The Charge Against Genesis

When he asserts that Moses’ account brought God in most impiously — as weak from the very start, and unable to win over even one single man whom he had formed himself — here is what we will say to it. What he says amounts to much the same as if someone brought a charge over the existence of wickedness, which God has not been able to keep off even one man, so that at least a single person might be found who from the beginning had come into the world with no taste of wickedness in him. For just as those whose business it is to make the defense about providence make it on that very point at no small length, and with arguments no one can despise, so too the matter of Adam and his sin will be dealt with philosophically by people who know that Adam, put into Greek, is “man,” and that in the parts of the account that look as though they were about Adam, Moses is giving an account of the nature of the human being. [a]

For “in Adam,” as the word says, “all die,” and they were condemned “in the likeness of Adam’s transgression” — the divine word saying these things not so much about one particular person as about the whole race. Even in the run of statements that reads as though it were about a single man, the curse on Adam belongs to everyone in common; and there is no woman of whom what is said against the woman is not said. And the man cast out of paradise along with the woman, clothed in the tunics of skin that God made for those who had sinned, because of the transgression of human beings — that holds an unspoken and hidden meaning, one that goes beyond Plato’s account of the descent of the soul as it sheds its wings and is carried down here, “until it lays hold of something solid.”

Next he says this: [g]

“Then a flood of some sort, and an outlandish ark with everything inside it, and a dove and a crow for messengers — counterfeiting and tampering with the story of Deucalion. For I do not suppose they expected these things would ever come to light; they were simply telling tales to small children.”

In these words, look at the man’s unphilosophical hostility toward the most ancient writing of the Jews. He had nothing to say against the story of the flood itself, and he never noticed the things he could have said against the ark and its measurements — that a man who takes the 450 feet of the ark’s length, the 75 of its width and the 45 of its height in the way most people take them could not maintain that it held all the animals on the earth, fourteen of every clean kind and four of every unclean one. So he simply called it outlandish, with everything inside it.

And what was outlandish about it? The account says it took a hundred years to build, and that it drew in from the 450 feet of its length and the 75 of its width until the 45 feet of its height ended in a top eighteen inches long and eighteen inches wide. Why should we not rather find the structure a marvel, and like a very great city, if the measurements are taken as squares — so that at its base it is about twenty-five miles long and about three-quarters of a mile wide? And why not admire the design that made it braced so solidly and able to hold out against a storm heavy enough to make a flood? For it was coated, and coated firmly, not with pitch or any material of that kind, but with bitumen. And why is it not a marvel that live embers of every kind were brought inside by God’s providence, so that the earth might have the seed of every living thing again, while God made use of a most righteous man, who was to be the father of those born after the flood?

Celsus tossed in a remark about the dove so that he might look as though he had read the book of Genesis, though he could say nothing to convict the story of the dove of being an invention. Then — as his habit is, to restate what is written in a more ridiculous form — he has turned “the raven” into a crow, and thinks Moses wrote all this while tampering with what the Greeks tell about Deucalion. Unless, of course, he thinks the writing is not Moses’ at all but several men’s; that is what he shows by “counterfeiting and tampering with the story of Deucalion,” and by “For I do not suppose they expected these things would ever come to light.” [k]

But how could men who were giving writings to a whole nation not expect them to come to light — men who actually prophesied that this worship of God would be proclaimed to all the nations? And when Jesus said to the Jews, “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation that produces its fruits,” what was he arranging but that he himself, by divine power, would bring the whole of the Jewish scripture out into the light, holding as it does the mysteries of the kingdom of God? And then, when they read the Greeks’ accounts of how the gods were born, and the stories about the twelve gods, they dignify them with allegories; but when they want to tear ours to pieces, they say the stories were simply told for small children.

He also calls the begetting of children utterly absurd and out of season. He named no names, but it is plain he means Abraham’s and Sarah’s. He throws in “the brothers’ plots” as well, meaning either Cain plotting against Abel or, besides that, Esau against Jacob. By “a father’s grief” he probably means Isaac’s over Jacob’s going abroad, and perhaps Jacob’s too over Joseph, who was sold into Egypt. And when he writes down “the mothers’ ambushes,” I think he means Rebecca, who arranged that Isaac’s prayers should reach not Esau but Jacob. [m]

Now if we say that God lived among them all as a fellow citizen, and very close at hand, what absurdity are we committing? We are persuaded that he never withdraws his own divinity from people who are devoted to him and live a good and vigorous life. He also sneered at the property Jacob got while he was with Laban, without understanding what these words point to: “And the unmarked were Laban’s, and the marked were Jacob’s.” He says that God made his sons a present of little donkeys and little sheep and camels, and he did not see that “all these things happened to them as patterns, and were written for our sake, on whom the ends of the ages have come.” Among us the many different customs, once they have become “marked,” live as citizens under the word of God, given as property to the one who is called Jacob in the figurative sense. For those out of the nations who come to trust in him were the ones being shown in what is written about Laban and Jacob.

He is far from the intent of what is written when he says that God gave wells to the righteous as well. He did not notice that the righteous do not build cisterns; they dig wells, searching out the spring and source of drinkable good things that lies there already. For they take as a figure the command that says, “Drink water from your own vessels, and from the spring of your own wells. Do not let your water spill out beyond your own spring; let your water run through your own streets. Let it be yours alone, and let no stranger share it with you.” [r]

In many places the word takes events that really happened and writes them down in order to set out greater things, things shown only by hint. The accounts of the wells are of this kind, and so are the accounts of the marriages and of the various sexual unions of righteous people; it will be a better time to make those clear in commentaries on the passages themselves. But that wells really were built in the land of the Philistines by righteous men, as Genesis records, is plain from the remarkable wells shown at Ashkelon, which deserve an account of their own, so strange and unlike other wells is the way they are made.

That brides and slave girls are to be taken up into a figurative reading is not our own teaching; we received it long ago from wise men. One of them said, rousing his hearer to figurative readings:

“Tell me, you who read the law, do you not hear the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and one by the free woman. But the son of the slave woman was born according to the flesh, and the son of the free woman through the promise. These things are an allegory, for these women are two covenants — one from Mount Sinai, bearing children into slavery, which is Hagar.”

And a little later: “But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother.” Anyone who cares to take up the letter to the Galatians will learn how the marriages and the unions with the slave girls have been read as allegory. What the word wants is that we should be eager to copy, not the acts of the men who did these things — the acts reckoned as bodily — but the ones the apostles of Jesus habitually call spiritual.

He ought to have welcomed the love of truth in the men who wrote down the divine scriptures — men who did not hide even what is discreditable — and been brought by it to take the rest, the more astonishing parts, as not made up. He did the opposite. Without examining the story of Lot and his daughters in its plain sense, and without searching it for the higher meaning, he called it more lawless than the evils of Thyestes. [w]

There is no need now to give the figurative reading of the passage: what Sodom is, and what the angels’ word was to the man being brought out of it safely — “Do not look around behind you, and do not stop anywhere in the surrounding country; escape to the mountain, or you will be swept away with them” — and who Lot is, and who his wife was, who became a pillar of salt because she turned back, and who his daughters were, who made their father drunk so that they might become mothers by him.

But come, let us take a little of the offense out of the story as it stands. The Greeks too have looked into the nature of things good, bad, and indifferent; and those of them who hit the mark put good and bad in deliberate choice alone, and say that everything examined apart from deliberate choice is, on its own account, indifferent — while the choice that uses such things as it should is praiseworthy, and the choice that does not is blameworthy. So in the section on things indifferent they have said that, taken by itself, for a man to have intercourse with his daughters is an indifferent thing, even though it ought not to be done in established communities. And for the sake of argument, to demonstrate that such an act belongs among things indifferent, they have supposed a wise man left with his daughter alone, the whole human race besides having perished, and they ask whether it is fitting for the father to come together with his daughter so that, on that supposition, the whole human race should not be lost.

So then — among the Greeks is this said soundly, with the school of the Stoics, which in their eyes is nothing to despise, arguing the case for it? But when young girls who had heard about the burning up of the world without getting it clear, and who had seen fire spreading through their city and their countryside, and who supposed that the one live ember of the human race had been left in their father and themselves — when they wanted, on the strength of such a supposition, to keep the world in being, is their conduct to count as worse than that of the wise man in the Stoics’ own hypothesis, who acts fittingly in having intercourse with his daughters when all human beings have been destroyed?

I am not unaware that some have stumbled at the intention of Lot’s daughters and have taken the act to be unholy, and have said that two accursed nations, the Moabites and the Ammonites, came from those unholy unions. And it is quite true that the divine scripture is nowhere found plainly accepting such a thing as well done, nor accusing and blaming it either. Still, however the event stands, it can be taken up into a figurative reading, and it also has some defense on its own account.

Celsus tosses in “the hatred” — Esau’s toward Jacob, I suppose — although Esau is a man scripture agrees was worthless. And without setting out clearly the story of Simeon and Levi, who went out against the outrage done to their sister when she was raped by the son of the king of Shechem, he lays the blame on them. By “brothers selling” he means Jacob’s sons; by “a brother sold,” Joseph; by “a father deceived,” Jacob, who suspected nothing about his sons when they showed him Joseph’s “many-colored tunic,” but believed them and “mourned” Joseph as lost while he was a slave in Egypt. [aa]

See in what a hostile way, and with how little love of truth, Celsus has gathered up the material out of the history. Wherever the history seemed to him to hold an accusation, he sets it out; but where there was a display of self-restraint worth mentioning — Joseph refusing to give in to the passion of the woman who counted as his mistress, when she coaxed him one moment and threatened him the next — he did not so much as mention the story. In fact we would see Joseph as far better than what is told about Bellerophon, since he chose to be shut up in prison rather than lose a mind that kept itself in hand. And although he could have given his own account and argued his case against the woman who accused him, he was great-souled enough to keep silent, and left his own affairs to God.

After this, Celsus for form’s sake, and with complete vagueness, brings up “the dreams of the chief cupbearer and the chief baker and of Pharaoh, and the solving of them, by which Joseph was brought up out of the prison to be entrusted by Pharaoh with the second throne over the Egyptians.” What absurdity, then, did the account of this history hold, even taken by itself, that he should set it down as part of an accusation — this man who gave the title A True Discourse to a book that sets out no teachings at all, but only brings charges against Christians and Jews? [ac]

He says that the brother who had been sold was generous to the brothers who had sold him, when they were starving and had been sent with their donkeys to buy provisions — though Celsus never set the events out. He puts down the recognition scene too, and I do not know what he is after, or what absurdity he means to show from the recognition; for, as one might say, not even Momus himself could have brought a reasonable charge against these events, which have much to draw a reader in even apart from their figurative meaning.

He also puts down that Joseph, who had been sold as a slave, was set free and went up with a procession to his father’s burial; and he thinks the account holds an accusation when he says: “By whom” — he plainly means Joseph — “the brilliant and god-touched race of the Jews, sown into a multitude in Egypt, was ordered to live as foreigners somewhere outside, and to pasture their flocks in places of no honor.” And he added, out of his own hate-filled choice, that they had been ordered to pasture their flocks in places of no honor, without showing how Goshen, the Egyptian district, is a place of no honor. He called the people’s going out from Egypt a flight, without recalling at all what is written in Exodus about the Hebrews’ exodus from the land of Egypt. We have set these things out too, to show that Celsus put down as matter for accusation and idle chatter even things that, taken in their plain wording, appeared to deserve no accusation whatever, and that he never showed by argument what he thinks is bad in our scripture.

Then, as though he had given himself over to nothing but hating and detesting the teaching that belongs to Jews and Christians, he says that “the more reasonable sort among both Jews and Christians read these things as allegory”; and he says that “they take refuge in allegory because they are ashamed of them.” [ae]

Someone might say to him: if what has to be called shameful on a first reading is myths and fabrications — whether they were written with a hidden sense or in any other way at all — then of what should this be said, if not of the Greek stories? In them sons who are gods castrate fathers who are gods, and fathers who are gods swallow down sons who are gods, and a mother goddess hands the father “of men and of gods” a stone in place of his son, and a father has intercourse with his daughter, and a wife ties her own husband up, taking as her helpers in the binding the brother of the god she is tying and his own daughter.

And why should I list the Greeks’ absurd stories about the gods — stories that deserve shame just as they stand, allegorized or not? Chrysippus of Soli, who is reckoned to have adorned the philosophers’ Stoa with many intelligent treatises, forces a reading onto the painting at Samos, in which Hera was painted doing the unspeakable thing to Zeus. For in his own treatises this dignified philosopher says that matter, having received the seminal words of God, holds them within herself for the ordering of the whole; since in the painting at Samos Hera is matter and Zeus is God.

It is on account of these things, then — because of such myths and countless others — that we are unwilling even so far as the name to call the God who is over all Zeus, or the sun Apollo, or the moon Artemis. Instead we practice a pure reverence toward the Maker and speak well of his good works of making, and we do not defile the things of God even so far as a name. We accept what Plato says in the Philebus, where he would not allow that pleasure is a god: “My own dread, Protarchus, about the names of the gods is of this kind.” We too really do have that dread about the name of God and about his good works of making — so much so that we would not, even on the pretext of a figurative reading, accept any myth that would do harm to the young.