Against Celsus 5.41

Let us look also at what Celsus says next, in which there is very little about Christians and a great deal about Jews. He says: "If, then, the Jews maintain their own law on these grounds, they are not to be blamed, but rather those who have abandoned their own customs and adopted those of the Jews. But if they pride themselves as knowing something wiser, and turn away from fellowship with others as not equally pure, they have already heard that not even their doctrine about heaven is their own, but, to pass over everything else, was held long ago by the Persians too, as Herodotus shows somewhere. 'For they are accustomed,' he says, 'to go up to the highest mountains and offer sacrifices to Zeus, calling the whole circle of the heaven Zeus.' I think, then, that it makes no difference whether one calls the Most High Zeus, or Zen, or Adonai, or Sabaoth, or Amoun, as the Egyptians do, or Papaeus, as the Scythians do. Nor would they be holier than others on this account, that they are circumcised; for the Egyptians and Colchians did this before them; nor because they abstain from pigs; for the Egyptians do this too, and besides from goats and sheep and oxen and fish, and Pythagoras and his disciples from beans and from all living things. Nor is it likely that they are in favour with God and loved in any way differently from others, and that angels are sent from there to them alone, as though they had been allotted some land of the blessed; for we see what sort of fortune both they and their land have been thought worthy of. Let this chorus, then, depart, having paid the penalty for its boasting, not knowing the great God, but led on and deceived by the sorcery of Moses, and having become his disciples for no good end."