The God Made in Egypt

Next Celsus brings up the man of Clazomenae as well, adding this to the story told about him: [a]

“Do they not say this too — that his soul often left his body and went roaming about with no body at all? And even him people did not think a god.”

To this we will say that some wicked demons probably arranged for such things to be written down — I do not believe they arranged for them actually to happen — so that what was prophesied about Jesus, and the things he himself said, would either be discredited as fictions of the same kind, or else be thought nothing much, as having no more to them than any other story.

But my own Jesus said this about his own soul, a soul separated from the body not by any human necessity but by the extraordinary authority that had been given him for this too:

“No one takes my soul from me; I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it back again.”

Since he had the authority to lay it down, he laid it down when he said, “Father, why have you forsaken me?” and “crying out with a loud voice, he gave up his spirit” — getting ahead of the executioners who work on men fastened to stakes and cut through the legs of the crucified, and who cut them for this very reason, so that the men will not go on paying the penalty any longer. And he took his soul back when he showed himself to his disciples, having told the Jews who would not believe him, in the disciples’ hearing, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” — and “he was saying this about the temple of his body.” The prophets, too, had announced such a thing beforehand in many places, and in this one: “And my flesh too will settle down in hope, because you will not abandon my soul to Hades, nor let your holy one see decay.”

Celsus does show that he has read a fair number of Greek histories, since he sets down alongside these the story of Cleomedes of Astypalaea. He reports that Cleomedes got down inside a chest and was shut in there, and then was not found inside it, but flew out of it by some supernatural fate, at the very moment when certain men were breaking the chest open to seize him. [f]

Now if this too is an invention — and it looks like one — it will not stand comparison with the accounts of Jesus. In the lives of such men there is no sign to be found of the divine quality the story credits them with. In Jesus’ case there are the churches of the people he has helped, and the prophecies spoken about him, and the cures that happen in his name, and the knowledge of him that comes with wisdom, and the reasoned account found by those who have taken the trouble to climb up from bare faith and to search out the meaning that lies in the divine Scriptures — as Jesus advised when he said, “Search the Scriptures,” and as Paul intended when he taught that we must “know how to answer each person” as we ought; and so did the man who said, “Always ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you for a reason for the faith that is in you.”

But if Celsus wants it granted that the story is not an invention, let him say what the more-than-human power was after when it made Cleomedes fly out of the chest by some supernatural fate. If he can point to something worth taking seriously, and to a purpose worthy of God in granting Cleomedes such a thing, we will decide what ought to be said to him. But if he is at a loss to say even one convincing thing on the point, then plainly, since no reason can be found, we will either discredit the story to those who have not accepted it and charge it with being untrue, or we will say that in the case of the Astypalaean too some demonic thing did what conjurors do when they put on a show by tricking the eye — while Celsus thinks he has delivered an oracle about the man when he says that “by some supernatural fate he flew out of the chest.”

For my part I think these were the only cases Celsus knew of. And so that he might look as though he were passing over similar ones on purpose, he said: [k]

“And one could name a good many others of the same sort.”

Very well, let it be granted that many such men have existed, and that they did the human race no good at all. Set any one of their acts beside the work of Jesus and the astonishing things told about him, which we have already discussed at length — what would it turn out to be?

After this he thinks that in worshipping the man who was, as he puts it, captured and put to death, we have done much the same as the Getae who revere Zamolxis, the Cilicians Mopsus, the Acarnanians Amphilochus, the Thebans Amphiaraus, and the people of Lebadea Trophonius. Here too we will show that he had no good reason for likening us to the people he has named. Those tribes built temples and cult statues for the men on that list. We have taken honor of that kind away from the Divine altogether — such honor suits demons better, which are somehow settled in one place or another, a place they either seize first or come to live in after being led there by certain rites and tricks of magic.

What we do instead is stand in awe of Jesus, who moved our mind away from everything the senses take in, as being not only perishable but bound to perish, and led it up to honoring the God who is over all with an upright life and with prayers. These prayers we bring to God through him, as through one who is between the nature of the uncreated and the nature of all created things; he brings us the good gifts that come from the Father, and he carries our prayers, in the manner of a high priest, to the God who is over all.

But I should like to talk this over a while with the man who says such things — I do not know why he says them — in the way that suits him. Are the men you have listed nothing at all, then? Is there no power at Lebadea to do with Trophonius, none at Thebes around the temple of Amphiaraus, none in Acarnania around Amphilochus, none in Cilicia around Mopsus? Or is there some being in them — a demon, or a hero, or even a god — at work in ways beyond what a man can do? [n]

If he says there is nothing demonic or divine about these men, any more than about anyone else, then let him admit his own opinion here and now: that he is an Epicurean, that he does not think as the Greeks do, that he neither acknowledges demons nor worships gods the way Greeks worship them. And let him be shown up for having brought forward the cases listed above for nothing, as though he accepted that they were true, along with the ones he adds in the pages that follow.

But if he says the men on his list are demons, or heroes, or even gods, let him notice that by what he has said he will be establishing the very thing he does not want: that Jesus too was something of that kind — which is also why he was able to show a good many people that he had come from God to visit the human race. And once he grants that, look whether he will not be forced to say that Jesus is stronger than the ones he counted him among. For not one of them forbids honors to be paid to the others; but Jesus, confident in himself as being more powerful than all of them, forbids people to accept them, on the ground that they are wicked demons who have seized places on earth beforehand, because they cannot lay hold of the purer and more divine region, where the thick heaviness of earth and its countless evils never reaches.

Next he brings up the boy Hadrian kept — I mean the accounts about the youth Antinous and the honors paid to him by the people of Antinous’ city in Egypt — and he thinks these fall nothing short of the honor we pay to Jesus. So let us show up this statement too for the hostility in it. What does the life lived as one of Hadrian’s boys — a boy who did not even keep his male body untouched by the woman’s sickness — have in common with our own Jesus, whom we revere, against whom not even the men who brought countless accusations and told every kind of lie about him were able to say that he had so much as tasted, in the slightest degree, of loose living? [p]

Further, if anyone examined the stories about Antinous honestly and without being bought, he would find that the reason he seems to do anything at all in the city named after him, even after his death, is Egyptian magic and Egyptian rites. The same thing is recorded of other temples, done by Egyptians and by men skilled in such practices. They settle demons in certain places, demons that prophesy or that heal, and that often torture people who seem to have broken some rule about ordinary foods or about touching a human corpse, so that they may look as if they can frighten the great uneducated crowd.

Of that kind is the being reckoned to be a god at Antinoopolis in Egypt. Some men, who live rather like sharpers, tell lies about his mighty acts; others are deceived by the demon settled there; and others again, convicted by a weak conscience, actually think they are paying a god-sent penalty that comes from Antinous. Of that kind too are the rites they perform and the oracles they seem to give. What belongs to Jesus is a very long way from all this.

For it was no band of conjurors, doing a favor for some king who ordered it or some governor who gave the command, that made him seem to be a god. It was the Maker of the universe himself who, in keeping with the astonishing power to convince that was in his speaking, presented him as worthy of honor — not only to the men who are willing to be sensible, but to demons as well, and to other unseen powers. Those powers show even now that they either fear the name of Jesus as the name of something stronger, or else accept him with reverence as one who rules them lawfully. If God had not given him his credentials, demons would not have given way at the mere announcement of his name and withdrawn from the people they were making war on.

The Egyptians, then, having been taught to revere Antinous, will put up with it if you compare Apollo or Zeus to him; they think it magnifies Antinous to be counted alongside those gods. Here too Celsus is plainly caught in a falsehood, when he says: [t]

“Even if you compare Apollo or Zeus to him, they will not put up with it.”

But Christians have learned that their eternal life consists in knowing “the only true God” who is over all “and Jesus Christ, whom he sent.” They have learned as well that “all the gods of the nations are demons” — greedy things, rolling about among sacrifices and blood and the smells that rise from sacrifices, in order to deceive people who have not taken refuge with the God who is over all; and that God’s divine and holy angels are of another nature and another will than every demon on earth; and that these angels are known to very few, to those who have looked into such matters with understanding and care. So Christians will not put up with it if you compare Apollo and Zeus, or any of the beings worshipped with the smoke of burning fat and with blood and sacrifices.

Some of them act this way out of great simplicity: they cannot give a reason for what they do, but they hold in good faith to what they received. Others act on reasons that are not to be dismissed lightly, but are deeper — and, as a Greek would put it, esoteric and epoptic. Among these there is a great deal of discussion about God, and about those whom God has honored, through the Word of God, his only Son, with a share in divinity and therefore with the name as well. There is a great deal of discussion too about the angels of God, and about the beings who are opposed to the truth but have been deceived, and who out of that deception proclaim themselves gods, or angels of God, or good demons, or heroes formed out of the transformation of a good human soul.

Christians of that sort will also show this: just as in philosophy many men seem to be in the truth who have either argued themselves into it by plausible reasoning or have rashly agreed with what others put forward and discovered, so among the souls that exist outside of bodies — angels and demons alike — there are some who have been dragged by plausible reasoning into proclaiming themselves gods. And because the reasons for such things cannot be found out among men with perfect exactness, it was judged safe that no one, being a man, should entrust himself to anyone as to God, except to the one alone who is over all as arbiter: Jesus Christ, who both saw these matters at their deepest and handed them on to a few.

So belief in Antinous, or in anyone else like him, whether among Egyptians or among Greeks, is — if I may put it this way — an unlucky faith. Faith in Jesus is either a lucky one, as it might seem, or else one that has been put to the test and examined: it looks like luck to most people, and to very few indeed it is something tested and examined. And when I call a faith lucky, as most people would call it, I refer the account of it to God, who knows the reasons behind what has been allotted to each person who comes into human life. [y]

Greeks too will say that even among the men reckoned wisest, good luck has counted for much in many ways: in the sort of teachers a man had, in falling in with the better ones — since there are teachers of the opposite schools as well — and in being brought up among better people. For many have been brought up in such conditions that they were never even allowed to form an idea of anything better, but always, from their earliest years, were the boys kept by men without self-control, or by their owners, or else lived in some other misery that kept the soul from looking up. The reasons for all this most likely lie among the accounts of providence, but they do not come easily within reach of men.

I thought it right to say this in passing, as a digression, because of how much a faith accomplishes once it has got in first. Since people are brought up differently, I had to speak of the differences among the beliefs men hold — some believing more luckily and some less luckily — and then to go on from there to this: that even for quicker minds, what is called good luck and what is called bad luck would seem to work along with them, both toward their seeming to be more reasonable and toward their assenting more reasonably to most opinions. But enough about that.

We must take note of what Celsus says next. In it he tells us that faith, having taken possession of our soul in advance, is what produces the assent we give in the case of Jesus. It is quite true that faith produces that assent in us. But see whether faith itself does not, right there, present something worth praising. We entrust ourselves to the God who is over all; we acknowledge our gratitude to the one who led us into such faith; and we say that he did not attempt or accomplish so great a thing without God. [ab]

We also trust the purposes of the men who wrote the Gospels, judging their reverence and their conscience from what shows in their writings, which have nothing spurious in them, nothing of the dice-cheat, nothing fabricated, nothing crafty. For it is clear to us that souls who had never learned what the crafty Greek art of argument teaches — with all its plausibility and its sharpness — or what the rhetoric that rolls around the law courts teaches, could not have invented events of a kind able, by themselves, to lead people to faith and to a life that matches that faith.

And I think this is why Jesus wanted to use teachers of that sort for his teaching: so that there would be no room for suspecting plausible sophistries, and so that it might be clear to everyone able to understand that the guilelessness of the writers’ purpose, which has a great deal in it of what I would call plainness, was judged worthy of a more divine power — a power that accomplishes far more than a wrapping-up of words, an arrangement of phrases, and an orderly sequence with all the divisions and technical apparatus of Greek art appear able to accomplish.

But see whether the things belonging to our faith, which from the first have spoken on the side of the notions all men share, do not change those who listen to what is said with an open mind. A twisted view of things has managed, with a great deal of instruction speaking on its side, to plant in most people the doctrine about cult statues, that they are gods, and the doctrine about things made of gold and silver and ivory and stone, that they deserve worship. Yet the notion all men share demands that we understand this: God is in no way perishable matter, and he is not honored when men give him shape in lifeless materials, as though these were made “according to an image” of him, or as symbols of him. [ad]

And so it is said at once about cult statues that “they are not gods”; and about such manufactured things, that they cannot be compared with the Maker; and a few things are said about the God who is over all, who made and holds together and steers the whole. And at once the reasoning soul, recognizing as it were its own kin, throws away what it had until then supposed to be gods and takes up again its natural love for the one who created it. And because of that love toward him it welcomes the one who first set these things before all the nations, through the disciples he had prepared and sent out with divine power and authority to proclaim the message about God and about his kingdom.