Not Even His Own Disciples

How can what the Jew in Celsus says be anything but a plain lie — that Jesus, having won over no one while he lived, not even his own disciples, was punished and endured all that he endured? Where else did the envy that the chief priests and the elders and the scribes among the Jews stirred up against him come from, if not from this: that crowds were won over and followed him even out into the deserts, held fast not only by the coherence of his words, since he always said what fitted his hearers, but also by the mighty works, which struck with amazement the people whom the coherence of his word had not brought to faith? [a]

And how is it anything but a plain lie to say that he did not win over even his own disciples? At the time they did show something human, out of cowardice — they had not yet been honed for courage — but they did not throw away the judgment they had formed about him, that he was the Christ. Peter, after his denial, saw the depth of the evil he had come to, and “went outside and wept bitterly.” The rest were struck down by their despair over him, since they still marveled at him; and then, through his appearing, they were made firm in believing, still more and still more surely than before, that he was the Son of God.

Celsus is in a very unphilosophical frame of mind when he pictures pre-eminence among human beings as lying not in a word that saves and a pure character, but in acting against the whole premise of the part he had taken up: in not dying, though he had taken mortality on; or, if he did die, at least in not dying the kind of death that could become a pattern for people who would learn, from the act itself, how to die for the sake of reverence toward God, and how to speak out boldly in that reverence in front of men who have gone wrong on the whole question of reverence and irreverence. [d]

For such men think that the reverent are the most irreverent of all, and suppose that the most reverent are the men who wander about God and fit the undistorted idea of him to anything at all rather than to God — and worst of all when they rush to kill the people who have given themselves over, with their whole soul and “even to death,” to the plain evidence of the one God who is over all things.

Celsus goes on accusing Jesus through the Jewish part he has taken up, saying that he did not show himself clean of all evils. Then let Celsus’s argument say which evils Jesus failed to show himself clean of. If he means that Jesus was not clean of what is properly called evil, let him produce plainly some work of wickedness in him. But if he counts poverty, and a cross, and the plotting of outrageous men as evils, then he is plainly saying that evils happened to Socrates as well, who could not show himself clean of evils. [g]

And how large the rest of the company of poor men is among the Greeks — men who took up philosophy and accepted poverty by choice — many Greeks know from what is on record. There is Democritus, who let his estate go to sheep pasture; and Crates, who set himself free by making the Thebans a present of the money he was given for the sale of everything he owned. And there is Diogenes, who out of an extreme plainness of living made his home in a storage jar; and not one person with even moderate sense held that Diogenes was in a bad state on that account.

And since Celsus also wants it that Jesus was not beyond reproach, let him produce someone — anyone content with Jesus’s teaching — who has written down something in Jesus that truly gives ground for reproach. Or, if his accusation is not drawn from them, let him show where he learned what made him say that Jesus was not beyond reproach. Jesus, for his part, made good on what he announced, by the benefits he did to those who gave heed to him. And we, always seeing fulfilled the things he said before they happened — that the good news would be proclaimed in the whole world, that his disciples would go to all the nations and announce his word, and further that they would be brought before governors and kings for no other reason than his teaching — we are astonished at him, and day by day we make our faith in him firmer. [i]

I do not know from what greater or clearer proofs Celsus wanted him to make his predictions trustworthy — unless, as it seems, not understanding that the Word had become the man Jesus, he wanted him to suffer nothing human and not to become a noble pattern to people for bearing what comes. Celsus may think these things utterly pitiable and utterly shameful, since he holds pain to be the greatest of evils and pleasure to be the complete good — a view accepted by none of the philosophers who bring in providence and agree that courage and endurance and greatness of soul are virtues.

So Jesus did no damage to the faith directed toward him by what he endured. He strengthened it, rather, among those willing to accept courage, and among those he taught that living in the strict and true sense — the blessed life — is not here, but in what his own words call “the coming age,” while living in what is called “the present age” is a disaster, or the soul’s first and greatest contest.

After this he says to us: “Surely you will not say about him that, having failed to win over the people here, he set off for Hades to win over the people there?” [l]

Whether he likes it or not, this is what we say. While he was in a body he won over not merely a few, but so many that a plot was laid against him because of the number of those he won. And when he became a soul stripped of a body, he kept company with the souls stripped of bodies, turning to himself those of them that were willing — or those he saw to be better fitted for it, for reasons he alone knew.

Next, with a silliness I cannot account for, he says: “If you find absurd defenses, and are laughably deceived by them, and then imagine you are really making a defense — what stops you from thinking that all the others too, the ones who were condemned and came to a more wretched end, are greater and more divine messengers than he is?” [m]

That Jesus, who suffered what is on record, is plainly and clearly nothing like men who came to a more wretched end for sorcery or on any other charge, is obvious to anyone. No one can point to any work of sorcerers that turned souls away from the many sins found among people, and away from the flood of wickedness.

But the Jew in Celsus compares him to robbers, and says that anyone with the same shamelessness could say about a robber and murderer who had been punished: “This man was no robber, but a god — he told his fellow robbers beforehand that he would suffer what he did in fact suffer.” The first thing to be said is this: it is not because he foretold that he would suffer such things that we hold what we hold about Jesus, the convictions that give us the boldness to speak out in him as one who has come down to us from God.

The second thing we say is that these things too were somehow foretold in the Gospels. For God “was counted among the lawless” by lawless men: they wanted a robber released to them instead — the man who had been thrown into prison “for a rebellion” “and for murder” — and wanted Jesus crucified; and they crucified him between two robbers. And Jesus is always being crucified along with robbers in his genuine disciples, the ones who bear witness to the truth, and he suffers the same sentence they do at the hands of men.

And we say this. If these men do have something in common with robbers — men who, for the sake of reverence toward the Creator, and in order to keep that reverence unmixed and pure according to Jesus’s teaching, take on every outrage and every kind of death — then it is plain that Jesus too, the father of such teaching, is with good reason compared by Celsus to the chiefs of robber bands. But neither the one who died for the common good, nor these men who suffer for the sake of reverence and who alone of all people are plotted against because of the way of honoring the divine that has appeared to them, are killed justly; nor was Jesus plotted against by men who were clear of irreverence.

Now notice how superficial his account is of the disciples Jesus had at that time. He says: “Then the men who were with him while he was alive, who listened to his voice and had him as their teacher, saw him punished and dying, and neither died with him nor died for him, and were not even persuaded to think nothing of punishments — they actually denied that they were his disciples. But you nowadays die along with him.” [s]

Here, too, the sin the disciples committed while they were still beginners and unfinished, the sin written down in the Gospels, he believes really happened, so that he can bring a charge against our teaching. But what they set right after that sin he passes over in silence: how they spoke out boldly in front of the Jews, suffered countless things at their hands, and in the end died for Jesus’s teaching.

For he was not willing to hear Jesus foretelling to Peter, “When you grow old, you will stretch out your hands,” and the rest, to which the Scripture adds, “He said this to show by what death he would glorify God.” Nor was he willing to hear that James the brother of John — an apostle, and an apostle’s brother — was killed “with the sword” by Herod for the word of Christ. Nor all the things Peter and the rest of the apostles did, speaking out boldly for the word: how they went out “from the presence of the council” after being flogged, “rejoicing that they had been counted worthy to be dishonored for the name,” and so went far beyond much of what the Greeks record about the endurance and courage of their philosophers.

So from the very beginning this above all of Jesus’s lessons took hold among his hearers: the lesson that taught them to think little of the life the crowd fusses over, and to be in earnest about the life that is like the living of God.

And how can the Jew who speaks in Celsus escape the charge of lying when he says this? “While he was here he won over only ten sailors and tax collectors, the most utterly worthless sort — and not even all of them.” [v]

It is clear that even Jews would admit he won over not ten only, nor a hundred, nor a thousand, but five thousand at one time and four thousand at another, all together. And he won them so far that they followed him even out into the deserts, the only places able to hold a crowd of that size, all of them believing God through Jesus; and there he showed them not only words but works.

By repeating himself he forces us to repeat ourselves too, since we take care not to be thought to have skipped over any of the charges he brings. So in the passage before us, following the order of his book as we have it, he says: “If while he was alive he won over no one, and after his death anyone who wishes wins over so many, how is that not utterly absurd?” Whereas, if he kept his argument consistent, he ought to have said: if after his death it is not simply anyone who wishes, but those who wish and are also able, who win over so many, how much more reasonable it is that while he was staying here in this life he won over many times as many, by a more powerful word and by deeds.

He takes something he says himself and treats it as our answer to one of his own questions. He asks: “By what reasoning were you led to think this man is the Son of God?” And then he makes us answer: “We were brought to this because we know that his punishment took place to pull down the father of evil.” [x]

In fact we were brought to him by countless other things, of which we have set out only a tiny fraction in the pages before this — and, God granting it, we will go on setting them out, not only in what we are working through here against what passes for Celsus’s True Account, but on countless other occasions as well. And then, as though we had said that we consider him the Son of God because he was punished, he says: “What of it? Have not many others been punished too, and no less basely?” In this Celsus is doing what the most slavish-minded enemies of our teaching do — the ones who think it follows from the account of Jesus being crucified that we worship people who have been crucified.

Many times already Celsus has been unable to look the mighty works Jesus is recorded to have done straight in the face, and has slandered them as sorcery; and many times we have answered the charge as well as we could. Now he has us answering, as it were, that we thought he was the Son of God because he healed the lame and the blind. And he adds, “and, as you say, he raised the dead.” That he did heal the lame and the blind, which is why we consider him the Christ and the Son of God, is plain to us from what is written in the prophecies as well: [z]

And that he also raised the dead, and that this is no invention of the men who wrote the Gospels, is shown by the following. If it were an invention, many would have been written up as having risen, including people who had already spent a long time in their tombs. But since it is not an invention, the ones spoken of are very easily counted: the daughter of the ruler of the synagogue — about whom, for reasons I do not know, he said, “She is not dead but sleeping,” saying something about her that does not hold for everyone who dies; and the only son of the widow, whom he pitied and raised up, making the men carrying the body stand still; and third, Lazarus, who had been four days in the tomb.

About these cases we would go on to say, to the fairer-minded and above all to the Jew, that just as “there were many lepers in the days of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian,” and “there were many widows in the days of Elijah the prophet, and Elijah was sent to none of those widows except to Zarephath in Sidon” — for she had been made worthy, by some divine decision, of the wonder the prophet worked with the loaves — so too there were many dead in the days of Jesus, but the only ones who rose were those the Word knew to be fit for resurrection, so that what the Lord did should not be merely symbols of certain things, but should also of itself bring many to the wonderful teaching of the good news.

And I would say this as well: that in keeping with Jesus’s promise, his disciples have done “greater things” than the works of Jesus that the senses could take in. For the eyes of those who are blind in soul are always being opened, and the ears of people who had been deafened to words about virtue listen eagerly about God and about the blessed life with him. And many who were lame in the feet of what Scripture calls “the inner man,” now that the Word has healed them, do not simply leap but leap “like a deer” — an animal hostile to snakes and stronger than any viper’s poison. And these lame men who have been healed receive from Jesus “authority to tread,” with the very feet in which they were lame before, “on” the “snakes and scorpions” of wickedness, and simply “on all the power of the enemy”; and treading on it they take no harm, since they too have become stronger than the poison of all wickedness and of the demons.