Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
But why should I marvel at your absurdities, when malice and stupidity are so bound together, fused into a single body, by the same shared master, error? Well, since I do not marvel, I must instead catalogue them, so that by recognizing them you may marvel yourselves at just how deep a stupidity you fall into when you insist we are the cause of every public disaster or injury. If the Tiber floods, if the Nile fails to flood, if the sky stands still, if the earth quakes, if a summer plague ravages, if famine strikes, at once the cry goes up from everyone: "It's the Christians' fault!" As if those who fear no god had little else, or nothing else, to fear! I suppose it is because we scorn your gods that we invite these missiles of theirs. As we have already stated, our age is not yet two hundred years old. Yet how many disasters, before that span, fell upon the whole world, upon individual cities and provinces — how many wars, foreign and civil? How many plagues, famines, fires, chasms of the earth, and earthquakes has history recorded across the ages? Where were the Christians then, when the annals of Rome supplied so many chronicles of her own troubles? Where were the Christians then, when Hiera, Anaphe, Delos, Rhodes, and the island of Cos went down with many thousands of men, or when — as Plato records — a landmass greater than Asia or Africa was swallowed in the Atlantic Ocean? When fire poured down from the sky on Volsinii, and from their own mountain upon the people of the Tarpeian Rock? When an earthquake tore the Corinthian sea apart? When a flood wiped out the entire world? Where then — I will not say the despisers of your gods, the Christians — but your own gods themselves, whom the places and towns founded after that disaster attest, the very places in which they were born, lived, and were buried, and even the cities they founded? For they could not otherwise have survived to this day, except as survivors left over from that calamity. Should you be unwilling to look back over and weigh again the record of bygone ages, laid out for you from a different angle, then above all you are bound to declare your gods thoroughly unjust, since on account of their despisers they injure even their own worshipers; and you thereby also prove yourselves mistaken, in that you hand yourselves over to gods who cannot tell you apart from the profane whom you claim to hate. But if, as one fool or another says, they are angry at you as well precisely because you neglect to stamp us out, then that settles the matter as to their weakness and mediocrity: gods who would not be angry at your inaction if they were able to carry out the punishment themselves. Though indeed you admit as much elsewhere, whenever you seem to think you are avenging them through our punishment. If one party needs defending by another, it is the lesser being defended by the greater. Shame, then, on gods who must be defended by man!
X.