Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
But the one who claims we are priests of a cross will also be a priest of ours. The nature of a cross is a sign made of wood — and you too worship wood, in the form of an image, among your own gods. Though your image has a human shape, so does ours, in its own way. Let them look now to the outlines, so long as the substance is one; let them look to the form, so long as it is itself the body of a god. But if there is a difference here, how much more is Attic Pallas and Pharian Ceres set apart from the stock of a cross — she who is represented, formless, by a rough stake and nothing more than a shapeless wooden post standing upright? Part of a cross — indeed the greater part — is simply any solid timber fixed upright in a straight stance. But the whole cross is charged to our account, crossbeam and all, down to that outward jut of the seat. This makes you the more inexcusable, you who condemn as a mutilated, truncated log what others have consecrated whole and fully built!
For the rest, your religion is thoroughly devoted to the whole cross, unmutilated, as I will show. But you don't even realize that the very origin of your gods comes from this same gibbet. For every image, whether carved from wood or stone, or cast in bronze, or produced from any richer material besides, must first pass through a sculptor's hands. And the sculptor sets up a wooden cross as the very first thing, because in our own body too there lies a silent, secret line in the shape of a cross: the head juts up, the spine runs straight, the shoulders slant out — <...> — set a man up with his arms spread wide, and you have made the image of a cross. So onto this framework, this scaffold if you like, clay is worked and layered over little by little, filling out the limbs, building the body, and whatever shape suits the clay is forced inside, onto the cross. From there, with compass and lead templates, the model of the image is prepared for its migration into marble, or clay, or bronze, or silver, or whatever material one has decided the god should become. From cross to clay, from clay to god: in a sense the cross passes into the god by way of the clay.
So it is a cross you consecrate, since it is from a cross that the consecrated thing begins. To give an example: from an olive stone, a peach kernel, a peppercorn worked into the earth, a tree rises up into branches, into foliage, into the very likeness of its kind. If you transplant it, or take a shoot from its branches to graft elsewhere, to what will the resulting growth be credited? Not to that stone, that kernel, that seed? For when a third stage is reckoned to the second, and the second equally to the first, the third is thereby traced back to the first through the second. There is no need to argue this point further, since by a rule of nature every kind whatsoever refers its lineage to its origin, and the more a kind is defined by its origin, the more that origin is bound up with the kind. If, then, among the kind of gods you worship a cross as the origin, here is the kernel, the primordial seed, from which the whole forest of your idols has sprung.
Now to plainer matters. You worship Victories as divinities — and indeed with greater reverence the more joyful they are. So that the act of consecration should elevate nothing better than this: those Victories are, in a sense, crosses turned inside out, trophies too. And so in the Victories the army's religion worships crosses as well. It adores standards, it swears by standards, it ranks standards above Jupiter himself: but that whole framework of images and all that cult of gold is nothing but necklaces hung on crosses. So too on the banners and flags, which the army guards with no less reverence, those streaming cloths are the garments of crosses. You blush, I suppose, to worship plain, undressed crosses!
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