew in Celsus’ book, making fun of Jesus as he supposes, is presented as knowing the line of Euripides’ Bacchus: [w]

Now Jews are not much given to the study of Greek literature. But grant that there was a Jew as well read as that. How does it follow that Jesus could not free himself, simply because he did not free himself when he was bound? Let Celsus believe, from our own writings, that Peter walked out of prison after being bound there, when an angel loosed his chains; and that Paul, fastened in the stocks with Silas at Philippi in Macedonia, was set free by divine power, when the doors of the prison were opened. But it is likely that Celsus laughs at these accounts, or that he never read the history at all; for he would probably answer that there are sorcerers who loose chains and open doors by spells, so as to put what sorcerers do on a level with what our histories record.

He says: “But nothing even happened to the man who condemned him, as it happened to Pentheus — madness, or being torn to pieces.” He did not see that it was not so much Pilate who condemned him — Pilate, who “knew that it was out of envy that the Jews had handed him over” — as the Jewish nation. And that nation has been condemned by God: torn to pieces and scattered over the whole earth, further than Pentheus was ever torn. And why did he deliberately pass over what is told about Pilate’s wife, who saw a dream and was so shaken by it that she sent word to her husband and said, “Have nothing to do with that righteous man; for today I have suffered much in a dream because of him”?

Again, saying nothing about what shows the divinity of Jesus, Celsus takes what is written in the Gospel about Jesus and turns it into a reproach, bringing up the men who mocked him and put the crimson cloak around him, and the crown of thorns, and the reed in his hand. Where did you learn these things, Celsus — where but from the Gospels? So you saw that they were fit matter for reproach, did you, while the men who wrote them down never noticed that you and men like you would laugh at them, but that others would take from them an example of despising those who laugh and jeer at the man who died readily for godliness’ sake? Admire instead their love of truth, and the love of truth of the one who suffered these things willingly for people’s sake and endured them with complete forbearance and patience. For it is not recorded that he wailed, or that after his condemnation he was thought to have done or said anything unworthy of him.

As for the objection, “Why, if not before, at least now does he not show something divine, and rescue himself from this shame, and bring to justice the men who insult him and his Father?” — we have to say that the same thing can be said to the Greeks, who bring in providence and accept that signs from the gods happen: why on earth does God not punish those who insult the divine and do away with providence? Whatever answer the Greeks make to that, we will make the same answer, or a better one. And there was a sign from heaven — the sun failing — and the other astonishing things, which show that the crucified man had something divine about him, something more than most men have. [ab] Then Celsus says: “And what does he say while his body is being fixed to the stake? What sort of ichor is it — ‘such as flows in the blessed gods’?” He is joking. But we will show, from the serious Gospels, whether Celsus likes it or not, that no mythical Homeric ichor flowed from his body. When he was already dead, “one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and blood and water came out. And the man who saw it has borne witness, and his witness is true; and he knows that he is telling the truth.” In other dead bodies the blood congeals, and no clear water runs out of them; but this was the astonishing thing about the dead body of Jesus, that even around a dead body there was blood and water, poured out from the side. And if this man — who, to get an accusation against Jesus and the Christians, carries off phrases from the Gospel that he does not even interpret correctly, while saying nothing about what establishes the divinity of Jesus — wants to hear about signs from God, let him read the Gospel and see that “the centurion and those keeping watch over Jesus with him, when they saw the earthquake and the things that were happening, were terrified, and said, ‘This man was the Son of God.’” [ac]

After this, the man who picks phrases out of the Gospel to build his accusation on makes the vinegar and the gall a reproach against Jesus, saying that “he rushed at the drink with his mouth wide open and gulped it down, and could not hold out against his thirst as any ordinary man often holds out.” This has an explanation of its own in the figurative reading. But for the present the more ordinary answer to the difficulty is that the prophets foretold this very thing. For it is written in the sixty-eighth Psalm, spoken in the person of the Christ: “And they gave me gall for my food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” So let the Jews say who it is that speaks these words in the prophet, and let them point out from history a man who took gall for his food and was given vinegar to drink. Or let them at least dare to say that the Christ they expect to come will be in such a state — so that we may answer: what harm is there, then, in the prophecy having already come about? That one prophecy, spoken so many ages before, is enough, along with the rest of the prophetic foreknowledge, to move a man who examines the whole matter fairly toward agreeing that Jesus is the one who was prophesied as Christ and as Son of God. [ae]

After this the Jew says to us further: “So this is what you accuse us of, you most faithful of men — that we do not regard this man as a god, and do not agree with you that he endured these things for people’s benefit, so that we too might despise punishments?” To this we say that we do blame the Jews. They were brought up on the law and the prophets, which announce the Christ beforehand, and yet they do not undo the arguments we put to them as proof that this man is the Christ — an undoing that would furnish their defense for not believing — nor, since they do not undo them, do they believe in the one who was prophesied. And he showed plainly, in the men who became his disciples, and even after the time of his life in a body, that he endured these things for people’s benefit. The aim of his first coming was not to judge human affairs before teaching and testifying about what must be done, and not to punish the wicked and save the good, but to sow his own word, in an astonishing way and with a power more than human, among the whole human race — just as the prophets set these things out as well. [ag]

We blame them further because, when he showed the power that was in him, they did not believe, but said that it was “by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons” that he threw the demons out of people’s souls. And we blame them because they slander his love for people. He overlooked not one city, not even one village in Judea, so that he might announce the kingdom of God everywhere; and they accuse him of vagrancy, as a man wandering about and drifting in a lowly body. But there is nothing lowly in enduring so many labors, for the benefit of everyone anywhere who is able to hear.