Against Celsus 1.40

Next after this, taking from the Gospel according to Matthew, and perhaps also from the other Gospels, the account of the dove that alighted on the Savior when he was baptized by John, he wants to slander what is said as a fiction. Having ridiculed, as he thought, the story of our Savior's birth from a virgin, he does not set out what follows in order, since anger and hatred have no order; people who are angry and hostile abuse those they hate as it comes to them, not being allowed by their passion to state their accusations thoughtfully and in order. For if he kept to order, he would have taken the Gospel, and, intending to accuse it, would have attacked the first story and then gone on to the second, and so to the rest. As it is, after the virgin birth, Celsus, who professes to know everything of ours, accuses the appearance of the Holy Spirit at the baptism in the form of a dove; then after this he slanders the prophecy of our Savior's coming; and after that he runs back to what is recorded after the birth of Jesus, the account of the star and of the magi who came from the east to "worship" the child. You too, if you watch, could find many things said confusedly by Celsus throughout his whole book, so that by this too he may be convicted, by those who know how to keep and look for order, of having entitled his book The True Word with great boldness and arrogance—something none of the eminent philosophers did. For Plato says that it is not fitting for a man of sense to insist on such things, which are rather obscure; and Chrysippus, having often set out what moved him, refers us to those we may find who will say better than he. This man, then, wiser than these and than the rest of the Greeks, in keeping with his claim to know everything, entitled his book The True Word.