Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Other inventive minds put their wantonness to work even in your entertainments, at the gods' expense. Look at the elegant wit of the Lentuli and Hostilii — are you laughing at mimes, or at your own gods, in their jokes and turns: "Anubis the adulterer," "the Moon turned male," "Diana whipped," "the reading of dead Jupiter's will," "the three starving Hercules mocked." [2] And the writings of the actors set out the whole disgrace of it. The Sun mourns his son thrown from the sky, while you cheer; Cybele sighs for her disdainful shepherd, and you feel no shame; you sit through Jupiter's eulogies being sung, and Juno, Venus, and Minerva being judged by a shepherd. [3] The very fact that your god's image is dressed in a disgraced and notorious head, that an impure body, produced for that trade by effeminization, plays out some Minerva or Hercules — is majesty not violated, is divinity not defiled, by your applause?
[4] Clearly you are more religious in the arena, where, over human blood, over the filth of punishments, your gods dance right along, supplying plots and stories to the condemned — except that the condemned themselves often put on the very gods in question. [5] We have seen Attis castrated once — that god from Pessinus — and the one who used to burn alive had put on Hercules. We laughed, amid the cruel jokes of the midday games, at Mercury testing the dead with a hot iron; we have seen Jupiter's brother hauling off gladiators' corpses with a mallet. [6] Anyone could still track down each of these details, if it mattered to disturb the honor of divinity, if it mattered to wear down the marks of majesty — but of course they're all judged as being held in contempt, both by those who habitually do such things and by those to whom they do them.
[7] But let's call all that mere play! What if I add — and it's no less within everyone's knowledge — that adulteries are arranged in temples, that pimping goes on among the altars, that in the very tents of the temple-wardens and priests themselves, under the same fillets and mitres and purple robes, with the incense burning, lust gets settled up? I don't know — perhaps your gods have more to complain of about you than about the Christians. Certainly, temple-robbers are always caught among your own people; Christians, after all, don't even know the temples by daylight; they might even plunder them themselves — if they worshipped them themselves.
[8] What, then, do people worship who worship none of that? By now it should be plain enough that those who are not worshippers of a lie are worshippers of the truth, and that they no longer go on erring in the very matter where, by recognizing their error, they have stopped erring. Grasp this first point, and from it draw out the whole order of our sacrament — once the false opinions have first been beaten back.