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| Chapter LXVI
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Chapter
LXVI.
And in addition to the above, this Jew of Celsus
afterwards addresses Jesus: “What need, moreover, was there
that you, while still an infant, should be conveyed into Egypt?
Was it to escape being murdered? But then it was not likely that
a God should be afraid of death; and yet an angel came down from
heaven, commanding you and your friends to flee, lest ye should be
captured and put to death! And was not the great God, who had
already sent two angels on your account, able to keep you, His only
Son, there in safety?” From these words Celsus seems to
think that there was no element of divinity in the human body and soul
of Jesus, but that His body was not even such as is described in the
fables of Homer; and with a taunt also at the blood of Jesus which was
shed upon the cross, he adds that it was not
“Ichor, such as flows in the veins of the
blessed gods.”3200
We now, believing Jesus Himself, when He says respecting His
divinity, “I am the way, and the truth, and the
life,”3201
and employs other
terms of similar import; and when He says respecting His being clothed
with a human body, “And now ye seek to kill Me, a man that hath
told you the truth,”3202
conclude that He
was a kind of compound being. And so it became Him who was making
provision for His sojourning in the world as a human being, not to
expose Himself unseasonably to the danger of death. And in like
manner it was necessary that He should be taken away by His parents,
acting under the instructions of an angel from heaven, who communicated
to them the divine will, saying on the first occasion, “Joseph,
thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife; for that
which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost;”3203
and on the second, “Arise, and take
the young Child, and His mother, and flee into Egypt; and be thou there
until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young Child to
destroy Him.”3204
Now, what is
recorded in these words appears to me to be not at all
marvellous. For in either passage of Scripture it is stated that
it was in a dream that the angel spoke these words; and that in a dream
certain persons may have certain things pointed out to them to do, is
an event of frequent occurrence to many individuals,—the
impression on the mind being produced either by an angel or by some
other thing. Where, then, is the absurdity in believing that He
who had once become incarnate, should be led also by human guidance to
keep out of the way of dangers? Not indeed from any impossibility
that it should be otherwise, but from the moral fitness that ways and
means should be made use of to ensure the safety of Jesus. And it
was certainly better that the Child Jesus should escape the snare of
Herod, and should reside with His parents in Egypt until the death of
the conspirator, than that Divine Providence should hinder the
free-will of Herod in his wish to put the Child to death, or that the
fabled poetic helmet of Hades should have been employed, or anything of
a similar kind done with respect to Jesus, or that they who came to
destroy Him should have been smitten with blindness like the people of
Sodom. For the sending of help to Him in a very miraculous and
unnecessarily public manner, would not have been of any service to Him
who wished to show that as a man, to whom witness was borne by God, He
possessed within that form which was seen by the eyes of men some
higher element of divinity,—that which was properly the Son of
God—God the Word—the power of God, and the wisdom of
God—He who is called the Christ. But this is not a suitable
occasion for discussing the composite nature of the incarnate Jesus;
the investigation into such a subject being for believers, so to speak,
a sort of private question.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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