Origen argues that Christian faith is justified because of a "demonstration of the Spirit and of power", a phrase borrowed from the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:4. Origen argues that, even though people in his own time could not observe the miracles of Jesus or the apostles first hand, the effects that those miracles have had on the Christian community are plainly visible and must therefore have had a cause. Origen turns Celsus's sneers at Jesus's lowly birth against him by saying, "Yet he has been able to shake the whole human world, not only more than Themistocles the Athenian, but even more than Pythagoras and Plato and any other wise men or emperors or generals in any part of the world." Likewise, Origen responds to Celsus's disgust at the fact that Jesus chose lowly fishermen and peasants as his disciples by insisting that this only makes it all the more astonishing that the Christian gospel has been so successful, for, if Jesus had chosen men skilled in rhetoric as his emissaries, it would be no surprise that Christianity had managed to spread throughout the entire known world. Origen therefore interprets Christianity's success as evidence of God working to promote it in the world.
