Origen of Alexandria, Against Celsus 36

Now that we have turned to the subject of the prophets, what follows will prove useful not only for Jews, who hold that the prophets spoke by the divine Spirit, but also for well-disposed Greeks. We will tell these readers that they must accept that the Jews possessed prophets as well. Otherwise, the Jews could not have continued in the law given to them, maintained their faith in the Creator as they had received it, or resisted any impulse to abandon their heritage for the polytheism of the nations. We will demonstrate this necessity as follows. Scripture says, 'The nations will listen to soothsayers and diviners' (Deuteronomy 18:14). Yet to Israel God declared, 'The Lord your God has not given this to you' (Deuteronomy 18:14). He adds, 'The Lord your God will raise up a prophet for you from among your brothers' (Deuteronomy 18:15). Now the nations practice divination through soothsayers, the flight of birds, the reading of entrails, ventriloquists, those who promise sacrificial rites, and Chaldean astrologers who cast nativities—all of which were forbidden to the Jews. If the Jews had lacked any divinely given consolation for knowing the future, mere human curiosity about what is to come would have driven them to despise their own institutions as devoid of the divine. They would never have accepted another prophet after Moses, nor preserved the prophets' words. Instead, they would have defected to the divinations and oracles of the nations, or attempted to establish such practices among themselves. Therefore, it is not at all absurd that their prophets spoke beforehand to comfort those who long for such knowledge—so that even Samuel prophesied about lost donkeys, and the prophet recorded in the third book of Kings spoke concerning the illness of a royal child (2 Kings 1:2-3). How else would the Jewish elders who administer the law have rebuked anyone who sought divination from idols? Just as Elijah rebuked Ahaziah: 'Is it because there is no God in Israel that you are going to inquire of Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron?' (2 Kings 1:3).