Against Celsus 7.10

But if he were fair-minded in his accusation, he ought to have set out the prophecies in their very words, whether those in which the speaker professed to be God almighty, or those in which he professed to be the Son of God, or those in which the speaker was believed to be the Holy Spirit. For thus he would have striven to refute what was said and to show that the words, which contain a call to turn from sins, a rebuke of the things that then existed, and foreknowledge of the future, were not inspired. That is why those who lived in their time wrote down their prophecies and preserved them, so that later generations too, reading them, might admire them as words of God, and, helped not only by the rebukes and calls to conversion but also by the predictions, and persuaded by the outcomes that the Spirit who foretold them was divine, might continue to practise the piety that accords with the Word, obeying the law and the prophets. The prophets, then, according to the will of God, said without any concealment whatever could be understood at once by the hearers as useful and contributing to the correction of morals; but whatever was more mystical and belonged to a higher initiation, related to contemplation beyond the hearing of the crowd, they declared “through riddles” and allegories and what are called dark sayings and what are named parables or proverbs; so that those who do not shrink from labour, but undertake every labour for virtue and truth, might examine and find them, and having found them, manage them as reason requires. But the fine fellow Celsus, as though angry at not having understood such words of the prophets, reviled them, saying: Having made these boasts, they add straightway unknown, frenzied, and wholly obscure words, whose meaning no one with sense could discover; for they are unclear and nothing, but they give occasion to any fool or sorcerer to take what was said in whatever sense he wishes about anything. And he seems to me to have said this craftily, wishing, so far as it rested with him, to prevent readers of the prophecies from testing and examining their meaning. He has had an experience like that of those who said of a certain prophet, who came to someone and foretold the future to him: “Why did this madman come to you?”