05_Biblica_1_H_Collins_Layout 1 05/11/12 12:19 Pagina 418 418 C. JOHN COLLINS for Noah, playing on words: “Come ( ), God calls ( ) you to repentance” .32 Origen writes of the great flood in his apologetic refuting the work of Celsus, who had apparently taken the Christians to task for getting the flood story of Deucalion wrong 33. Celsus seems also to have cited Plato, Timaeus, 22c-d, to the effect that “there have been many conflagrations from all eternity and many floods, and that the deluge which lately happened in the time of Deucalion was the most recent” (cf. also Laws, 677a). Origen allows that both the Noah and Deucalion stories are about the same events, though he is of course clear that Moses has told it truly. The church historian Eusebius of Caesarea, in his Preparation for the Gospel, aims to show that the Gentile flood stories supply a confirmation to the biblical version 34. He mentions the floods as- sociated with Ogygos and with Deucalion (see 10.9-10 [486c, 488d, 489b]). He includes (9.11 [414a-c]) quotations from Josephus’ An- tiquities, citing the ancient historians Berossus, Hieronymus, Mnaseas, and Nicolaus (see above); he adds to these a passage from the historian Abydenus (perhaps 2nd century B.C.E.), who recounts the Mesopotamian flood story of Sisithrus (cf. Xisuthros in Berossus); Eusebius considers this to be about the same events. Par- ticularly interesting for our purposes is the way Eusebius draws on Plato’s flood story in his Laws, and then goes on to liken it to the Mosaic account (11.15 [588b]): Just as Moses appends to the history after the flood the civil state of the godly Hebrews of old, in like manner Plato also, next to the lives of those who followed the flood, tries to describe the ancient times of Greek history, as Moses does of the Hebrews, mentioning the Trojan war, and the first constitution of Lacedaemon, and the Persians, and those who had lived among these events whether well Cf. Sibylline Oracles, 1:129, where God tells Noah, 32 “proclaim repentance, that all might be saved”; in 1 Clement 7,6, “Noah proclaimed repentance and those who listened were saved”. Citing from Origen, Contra Celsum (ed. H. CHADWICK) (Cambridge 33 1965). See 1:19; 4:11, 41-42. The English translation is based on the edition of Eusebius, Preparation 34 for the Gospel (trans. E.H. Gifford) (Oxford 1903).