Against Celsus 1.36

Since we have once come to the subject of the prophets, what is about to be said will be useful not only to the Jews, who believe that they spoke by a divine spirit, but also to the fair-minded among the Greeks. To them we will say that it is necessary to accept that the Jews too had prophets, if they were to be held together in the legislation given them and to believe in the Creator as they had received, and, as far as the law was concerned, to have no occasions to fall away to the polytheism of the nations. We will show the necessity thus. "The nations," as is written in the law of the Jews itself, "will listen to omens and divinations"; but to that people it is said: "But the Lord your God has not given it so to you." And to this is added: "The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet from among your brothers." Since, then, the nations used divination, whether through "omens," or through auguries, or birds, or ventriloquists, or those who profess sacrificial divination, or Chaldeans casting horoscopes—all of which were forbidden to the Jews—if the Jews had had no consolation of knowledge of the future, they would have been led by the very human greed to know what will be, and would have despised their own traditions as having nothing divine in them. They would not have accepted any prophet after Moses, nor recorded their words, but would have deserted to the oracles and divinations of the nations, or tried to set up something of the kind among themselves. So it is not at all absurd that their prophets foretold even ordinary things to console those who longed for such things—so that Samuel prophesied even "about lost donkeys," and the prophet recorded in the Third Book of Kingdoms about the illness of a king's son. How else could those who upheld the law of the Jews rebuke one who wished to get divination from idols? As Elijah is found rebuking Ahaziah and saying: "Is it because there is no God in Israel that you go to inquire of Baal-fly, the god of Ekron?"