Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
To go back a bit and examine the origin of laws of this kind: an old ruling existed that no deity could be consecrated by an emperor without first winning the senate's approval. Marcus Aemilius knows this about his god Alburnus. This also bears on our case, that among you divinity is weighed out by human judgment. Unless a god pleases a man, he will not be a god; by now man must actually do the god the favor of being pleased with him. So then, Tiberius, in whose time the Christian name entered the world, having been informed of it from Syria Palestine — where the truth of that very divinity had been revealed — brought the case before the senate, casting his own vote on its behalf. The senate, because it had not approved the matter itself, rejected it; Caesar held to his own opinion, and threatened danger to any who accused the Christians. Consult your own records; there you will find that Nero was the first to rage against this sect with the imperial sword, precisely when it was rising to greatest prominence at Rome. But we actually glory in having such a man as the one who dedicated us to condemnation. Anyone who knows Nero can understand that only something truly great could have been condemned by him. Domitian too made an attempt — he had a share of Nero's cruelty — but because he was also, after all, a man, he quickly called off what he had begun, and even restored those he had exiled. Such have always been our persecutors — unjust, godless, base men, the very sort you yourselves are accustomed to condemn, and whose victims you are accustomed to restore.
As for the rest, out of so many emperors since then down to today, men wise in things divine and human, produce for me a single one who made war on the Christians! We, on the contrary, can produce a protector — if the letters of Marcus Aurelius, that most serious of emperors, are consulted, in which he testifies that the German thirst was broken by rain obtained, as it happened, through the prayers of Christian soldiers. Even though he did not openly lift the penalty from men of that kind, he nevertheless dispersed it openly in another way, by even attaching a condemnation to their accusers — and a rather grim one at that. What sort of laws, then, are these, which only the wicked, the unjust, the vile, the savage, the foolish, the mad enforce against us — laws which Trajan partly frustrated by forbidding Christians to be sought out, which no Hadrian, curious explorer of everything though he was, ever pressed, which no Vespasian, conqueror of the Jews though he was, ever pressed, which no Pius, no Verus ever pressed? It would, after all, be far easier for the worst men to be uprooted by the best, as by rivals, than by their own partners in crime.