Thus the fundamental conceptions of the Christians are shown to be wrong, but more remains to be done. Let us assume for purposes of discussion that there could be a "descent of God"--would it be what the Christians say it was? "God is great and hard to be seen," he makes the Christian say, "so he put his own spirit into a body like ours and sent it down here that we might hear and learn from it."[39] If that is true, he says, then God's son cannot be immortal, since the nature of a spirit is not such as to be permanent; nor could Jesus have risen again in the body, "for God would not have received back the spirit which he gave when it was polluted with the nature of the body."[40] "If he had wished to send down a spirit from himself, why did he need to breathe it into the womb of a woman? He knew already how to {249} make men, and he could have fashioned a body about this spirit too, and so avoided putting his own spirit into such pollution."[41] Again the body, in which the spirit was sent, ought to have had stature or beauty or terror or persuasion, whereas they say it was little, ugly and ignoble.[42] Then, finally, "suppose that God, like Zeus in the Comedy, waking out of long sleep, determined to rescue mankind from evil, why on earth did he send this spirit (as you call it) into one particular corner? He ought to have breathed through many bodies in the same way and sent them all over the world. The comic poet, to make merriment in the theatre, describes how Zeus waked up and sent Hermes to the Athenians and Lacedaemonians; do you not think that your invention of God's son being sent to the Jews is more laughable still?"[43] The incarnation further carried with it stories of "God eating"--mutton, vinegar, gall. This revolted Celsus, and he summed it all up in one horrible word.[44] [Sidenote: The ignominy of Jesus]