Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] The utmost antiquity claims first authority for these documents of ours; and among you too it is a point of religion to establish credit on the basis of dates.
(The Fulda Fragment)
[F1] The utmost antiquity confers authority upon a body of writings. For the first prophet, Moses—who took the constitution of the world and the budding-forth of the human race, and then, going back in time, the avenging force of the flood that fell on the wickedness of that age, and set them out by prophecy down to his own lifetime, and thereafter, through the record of his own affairs, published images of things to come; in whose hands too the order of the ages, arranged from the beginning, supplied a reckoning of time—Moses is found to be older by about three hundred years than that most ancient figure of yours, Danaus, when he crossed over into Argos. [F2] He comes, in fact, some thousand years before the Trojan war, and hence before Saturn himself. For according to the history of Thallus, in which it is recorded that the Assyrian war and Saturn king of the Titans fought against Jove, it is shown that that war preceded the fall of Troy by three hundred and twenty-two years. Through this same Moses, moreover, that law peculiar to the Jews was sent from God. [F3] After him came many other prophets besides, older still than your literature; for even the last of them to sing either ran a little ahead of, or at the very least kept pace with, the founders of your wisdom—yes, even with your lawgivers. [F4] For Zechariah belonged to the reign of Cyrus and Darius, at which time Thales, the chief of the natural philosophers, when Croesus questioned him, could give no certain answer about the divine—troubled, evidently, by the voices of the prophets. Solon told that same king to look to the end of a long life before calling it happy, no differently than the prophets had spoken. [F5] So it can be seen that both your laws and your studies took their conception from the Law and from divine teaching. Whatever comes first must necessarily be the seed. Hence you hold certain things in common with us, or close to us: [F6] out of wisdom (sophia), the love of it was called philosophy; out of prophecy, its counterfeit was assigned to poetic divination. Men greedy for glory, wanting to make what they found their own, adulterated it. Even fruit, it happens, degenerates from its seed.
[F7] I could still establish the antiquity of the divine writings in many more ways, if a greater authority for believing them did not already stand ready in the strength of their own truth rather than in the annals of their age. For what will plead their case more powerfully than the daily audit of the whole world, when the arrangements of kingdoms, the falls of cities, the ends of nations, the state of the times, all answer just as they were foretold a thousand years before? [F8] From this, then, the hope you laugh at draws its life, and the confidence you call presumption is strengthened. For a proper review of the past is fit ground for arranging confidence about the future: the same voices proclaimed both, the same writings recorded them. [F9] There is one single time in those writings, though it seems divided among us. So everything that remains is already proven to us, because it was foretold together with the things that have been proven, back when they were still future. You too, so far as I know, have your Sibyl—insofar as that title of a true prophetess of the true God has been seized here and there by others who merely seemed to prophesy, just as your Sibyl's name is a lying counterfeit of the truth, exactly like your gods.
[2] So then, every substance, every matter, every origin, order, and vein of any one of your old authors' pens; most nations too, and famous cities, and the hoary memorials of history; the very shapes of letters themselves, the indices and keepers of things; and—I think I still put it too mildly—your very gods themselves, your temples and oracles and rites: the strongbox of a single prophet outstrips them all in age, in which, as it happens, is stored the treasure of the whole Jewish covenant, and from there now of ours as well. [3] If you have at least heard of one Moses, he is contemporary in age with Inachus of Argos; he comes before Danaus—the most ancient figure among you too—by nearly four hundred years, less seven; he goes ahead of the fall of Priam by about a thousand years; I could even say he precedes Homer by more than five hundred, and I have sources to back me up. [4] As for the rest of the prophets, even granting that they come after Moses, is not the very last of them still shown to be no more recent than the earliest of your own sages, lawgivers, and historians?
[5] By what steps these things can be proved is not so much difficult for me to set out as it is enormous—not hard, but, for the moment, long. One would have to sit down over many documents with the finger-reckoning of an accountant; the archives of the most ancient nations must be unlocked—Egyptians, Chaldeans, Phoenicians—[6] and their own countrymen must be summoned, through whom the record has been handed down: Manetho of Egypt together with Berosus of Chaldea, and also Hieromus the Phoenician, king of Tyre; and their followers too—Ptolemy of Mendes, Menander of Ephesus, Demetrius of Phalerum, king Juba, Apion, Thallus, and, whether to confirm or refute the rest, Josephus the Jew, the native champion of Jewish antiquities. [7] The chronologers of the Greeks, too, must be brought in, and it must be shown when things happened and how the chains of dates link up, so that the tallies of the annals may shine through; one must go traveling through the histories and literatures of the whole world. And yet it is as if I have already brought in part of the proof, by sprinkling in the means by which it could be proved. [8] Still, it is better to put this off, either so that we do not skimp on the case by rushing, or wander too far afield by chasing it out in full.