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
life[620] 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,[621] 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,[622]—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.
Footnote 620:
συγκύψαντες.
Footnote 621:
ἀμουσότατα.
Footnote 622:
Cf. Plato, _de Repub._ Book ii. etc.