Poverty and the cross are not evils

Further, Celsus, speaking through his Jewish character, charges Jesus with not having shown himself “pure of all evils.” Of what evils, then, let Celsus’s argument tell us, did Jesus not show himself pure? If he says that Jesus was not pure of evils in the proper sense, let him plainly show a work of vice in him. But if he thinks that poverty, the cross and the plotting of perverse men are evils, then plainly he is saying that evils befell Socrates too, and that Socrates was unable to show himself pure of evils.

And how large a company of other poor men there is among the Greeks, men who practised philosophy and accepted poverty of their own will, even ordinary Greeks know from what has been recorded: of Democritus, who let his property become pasture for sheep, and of Crates, who set himself free by making a gift to the Thebans of the money he was paid when all his possessions were sold. Diogenes, too, lived in a jar out of his exceeding simplicity of life; yet no one with even a moderate share of sense thought Diogenes in an evil plight on that account.