Chapter XXII

Chapter XXII.

But, according to Celsus, “the Christians, making certain additional statements to those of the Jews, assert that the Son of God has been already sent on account of the sins of the Jews; and that the Jews having chastised Jesus, and given him gall to drink, have brought upon themselves the divine wrath.”  And any one who likes may convict this statement of falsehood, if it be not the case that the whole Jewish nation was overthrown within one single generation after Jesus had undergone these sufferings at their hands.  For forty and two years, I think, after the date of the crucifixion of Jesus, did the destruction of Jerusalem take place.  Now it has never been recorded, since the Jewish nation began to exist, that they have been expelled for so long a period from their venerable temple-worship³⁷⁶³ and service, and enslaved by more powerful nations; for if at any time they appeared to be abandoned because of their sins, they were notwithstanding visited (by God),³⁷⁶⁴ and returned to their own country, and recovered their possessions, and performed unhindered the observances of their law.  One fact, then, which proves that Jesus was something divine and sacred,³⁷⁶⁵ is this, that Jews should have suffered on His account now for a lengthened time calamities of such severity.  And we say with confidence that they will never be restored to their former condition.³⁷⁶⁶  For they committed a crime of the most unhallowed kind, in conspiring against the Saviour of the human race in that city where they offered up to God a worship containing the symbols of mighty mysteries.  It accordingly behoved that city where Jesus underwent these sufferings to perish utterly, and the Jewish nation to be overthrown, and the invitation to happiness offered them by God to pass to others,—the Christians, I mean, to whom has come the doctrine of a pure and holy worship, and who have obtained new laws, in harmony with the established constitution in all countries;³⁷⁶⁷ seeing those which were formerly imposed, as on a single nation which was ruled by princes of its own race and of similar manners,³⁷⁶⁸ could not now be observed in all their entireness.