A Body You Could Touch

After this the Jew speaks to his own fellow citizens who believe in Jesus: “Come now, let us even grant you that this was said. How many others put on wonders like these, working the deception for profit to win over people who listen without thinking? So they tell it of Zamolxis among the Scythians, the slave of Pythagoras; and of Pythagoras himself in Italy; and of Rhampsinitus in Egypt — the man who they say played dice with Demeter down in Hades and came back up carrying a golden napkin, a gift from her; and of Orpheus among the Odrysians, and Protesilaus in Thessaly, and Heracles at Cape Taenarum, and Theseus. But here is the thing to look at: whether anyone who really died ever rose again with the same body. Or do you think the stories of the others are myths and look like myths, while the ending of your own drama has been worked out to be respectable and convincing — the voice from the stake as he breathed his last, and the earthquake, and the darkness? While he was alive he was no help to himself; but dead he rose again, and showed the marks of his punishment, and how his hands had been pierced through. Who saw this? A frenzied woman, as you say, and perhaps someone else in on the same sorcery — a man who either dreamed it in some state of his own, or who in a deluded opinion pictured what he wanted (which has happened to countless people), or, what is more likely, who wanted to stun the rest with this staged wonder and by such a lie to hand an opening to other charlatans.” [a]

Since it is a Jew who says these things, we will make our defense of our Jesus as though we were answering a Jew, still holding the argument in common with the case of Moses, and saying to him: How many others put on wonders like the ones Moses put on, working the deception for profit to win over people who listen without thinking? A man who does not believe Moses is in a far better position to bring up Zamolxis and Pythagoras and their staged wonders than a Jew is, since a Jew is not much given to studying Greek histories.

And an Egyptian who does not believe the marvels told of Moses can bring up Rhampsinitus quite plausibly. He can say it is much more credible that this man went down to Hades and played dice with Demeter, and snatched a golden napkin from her and showed it as proof that he had been in Hades and had come back up from there, than that Moses should have written of himself that he went into “the thick darkness where God was,” and that he alone, beyond all the rest, came near to God. For he wrote it this way: “And Moses alone will come near to God; the rest will not come near.” So we, the disciples of Jesus, will say to the Jew who talks like this: Make your own defense, then, while you are accusing us over our faith in Jesus, and answer the Egyptian and the Greeks. What will you say to the charges you brought against our Jesus — charges that would have reached Moses first? And however hard you fight to defend Moses, since the accounts of him do allow a forceful and clear case, you will not notice that in defending Moses you have unwillingly established Jesus as more divine than Moses.

The Jew in Celsus says that these hero stories — about men said to have gone down to Hades and to have come back up from there — are staged wonders. The heroes, he says, disappeared for a while, stole themselves out of everyone’s sight, and afterward showed themselves again as though they had come back from Hades. That seems to be what his words mean about Orpheus among the Odrysians, and Protesilaus in Thessaly, and Heracles at Cape Taenarum, and Theseus as well. So let us show that what is recorded of Jesus, that he was raised from the dead, cannot be set beside these. Each of the heroes named in those places could have stolen himself out of people’s sight if he wished, and could have decided to come back again to the people he had left. But Jesus was crucified in front of all the Jews, and his body was taken down in the sight of their whole people. How can anyone say that he faked something like what is told of those heroes who went down to Hades and came back up? [i]

We say this as well, which might perhaps be offered in defense of Jesus having been crucified — and especially because of what is told about the heroes who are thought to have gone down to Hades by force. Suppose Jesus had died an unmarked death, not the kind that made his dying plain to the whole Jewish people, and had then truly risen from the dead. In that case the suspicion people hold about the heroes would have had room to be said about him too. So perhaps, along with the other reasons for Jesus being crucified, this one also weighed toward his dying a marked death on the cross: so that no one could say he withdrew from people’s sight of his own accord and only seemed to die without really dying, and then, when he wanted to, appeared again and staged the resurrection from the dead as a wonder.

And I think the argument drawn from his own disciples is plain and clear. They handed themselves over to a teaching that was dangerous as far as human life goes, and they would not have taught it with such force if they had made up the raising of Jesus from the dead. They did not merely prepare other people to think little of death; they did it first themselves.

Notice whether the Jew in Celsus is not talking quite blindly when he says that it is impossible for anyone to rise from the dead with the same body. His words are: “But here is the thing to look at: whether anyone who really died ever rose again with the same body.” A Jew would not have said this if he believed what is written in the third and fourth books of Kingdoms about the two little boys, one of whom Elijah raised and the other Elisha. And this, I think, is why Jesus made his stay among no other nation than the Jews, who had grown used to marvels: so that by setting what they already believed beside what he did and what is recorded of him, they might accept that this man, in whose case greater things happened and by whom more marvelous things were carried through, was greater than all who came before him. [l]

After the Greek stories the Jew brought up — about men who supposedly staged wonders and supposedly rose from the dead — he says this to the Jews who have come to believe in Jesus: “Or do you think the stories of the others are myths and look like myths, while the ending of your own drama has been worked out to be respectable and convincing — the voice from the stake as he breathed his last?” We will say to the Jew: the stories you brought up we too consider myths. But the Scriptures we hold in common with you, in which not only you but we also take pride, we do not call myths at all. So we believe the men who wrote there about people raised from the dead, as men who were not staging wonders; and we believe the one here, since he both foretold it himself and was foretold by others and did rise. [n]

And his rising from the dead is more marvelous than theirs in this respect: those boys were raised by prophets, by Elijah and Elisha, but this man by none of the prophets — by the Father in the heavens. That is why his resurrection also accomplished more than theirs did. What came to the world from the little boys raised through Elijah and Elisha that was anything as great as what came through the preached resurrection of Jesus, believed to have happened by divine power?

He thinks the earthquake and the darkness were a staged wonder too. We made our defense on those points earlier, as best we could, bringing in Phlegon, who records that such things happened at the time of the Savior’s suffering. Then he goes on: “While he was alive he was no help to himself; but dead he rose again, and Jesus showed the marks of his punishment, and how his hands had been pierced through.” And we ask him what he means by “was no help to himself.” If he means it with respect to virtue, we say that he helped himself very greatly indeed. He said nothing and did nothing out of place; he was truly “led as a sheep to the slaughter, and like a lamb before its shearer, without a voice” — and the Gospel bears witness that in just this way he “did not open his mouth.” But if he takes “was no help” from the things in between and the things of the body, we say that we have shown from the Gospels that he came to these things willingly. [o]

Then, after repeating what comes from the Gospel — that when he rose from the dead he showed the marks of his punishment, and how his hands had been pierced through — he asks: “Who saw this?” And running down the account of Mary Magdalene, who is recorded to have seen him, he says: “A frenzied woman, as you say.” And since she is not the only one recorded to have seen Jesus risen, but others as well, the Jew in Celsus slanders that too, saying: “And perhaps someone else in on the same sorcery.”

Then, as though this could actually happen — I mean that an appearance of a dead man could come to someone as though he were alive — he goes on like an Epicurean and says that somebody dreamed it in some state of his own, or in a deluded opinion pictured what he wanted, and reported it; and this, he says, has already happened to countless people. But even if that seems very forcefully put, it nonetheless goes to establish a necessary teaching: that the soul of those who have died goes on existing. And a man who has taken up that teaching has not believed without reason in the soul’s immortality, or at least in its continuance — as Plato too says in his book on the soul, that “shadowy phantoms” of people already dead have appeared to some around their tombs. Now these phantoms that occur about the soul of the dead arise from something underlying: from the soul that subsists in what is called the radiant body. [s]

But Celsus, not wanting anything of the kind, will have it that some people dream while wide awake, and in a deluded opinion picture what they themselves wish. It is not unreasonable to believe that this happens in sleep. But in waking hours, with people who are not altogether out of their minds, delirious or melancholic, it is not convincing. Celsus foresaw this too, and so he called the woman frenzied — which is not what the written account shows. He took his cue from that and brought his charge against the facts.

So Jesus after his death, as Celsus supposes, was sending out an appearance of the wounds he took on the cross, and was not really wounded as he is described to have been. But as the Gospel teaches — parts of which Celsus believes, the parts he wants so that he can accuse, while he disbelieves other parts — Jesus called to himself one of the disciples who did not believe and thought the marvel impossible. That disciple had agreed with the woman who said she had seen him, since it is not impossible for the soul of a dead man to be seen; but he did not yet think it true that Jesus had been raised in a body you could touch. So he did not only say, “Unless I see, I will not believe.” He added, “Unless I put my hand into the mark of the nails and feel his side, I will not believe.” Thomas said this because he judged that the body of a soul can be seen by the eyes of sense — [v]

and often, too,

And Jesus called Thomas and said: “Bring your finger here and see my hands; and bring your hand and put it into my side; and do not be unbelieving, but believing.”

And it followed from everything that was prophesied about him — this among the rest — and from what he did and what happened to him, that this should be the most marvelous thing of all. For it had been said beforehand in the prophet, in the person of Jesus: “My flesh will pitch its tent in hope; and you will not abandon my soul to Hades, and you will not let your holy one see corruption.” And at his resurrection he was, so to speak, on a border between the thickness of the body he had before his suffering and a soul appearing stripped of such a body. That is why, when “his disciples, and Thomas with them,” were together in one place, “Jesus comes, the doors being shut, and stood in the middle and said: Peace to you. Then he says to Thomas: Bring your finger here” — and the rest. [y]

And in the Gospel according to Luke, while Simon and Cleopas were talking “with each other about all the things that had happened” to them, Jesus came up to them and “went along with them; and their eyes were held from recognizing him. And he said to them: What are these words you are exchanging with each other as you walk?” And when “their eyes were opened and they recognized him,” then Scripture says, in these very words: “And he became invisible to them.” So even if Celsus wants to lump what is told of Jesus, and of the people who saw him after the resurrection, together with other phantoms and other people who saw things, still, to those who examine the matter fair-mindedly and sensibly, it will look all the more marvelous.

After this Celsus speaks against what is written in a way that is not to be lightly brushed aside. He says: “If Jesus really wanted to display divine power, he ought to have appeared to the very men who abused him, and to the man who condemned him, and to everyone without exception.” For it truly appears to us as well, from the Gospel, that after the resurrection he was not seen in the way he used to show himself before — in public and to everyone. In Acts it is written that “being seen through forty days,” he announced to the disciples “the things concerning the kingdom of God.” And in the Gospels it is not said that he was always with them; in one place he appeared among them after eight days, “the doors being shut,” and in another place in some such way. [ab]

Paul too, at the end of the first letter to the Corinthians, writes as follows, since Jesus was not seen publicly as he had been in the time before his suffering: “For I handed on to you among the first things what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” — and “that he was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve. Then he was seen by more than five hundred brothers at once, of whom the greater part remain until now, though some have fallen asleep. Then he was seen by James, then by all the apostles. And last of all, as by the miscarried child, he was seen by me also.”

Now I take what belongs to this passage to be great and wonderful, and beyond the worth not only of most believers but even of those who are far advanced — matters in which the reason would be made clear why, once raised from the dead, he did not appear as he had in the earlier time. But out of the many things there are to say, in a book like this one, written against the argument aimed at Christians and their faith, see whether we can reasonably set down a few of them and so reach the people who will hear this defense.