The teaching of Jesus, to which Christians pointed, was after all a mere medley of garbled quotations from Greek literature. Thus when Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich man to go into the kingdom of God, he was merely spoiling the Platonic saying that it is impossible for a man to be exceedingly good and exceedingly rich at the same time.[62] The kingdom of heaven itself comes from the "divinely spoken" words of Plato; it is the "supercelestial region" of the _Phaedrus_.[63] Satan is a parody of Heraclitus' conception of War.[64] The Christian resurrection comes from metempsychosis.[65] The idea that "God will descend, carrying fire (like a torturer in a law-court)" comes from some confused notion of the teaching of the Greeks upon cycles and periods and the final conflagration.[66] Plato has this advantage that he never boasted and never said that God had "a son who descended and talked with me."[67] The "son of God" itself was an expression borrowed in their clumsy way by the Christians from the ancients who conceived of the universe as God's offspring.[68] [Sidenote: Resurrection] Christians lay great stress on the immortality, "but it is silly of them to suppose that when God--like a cook--brings the fire, the rest of mankind will be roasted and they themselves will alone remain, not merely the living, but even those who died long ago, rising from the earth with the identical flesh they had before. Really it is the hope of worms! For what soul of a man would any longer wish for a body that {253} had rotted?"[69] The loathsomeness of the idea, he says, cannot be expressed, and besides it is impossible. "They have nothing to reply to this, so they fly to the absurdest refuge, and say that all is possible with God. But God cannot do what is foul, and what is contrary to nature he will not do. Though you in your vulgarity may wish a loathsome thing, it does not follow that God can do it, nor that you are right to believe at once that it will come to pass. For it is not of superfluous desire and wandering disorder, but of true and just nature that God is prince (_archegetes_). He could grant immortal life of the soul; but 'corpses,' as Heraclitus says, 'are less useful than dung.' The flesh is full of--what it is not beautiful even to mention--and to make it immortal contrary to all reason (_paralogos_), is what God neither will nor can do. For he is the reason of all things that are, so that he cannot do anything contrary to reason or contrary to himself."[70] And yet, says Celsus, "you hope you will see God with the eyes of your body, and hear his voice with your ears, and touch him with the hands of sense."[71] If they threaten the heathen with eternal punishment, the exegetes, hierophants, and mystagogues of the temples hurl back the same threat, and while words are equal, they can show proofs in daemonic activities and oracles.[72] "With those