Against Celsus 2.48

Celsus has often before, unable to face the miracles Jesus is recorded to have done, slandered them as sorceries; and we have often answered his argument as best we could. Now too he says, as if we had answered, that we thought him the Son of God because he healed the lame and the blind. He adds this too: “He raised the dead, as you say.” That he healed the lame and the blind, for which we consider him the Christ and the Son of God, is clear to us from its also being written in prophecies: “Then the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf will hear; then the lame will leap like a deer.” That he also raised the dead, and that this is not an invention of those who wrote the Gospels, is shown by this: if it were an invention, many who rose would have been recorded, including those who had already been a long time in their tombs; but since it is no invention, very few are mentioned: the daughter of the ruler of the synagogue (of whom, I do not know why, he said, “She is not dead but sleeping,” saying something about her that did not apply to all the dead), the only son of the widow, whom he raised out of compassion, having stopped those who carried the dead man, and third, Lazarus, who had been four days in the tomb. And we shall say further about these things to the more fair-minded, and especially to the Jew, that just as “there were many lepers in the days of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian,” and “there were many widows in the days of Elijah” the prophet, “and Elijah was sent to none of them except to Zarephath in Sidon” (for she had become worthy, by a certain divine judgment, of the marvel the prophet worked with the loaves), so there were many dead in the days of Jesus, but only those rose whom the Word knew to be fit for the resurrection, so that what the Lord did might not only be symbols of certain things but might also by itself bring many to the wonderful teaching of the Gospel. I would say that, according to Jesus' promise, the disciples have done even “greater” works than the perceptible ones Jesus did. For the eyes of those blind in soul are always being opened, and the ears of those deaf to words of virtue hear eagerly about God and the blessed life with him. And many who were lame in the feet of what Scripture called the “inner” man, now that the Word has healed them, do not merely leap but leap “like a deer,” an animal hostile to serpents and stronger than all the poison of vipers. These healed lame men receive from Jesus “authority to tread,” with the feet on which they were formerly lame, “upon the serpents and scorpions” of wickedness, and in short “over all the power of the enemy,” and treading they are not harmed; for they too have become stronger than the poison of all wickedness and of the demons.