After this, being desirous to show that it is nothing either wonderful
or new which we state regarding floods or conflagrations, but that, from
misunderstanding the accounts of these things which are current among
Greeks or barbarous nations, we have accorded our belief to our own
Scriptures when treating of them, he writes as follows: “The belief has
spread among them, from a misunderstanding of the accounts of these
occurrences, that after lengthened cycles of time, and the returns and
conjunctions of planets, conflagrations and floods are wont to happen,
and because after the last flood, which took place in the time of
Deucalion, the lapse of time, agreeably to the vicissitude of all
things, requires a conflagration; and this made them give utterance to
the erroneous opinion that God will descend, bringing fire like a
torturer.” Now in answer to this we say, that I do not understand how
Celsus, who has read a great deal, and who shows that he has perused
many histories, had not his attention arrested[509] by the antiquity of
Moses, who is related by certain Greek historians to have lived about
the time of Inachus the son of Phoroneus, and is acknowledged by the
Egyptians to be a man of great antiquity, as well as by those who have
studied the history of the Phœnicians. And any one who likes may peruse
the two books of Flavius Josephus on the antiquities of the Jews, in
order that he may see in what way Moses was more ancient than those who
asserted that floods and conflagrations take place in the world after
long intervals of time; which statement Celsus alleges the Jews and
Christians to have misunderstood, and, not comprehending what was said
about a conflagration, to have declared that “God will descend, bringing
fire like a torturer.”[510]
Footnote 509:
οὐκ ἐπέστη.
Footnote 510:
δίκην βασανιστοῦ πῦρ φέρων.