Unlettered apostles and the power of their preaching

After this, since Celsus, not even knowing the number of the apostles, said that Jesus “attached to himself ten or eleven notorious men, tax collectors and sailors of the worst sort, and with them ran away here and there, gathering his food in a shameful and beggarly way,” come, let us deal with these points too, as far as we can. It is plain to those who read the Gospel accounts, which Celsus seems not even to have read, that Jesus chose twelve apostles (Matthew 10:1–4), of whom Matthew was a tax collector (Matthew 10:3). By those whom he loosely called sailors he perhaps means James and John, since they left the boat and “their father Zebedee” and followed Jesus (Matthew 4:21–22). For Peter and his brother Andrew, who used a casting net to get the food they needed, must be counted not among sailors but, as Scripture recorded, among fishermen (Matthew 4:18). Granted that Levi too, a tax collector, followed Jesus (Mark 2:14); yet he was not of the number of his apostles, except in some copies of the Gospel according to Mark. Of the rest we have not learned the trades by which they earned their food before they became disciples of Jesus.

To this, then, I say that those who are able to examine the story of the apostles of Jesus with good sense and fairness can see that these men taught Christianity by divine power and succeeded in winning people over to the word of God. For what was in them and won over their hearers was not a power of speech or an ordered delivery shaped by the dialectical or rhetorical arts of the Greeks. It seems to me that if Jesus had chosen men who were wise in the opinion of the multitude and able to think and speak in a way that pleases crowds, and had used them as ministers of his teaching, he would with very good reason have been suspected of having been proclaimed by a method like that of philosophers who stand at the head of some school. Then the claim that the message is divine would no longer have shone out, since the message and the preaching would have rested on the persuasiveness of a wisdom that lies in the phrasing and arrangement of words (1 Corinthians 2:4); and “faith,” like the faith that the philosophers of the world have in their doctrines, would have been “in the wisdom of men” and not “in the power of God” (1 Corinthians 2:5).

But as it is, the Gospel records that these fishermen and tax collectors had not learned even their first letters (Acts 4:13), and on this point Celsus has believed them, as telling the truth about their lack of learning. Who, then, seeing such men speaking boldly not only to Jews about faith in Jesus but also preaching him among the other nations, and succeeding, would not ask where their power to persuade came from? For it was not the kind that most people are used to. And who would not say that Jesus fulfilled the words “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19) by some divine power in his apostles? Paul too sets this power before us, as we have also said above, when he says: “And my word and my preaching were not in persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that our faith might not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (1 Corinthians 2:4–5). For, as was said in the prophets, who announced beforehand the preaching of the gospel, “The Lord gave a word to those who preach the good news with great power, the King of the powers of the beloved” (Psalm 68:11–12), so that the prophecy which says, “His word will run swiftly” (Psalm 147:15), might also be fulfilled. And indeed we see that the “sound” of the apostles of Jesus “has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world” (Psalm 19:4; Romans 10:18).

That is why those who hear the word proclaimed with power are filled with power, and they show it in their disposition, in their life, and in their struggle for the truth even to death. But some are empty, even though they profess to believe in God through Jesus: those who seem to be brought to the word of God without having divine power. Though I have already mentioned above a saying in the Gospel spoken by the Saviour, I will nonetheless use it again now, since the moment calls for it, to show both our Saviour's foreknowledge about the preaching of the gospel, made known in a most divine way, and the strength of the word, which without teachers prevails over those who believe, by a persuasion joined with divine power. Jesus says: “The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest” (Matthew 9:37–38).