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| Chapter XXXVI
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Chapter
XXXVI.
Celsus in the next place, producing from history
other than that of the divine record, those passages which bear upon
the claims to great antiquity put forth by many nations, as the
Athenians, and Egyptians, and Arcadians, and Phrygians, who assert that
certain individuals have existed among them who sprang from the earth,
and who each adduce proofs of these assertions, says: “The
Jews, then, leading a grovelling life3838
in
some corner of Palestine, and being a wholly uneducated people, who had
not heard that these matters had been committed to verse long ago by
Hesiod and innumerable other inspired men, wove together some most
incredible and insipid stories,3839
viz., that a
certain man was formed by the hands of God, and had breathed
into him the breath of life, and that a woman was taken from his side,
and that God issued certain commands, and that a serpent opposed these,
and gained a victory over the commandments of God; thus relating
certain old wives’ fables, and most impiously representing God as
weak at the very beginning (of things), and unable to convince even a
single human being whom He Himself had formed.” By these
instances, indeed, this deeply read and learned Celsus, who accuses
Jews and Christians of ignorance and want of instruction, clearly
evinces the accuracy of his knowledge of the chronology of the
respective historians, whether Greek or Barbarian, since he imagines
that Hesiod and the “innumerable” others, whom he styles
“inspired” men, are older than Moses and his
writings—that very Moses who is shown to be much older than the
time of the Trojan war! It is not the Jews, then, who have
composed incredible and insipid stories regarding the birth of man from
the earth, but these “inspired” men of Celsus, Hesiod and
his other “innumerable” companions, who, having neither
learned nor heard of the far older and most venerable accounts existing
in Palestine, have written such histories as their Theogonies,
attributing, so far as in their power, “generation” to
their deities, and innumerable other absurdities. And these are
the writers whom Plato expels from his “State” as being
corrupters of the youth,3840
| 3840 Cf. Plato, de
Repub., book ii. etc. | —Homer, viz.,
and those who have composed poems of a similar description! Now
it is evident that Plato did not regard as “inspired” those
men who had left behind them such works. But perhaps it was from
a desire to cast reproach upon us, that this Epicurean Celsus, who is
better able to judge than Plato (if it be the same Celsus who composed
two other books against the Christians), called those individuals
“inspired” whom he did not in reality regard as
such.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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