Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] We are said to be the most depraved of criminals on account of a sacrament of infanticide, and the feast made from it, and the incest that follows the banquet — a rite the dog, that overturner of the lamps, procures for us by decently obliging, being of course the pimp of the darkness for our impious lusts. [2] Yet we are only ever said to do this — you never trouble to dig out what you have been saying so long. So either dig it out, if you believe it, or stop believing it, since you have not dug it out! Your own concealment of the matter prescribes against you the fact that you yourselves do not dare to dig out what you do not even yourselves believe worth uncovering. You impose on the executioner a far different task where Christians are concerned — not that they should say what they do, but that they should deny what they are.
[3] The birth-certificate of this discipline, as we have already shown, dates from Tiberius. From the moment truth began to exist, it began to be hated; the instant it appeared, it was an enemy. It has as many enemies as it has outsiders — the Jews hostile out of rivalry proper to them, the soldiers out of extortion, and even our own household out of sheer human nature. [4] Daily we are besieged, daily we are betrayed, and it is precisely in our own meetings and assemblies that we are caught in the act, most of all. Who has ever come upon an infant wailing in such a rite? [5] Who has ever kept for the judge the bloodied mouths, Cyclops-like and Siren-like, just as he found them? Who has ever caught any unclean traces even on the wives? Who, upon discovering such crimes, has ever concealed them or sold his silence, dragging the very persons involved into court?
If we always hide, when was it ever betrayed what we supposedly commit? [6] Indeed, by whom could it have been betrayed? Not by the guilty themselves, surely, since even by the very form of all mystery-rites, a pledge of silence is owed. Samothrace and Eleusis keep their silence: how much more will such rites as these, which if betrayed would provoke not only divine but also, meanwhile, human punishment — while things merely divine are kept safe! [7] If then they are not betrayed by their own initiates, it follows that it must be outsiders. And how would outsiders come to know, when even pious initiations always bar the profane and take care against witnesses? Unless, perhaps, the impious fear less.
[8] The nature of Rumor is known to everyone. It is your own poet's line: "Rumor, an evil than which nothing else is swifter." Why is Rumor an evil? Because she is swift? Because she is an informer? Or because, above all, she is a liar? For not even when she brings something true is she without the vice of lying — subtracting, adding, altering the truth as she goes. [9] What of the fact that her very condition is such that she only survives by lying, and lives only as long as she is not proven? For the moment she is proven, she ceases to exist, and, having as it were discharged her office of reporting, hands the matter over; and from then on the matter is simply held as fact, simply named as fact. [10] And no one then says, for instance, "They say this happened at Rome," or "Rumor has it that he obtained that province by lot," but rather: "He obtained that province," and "This happened at Rome." [11] Rumor, a name for something uncertain, has no place where a thing is certain. Who indeed believes Rumor, except the unthinking? For the wise man does not put faith in the uncertain. Anyone can reckon that, however widely her ambition has spread it, however emphatically she has built it up, it must nonetheless have sprung at some point from one single source. [12] From there it creeps along the relay-lines of tongues and ears, and thus the flaw of one small seed obscures the rest of the rumor, so that no one stops to consider whether that first mouth may have sown a lie — which often happens either from a talent for rivalry, or from the judgment of suspicion, or from a pleasure in lying that is, in certain people, not even acquired but innate. [13] It is well, however, that time reveals all things — your own proverbs and maxims bear witness to this — by the arrangement of nature, which has so ordained that nothing lies hidden for long, not even what Rumor has failed to spread.
[14] Rightly, then, has Rumor alone for so long been the sole witness of Christian crimes; this is the informer you produce against us — one who, though she has boasted of it for so long and strengthened it into settled opinion over so great a stretch of time, has to this very day been unable to prove it.