Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
"Where then," you ask, "did Rumor get such license to speak of you — Rumor, whose testimony might perhaps have sufficed even for the founders of your laws?" Who, I ask, ever vouched for the reliability of Rumor, either to them then or to you since? Is this not she—
"Rumor, an evil than which nothing else is swifter"?
Why an evil, if it is always true? Is it not mostly lying? Even when it does report the truth, it never stops lusting after falsehood — weaving in the false with the true, adding, subtracting, confusing everything with variation. What's more, its very condition is that it survives only by lying. It lives only so long as it proves nothing; once a thing is confirmed, it falls, and having as it were discharged its office of announcing, it steps aside. From then on the fact is grasped, the fact is named, and no one says, for instance, "they say this happened at Rome," or "rumor has it that he drew that province," but rather, "he drew that province," and "this happened at Rome." No one names Rumor except someone still uncertain, because no one becomes certain by rumor but by knowledge; and no one believes Rumor except a fool, because a wise man does not believe the uncertain.
However widely Rumor spreads through its own ambition, it must have started at some point from a single mouth; from there it creeps along a kind of graft of tongues and ears, and the small flaw of its origin is obscured by the rumor's own spread, so that no one stops to consider whether that first mouth sowed lies — which often happens either from the cleverness of rivalry, or the whim of suspicion, or even the sheer novel pleasure of lying. But it is well that time reveals everything, as your own maxims and proverbs testify, and nature herself, which is so ordered that nothing stays hidden, not even what Rumor never disclosed. See, then, what a squanderer you have suborned against us: what she once reported, and has kept propped up as credible for so long a time, she has still not been able to prove.
The name arose under Augustus's principate, our discipline came to light under Tiberius, condemnation of it took hold under Nero — so that from the very person of our persecutor you may already weigh us: if that prince was pious, then Christians are impious; if just, if chaste, then Christians are unjust and incestuous; if he was not a public enemy, then we are the public enemies. What sort we are, our very condemner has shown — punishing, of course, what rivaled himself.
"And yet, of all Nero's edicts, when all the rest were struck down, this alone survived — fitting enough, since it is so unlike its own author." Well then, our people have not even two hundred years behind them. In that time, so many wicked deeds, so many crosses that have won divine honors, so many slaughtered infants, so many blood-soaked loaves, so many riots of lamps put out, so many wanderings of illicit weddings — and still it is Rumor alone that decides the case against Christians! This much rests on a solid foundation of the vice of human nature: it lies more successfully about bitter and atrocious things. The more prone you are to malice, the readier you are to believe evil; indeed, a false evil is believed more easily than a true good. Yet if any room for good sense had been left to you by your own unfairness, then simple justice would have demanded, before testing Rumor's reliability, that you look into who could have set Rumor loose among the crowd and so across the whole world. Not from the Christians themselves, I think — since even by the form and law governing every mystery-cult, silence is owed, how much more in matters whose disclosure would not spare the discloser instant punishment at human hands? If, then, they are not betrayers of themselves, it follows they must be outsiders. But how would outsiders come to know, when even lawful and permitted mysteries bar every outside judge — unless it is the unlawful ones they scorn less? And yet it suits outsiders just as well to exaggerate as to invent. "But," you say, "the curiosity of household members stole through cracks and crannies." What then, when it is household members who betray you to yourselves, betraying everyone? By no one are we betrayed more readily — all the more so, if the outrage is as great as you claim, since indignation at such justice would burst every bond of intimacy. The mind that shuddered, the eye that recoiled in horror, could not have held its tongue. It is also strange that the one who leapt forward with such impatient urgency to inform did not also trouble himself to prove it, and that the one who heard did not trouble himself to see — since the profit is the same for the informer, if he proves what he reported, and for the hearer, if he believes even for himself what he heard. "It was then," you say, "first informed on, and put on display; heard, and inspected, and only then handed over to rumor." This surpasses all wonder — that a thing caught once should be a thing constantly repeated, unless perhaps we have by now stopped doing such things. And yet we are still called by the same name, still reckoned among the same charges, and our numbers grow daily: the more of us there are, the more hateful we are to the many. Hatred grows as the subject-matter grows; as the multitude of the accused increases, why does the multitude of informers not increase along with it?
As far as I know, our way of life has become quite well-known: you even know the days of our meetings; and so we are besieged, we are surprised, we are caught in the very act during our secret gatherings. Yet who has ever come upon a half-eaten corpse? Who has ever found tooth-marks in a blood-soaked loaf? Who, when a sudden light broke in upon the darkness, ever recognized any filthy sign there — I will not say incestuous? If it is by bribery that we manage never to be dragged into public exactly as we are caught, we could just as well manage never to be dragged out at all: for who sells or buys off the betrayal of a crime without the crime itself existing?
But why should I discredit outside spies and informers, when you yourselves level charges of the kind that are not even publicized by us with the loudest outcry — either as soon as they are heard, if they can first be demonstrated, or once discovered later, if meanwhile they were being concealed? For no doubt it is the custom for would-be initiates to first approach the master of the rites, or the "father." Then he will tell them: you need an infant, still crawling, to be sacrificed, and some bread to be soaked in its blood; besides that, lamp-stands, which tethered dogs are to knock over, and scraps of meat to lure those same dogs; and you also need a mother or a sister. And what if there are none? I suppose, then, you cannot become a proper Christian. Now, I ask you, can charges like these bear being reported by others first? "But," you say, "it isn't necessary for the initiates to know beforehand. First the deception is carried out: the feast and the wedding are sprung on the unwitting, since they had never before heard anything about Christian mysteries." Yet afterward they must find out — or else those others they draw in must be briefed in advance. Besides, how absurd it is for outsiders to know what the priest himself does not! So they keep silent, and take it as received truth, and never burst out with the tragedy of Thyestes or Oedipus, and never drag the ministers and masters of the faith before the public, and do not snatch from those already initiated the choicer bite that is theirs. If nothing of the sort can be proved, then some great mystery, I know not what, must be reckoned to exist, whose compensation lies in the endurance of such atrocities.
Wretched and pitiable nations, here we set before you the pledge of our discipline: it promises eternal life to those who follow and keep it, and, on the contrary, threatens eternal punishment in eternal fire to the profane and its rivals; for both parties alike, the resurrection of the dead is proclaimed. We shall look into the credibility of these claims when we treat them in their proper place; for now, believe them just as we do. So this is what I would like to learn: are you yourselves ready to approach such matters through crimes of this kind, just as we are alleged to do? Come, whoever you are — plunge the blade into the infant, or, if that task falls to someone else, simply stand watching while the soul departs a body that has not yet begun to live; either way, gather up the still-warm blood, drench your loaf in it, and feast without hesitation; meanwhile recline at table, count off the places where a mother or a sister has pressed the couch; note them carefully, so that when the darkness falls in — testing, of course, each person's diligence — you do not blunder and fall on the wrong woman: you will have committed a sin, unless it is incest!
"Once you have carried these out, you will live forever." I would love to hear your answer, if you value eternity as much as that. But no — that is precisely why you do not believe it; and even if you did believe it, I deny that you would want to; and even if you wanted to, I deny that you could. But why should others be able to do it, if you cannot? Why should you not be able to, if others can? At what price do you imagine impunity, or eternity, is bought? Do you think these things must be purchased by us in every conceivable way? Do Christians have some other set of teeth, some other cavern of a throat, some other sinews bent toward incestuous lust? I think not: it is enough for us to be distinguished from your position by the truth alone!
VIII.