Churches Beside the City Assemblies

And again: when it is said of Asclepius that a great crowd of people, Greeks and non-Greeks alike, admit they have often seen him — and still see him — not as an apparition but as Asclepius himself, healing and doing good and telling what is to come, Celsus expects us to believe it, and he finds no fault with those who trust in Jesus when we believe stories of that kind. But when we give our assent to the disciples, the men who watched the astonishing things Jesus did and who plainly show the honesty of their own conscience — for we can see there was no cunning in them, as far as a conscience can be seen through writing — then Celsus gives us a name and calls us simpletons. And he cannot produce that countless crowd of Greeks and non-Greeks who, he says, acknowledge Asclepius; while we, if he thinks a thing like that impressive, can plainly point to a countless crowd of Greeks and non-Greeks who acknowledge Jesus. [a]

Some of them show signs of having received something quite out of the ordinary through this faith, in the people they heal. Over those who need healing they call on no other name than the God who is over all things and the name of Jesus, along with the account of his life. By these means we too have seen many people set free from crushing afflictions, and from losing their senses, and from madness, and from countless other troubles that neither men nor demons had cured.

Now let me even grant that there is a healing demon called Asclepius who cures people’s bodies. To anyone amazed at such a thing, or at Apollo’s power of prophecy, I would say this. Healing bodies is a thing in the middle, a business that falls not only to good men but to bad ones as well; and knowing the future beforehand is also a thing in the middle, since a man who knows the future does not necessarily show any goodness in himself. So show us that the men who heal, or who know what is coming, are in no way bad, and are proved in every way to be good men, not far from being taken for gods. But they will not be able to show that healers and foretellers are good men. Many people are said to have been cured who are not worthy to live — people no physician who was wise would have wanted to cure, since they were living in a way no man ought to live. [c]

In the responses of the Pythian oracle, too, you can find instructions given that are not reasonable. I will set down two of them here. The oracle ordered that Cleomedes — the boxer, I think — be honored with the honors of a god, having seen who knows what greatness in his boxing; yet it gave neither Pythagoras nor Socrates the honors it awarded to a boxer. And it called Archilochus “a servant of the Muses” — a man who spent his poetry on the vilest and most obscene material, and who put on display a character that was unrestrained and unclean — and then, on the strength of his being a “servant” of the “Muses,” who are believed to be goddesses, it declared him a pious man. I doubt whether even an ordinary man would call someone pious who is not fitted out with every kind of moderation and virtue, or whether a decent man would say the sort of things that Archilochus’ indecent iambics contain.

And if nothing divine shows through of itself in Asclepius’ healing or in Apollo’s prophesying, how could anyone reasonably worship them as gods who are pure — even granting that these things are as they are said to be? Especially when, at the mouth of the Pythian cave, as the woman they call the prophetess sits over it, the prophetic spirit — Apollo, the thing that is pure of any earthly body — slips into her from below, through her genitals. We think nothing of the kind about Jesus and his power. The body born from the virgin was put together out of human material, able to take human wounds and human death.

Let us look at what Celsus says next, where he sets alongside our accounts some marvels out of the histories — things that look incredible in themselves, but that he does not disbelieve, at least not to judge by his own wording. First, the story of Aristeas of Proconnesus, about whom he says this: “Then there is Aristeas of Proconnesus, who vanished from among men in a way so plainly the work of a divine power, and who then showed himself again unmistakably, and at many later times visited many parts of the inhabited world and announced marvels, and whom Apollo ordered the people of Metapontium to count among the gods — and no one thinks him a god any longer.” [i]

He seems to have taken the story from Pindar and Herodotus. For the present it will be enough to set down the words of Herodotus, from the fourth book of his histories, which run like this:

“I have already said what country Aristeas, the man who made those verses, came from; now I will tell the story I heard about him in Proconnesus and Cyzicus. They say that Aristeas, who was as well born as anyone in the town, went into a fuller’s shop in Proconnesus and died there; and that the fuller shut up his workshop and went to tell the dead man’s relatives. When the report had already spread through the city that Aristeas was dead, a man of Cyzicus who had just come from the town of Artace fell into an argument with those who were reporting it, saying that he had met him on the road to Cyzicus and talked with him; and while this man was arguing hard, the dead man’s relatives came to the fuller’s shop with what was needed to carry the body away. But when the building was opened, Aristeas was not there, dead or alive. They say that afterward, in the seventh year, he appeared in Proconnesus and made the poem that the Greeks now call the Arimaspea, and that after making it he disappeared a second time. “That is what these two cities say. But this I know happened to the people of Metapontium in Italy, two hundred and forty years after Aristeas’ second disappearance, as I found by putting together what I learned in Proconnesus and in Metapontium. The Metapontines say that Aristeas himself appeared in their country and told them to set up an altar to Apollo and to place beside it a statue bearing the name of Aristeas of Proconnesus; for he said that Apollo had come to their country and to no other people in Italy, and that he himself, the man who was now Aristeas, had come with him, and that when he followed the god he was a crow. And after saying this he vanished. And the Metapontines say that they sent to Delphi to ask the god what the appearance of the man meant, and that the Pythia told them to obey the apparition, and that if they obeyed it would go better for them. They took this answer and carried it out. And now a statue bearing Aristeas’ name stands beside the very image of Apollo, with laurels planted around it; the image stands in the marketplace. So much for Aristeas.”

Now this is what has to be said to the story of Aristeas. If Celsus had set it out as history, without letting his own agreement show, we would have met his argument in another way. But he says that Aristeas “vanished by the work of a divine power,” and “showed himself again unmistakably,” and “visited many parts of the inhabited world,” and “announced marvels”; and further, that there was “an oracle of Apollo ordering the people of Metapontium to count Aristeas among the gods.” He sets it all down on his own authority, as a man who agrees with it. [l]

So then: how is it that you, who take everything the disciples of Jesus wrote down about the marvels of their teacher to be inventions, and who find fault with the people who believe them, do not think these stories of yours are conjuring tricks or inventions? And how can you accuse other people of believing the marvels told of Jesus without reason, and then show yourself to have believed all this, when you bring forward no proof about any of it, and nothing to make out that it happened? Do Herodotus and Pindar count with you as men who do not lie, while the men who trained themselves to die for what Jesus taught, and who left to those who came after them such writings about what they had been persuaded of — do these men contend so hard for inventions, as you think them, and myths and conjuring tricks, that because of them they live hemmed in by danger and die by violence?

So stand yourself in the middle, between what has been written about Aristeas and what is recorded about Jesus, and see whether, from the outcome, and from the people who are helped toward setting their characters straight and toward reverence for the God who is over all, it is not fair to say this: that the things recorded about Jesus are to be believed, as things that did not happen without God, and that the things about Aristeas of Proconnesus are not.

For what did providence want, in bringing about the marvels told of Aristeas? What good to the human race was it aiming at, in putting on a display so great — as you take it to be? You cannot say. But when we tell the story of Jesus, we have no ordinary defense to offer for its having happened: that God willed to establish the message that came through Jesus as a message that saves people — a message made firm by the apostles, like the foundations of the building of Christianity that was then being laid, and a message that has gone on growing in the years since, in which not a few healings are performed in the name of Jesus, and other appearances of his power take place that are not easily despised. [o]

And what sort of being is this Apollo, who orders the Metapontines to count Aristeas among the gods? What does he want in doing it? What benefit was he arranging for the Metapontines out of honoring as a god a man who a little while before was a man? And yet Apollo’s recommendations about Aristeas — Apollo, who as we see him is a demon allotted as his privilege “the drink offering and the smoke of the fat” — seem to you worth taking seriously; while the announcements of the God who is over all and of his holy angels, made through the prophets not after Jesus had come but before he ever came to live among men, do not stir you to wonder at the prophets who made room for a divine spirit, or at the one they prophesied about.

His coming into the world had been proclaimed so many years beforehand, and by so many, that the whole Jewish nation was left hanging on the expectation of the one they were waiting for; and when Jesus came they fell to arguing with one another. A great many of them acknowledged the Christ and believed that he was the one the prophets had spoken of. The ones who did not believe despised the gentleness of men who, because of what Jesus taught, were unwilling to stir up even the smallest faction — and they dared to do to Jesus what his disciples wrote down, truthfully and honestly, without quietly stealing out of that astonishing account of him the part that most people think brings disgrace on the message of the Christians.

For Jesus himself, and his disciples too, wanted those who came to him to believe not only in his divinity and his marvels — as though he had not shared in human nature, and had not taken on the flesh that among human beings “craves against the spirit.” They saw that the power which had come down into human nature and into human circumstances, and had taken on a human soul and a human body, contributed to the salvation of those who believe by being believed, along with what is more divine in it — since they see that from him a divine and a human nature began to be woven together, so that the human, by sharing in what is more divine, might become divine. And not in Jesus alone, but in all who, along with believing, take up the life Jesus taught: the life that leads everyone who lives by his instructions up to friendship with God and to sharing in him.

So Celsus’ Apollo wants the Metapontines to count Aristeas among the gods. But since the Metapontines judged the plain evidence that Aristeas was a man — and probably not a serious one — to be stronger than the oracle that called him a god, or worthy of a god’s honors, they were unwilling to obey Apollo; and so no one thinks Aristeas a god. [v]

About Jesus we would say this. It was to the advantage of the human race to receive him as the Son of God — God come in a human soul and body. That did not look profitable to the greed of the body-loving demons, or to the people who take them for gods on that account. So the demons on earth, who are thought to be gods by people who have never been taught what demons are, and the men who serve them as well, set themselves to stop the spread of Jesus’ teaching; for they saw the drink offerings and the smoke of the fat, which they took such greedy pleasure in, being swept away as the teachings of Jesus prevailed. But the God who sent Jesus broke up every plot of the demons and made the good news of Jesus prevail everywhere in the inhabited world, for the turning around and the setting straight of people; and everywhere he made churches come into being that live as a rival body of citizens against the assemblies of superstitious and undisciplined and unjust men — for that is what the crowds are like who make up the citizen bodies in the assemblies of the cities everywhere.

But the churches of God, taught by Christ, when they are examined side by side with the assemblies of the people they live among, are “like lights in the world.” For who would not admit that even the worse members of the church, the ones who are inferior when compared with the better, are far better than the men in the assemblies of the people?

Take the church of God at Athens: it is a gentle and steady body, since what it wants is to please the God who is over all. But the assembly of the Athenians is full of faction, and cannot be compared at all with the church of God in that city. You will say the same about the church of God at Corinth and the assembly of the Corinthian people, and about the church of God at Alexandria and the assembly of the Alexandrian people. And if the man who hears this is fair-minded, and looks into the matter with a love of the truth, he will be filled with wonder at the one who both planned it and was able to bring it off: to set up churches of God everywhere, settled as resident foreigners alongside the assemblies of the people in each city. [y]

In the same way, if you examine the council of a church of God beside the council of a given city, you would find which members of the church’s council are worthy — if there is anywhere in the universe a city of God — to hold citizenship in that city; while the council members everywhere else show nothing in their characters that is worth the superior rank they are ranked into and appear to hold over their fellow citizens. And the ruler of the church in each city must be compared with the ruler of the people of that city in the same way, so that you may see this: that even in the case of council members and rulers of a church of God who fall very far short, and who live more slackly than those who live at full stretch, it is still generally possible to find them above the characters of the council members and rulers in the cities, in this — that they are making progress toward the virtues.

If this is how things stand, why is it not reasonable to hold about Jesus, who has been able to establish so much, that there was no ordinary divinity in him — and that this was not so with Aristeas of Proconnesus, even if Apollo wants him counted among the gods, nor with the others Celsus counts up when he says: “No one thinks Abaris the Hyperborean a god, who had power enough to be carried along on an arrow.” [ab]

For what did the divine power that granted Abaris the Hyperborean the ability to be carried along on an arrow want, in making him so great a present? Was it so that the human race would get some benefit from it? Or what did the man himself gain by being carried along on an arrow? — even granting that these things are in no way inventions, but happened through the working of some demon.

But when it is said of my Jesus that he was “taken up in glory,” I can see the arrangement in it: that God, who brought it about, was commending the teacher to the people who watched it, so that they, as men contending not for a human teaching but for a divine one, might devote themselves as far as they can to the God who is over all, and do everything to please him — men who are to receive back, as they deserve, in God’s court, whatever good or evil they have done in this life.