Testing the Wonder-Workers

Jesus was turning his disciples away — not from paying attention to sorcerers in general, or to people who profess to work wonders by whatever road they can, since his disciples had no need of that warning, but from the men who announce themselves as the Christ of God and try, by certain appearances, to turn the disciples of Jesus toward themselves. In one place he says: “Then, if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ,’ or ‘Here he is,’ do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will rise up, and they will give great signs and wonders, so that even the chosen ones would be led astray, if that were possible. Look, I have told you beforehand. So if they say to you, ‘Look, he is out in the wilderness,’ do not go out; ‘Look, he is in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it. For just as the lightning comes out from the east and shines as far as the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man be.” And in another place: “Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not eat in your name, and drink in your name, and drive out demons in your name, and do many mighty works?’ And I will say to them, ‘Go away from me, because you are workers of injustice.’” [a]

But Celsus wants to put the mighty works of Jesus on the same footing as the sorcery practiced among men, and he says, in these very words: “O light and truth! In his own voice he declares outright — as you yourselves have written down — that others too will come to you who use powers like his, wicked men and sorcerers; and he names a certain Satan as the one who contrives such things. So not even he denies that these things, at any rate, are nothing divine but are the works of wicked men. Forced by the truth, he uncovered what the others do and in the same breath convicted his own doings. How, then, is it not a wretched thing to judge from the very same works that the one is a god and the others are sorcerers? Why, on the strength of these works, should the others be counted wicked rather than this man, when they have him as their witness against himself? He himself has admitted that these are not the marks of a divine nature but of certain frauds and thoroughly wicked men.”

Now look and see whether Celsus is not plainly caught here handling the text like a criminal. What Jesus says about the men who will work “signs and wonders” is one thing; what the Jew in Celsus claims he says is another. If Jesus had simply told his disciples to be on their guard against people who profess to work wonders, without adding what those people would claim to be, then perhaps Celsus’s suspicion would have had some room. But the men Jesus wants us to guard against announce that they are “the Christ,” which is not what sorcerers do; and he says as well that some who live badly will work mighty works in his name and drive demons out of people. So sorcery, in these cases, and every suspicion of it, is rather — if I may put it that way — driven out of the passage altogether, and what is brought in is the divinity of Christ and the divinity of his disciples. For it is possible that a man who uses his name, and who is worked upon, in some way I do not know, by some power, so as to make the pretense that he himself is the Christ, should seem to accomplish things much like what Christ did; and that others, in the name of Jesus, should seem to do things much like what his genuine disciples do.

Paul, too, in his second letter to the Thessalonians, sets out the manner in which there will one day be revealed “the man of lawlessness, the son of destruction, the one who sets himself against everything called a god or an object of worship and lifts himself above it, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, putting himself on display as being God.” And again he says to the Thessalonians: “And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only, the one who now holds it back will do so until he is out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord God will destroy with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearing of his coming — the one whose coming is according to the working of Satan, with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with every deceit of injustice among those who are perishing.” And when he sets out the reason why the lawless one is allowed to take up residence in this life, he says: “because they did not receive the love of the truth, so as to be saved. And for this reason God sends them a working of delusion, so that they believe the lie — so that all may be judged who did not believe the truth but took pleasure in injustice.” [g]

Now let someone tell us whether anything in the good news, or anything in the apostle, can leave room for a suspicion that sorcery is what is being foretold in this passage. And anyone who wishes may take up from Daniel as well the prophecy about the antichrist.

But Celsus speaks falsely against the words of Jesus. Jesus did not say, “there will come others who use powers like mine, wicked men and sorcerers”; and Celsus says that he said exactly that. The power of the spell-chanters in Egypt was not like the astonishing grace at work in Moses. The outcome proved it: what the Egyptians did was conjuring, and what Moses did was divine. In the same way, what the antichrists do, and what those men do who pretend to powers as though they were disciples of Jesus, is called signs and wonders “of falsehood,” prevailing “with every deceit of injustice among those who are perishing”; whereas the works of Christ and of his disciples had for their fruit not deceit but the salvation of souls. For who would reasonably say that the better life — the life that day by day draws in what belongs to wickedness and makes it less — comes out of deceit?

Celsus caught a glimpse of what Scripture says when he made Jesus say that some Satan will contrive such things. But he also snatches the argument up and runs off with it when he asserts that Jesus does not deny that these works have nothing divine in them but are the works of wicked men. He has made things of one kind out of things that in fact belong to different kinds. A wolf is not of the same kind as a dog, even if it seems to have something like a dog in the shape of its body and in its voice; nor is a wood pigeon the same as a dove. In the same way, what is accomplished by the power of God has nothing in common with what comes about from sorcery. [l]

There is this to say as well against the dishonest turns Celsus takes. Are we to hold that mighty works do come about by sorcery, from wicked demons, but that not one mighty work is accomplished by the divine and blessed nature — that human life has borne the worse things and made no room at all for the better?

It seems to me that this must be set down as holding in every case: wherever something worse pretends to be of the same kind as something better, there is on the opposite side, without fail, something better. So it goes with those who accomplish things by sorcery. There must also be things in human life that come about by divine working. Consistency requires one and the same man either to do away with both and say that neither happens, or, once he grants the one — and especially the worse one — to admit the better as well. But if a man were to grant that things happen by sorcery and refuse to grant that things happen by the power of God, he seems to me like someone who grants that there are sophisms and plausible arguments, which miss the truth while pretending to set the truth out, and yet holds that truth has no home anywhere among men, nor any reasoning free of sophisms.

Suppose we once accept this: that since magic and sorcery really exist — worked by wicked demons who are charmed by elaborate incantations and made to obey human sorcerers — it follows that things done by divine power must also be found among men. Then why should we not put the men who profess such powers thoroughly to the test? Test them by their life, by their character, and by what follows from the powers — whether harm to people or the setting right of character. Which of them does such things as a servant of demons, by spells and conjuring tricks? And which of them does them after coming, in his soul and his spirit, and I think in his body as well, into a place that is pure and holy before God, and after receiving some divine spirit — doing them for the benefit of men and to urge them on toward believing in the true God?

And if we must once inquire, without letting the mighty works themselves snatch us up, which man accomplishes such things by the better power and which by the worse — so that we neither speak ill of them all nor admire and accept them all as divine — then how will it not be plain, from what happened in the time of Moses and in the time of Jesus, where whole nations were formed after their signs, that these men did by divine power the things they are recorded to have done? Wickedness and conjuring would never have formed a whole nation, one that rose above not only cult statues and the things men set up, but above every created nature, and climbed up to the uncreated beginning, the God of the universe.

But since it is a Jew who says these things in Celsus’s book, we would say to him: You there — why on earth do you believe that the things written in your own books, as accomplished by God through Moses, are truly divine, and try to argue against the men who slander them as having come about by sorcery, like the things done by the wise men of Egypt — while the things done by Jesus, which even you admit did happen, you charge with not being divine, imitating the very Egyptians who argue against you? [q]

For if the outcome, and a whole nation formed through the wonders worked in Moses, gives plain evidence that it was God who brought these things about in Moses’s time, why should the same not be shown all the more in the case of Jesus, who did a greater work than Moses did? Moses took men of his own nation, from the seed of Abraham, who had kept circumcision handed down in succession and had become zealous for Abraham’s customs — men who were readier than others — and led them out of Egypt, setting before them the laws you believe to be divine. Jesus ventured on something greater: onto a way of life already in possession of the ground, and ancestral customs, and an upbringing shaped by the laws already laid down, he brought in the way of life that follows the good news.

And just as Moses needed the signs he is recorded to have worked in order to be believed, not by the council of elders only but by the people as well, why would Jesus not need mighty works of the same kind in order to be believed by those of the people who had been taught to ask for “signs and wonders”? They would have to be works that, being greater and more divine in comparison with the ones worked through Moses, were able to draw men away from Jewish myth-making and from the human traditions current among them, and to make them accept that the one who taught and did such things was greater than the prophets. For how was he not greater than the prophets, when he was the very man the prophets proclaimed as the Christ and the Savior of the human race?

Everything the Jew in Celsus says against those who believe in Jesus can just as well be put on the same footing and turned into an accusation against Moses. One could then say that the sorcery of Jesus either differs in nothing from the sorcery of Moses, or is very like it — both of them, so far as the wording of Celsus’s Jew goes, open to the same charges. About Christ, for instance, the Jew in Celsus says: “But, O light and truth! Jesus in his own voice declares these things outright — as you yourselves have written down — that others too will come to you who use powers like his, wicked men and sorcerers.” And about Moses, a man who did not believe Moses’s writings and was arguing against the Jew — an Egyptian, or anyone at all — might say: “But, O light and truth! Moses in his own voice declares outright — as you yourselves have written down — that others will come to you who use powers like his, wicked men and sorcerers. For it is written in your law: ‘If a prophet rises up among you, or a man who dreams a dream, and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder comes about that he spoke of to you, saying, Let us go and follow other gods, whom you do not know, and let us serve them — you are not to listen to the words of that prophet or of that dreamer of the dream,’” and so the passage goes on. [v]

The man who slanders the words of Jesus says that Jesus names a certain Satan as the one who contrives such things; and the man who puts this on the same footing with Moses will say that Moses names a dreaming prophet as the one who contrives such things. Just as the Jew in Celsus says of Jesus: “So not even he denies that these things, at any rate, are nothing divine but are the works of wicked men,” so the man who does not believe Moses’s writings will set out the passage just quoted and say the same to him: “So not even Moses denies that these things, at any rate, are nothing divine but are the works of wicked men.” And he will do the same with this line too: “Forced by the truth, Moses uncovered what the others do and in the same breath convicted his own doings.” And when the Jew says: “How, then, is it not a wretched thing to judge from the very same works that the one is a god and the others are sorcerers?” someone might answer him, on the strength of the words of Moses set out above: “How, then, is it not a wretched thing to judge from the very same works that the one is a prophet of God and his attendant, and the others are sorcerers?”

And since Celsus, lingering over the subject, added to the statements I have set out and put on the same footing this one as well: “Why, on the strength of these works, should the others be counted wicked rather than this man, when they have him as their witness against himself?” we too will add something of the same kind to what has been said. Why, on the strength of the men Moses forbids us to trust when they display signs and wonders, should we count them wicked rather than Moses, seeing that he slandered other men over signs and wonders? And saying more to the same effect, so that his attempt may look bigger, he says: “He himself has admitted that these are not the marks of a divine nature but of certain frauds and thoroughly wicked men.” Who, then, is “he himself”? You, Jew, say it is Jesus. But the man who charges you with being open to the same accusations will carry that “himself” back to Moses.

After this, Celsus’s Jew — supposedly addressing us, so that I may keep to the part laid out for the Jew from the beginning — says, in his speech to those of his own countrymen who had come to believe: “What was it, then, that brought you over? Was it that he said beforehand that after dying he would rise again?” [y]

This too, like the earlier questions, will be put on the same footing and turned to Moses. For we will say to him: What was it, then, that brought you over? Was it that he put on record, about his own death, words like these — “And Moses, the household servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab by the word of the Lord; and they buried him in the land of Moab, near the house of Phogor. And no one knows his burial place to this day”? For as the Jew casts discredit on the claim that Jesus said beforehand that after dying he would rise again, so a man who says the like about Moses will reply to him that Moses too put it on record — for Deuteronomy is his own book — that “no one knows his burial place to this day,” dignifying and exalting even his burial as something the human race does not know.