Against Celsus 1.29

For among human beings, what helps someone become distinguished and famous and have a celebrated name is birth, when the parents are of high rank and standing; the wealth of those who raised him and could spend on the education of their son; and a great and notable homeland. But when someone who has all the opposite of these can rise above the obstacles to his becoming known, and can stir those who hear of him, and become famous and known to the whole world, which says unlike things about him, how must we not admire such a nature at once as noble, undertaking great things, and having a boldness not to be despised? And if one examined the case of such a man further, how would he not ask how, brought up in cheapness and poverty, having received no general education, and having learned no arguments or doctrines by which he might have become persuasive in addressing crowds, leading the people, and drawing many hearers, he devotes himself to teaching new doctrines, bringing to the human race a teaching that abolishes the customs of the Jews while honoring their prophets, and overthrows the laws of the Greeks, especially about the Divine? How could such a man, so brought up, who (as even his detractors admit) learned nothing venerable from any human being, say such things, not to be despised, about the judgment of God, about punishments of wickedness and rewards of the good, so that not only rustic and uneducated people were led by what he said, but also not a few of the more intelligent and those able to see into the concealment of what is thought to be said in simple terms, which contains, so to speak, something more secret within? The man from Seriphos in Plato, reproaching Themistocles, who had become celebrated for his generalship, as having won his fame not by his own character but by the good fortune of having the most notable homeland in all Greece, heard from Themistocles—who was fair-minded and saw that his homeland had also contributed to his fame—"Neither would I have become so famous if I had been a Seriphian, nor would you have become a Themistocles if you had had the good fortune to be an Athenian." But our Jesus, reproached as coming from a village, and that not a Greek one nor belonging to any nation held in honor by the many, and slandered as the son of a poor woman working with her hands, and as having left his homeland because of poverty to hire himself out in Egypt—being, to follow the example taken, not only a Seriphian from the smallest and most obscure island, but even, so to speak, the most ignoble of Seriphians—has been able to stir the whole world of human beings, not only more than Themistocles the Athenian, but more than Pythagoras and Plato and any others of the world's wise men, kings, or generals whatever.