Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Are the letters of the apostles, then, mere shifting things? And are we simple souls through and through, mere doves, happy to wander astray? I suppose, out of a lust for living! Let it really be so — that their meaning drops away from their letters. Yet what the apostles are shown to have suffered is plain teaching. This alone I understand, running through the Acts; I ask for nothing more. [2] There, prisons and chains and floggings and stonings and swords, the assaults of the Jews and the mobs of the nations, the formal charges of tribunes, the courtrooms of kings and the tribunals of proconsuls, and the name of Caesar himself — these need no interpreter. That Peter is beheaded, that Stephen is crushed under stones, that James is slain as a sacrifice, that Paul is torn apart — these things are written in their own blood. [3] And if the heretic wants faith in a mere record, the archives of the empire will testify, and so will the ruins of Jerusalem's own stones. We have the Caesars' biographies before us: Nero was first to mark the newborn faith with blood at Rome. Then Peter is girded by another, when he is fastened to the cross. Then Paul attains the citizenship of the city of Rome, when there he is reborn into the nobility of martyrdom. [4] Wherever now I read these things, I learn to suffer; nor does it matter to me which masters of martyrdom I follow, the apostles' meaning or their end — except that I recognize their meaning in their ends. For they would have suffered nothing that they had not first known they must suffer. When Agabus had, by gesture too, prophesied chains for Paul, the disciples, weeping and praying that he not commit himself to Jerusalem, had prayed in vain. [5] For he, animated as he had always taught, said: "Why this weeping, this breaking of my heart? As for myself, I would gladly bear not only chains at Jerusalem, but even death itself, for my Lord Jesus Christ's own name." And so they gave way, saying: "Let the Lord's will stand" — trusting, plainly, that sufferings belong to the will of God. [6] For they had not tried to hold him back on the counsel of dissuasion, but out of love — as men longing for the apostle, not as men arguing against martyrdom. But if some Prodicus or Valentinus had already been standing by then, whispering that confession before men on earth is unnecessary, I fear far less that God thirsts for human blood, or that Christ demands the return of his own suffering as though he too were to win salvation from it thereby, than that he would at once have heard, from a servant of God, the very words that once fell on the devil's ears from the Lord himself: "Go behind me, Satan — you are a stumbling-block to me. It is written: you shall worship the Lord your God, and him alone shall you serve." [7] But even now he ought to hear it, since it is he who has since poured out those poisons, which will do no easy harm to any of the weak — unless one who has not first drunk deep, or even drunk to excess, of this our draught of faith.