Against Celsus 8.53

Having said so much on this point too, let us see another statement of Celsus, which runs thus: “Since men have been born bound to a body, whether for the sake of the administration of the universe, or paying penalties for sin, or because the soul has been weighed down by certain passions until it is cleansed in the appointed cycles (for according to Empedocles it must ‘wander thrice ten thousand seasons away from the blessed, becoming through time all kinds of forms of mortals’), we must believe, then, that they have been handed over to certain overseers of this prison.” See, then, how in these words, doubting like a man about so many things and setting out the doctrines of many about the cause of our birth, he shows a certain caution, not daring to declare any of them false. Would it not, then, have befitted such a man, who had once decided neither to assent at random nor boldly to reject the views of the ancients, at least to doubt, if he did not wish to believe, the teaching of the Jews declared by their prophets and that about Jesus; and to consider that it was likely that those who served the God of the universe, and who many times faced countless dangers and deaths for the sake of honour to him and to what they believed he had legislated, were not overlooked by God, but that some manifestation came to them too, since they despised human craftsmanship in images and tried to ascend by reason to the God over all himself? He ought to have considered that the common Father and Creator of all, who sees all and hears all, judging according to its desert the choice of each that seeks him and wishes to be pious, gives to these too some fruit of his protection, so that they may increase the notion of him which they have once received. If Celsus and those who hate Moses, the prophets among the Jews, Jesus, and his genuine disciples who laboured for his word had reasoned thus, they would not have so reviled Moses, the prophets, Jesus, and his apostles; nor would they have rejected the Jews alone among all the nations on earth, saying that they were worse even than the Egyptians, who brought down, as far as lay in them, the honour due to the divine to irrational animals, whether from superstition or from whatever cause or error. We have said this not to urge anyone to doubt the teaching of Christianity, but to show that for those who utterly revile the teaching of Christians it is preferable at least to doubt about them, and not to speak so boldly about Jesus or his disciples things they do not know and declare, not with what the Stoics call “apprehensive impression,” nor from any other criterion concerning which each school of philosophy has established what seemed good to it.