Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Nor is it only that we stand accused, in this name, of deserting the common religion — no, we stand accused of importing some monstrous superstition besides. For, as some of you have dreamed up, our god is supposed to have the head of a donkey: this suspicion Cornelius Tacitus set going. [2] In book four of his Histories, setting out the war against the Jews from that nation's beginnings and holding forth, as suited him, on both their origin and the name of their cult, he reports that the Jews, on campaign in a vast waterless country and struggling with thirst, followed wild asses, supposing that the beasts, in search of water after grazing, would lead them to a spring, and so escaped; and that out of gratitude for this the Jews worship, under that guise, the likeness of that very animal. [3] From there, I suppose, it was assumed that we too, as kin to the Jewish religion, are initiated into the same image. And yet this same Cornelius Tacitus — that most talkative of liars, mind you — forgetting his own claim, reports further on that Pompey the Great, once he had beaten down the Jewish forces and taken Jerusalem, went into the temple to search it top to bottom, and turned up no image of any sort there. [4] Where, then, would this god of ours have been? Surely nowhere more fittingly than in so memorable a temple, especially one closed to everyone but the priests, where they would have had no reason to fear an outsider's eye.
[5] But why should I even bother defending the point, when in the meantime I have simply confessed, as a matter of the moment, that all such charges apply equally to you? Suppose our god really were given some donkey's shape: you at any rate could not deny that you worship the same thing along with us. [6] For you people worship whole donkeys outright — along with your goddess Epona — and every beast of burden and flock and herd besides, which you likewise consecrate together with their very stalls. And perhaps this is the very charge you level at us: that among all these worshipers of animals, we alone worship the donkey-keeper's god.
XII.