Celsus on the ancestral laws of the Jews

Let us look also at Celsus’s next passage, which runs as follows: “Now the Jews, having become a nation of their own and having laid down laws according to their local custom, still maintain them among themselves to this day; and in keeping a form of worship, whatever kind it may be, but at any rate ancestral, they act like the rest of mankind, since each people honours its ancestral customs, however they happen to have been established. And to do so seems to be of benefit too, not only because different people have come to think in different ways, and what has been publicly ratified must be preserved, but also because, as is likely, the parts of the earth were allotted from the beginning to different overseers and, being divided into certain dominions, are administered in this way. And indeed what is done among each people would be done rightly when it is done in the way that pleases them; and it is not holy to abolish the customs established in each place from the beginning.”

In these words Celsus implies that the Jews, who were Egyptians of old, later became a nation of their own, and that having laid down laws they maintain them. And, so as not to repeat Celsus’s words set out above, he says that it benefits them to practise their ancestral worship, like the other nations who honour their own customs. He also sets out a deeper cause why it benefits the Jews to honour their ancestral customs, hinting that those who were allotted to be overseers of the land of the peoples receiving laws laid down each people’s laws, working together with the lawgivers. He seems, then, to show that the land of the Jews too, and the nation living in it, is overseen by someone, or by several, and that the laws of the Jews were laid down by that one or those several, working together with Moses.