Celsus would seem to have heard Christian preaching, for beside deriding "Only believe" and "Thy faith will save thee," he is offended by the language they use about the cross. "Wide as the sects stand apart, and bitter as are their quarrels and mutual abuse, you will hear them all say their 'To me the world is crucified and I to the world.'"[55] In one great passage he mixes, as Origen says, the things he has mis-heard, and quotes Christian utterances about "a soul that lives, and a heaven that is slain that it may live, and earth slain with the {251} sword, and ever so many people being slain to live; and death taking a rest in the world when the sin of the world dies; and then a narrow way down, and gates that open of themselves. And everywhere you have the tree of life and the resurrection of the flesh from the tree--I suppose, because their teacher was nailed to a cross and was a carpenter by trade. Exactly as, if he had chanced to be thrown down a precipice, or pushed into a pit, or choked in a noose, or if he had been a cobbler, or a stone-mason, or a blacksmith, there would have been above the heavens a precipice of life, or a pit of resurrection, or a rope of immortality, or a happy stone, or the iron of love, or the holy hide."[56] [Sidenote: The Cross and the miracles] The miracles of Jesus Celsus easily explains. "Through poverty he went to Egypt and worked there as a hired labourer; and there he became acquainted with certain powers [or faculties], on which the Egyptians pride themselves, and he came back holding his head high on account of them, and because of them he announced that he was God."[57] But, granting the miracles of healing and of raising the dead and feeding the multitudes, he maintains that ordinary quacks will do greater miracles in the streets for an obol or two, "driving devils out of men,[58] and blowing away diseases and calling up the souls of heroes, and displaying sumptuous banquets and tables and sweetmeats and dainties that are not there;"--"must we count _them_ sons of God?"[59] There are plenty of prophets too, "and it is quite an easy and ordinary thing for each of them to say 'I am God--or God's son--or a divine spirit. And I am come; for already the world perisheth, and ye, oh men, are lost for your sins. But I am willing to {252} save you; and ye shall see me hereafter coming with heavenly power. Blessed is he that has worshipped me now; but upon all the rest I will send eternal fire, and upon their cities and lands. And men who do not recognize their own guilt shall repent in vain with groans; and them that have believed me, I will guard for ever.'"[60] Jesus was, he holds, an obvious quack and impostor. In fact, there is little to choose between worshipping Jesus and Antinous, the favourite of Hadrian, who had actually been deified in Egypt.[61]