By Water & Blood

Panarion 51, Chapter 8: Pagan and Jewish attacks on Gospel chronology

Hence certain other Greek philosophers as well—I mean Porphyry and Celsus, and Philosabbatius, a dread and deceitful serpent springing from the Jews—going through to overturn the Gospel narrative, accuse the holy evangelists, being psychic and fleshly, warring according to the flesh and unable to please God, and not having understood the things spoken through the Spirit.

For each of them, stumbling at the words of truth because of the blindness of ignorance in him, falling into this, said: How can the same day of the birth in Bethlehem also have an eighth-day circumcision and, after forty days, the ascent to Jerusalem and the things accomplished concerning him by Simeon and Anna, when on the

night in which he was born an angel appeared to him, they say, after the arrival of the magi who came to worship him and opened their bags and offered gifts, as Scripture says: "An angel appeared to him saying, 'Rise, take your wife and the child, and go into Egypt, for Herod seeks the life of the child'"?

If, then, on that very night on which he was born he was taken into Egypt and was there until Herod died, how can he have remained eight days and been circumcised? Or how, after forty days, is Luke found lying—as they blaspheme against their own head—when he says, “On the fortieth day they brought him up to Jerusalem and from there returned to Nazareth”?