The Shadow of a Donkey

In the first book of our answer to Celsus — who gave the book he composed against us the boastful title The True Discourse — we went through his preface and then each of his statements in turn, testing them as we went, most faithful Ambrosius, as you instructed and as well as we could, until we came to the end of the speech he puts in the mouth of his Jew, a speech he invents and aims at Jesus. In the second book we met, as best we could, everything in that Jew’s speech against us who believe in God through Christ. Now we take up this third book, and the task here is to argue against what he sets out in his own person. [a]

He says that Christians and Jews quarrel with each other in the silliest way, and that our debate with one another about Christ is no different from what the proverb calls a fight over the shadow of a donkey. He thinks there is nothing serious in the question Jews and Christians are investigating, since both sides believe that a divine spirit prophesied that someone would come as a savior for the human race, and they only fail to agree about whether the one prophesied has come or not. We Christians, for our part, have believed in Jesus as the one who came according to the prophecies. Most Jews are so far from believing in him that those alive at the time plotted against him, while those alive now approve of what the Jews of that day dared to do to him and speak evil of him. They say that by some sorcery he faked being the one the prophets announced would come — the one called, in the ancestral tradition of the Jews, the Christ.

Then let Celsus tell us, and let those tell us who are pleased with what he says against us, whether it is at all like a donkey’s shadow that the prophets of the Jews foretold the birthplace of the one who would lead those who have lived well and who are called God’s portion; and that a virgin would conceive Immanuel; and that such signs and wonders would be done by the one they prophesied; and that “his word would run swiftly,” so that the sound of his apostles would go out “into all the earth”; and what he would suffer when the Jews condemned him; and how he would rise again. [d]

Did the prophets say all this at random, then, with nothing plausible behind it — nothing that moved them not only to speak but to think their words worth writing down? Did the whole Jewish nation, which had long since been given a country of its own to live in, proclaim some men prophets and reject others as false prophets with nothing plausible to go on? Was there nothing that prompted them to count the words of the men later reckoned to be prophets alongside the books of Moses, which they held sacred?

And can the people who charge Jews and Christians with stupidity show us that the Jewish nation could have held together with no promise of knowing the future among them? Every nation around them believed, each according to its own ancestral custom, that it received oracles and predictions from the gods it recognized. These people alone had been taught to despise all the gods the nations recognize, as not gods at all but demons — since their prophets said, “All the gods of the nations are demons.” Were they alone to have no one who claimed to prophesy, no one able to pull back the men who, out of a longing to know the future, wanted to desert to the demons of other peoples? Consider, then, whether it was not a necessity that a whole nation taught to despise everyone else’s gods should have had a good supply of prophets — men who showed, right there in what they said, something greater, something that surpassed the oracle-shrines everywhere.

Next: miracles happened everywhere, or at least in many places. Celsus himself brings this up further on, citing Asclepius, who did people good and foretold the future to whole cities dedicated to him, such as Tricca and Epidaurus and Cos and Pergamum. Along with Asclepius he mentions Aristeas of Proconnesus, and a certain man of Clazomenae, and Cleomedes of Astypalaea. And among the Jews alone, who say they are dedicated to the God of all things, was there no sign or wonder at all to help confirm their faith in the one who created all things, along with their hope of another and greater life? How could that be? They would have gone straight over to worshiping the demons who gave oracles and cures, and abandoned a God who was believed to help them only as far as words went and who never showed himself to them. [g]

But that is not what happened. Instead they endured any number of things rather than forswear Judaism and its law, and they suffered cruelly — at one time in Assyria, at another in Persia, at another under Antiochus. So does it not follow, on the ordinary probabilities, even for people who do not believe their strange histories and prophecies, that these things were not inventions? Rather, some divine spirit, present as it is in pure souls — and the souls of the prophets were the souls of men who had taken on every hardship for the sake of virtue — moved them to prophesy: some things about their own contemporaries, others about those who came later, and above all about someone who was to come as a savior for the human race.

If that is how things stand, how are Jews and Christians looking into a donkey’s shadow when they examine the prophecies they both believe and ask whether the one prophesied has come, or has not arrived at all and is still awaited? And even if it be granted to Celsus, for the sake of argument, that Jesus is not the one the prophets announced, the search for the meaning of the prophetic writings is still no hunt for a donkey’s shadow — not if it can plainly establish who is being announced, what sort of person he was prophesied to be, what he would do, and, if possible, when he would come. Earlier we set out a few prophecies out of many to show that Jesus is the Christ who was prophesied. So neither Jews nor Christians go wrong in accepting that the prophets spoke from God. The ones who go wrong are those who hold false opinions about the one prophesied and awaited — about who he is and what sort of person the prophets’ true discourse announced him to be. [j]

Next Celsus supposes that the Jews were Egyptians by race who left Egypt after rebelling against the Egyptian state and looking down on the customary Egyptian worship. He says that they then suffered from the people who joined Jesus and believed in him as the Christ exactly what they themselves had done to the Egyptians, and that in both cases the cause of the upheaval was rebellion against the community. [k]

Look at what Celsus has done here. The Egyptians of long ago treated the Hebrew people badly — a people who had come to live in Egypt because a famine had struck Judea — and for wronging guests and suppliants they suffered what a whole nation deserved to suffer at the hands of divine providence, since they had conspired as one against an entire people who were their guests and had done them no wrong. Struck by God’s whips, they grudgingly and before long let the people they had unjustly enslaved go wherever they wanted. Because they were a people who loved themselves and honored anyone of their own blood, whatever he was like, above outsiders who lived better lives, there is no accusation they have left unmade against Moses and the Hebrews. They do not deny outright the wonders Moses did; they say they were done by sorcery and not by divine power. But Moses was no sorcerer. He was a devout man, dedicated to the God of all things and sharing in a spirit more than human. He gave the Hebrews their laws as God prompted him, and he wrote down what happened exactly as it was.

So Celsus was no fair examiner of the accounts, which the Egyptians give one way and the Hebrews another. He had been captured in advance, as though by Egyptian love-charms. He agreed with the people who had wronged the strangers, as if their story were true, and said that the Hebrews, the wronged party, left Egypt in a revolt. [m]

He does not see how impossible it is for so large a mob of rebel Egyptians, taking its start from that revolt, to become a nation and change its language at the same moment it rebelled — so that men who up to then used Egyptian should suddenly and completely take up the speech of the Hebrews. But grant his theory: say that on leaving Egypt they also came to hate the language they had grown up with. Why then did they not use the Syrian language, or the Phoenician, instead of settling on Hebrew, which differs from both? What the argument means to establish, I think, is that this is false: that some men who were Egyptian by race revolted against Egyptians, left Egypt, went to Palestine, and settled the land now called Judea. Hebrew was their fathers’ language before they went down into Egypt, and the Hebrew letters Moses used to write the five books the Jews hold sacred were different from the letters of the Egyptians.

It is false, then, that the Hebrews were Egyptians who took their start from a revolt; and it is just as false that in the time of Jesus other Jews revolted against the Jewish state and followed him. Neither Celsus nor those who think as he does will be able to point to a single act of revolt on the part of Christians. [n]

And in fact, if a revolt had been the cause of the Christians’ coming together, taking their start from the Jews — who were allowed to take up arms for their own families and to kill their enemies — then their lawgiver would not have forbidden the killing of a human being altogether, teaching that it is never right for his own disciples to raise a hand against a man, however unjust that man may be. He did not think it fitting for laws that came from God to allow the killing of any human being at all. And Christians, if they had begun in a revolt, would not have accepted laws so gentle that they were killed “like sheep” and were never able to fight back against those who persecuted them.

And in fact, if one looks a little deeper into these things, one can say about those who came out of the land of Egypt that the whole people astonishingly took up all at once, as though it were a gift from God, the language called Hebrew — as one of their own prophets said: “When they came out of the land of Egypt, he heard a language he did not know.”

Here is another way to establish that the people who left Egypt with Moses were not Egyptians. If they had been Egyptians, their names would be Egyptian too, since in every language the names people bear belong to that language. But if the names are Hebrew, it is clear they were not Egyptians — and the Scriptures are full of Hebrew names, given to their children while they were still in Egypt. So what the Egyptians say is false, that they were Egyptians driven out of Egypt with Moses. It is plainly obvious that, descended from Hebrew ancestors as the history Moses wrote records, they used a language of their own, and took from it the names they gave their children. [p]

As for the Christians: because they were taught not to fight back against their enemies and have kept a law that is gentle and loves humankind, they have received from God what they could never have achieved by going to war, even if they had been given the authority to do it and were perfectly able. God has always fought on their behalf, and from time to time has stopped those who rose against Christians and wanted to destroy them. A few — very few, and easily counted — have died at particular times for the Christians’ worship of God, and this was for a reminder: so that others, seeing a handful contending for reverence toward God, might be proved better men and might learn to despise death. God did not allow their whole people to be wiped out by war. He wanted it to hold together, and wanted the whole earth to be filled with this saving and most reverent teaching. And then again, so that the weaker among them could breathe freely, released from anxiety about death, God watched over the believers and scattered every plot against them by his will alone, so that neither emperors nor local governors nor the assemblies of the people could be inflamed against them beyond a certain point.

That is our answer to what Celsus said about a revolt being the origin of the Jewish state long ago, and later of the Christians.

But since what follows is plainly false, let us set out his own words. He says: “If all people should want to be Christians, then these people would no longer want it.” [t]

That this is false is clear from the fact that Christians, as far as it depends on them, do not neglect to sow their message everywhere in the inhabited world. Some of them have made it their work to travel around not only cities but villages and farmsteads as well, to make others reverent toward God too. And no one could say they do it for money, when sometimes they will not take even what they need to eat; and if want ever forces them to, they are content with the bare necessity, though many are willing to share with them and to give them more than they need.

Nowadays, perhaps, when so many are coming to the message that even rich men, and some men of rank, and dainty, well-born ladies receive the teachers, someone will dare to say that certain people put themselves at the head of Christian teaching for the sake of a little glory. But it is not reasonable to suspect that of the beginning, when the danger, and above all the danger to teachers, was great. And even now the disgrace they have among everyone else is greater than the honor they are supposed to have among those of their own belief — and not everyone has even that. So it is false on the face of it to say: “If all people should want to be Christians, then these people would no longer want it.”

But look at what he offers as proof of it. He says: “At the start they were few, and they were of one mind. But now that they have been scattered into a multitude, they are cut up and split apart all over again, and each group wants factions of its own — which is what they were after from the beginning.” [u]

That Christians at the start were few, compared with the numbers who came later, is plain enough. All the same, they were not few in every respect. What stirred up envy against Jesus and provoked the Jews to plot against him was the size of the crowds that followed him out into deserted places: five thousand men on one occasion and four thousand on another, not counting the number of the women and the children. Such was the spell in Jesus’ words that not only did men want to follow him into the wilderness, but women too, who did not let the weakness of their sex, or how it would look, cut short their following of their teacher into deserted country. And children, who are utterly unmoved by such feelings, went along with their parents — either following the ones who bore them, or perhaps drawn by his divinity as well, so that divinity might be sown into them.

But grant that they were few at the start. What does that contribute toward showing that Christians would be unwilling to persuade everyone about their message?

He says as well that they were all of one mind. Here too he fails to see that from the beginning there were disagreements among believers about how to take the books held to be divine. While the apostles were still preaching, and while men who had seen Jesus with their own eyes were still teaching what he taught, there was no small dispute among the believers who came from Judaism about those who came to the message from the nations: whether they had to keep Jewish customs, or whether the “burden” about clean and unclean foods should be taken off them, as not binding on people who had left their ancestral customs among the nations and had come to believe in Jesus. [w]

Even in Paul’s letters — and Paul lived at the same time as the men who had seen Jesus — some things are said which show that questions were being argued: about the resurrection, and whether it had “already happened”; and about the day of the Lord, whether it “has come” or not. And the very words “turn away from profane empty talk and the contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge; some who professed it have made shipwreck of the faith” are enough to show that from the beginning there were readings that went off in different directions, at a time when the believers had not yet become many — which is what Celsus himself supposes.