Not Seen Alike by All

Jesus was one person, and yet in the ways he can be thought of he was more than one; nor was he seen alike by everyone who looked at him. That he was more than one in this way is clear from the saying, “I am the way and the truth and the life,” and from “I am the bread,” and “I am the door,” and countless others. And that when he was seen he did not appear the same to everyone who saw him, but according to what each could make room for, will be clear to anyone who notices why, when he was about to be transfigured on the high mountain, he did not take all the apostles along, but only Peter and James and John — since they alone could make room for beholding his glory at that time, and were able as well to take in Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory, and to hear them talking with him, and to hear the voice out of the cloud from heaven. [a]

I think, too, that even before he went up the mountain — where the disciples came to him by themselves and he taught them about the beatitudes — while he was somewhere down below the mountain, and evening came on and he was healing those who were brought to him, ridding them of every disease and every sickness, he did not appear the same to the sick, who needed him to heal them, as he did to those who, being in good health, were able to climb the mountain with him. And further: when he explained privately to his own disciples the parables that had been spoken to the crowds outside with their meaning covered over, then, just as those who heard the solution of the parables were better in their hearing than those who heard the parables with no solution given, so it was with their sight as well — certainly the sight of the soul, and, I think, of the body too.

That he did not always look the same is shown by Judas. When he was about to betray him he said to the crowds going out with him, who did not know him, “Whomever I kiss, that is the man.” And I think the Savior himself indicates something of the same kind through the words, “Daily I was with you in the temple, teaching, and you did not lay hold of me.”

Since, then, we hold such views about Jesus — not only about the divinity within him, hidden from most people, but also about the body that was transfigured when he wished and for whom he wished — we say this. While Jesus had not yet “stripped off the rulers and the authorities,” and had not yet died “to sin,” everyone could make room for seeing him. But once he had “stripped off the rulers and the authorities,” and no longer had anything that most people could make room for seeing, then all who had seen him before were no longer able to see him. And so, sparing them, he did not appear to everyone after he rose from the dead.

And why do I say “to everyone”? He was not always with even his own apostles and disciples, nor did he always show himself to them, because they could not make room for the sight of him without a break. For his divinity was brighter once he had finished the plan he was carrying out. That divinity Cephas — Peter — was able to see, being, so to speak, the firstfruits of the apostles; and after him the twelve, once Matthias had been put in Judas’ place; and after them “five hundred brothers at once.” “Then he appeared to James. Then to” the other apostles besides the twelve, “to all of them” — perhaps to the seventy as well. “And last of all,” to Paul, who was like “a child born too soon,” and who knew how to say, “To me, the least of all the holy ones, this grace was given.” And perhaps “the least” means the same thing as “a child born too soon.” [g]

For just as no one could easily bring a charge against Jesus for not taking all the apostles up the high mountain, but only the three already named, when he was about to be transfigured and to show the brightness of his own clothes and the glory of Moses and Elijah talking with him — so no one could reasonably find fault with the apostles’ words, which present Jesus as having been seen after the resurrection not by everyone, but by those whom he saw had received eyes that could make room for seeing his resurrection.

I think what is said about him in these words is also useful for the defense of the matter before us: “For to this end Christ died and rose again, that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.” Notice in these words that Jesus “died, that he might be Lord of the dead,” “and rose, that he might be Lord” not only “of the dead” but “also of the living.” And the apostle certainly knows who the dead are over whom Christ is Lord: those listed this way in the first letter to the Corinthians — “For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable.” The living are those who will be changed, who are a different group from the dead who will be raised. About these the wording runs, “and we shall be changed,” which comes right after “the dead will be raised first.”

And in the first letter to the Thessalonians as well, setting out the same difference in other words, he says that those who have fallen asleep are one group and the living another: “We do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, about those who have fallen asleep, so that you may not grieve as the rest do, who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose, so also God will bring with him, through Jesus, those who have fallen asleep. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord: that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not go ahead of those who have fallen asleep.” The explanation of these passages that seemed right to us we set out in the commentaries we dictated on the first letter to the Thessalonians.

And do not be surprised if not all the crowds who have believed in Jesus see his resurrection, when Paul, writing to Corinthians as to people who could not make room for anything more, says, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” And this is of the same sort: “For you were not yet able; and you are not able even now, for you are still fleshly.” [n]

So then the word, doing everything by a divine judgment, recorded about Jesus that before the suffering he simply appeared to most people — and even that not always; while after the suffering he no longer appeared in the same way, but with a certain judgment that measured out to each person what was due to him. And just as it is written that “God appeared to Abraham,” or to one of the holy ones, and this “appeared” did not happen all the time but at intervals, and he did not appear to everyone — understand in the same way that the Son of God too was seen by a judgment very like the one at work in their case, in God’s appearing to them.

So we have made our defense, as far as we could in a work of this kind, against the claim that “he ought, if he really wanted to display divine power, to have shown himself to the very men who abused him, and to the man who condemned him, and to absolutely everyone.” There was no need for him to be seen by the man who condemned him, or by those who abused him. Jesus spared both the man who condemned him and the men who abused him, so that they would not be struck with blindness, the way the men in Sodom were struck when they plotted against the beauty of the angels who were being entertained at Lot’s house. The account makes this clear: “But the men put out their hands and pulled Lot in to themselves, into the house, and shut the door; and they struck the men at the door of the house with blindness, from the small to the great, so that they wore themselves out looking for the door.” [q]

Jesus, then, wanted to display his own power — which was divine — to each person who could see it, and to see it in the measure that he could make room for. And I do not suppose he guarded against being seen for any other reason than the capacity of those who could not make room for seeing him. And Celsus brings in this to no purpose: “For he no longer had any man to fear once he was dead, being, as you say, a god; nor was he sent in the first place in order to go unnoticed.” Yet he was sent not only to be known but also to go unnoticed. For not everything that he was was known even to those to whom he was known; something of him escaped even them, and to some he was not known at all. And he opened the gates of “light” to men who had become sons of “darkness” and of “night” but had given themselves over to becoming sons of “day” and of “light.” And the Lord came to us as Savior more as a good physician to men full of sins than to the righteous.

But let us see in what way this Jew of Celsus says that “if this much at least would have served to display his divinity, he ought at any rate to have vanished from the stake on the spot.” This too seems to me like the argument of men who set themselves against providence, sketching out for themselves something other than what exists and saying that the world would be better if it were the way we have sketched it. Where they sketch what is possible, they are shown to be making the world worse by their sketch, so far as it depends on them, than it actually is; and where they seem not to be painting things worse than they are, they are proved to want what is impossible by nature — so that either way they make themselves ridiculous. [s]

And so here too. That it was not impossible for one who came in a more divine nature to become invisible whenever he wished is plain in itself, and clear as well from what is written about him — clear, that is, to men who do not take up some of what is written in order to accuse the word while supposing the rest to be fiction. For it is written in Luke that after the resurrection Jesus, “taking the bread, blessed it, and breaking it gave it” to Simon and Cleopas; and when they had received the bread, “their eyes were opened and they recognized him; and he became invisible to them.”

But we want to show how it would not have been more useful, for the whole plan, that he should have vanished bodily from the stake at once. What is recorded as having happened to Jesus does not hold the whole view of the truth in the bare wording and the narrative; each of these things can be shown, to men who read the scripture with more understanding, to be a symbol of something else as well. [v]

So then, his being crucified holds the truth set out in “I have been crucified with Christ,” and what is signified by “Far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the world has been crucified to me and I to the world.” His death was necessary because of “For in that he died, he died to sin once for all,” and because the righteous man says, “being conformed to his death,” and “For if we died with him, we shall also live with him.” In the same way his burial reaches to those who have been conformed to his death, who were crucified with him and died with him — as Paul also says: “For we were buried with him through baptism,” and we rose with him.

What is recorded about the burial, and the tomb, and the man who buried him, we shall go through at more length in another place, at a better time, where it will be our main business to speak of these things. For now the clean linen sheet is enough — the sheet in which the clean body of Jesus had to be wrapped — and the new tomb that Joseph “quarried in the rock,” “where no one was yet lying,” or, as John puts it, “in which no one had ever yet been laid.” And consider whether the agreement of the three evangelists is not enough to move a man: they thought it worth recording that the tomb was quarried, or hewn, in rock, so that anyone examining the words of the account might see something worth attention here — in the newness of the tomb, which Matthew and John recorded, and in the fact that no dead man had ever been there, according to Luke and John.

For it was fitting that the one who was not like the rest of the dead — who showed signs of life even in his deadness, the water and the blood — and who was, if I may put it so, a new kind of dead man, should come to lie in a new and clean tomb. So that just as his birth was purer than every birth, in that he was born not from intercourse but from a virgin, his burial too might have that purity, shown by way of the symbol: his body laid in a new tomb, one that had not been built up out of stones picked from here and there, with no natural unity, but quarried and hewn in a single rock, of one piece throughout.

As for the exposition of these things, and the climb from what is recorded as having happened up to the realities the events pointed to, a man might treat it more fully and in a way more suited to their divine character, setting such matters out at a better time in a work devoted to them. The plain wording, however, one might account for like this: that for a man who had decided to endure being hung on a stake, it belonged to keep everything that followed from what he had taken on, so that, having been taken down as a man because he had died as a man, he might also be buried as a man.

But suppose it had been written in the Gospels, as Celsus wants, that he vanished from the stake at once. Celsus and the unbelievers would have run down what was written and would have accused it just the same, saying: “Why on earth did he become invisible after the cross, and not manage it before he suffered?” If, then, having learned from the Gospels that he did not vanish from the stake at once, they think they can bring a charge against the word — for not inventing, as those men thought it should, his vanishing from the stake at once, but recording the truth instead — is it not reasonable that they should believe his resurrection too? And believe that, when he wished, at one time he “stood in the midst” of the disciples “with the doors shut,” and at another, after giving bread to two of his acquaintances, he “became invisible to them” at once, after certain words he had spoken to them?

But where does this Jew of Celsus get it that Jesus was hiding? For he says of him: “And what messenger, once he is sent, hides himself when he ought to announce what he was ordered to announce?” He was not hiding, the man who said to those who were seeking to arrest him, “Daily I was in the temple, teaching openly, and you did not lay hold of me.” As for what comes next, which Celsus repeats over again, we have already made our defense once and shall be content with what was said before. For it has been written in the earlier pages against this too: “Or again: when he was disbelieved while he was in the body, he preached to everyone without restraint; but when he could have produced a strong faith by rising from the dead, he showed himself secretly to one little woman only, and to his own band of devotees.” [ab]

Now it is not even true that he appeared to one little woman only. It is written in the Gospel according to Matthew that “late on the sabbath, as it was growing light toward the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to look at the tomb. And look, there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven, and came and rolled away the stone.” And a little further on Matthew says: “And look, Jesus met them” — clearly the Marys already mentioned — “saying, ‘Greetings.’ And they came and took hold of his feet and worshiped him.”

We have also answered the charge that “while being punished he was seen by everyone, but risen, by one,” when we made our defense against “he was not seen by everyone.” And now we shall say this as well: his human attributes were visible to all men, but the more divine ones — and I am not speaking of things that stand in a relation to other things, but of things that differ in kind — were not something everyone could make room for.

But notice the contradiction Celsus falls into, right at his own feet. Having just said that Jesus showed himself secretly to one little woman and to his own band of devotees, he adds immediately: “So then, while being punished he was seen by all men, but risen, by one — whereas the opposite ought to have happened.” Let us hear what he supposes the “ought” to be. It is the opposite of this: that while being punished he was seen by all, but risen, by one. For as far as his own wording goes, he wanted what is both impossible and unreasonable — that while he was being punished he should be seen by one man only, but once risen, by everyone. Or else how will you explain his “whereas the opposite ought to have happened”?