Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] But since we have already shown that this sect of ours is propped up on the most ancient documents of the Jews — a sect that most people know to be, comparatively speaking, quite new, dating only from the reign of Tiberius, as we ourselves openly admit — perhaps on that very score its standing may be called into question, as though under the shadow of a supremely respected religion, one certainly permitted by law, it were hiding some presumption of its own. [2] Or the objection may run that, apart from our age, we have nothing to do with dietary restrictions, or festival observances, or the very mark cut into the flesh, or even sharing a name with the Jews — all of which would surely be required if we were bound in service to the same god. [3] But by now even the common crowd knows Christ merely as a man, the sort of man the Jews made him out to be — which makes it all the easier for someone to suppose we are worshippers of a mere man. Yet we are not ashamed of Christ, since it is our pleasure to be classed and condemned under his name, nor do we hold any different assumption about God. So a few words about Christ as God are necessary.
[4] Everything, with the Jews, was a matter of grace before God, so long as there was outstanding righteousness and faith among their forefathers. From that came the greatness of their nation and the loftiness of their kingdom and such great prosperity, that they were forewarned, by the very voice of God with which they were instructed, how to earn God's favor and how not to offend him. [5] But how greatly they transgressed, puffed up with confidence in their fathers, turning aside from discipline into profane conduct — even if they themselves would not confess it, their own condition today proves it. Scattered, wandering, exiled from their own soil and their own sky, they roam the world without a king, without a homeland, without even a stranger's right to set foot, in mere greeting, on the land of their fathers. [6] While these holy voices kept warning them of this, the same voices always kept pressing on them one further thing: that in the final laps of the age's racecourse God would choose for himself worshippers far more faithful, out of every nation and people and place, and to these he would transfer his grace — indeed a fuller grace, since they would be capable of a more expansive discipline.
[7] So he came who, it had been foretold by God, was to come to reform and enlighten that discipline — Christ, that son of God. This, then, was the arbiter and teacher of that grace and discipline, the illuminator and guide of the human race, announced as the Son of God — not begotten in a manner that need blush at the name of "son," or at the seed of a father. [8] God the Father did not, to beget him, endure the incest of a sister, or the rape of someone's daughter or another man's wife, turned into scales or horns or feathers, a lover transformed into gold for the Danaids. Those are the divinities of your Jupiter. [9] But the Son of God had no unchaste mother to give him birth; even she who seems to be his mother had not been married. But let me first explain his substance, and then the manner of his birth will be understood.
[10] We have already declared that God fashioned this whole universe by his Word and Reason and Power. Among your own sages too it is agreed that the Logos — that is, speech and reason — appears to be the maker of the universe. This is what Zeno defines as the artificer who shaped all things in their arrangement; the same, he says, is also called fate, and god, and the mind of Jupiter, and the necessity governing all things. Cleanthes gathers all this into "spirit," which he affirms pervades the universe. [11] We too ascribe a distinct substance to that speech and reason and likewise power, through which we have declared God fashioned everything: we call it Spirit — in whom speech is present as he utters, and reason is present as he arranges, and power presides as he accomplishes. This we have learned was brought forth from God, and generated by that bringing-forth, and therefore called Son of God and God, from unity of substance — for God too is spirit. [12] When a ray is projected from the sun, it is a portion from the whole; yet the source stays whole within that beam, since the beam belongs to it, and the substance is not separated but extended — so spirit comes from spirit, and God from God, as light kindled from light. The source-material remains whole and undiminished, even though you draw off from it many offshoots sharing its quality. [13] So too what has proceeded from God is God and God's son, and the two are one; so too spirit from spirit and God from God make a second by way of degree, not of division in status, and it has not departed from the source, but only issued from it. [14] This ray of God, then, as had always been foretold from of old, descended into a certain virgin and, shaped into flesh in her womb, is born a man mixed with God. The flesh, instructed by spirit, is nourished, grows, speaks, teaches, works — and is Christ. Take this account provisionally, since it resembles your own tales, and let us press forward into demonstrating that Christ is genuine, and who among you provided such rival stories in advance to undermine this truth.
[15] The Jews too knew that a Christ was to come — naturally, since it was to them the prophets spoke. Even now they await his coming, and there is no greater clash between us and them than this: that they do not believe he has already come. For two comings of his were foretold: the first, already accomplished, in the lowliness of a human condition; the second, still impending at the close of the age, in the loftiness of manifest divinity. By failing to understand the first, they took the two for one, since they hope for the second more plainly foretold. [16] For it was the due penalty of their sins that they should fail to understand the earlier coming — for they would have believed, had they understood it, and would have attained salvation, had they believed. They themselves read it written that they were mulcted of wisdom and understanding, and of the fruit of eyes and ears.
[17] Since they had assumed him to be a mere man on the strength of his lowliness, it followed that they should judge him a magician on the strength of his power, when by a word he drove demons out of men, restored sight to the blind, cleansed lepers, braced the limbs of the paralyzed, and finally by a word gave the dead back to life; when he made the very elements his servants, stilling storms and walking upon the sea — showing himself to be the Word of God, that is, that primordial, firstborn Logos, attended by power and reason and upheld by spirit, the very one who by a word both made and had made all things. [18] But at his teaching, by which they were refuted, the Jewish teachers and leading men grew so exasperated — chiefly because a huge multitude was turning aside to him — that at last they hauled him before Pontius Pilate, then governing part of Syria on Rome's behalf, and by the sheer violence of their outcry wrung from him the surrender of Jesus to the cross. He himself had foretold that they would do so — and it would have been little enough, had not the prophets foretold it long before as well. [19] And yet, nailed up as he was, his death displayed many marks peculiar to itself. For he dismissed his spirit with a word, of his own will, forestalling the executioner's office. At that very moment day was withdrawn, the sun standing at midpoint of its course. Those who did not know that this too had been foretold concerning Christ took it, naturally, for an eclipse — and yet you have that catastrophe of the world recorded in your own archives. [20] Then the Jews, having taken him down and laid him in a tomb, surrounded it with a large detachment of soldiers, keeping careful watch, lest, since he had foretold that he would rise from death on the third day, his disciples should steal the corpse away and deceive their already-suspicious minds. [21] But behold, on the third day the earth was suddenly shaken, the stone that had sealed the tomb was rolled back, the guard was scattered in terror, and — with no disciples anywhere in sight — nothing was found in the tomb but the wrappings of the buried man. [22] Nonetheless the leading men, whose interest it was both to spread abroad the crime and to keep a people, tributary and enslaved to them, from turning to faith, put it about that he had been stolen away by his disciples. For he did not present himself to the crowd at large, lest the wicked be freed from their error, and so that faith too — reserved for no small reward — might rest on difficulty. [23] But with certain of his disciples, in Galilee, a region of Judea, he spent some forty days, teaching them what they were to teach. Then, having appointed them to the office of preaching throughout the world, he was taken up into heaven wrapped in a surrounding cloud — a far truer tale than the one your people are accustomed to swear to about Romulus, on Proculus's word.
[24] All this concerning Christ, Pilate — himself by now a Christian in his own conscience — reported to Tiberius, then Caesar. And indeed the Caesars too would have believed concerning Christ, had the age not required emperors, or had believers in Christ been able to hold that office themselves. [25] The disciples too, scattered throughout the world, obeyed the command of their divine teacher; and they themselves, having suffered much at the hands of the pursuing Jews — gladly, in confidence of the truth — at last, at Rome, through Nero's savagery, sowed Christian blood.
[26] But we shall show you competent witnesses to Christ — those very beings you worship. It would be a great deal, were I to bring them forward to make you believe Christians, seeing that it is on their account that you refuse to believe Christians. [27] Meanwhile, this is the sequence of our founding; this is the record we have set forth of our sect and our name, together with its author. Let no one now cast reproach on us, let no one suppose otherwise, since it is not lawful for anyone to lie about his own religion. For when a man says he worships something other than what he actually worships, he denies what he worships, transfers his cult and honor to another object, and by that transfer no longer worships what he has denied. [28] We say it, and we say it openly, and even as you tear us and bloody us on the rack we cry it out: "We worship God through Christ." Suppose him a mere man if you like — it is through him and in him that God wills himself to be known and worshipped.
[29] To answer the Jews: they too learned to worship God through a man, Moses. To meet the Greeks: Orpheus at Pieria, Musaeus at Athens, Melampus at Argos, Trophonius in Boeotia, bound men by their initiations. And to turn my eyes to you, the rulers of the nations: Numa Pompilius was a man, and he burdened the Romans with the most laborious superstitions. [30] Well then, let Christ too have been permitted to devise a divinity of his own — not, however, in order to tame savage men, still half-wild, into civility by stunning a multitude with the winning-over of so many divine powers, as Numa did, but rather in order to open the eyes of men already refined and deceived by their very civility, and bring them to the recognition of truth. [31] Ask, then, whether this divinity of Christ is real; if it is the kind whose recognition reforms a man toward the good, it follows that whatever divinity must be renounced as false is that other kind entirely — a divinity found out, above all, by this test: that it lurks under the names and images of dead men, and by certain signs and miracles and oracles manufactures a counterfeit belief in its own godhead.