If Moses learned it, what was his fault?

For this is what Celsus and the Epicureans think. “Moses, then,” he says, “having heard of this doctrine, which was current among wise nations and men of renown, won a godlike reputation.” To this we must reply, even granting him that Moses heard an older doctrine and handed it on to the Hebrews: if he heard a false doctrine, one neither wise nor venerable, and accepted it and handed it on to those under him, he is open to blame; but if, as you say, he assented to wise and true doctrines and educated his own people by means of them, what has he done that deserves accusation?

Would that Epicurus too had heard this doctrine, and Aristotle, who is less impious than he toward providence, and the Stoics, who said that God is a body! Then the world would not have been filled with teaching that sets providence aside, or curtails it, or brings in a corruptible first principle, the bodily one, according to which God too is a body for the Stoics. They are not ashamed to say that he is changeable, alterable through and through, and mutable, and in short capable of perishing if he had anything to destroy him, but fortunate enough not to perish because there is nothing to destroy him. Yet the doctrine of Jews and Christians, which preserves the unchangeableness and unalterableness of God, has been thought impious, because it does not join in impiety with those who hold impious views about God, saying in its prayers to the Divine, “But you are the same” (Psalm 102:27); and it is believed that God also said, “I do not change” (Malachi 3:6).