Turning the Whole World Around

Then, as his closing speech after all of this, the Jew says about Jesus: “So he was a man, and the sort of man that the truth itself makes plain and reason shows him to be.” [a]

But I do not know whether a man who dared to sow through the whole inhabited world the worship of God and the teaching that go with him could have done what he wanted without God’s help, or could have come out stronger than everyone who worked against the spread of his teaching — kings, governors, the Roman senate, the magistrates everywhere, and the common people. And how could a man’s nature, with nothing greater in it, turn so large a crowd around? It would be no wonder if only the sensible were turned. But it is also the most unreasoning of people, the ones sunk in their passions, the ones whose very unreason makes them harder to shift toward a life of more self-restraint. But it is because Christ was the power of God and the wisdom of the Father that he has done these things and does them still — even though neither Jews nor Greeks will have it so, the ones who refuse to believe his word.

So we will not stop trusting God, following the instructions of Jesus Christ, and we will not stop wanting to turn around the people who are blind about the worship of God — even when the ones who are truly blind abuse us for being blind, and the ones who themselves lead by the nose everyone who sides with them, Jews and Greeks alike, accuse us of leading people by the nose. A fine leading it is! Instead of self-indulgent, they become self-restrained, or at least make progress toward self-restraint; instead of unjust, just, or making progress toward righteousness; instead of senseless, sensible, or on the road to good sense; and instead of cowardly and ignoble and unmanly, brave and steadfast — which they show most of all in the contests they go through for reverence toward God, who created all things. So Jesus Christ came, announced beforehand by a herald — not by one prophet, but by all of them. And this too was a piece of Celsus’ ignorance: to drape on his Jewish character the claim that only one prophet had spoken beforehand about the Christ.

And since Celsus’ Jew has been brought on stage saying these things — supposedly in line with his own law — and has stopped his speech somewhere about here, after some other remarks not worth remembering, I too will stop here the second of the books I have dictated in answer to his treatise. If God grants it, and the power of Christ is at home in our soul, we will try in the third to take up what Celsus wrote next.