8. Now let us see what he has to say next. "They have," he says, "a precept to the effect that we are not to avenge ourselves on any one who treats us with insolence and violence. Even if a man strikes you on the one cheek, you are, according to it, to offer him the other also. This is an old saw; it was well enough expressed before; the Christians have revived it in a rougher form. Plato makes Socrates say in his argument with Crito, 'Then we must do no wrong. Certainly not. Nor when injured injure in return, as the many imagine; for we must injure no one at all. Clearly not,'" and so on. Our reply to this and to all those passages which Celsus has made out to be common property, alleging, because he could not face the truth of them, that the same things have been said by Greek authors, is something like this. If the doctrine is serviceable and its purpose sound and wise, and it has been taught the Greeks by Plato or some other philosopher, and the Jews by Moses or some other Prophet, and Christians in the recorded sayings of Jesus or of one of the Apostles, we must not suppose that what is held by Jews or Christians is prejudiced by the fact that the same things have been said by Greeks, particularly if Jewish teaching can be shown to be older than Grecian. Nor, again, must we suppose that a given statement is by reason of the beauty of Greek phraseology of necessity better than what |69 is expressed with less elegance and in simpler terms by Jewish or Christian authors, though we must bear in mind that the primitive language of the Jews, which the Prophets employed in the books which they have left us, is perpetuated in the Hebrew, and with a wise regard to the possibilities of composition in that tongue.