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| Chapter XXXVII
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Chapter
XXXVII.
I think, then, that it has been pretty well
established not only that our Saviour was to be born of a virgin, but
also that there were prophets among the Jews who uttered not merely
general predictions about the future,—as, e.g., regarding Christ
and the kingdoms of the world, and the events that were to happen to
Israel, and those nations which were to believe on the Saviour, and
many other things concerning Him,—but also prophecies respecting
particular events; as, for instance, how the asses of Kish, which were
lost, were to be discovered, and regarding the sickness which had
fallen upon the son of the king of Israel, and any other recorded
circumstance of a similar kind. But as a further answer to the
Greeks, who do not believe in the birth of Jesus from a virgin, we have
to say that the Creator has shown, by the generation of several kinds
of animals, that what He has done in the instance of one animal, He
could do, if it pleased Him, in that of others, and also of man
himself. For it is ascertained that there is a certain female
animal which has no intercourse with the male (as writers on animals
say is the case with vultures), and that this animal, without sexual
intercourse, preserves the succession of race. What
incredibility, therefore, is there in supposing that, if God wished to
send a divine teacher to the human race, He caused Him to be born in
some manner different from the common!3139
| 3139 Πεποίηκεν
ἀντὶ
σπερματικοῦ
λόγου, τοῦ ἐκ
μίξεως τῶν
ἀῤῥένων
ταῖς γυναιξὶ,
ἄλλῳ τρόπῳ
γενέσθαι τὸν
λόγον τοῦ
τεχθησομένου. | Nay, according to the Greeks
themselves, all men were not born of a man and woman. For if the
world has been created, as many even of the Greeks are pleased to
admit, then the first men must have been produced not from sexual
intercourse, but from the earth, in which spermatic elements existed;
which, however, I consider more incredible than that Jesus was born
like other men, so far as regards the half of his birth. And
there is no absurdity in employing Grecian histories to answer Greeks,
with the view of showing that we are not the only persons who have
recourse to miraculous narratives of this kind. For some have
thought fit, not in regard to ancient and heroic narratives, but in
regard to events of very recent occurrence, to relate as a possible
thing that Plato was the son of Amphictione, Ariston being prevented
from having marital intercourse with his wife until she had given birth
to him with whom she was pregnant by Apollo. And yet these are
veritable fables, which have led to the invention of such stories
concerning a man whom they regarded as possessing greater wisdom and
power than the multitude, and as having received the beginning of his
corporeal substance from better and diviner elements than others,
because they thought that this was appropriate to persons who were too
great to be human beings. And since Celsus has introduced the Jew
disputing with Jesus, and tearing in pieces, as he imagines, the
fiction of His birth from a virgin, comparing the Greek fables about
Danaë, and Melanippe, and Auge, and Antiope, our answer is, that
such language becomes a buffoon, and not one who is writing in a
serious tone.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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