Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] "You do not worship the gods," comes the charge, "and you pay no sacrifices on the emperors' behalf." It follows, by the same logic, that we do not sacrifice for anyone else, since we do not even sacrifice for ourselves — we simply do not worship gods at all. And so the charge laid against us is sacrilege joined with treason. That is the whole matter at issue, the sum of it, and it surely merits a hearing — provided the judge is not prejudice or injustice, one of which despairs of the truth, the other refuses it outright.
[2] We have stopped worshiping your gods from the moment we discovered they are not gods. What you ought to be demanding of us, then, is proof that they are not gods, and therefore ought not to be worshiped — since worship would only have been owed them if they had in fact been gods in the first place. And Christians would deserve punishment only if it could be established that those we refuse to worship, thinking them nonexistent, really were gods after all. [3] "But to us," you say, "they are gods." We appeal, we call you to your own conscience as witness against yourselves; let it be the judge, let it condemn us, if it can deny that every one of your gods was once a man. [4] And if conscience itself tries to deny it, it will be refuted by your own historical records — the very sources from which you learned who these gods were, records still bearing witness today, backed by the cities where they were born, the regions where they left traces of their activities, the very places where they are shown to be buried. [5] Must I now run through them one by one, so many and so various — new and old, barbarian and Greek, Roman and foreign, captives and adopted sons, private and public property, male and female, country folk and city folk, sailors and soldiers? [6] It would be tedious even to chase down their titles. Let me compress it all into one summary — and this not so that you may learn it, but so you may remember it again, since you plainly go about pretending to have forgotten: before Saturn, not one single god exists among you. From him the whole census of your higher and better-known divinities begins. Whatever turns out to be true of the origin will hold for everything that comes after. [7] As for Saturn, then — so far as the literature teaches, neither Diodorus the Greek, nor Thallus, nor Cassius Severus, nor Cornelius Nepos, nor any commentator on antiquities of that sort has ever declared him anything but a man; and so far as the physical evidence goes, I find nowhere more reliable testimony than in Italy itself, where Saturn settled after many campaigns and after his stay in Attica, welcomed by Janus — or Janus, as the Salii would have it. [8] The mountain he had lived on was called the Saturnian; the town he had staked out is still called Saturnia to this day; indeed the whole of Italy, after being called Oenotria, took the name Saturnia. From him coinage was first stamped with a design and image, and to this day he presides over the treasury.
[9] All the same, if Saturn was a man, he was certainly born of a man, and precisely because he came from a man, he did not come from Heaven and Earth. But when a man's parents are unknown, it is easy to call him the son of the very powers under which we can all be said to stand. Who does not, out of respect and honor, or simply by human custom, call heaven and earth mother and father — the way unknown people, or people who turn up out of nowhere, are said to have dropped from the sky? [10] That is exactly how Saturn, appearing suddenly, everywhere came to be called a child of heaven; the common people likewise call unaccountable people 'sons of the earth.' I say nothing of the fact that men were still so primitive back then that the mere sight of any stranger struck them as something divine — when today, in our sophistication, men whom the public mourned as dead only a few days earlier are being enrolled among the gods. [11] Enough of Saturn, brief as this has been. Next we shall show that Jupiter too was every bit as much a man, born of a man, and after him the whole swarm of his line, as mortal as the seed that produced them.