Then, finally, "suppose that God, like Zeus in the Comedy, waking out of long sleep, determined to rescue mankind from evil, why on earth did he send this spirit (as you call it) into one particular corner? He ought to have breathed through many bodies in the same way and sent them all over the world. The comic poet, to make merriment in the theatre, describes how Zeus waked up and sent Hermes to the Athenians and Lacedæmonians; do you not think that your invention of God's son being sent to the Jews is more laughable still?"[[43]] The incarnation further carried with it stories of "God eating"—mutton, vinegar, gall. This revolted Celsus, and he summed it all up in one horrible word.[[44]]
The ignominy of Jesus
The ignominy of the life of Jesus was evidence to Celsus of the falsity of his claim to be God's son. He bitterly taunts Christians with following a child of shame—"God's would not be a body like yours—nor begotten as you were begotten, Jesus!"[[45]] He reviles Jesus for the Passion—"unhelped by his Father and unable to help himself."[[46]] He goes to the Gospels ("I know the whole story," he says[[47]]) and he cites incident after incident. He reproaches Jesus with seeking to escape the cross,[[48]] he brings forward "the men who mocked him and put the purple robe on him, the crown of thorns, and; the reed in his hand";[[49]] he taunts him with being unable to endure his thirst upon the cross—"which many a common man will endure."[[50]] As to the resurrection, "if Jesus wished really to display his divine power, he ought to have appeared to the actual men who reviled him, and to him who condemned him and to all, for, of course, he was no longer afraid of any man, seeing he was dead, and, as you say, God, and was not originally sent to elude observation."[[51]] Or, better still, to show his Godhead, he might have vanished from the gibbet.[[52]]
What befel Jesus, befals his followers. "Don't you see, my dear sir?" Celsus says, "a man may stand and blaspheme your dæmon; and not that only, he may forbid him land and sea, and then lay hands on you, who are consecrated to him like a statue, bind you, march you off and impale you; and the dæmon, or, as you say, the son of God, does not help you."[[53]] "You may stand and revile the statues of the gods and laugh. But if you tried it in the actual presence of Dionysus or Herakles, you might not get off so comfortably. But your god in his own person they spread out and punished, and those who did it have suffered nothing.... He too who sent his son (according to you) with some message or other, looked on and saw him thus cruelly punished, so that the message perished with him, and though all this time has passed he has never heeded. What father was ever so unnatural (anósios)? Ah! but perhaps he wished it, you say, and that was why he endured the insult. And perhaps our gods wish it too, when you blaspheme them."[[54]]
Celsus would seem to have heard Christian preaching, for beside deriding "Only believe" and "Thy faith will save thee," he is offended by the language they use about the cross. "Wide as the sects stand apart, and bitter as are their quarrels and mutual abuse, you will hear them all say their 'To me the world is crucified and I to the world.'"[[55]] In one great passage he mixes, as Origen says, the things he has mis-heard, and quotes Christian utterances about "a soul that lives, and a heaven that is slain that it may live, and earth slain with the sword, and ever so many people being slain to live; and death taking a rest in the world when the sin of the world dies; and then a narrow way down, and gates that open of themselves. And everywhere you have the tree of life and the resurrection of the flesh from the tree—I suppose, because their teacher was nailed to a cross and was a carpenter by trade. Exactly as, if he had chanced to be thrown down a precipice, or pushed into a pit, or choked in a noose, or if he had been a cobbler, or a stone-mason, or a blacksmith, there would have been above the heavens a precipice of life, or a pit of resurrection, or a rope of immortality, or a happy stone, or the iron of love, or the holy hide."[[56]]
The Cross and the miracles
The miracles of Jesus Celsus easily explains. "Through poverty he went to Egypt and worked there as a hired labourer; and there he became acquainted with certain powers [or faculties], on which the Egyptians pride themselves, and he came back holding his head high on account of them, and because of them he announced that he was God."[[57]] But, granting the miracles of healing and of raising the dead and feeding the multitudes, he maintains that ordinary quacks will do greater miracles in the streets for an obol or two, "driving devils out of men,[[58]] and blowing away diseases and calling up the souls of heroes, and displaying sumptuous banquets and tables and sweetmeats and dainties that are not there;"—"must we count them sons of God?"[[59]] There are plenty of prophets too, "and it is quite an easy and ordinary thing for each of them to say 'I am God—or God's son—or a divine spirit. And I am come; for already the world perisheth, and ye, oh men, are lost for your sins. But I am willing to save you; and ye shall see me hereafter coming with heavenly power. Blessed is he that has worshipped me now; but upon all the rest I will send eternal fire, and upon their cities and lands. And men who do not recognize their own guilt shall repent in vain with groans; and them that have believed me, I will guard for ever.'"[[60]] Jesus was, he holds, an obvious quack and impostor. In fact, there is little to choose between worshipping Jesus and Antinous, the favourite of Hadrian, who had actually been deified in Egypt.[[61]]
The teaching of Jesus, to which Christians pointed, was after all a mere medley of garbled quotations from Greek literature. Thus when Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich man to go into the kingdom of God, he was merely spoiling the Platonic saying that it is impossible for a man to be exceedingly good and exceedingly rich at the same time.[[62]] The kingdom of heaven itself comes from the "divinely spoken" words of Plato; it is the "supercelestial region" of the Phædrus.[[63]] Satan is a parody of Heraclitus' conception of War.[[64]] The Christian resurrection comes from metempsychosis.[[65]] The idea that "God will descend, carrying fire (like a torturer in a law-court)" comes from some confused notion of the teaching of the Greeks upon cycles and periods and the final conflagration.[[66]] Plato has this advantage that he never boasted and never said that God had "a son who descended and talked with me."[[67]] The "son of God" itself was an expression borrowed in their clumsy way by the Christians from the ancients who conceived of the universe as God's offspring.[[68]]
Resurrection
Christians lay great stress on the immortality, "but it is silly of them to suppose that when God—like a cook—brings the fire, the rest of mankind will be roasted and they themselves will alone remain, not merely the living, but even those who died long ago, rising from the earth with the identical flesh they had before. Really it is the hope of worms! For what soul of a man would any longer wish for a body that had rotted?"[[69]] The loathsomeness of the idea, he says, cannot be expressed, and besides it is impossible. "They have nothing to reply to this, so they fly to the absurdest refuge, and say that all is possible with God. But God cannot do what is foul, and what is contrary to nature he will not do. Though you in your vulgarity may wish a loathsome thing, it does not follow that God can do it, nor that you are right to believe at once that it will come to pass. For it is not of superfluous desire and wandering disorder, but of true and just nature that God is prince (archegétes). He could grant immortal life of the soul; but 'corpses,' as Heraclitus says, 'are less useful than dung.' The flesh is full of—what it is not beautiful even to mention—and to make it immortal contrary to all reason (paralogôs), is what God neither will nor can do. For he is the reason of all things that are, so that he cannot do anything contrary to reason or contrary to himself."[[70]] And yet, says Celsus, "you hope you will see God with the eyes of your body, and hear his voice with your ears, and touch him with the hands of sense."[[71]] If they threaten the heathen with eternal punishment, the exegetes, hierophants, and mystagogues of the temples hurl back the same threat, and while words are equal, they can show proofs in dæmonic activities and oracles.[[72]] "With those however who speak of the soul or the mind (whether they choose to call it spiritual, or a spirit intelligent, holy and happy, or a living soul, or the supercelestial and incorruptible offspring of a divine and bodyless nature—or whatever they please)—with those who hope to have this eternally with God, with such I will speak. For they are right in holding that they who have lived well will be happy and the unjust will be held in eternal woes. From this opinion (dógmatos) let not them nor any one else depart."[[73]]