Against Celsus 1.37

It seems to me, then, that it has been fairly well established not only that our Savior would be born of a virgin, but also that there were prophets among the Jews, who foretold not only general things about the future—such as those about Christ, about the kingdoms of the world, about what would happen to Israel, about the nations that would believe in the Savior, and many other things said about him—but also particular ones, such as how the lost donkeys of Kish would be found, and about the illness of the son of the king of Israel, or anything else of the kind that is recorded. Further, we must say to the Greeks who do not believe in the virgin birth of Jesus that the Creator, in the generation of various animals, has shown that it was possible for him, when he wished, to do in one animal what he does in others and in human beings themselves. Some female animals are found that have no intercourse with a male, as those who have written about animals say of vultures; and this creature preserves the succession of its kind without mating. What is extraordinary, then, if God, wishing to send a divine teacher to the human race, caused the principle of the one to be born to come about in another way, instead of the seminal principle from the union of males with women? And according to the Greeks themselves, not all human beings were born of a man and a woman. For if the world is created, as many Greeks too have held, the first human beings must have come into being not from intercourse but from the earth, seminal principles having formed in the earth; which I think more extraordinary than that Jesus was half born like other human beings. It is not out of place, in addressing Greeks, to use Greek stories too, so that we may not seem to be the only ones to use this extraordinary story. For some have seen fit to write—not about ancient and heroic stories, but about events of only yesterday—that it was possible that Plato too was born of Amphictione, Ariston having been prevented from coming together with her until she gave birth to the child sown by Apollo. But these are truly myths, which moved people to invent something of the kind about a man they thought had greater wisdom and power than the many, and had received the beginning of his bodily formation from better and more divine seed, as befitting those greater than human. But since Celsus introduced the Jew conversing with Jesus and ridiculing what he thinks the pretense of his virgin birth, bringing up the Greek myths about Danae, Melanippe, Auge, and Antiope, we must say that these words befitted a buffoon, not someone serious in what he reports.