Weighing the wonders by their results

But the Greeks will say that these things are myths, even though two whole nations bear witness that they are true. And why are the stories of the Greeks not myths rather than these? Suppose, however, that someone meets the argument head on, and, so as not to seem to accept his own accounts arbitrarily while disbelieving those of others, says that the Greek wonders too were done by certain demons; the Jewish ones either by God through the prophets, or by the angels, or by God through the angels; and the Christian ones by Jesus and by His power at work in the apostles. Come, then, let us set them all side by side and look at the end that those who worked them had in view, and at the benefit or harm, or neither, that came of it to those who received what were thought to be benefits.

Will such a person not see that the Jewish nation of old was a nation of philosophers, before they behaved outrageously toward the Divine, by whom they were forsaken because of their great wickedness; and that the Christians, who came together against all expectation, were drawn at the beginning more by wonders than by words of exhortation to abandon their ancestral ways and to choose ways foreign to those of their fathers? For if we must also use the argument from likelihood about how the Christians first came together, we shall say that it is not credible that the apostles of Jesus, unlettered and ordinary men (Acts 4:13), took courage to proclaim Christianity to men from anything other than the power given to them and the grace in their word for setting forth the things it proclaimed; nor is it credible that those who heard them were moved from long-standing ancestral customs, unless some remarkable power and wondrous deeds had moved them toward teachings so strange and so foreign to those they had been brought up with.