Apology 18–23

But so that we might approach more fully and more forcefully both him and his dispensations and will, he added the provision of writings, for anyone who wishes to inquire about God, and having inquired to find, and having found to believe, and having believed to serve. For from the beginning he sent into the world men worthy, by their righteousness and innocence, to know God and to make him known, flooded with the divine Spirit, so that they might proclaim that God is one, who created all things, who formed man from the ground (for he is the true Prometheus), who ordered the world with fixed dispensations and ends of the times; and then what signs of his judging majesty he has given through floods and fires; what disciplines he has laid down for winning his favor; what rewards he has appointed for those who ignore and abandon them and for those who keep them; seeing that at the end of this age he will judge his worshipers for the reward of eternal life, and the profane for a fire equally perpetual and unceasing, when all who have died from the beginning have been raised, re-formed, and reviewed for the settling of either desert. These things we too once laughed at. We are from among you. Christians are made, not born. Those whom we have called preachers are called prophets, from their office of foretelling. Their words, and likewise the miracles they performed to win faith in the Godhead, remain in the treasuries of literature, and these are not hidden. The most learned of the Ptolemies, whom they surname Philadelphus, and most skilled in all literature, when in his zeal for libraries he was emulating Pisistratus, I suppose, among other records that antiquity or some curiosity commended to fame, at the suggestion of Demetrius of Phalerum, the most esteemed scholar of the time, to whom he had entrusted the charge, asked the Jews too for their books, their own native literature, which they alone had. For it was from among them and to them that the prophets had always spoken, namely to the household nation of God, by the favor shown to the fathers. Those who are now Jews were formerly Hebrews; hence both the Hebrew literature and speech. But lest the knowledge of it be lacking, this too was granted to Ptolemy by the Jews: seventy-two translators were provided, whom Menedemus too, the philosopher who championed providence, admired for their agreement in meaning. Aristaeus too has affirmed this to you. So he left these records opened up in the Greek language. Today the libraries of Ptolemy at the Serapeum display them, together with the Hebrew texts themselves. The Jews too read them openly. Their liberty pays a tax; they are visited by the public every Sabbath. Whoever listens will find God; whoever also takes pains to understand will be compelled to believe as well.

Supreme antiquity first claims authority for these writings. With you too it is almost a matter of religion to establish credibility from dates. [Their supreme antiquity gives these writings authority. For Moses was the first prophet; he began from the past with the founding of the world, the sprouting of the human race, and soon the avenging force of the flood upon the wickedness of that age; by prophecy he set out events down to his own time, and then, through his own history, images of things to come; and with him the order of times, arranged from the beginning, furnished a reckoning of the world's age. He is found to be about three hundred years earlier than the time when that most ancient of yours, Danaus, crossed over to Argos; and he is about a thousand years before the Trojan war, and so before Saturn himself. For according to the history of Thallus, in which it is related that the Assyrians' war took place, and that Saturn, king of the Titans, fought with Jupiter, that war is shown to have preceded the fall of Ilium by three hundred and twenty-two years. Through this Moses also that law proper to the Jews was sent by God. After him many other prophets too are older than your literature. For even the one who prophesied last either preceded a little or at least was contemporary with your authors of wisdom, and even with your lawgivers. For Zechariah lived in the reign of Cyrus and Darius, at which time Thales, the first of the natural philosophers, gave Croesus no certain answer about divinity when asked, disturbed, no doubt, by the words of the prophets. Solon told the same king to look to the end of a long life, just as the prophets did. So it can be seen that both your laws and your studies were conceived from the law and from divine teaching. What is earlier must be the seed. Hence you have certain things in common with us, or near to us. From sophia (wisdom), love of it was called philosophia; from prophetia, the imitation of it produced poetic soothsaying. Men eager for glory, if they found anything, adulterated it to make it their own. Even fruits come to degenerate from their seed. I would still dwell in many ways on the antiquity of the divine writings, if they did not have a greater authority for belief from the power of their truth than from the annals of their age. For what will plead more powerfully for their testimony than the daily fulfillment throughout the whole world, when the dispositions of kingdoms, the falls of cities, the ends of nations, the states of the times all correspond just as they were foretold thousands of years before? From this our hope, which you mock, is enlivened, and our confidence, which you call presumption, is strengthened. For the recognition of the past is a fit basis for confidence about the future. The same voices foretold both parts; the same writings recorded them. With them there is one time, which with us seems to be divided. So all that remains unproved has been proved to us, because it was foretold together with what has been proved, when that was still future. You too, so far as I know, have a Sibyl, inasmuch as this name of a true prophet of the true God has been usurped here and there for others who seemed to prophesy. Your Sibyls have falsely borne a name taken from the truth, just as your gods have.] So all the substances and all the materials, origins, orders, and veins of every ancient writing of yours, even most nations and cities famous in history and hoary in memory, the very forms of letters themselves, the guides and guardians of things, and (I think we still say too little) your very gods, I say, your very temples and oracles and rites, are surpassed by ages by the book-chest of a single prophet, in which seems to be stored the treasure of the whole Jewish religion, and from it of ours too. If you have heard of Moses meanwhile, he is of the same age as Inachus of Argos. By nearly four hundred years (seven fewer, in fact) he precedes Danaus, himself the most ancient among you; he comes about a thousand years before the fall of Priam; I could even say five hundred more before Homer, having authorities to follow. Are not the other prophets too, though later than Moses, found, even the last of them, to be no later than your first wise men, lawgivers, and historians? By what lines of proof these things could be shown is not so much difficult for us to set out as enormous; not hard, but for now long. One would have to sit down with many documents, with gestures of finger-reckoning; the archives of even the most ancient nations would have to be unlocked, of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Phoenicians; their own citizens through whom the knowledge has been supplied would have to be called on, such as Manetho the Egyptian and Berosus the Chaldean, and also Hieromus the Phoenician, king of Tyre; their followers too, Ptolemy of Mendes, Menander of Ephesus, Demetrius of Phalerum, King Juba, Apion, and Thallus; and, whoever proves or refutes these, the Jew Josephus, native champion of Jewish antiquities; the Greek registers too would have to be compared, so that what was done when, and the links of the times, might be laid open, through which the numbers of the annals might shine; one must travel through the histories and literature of the world. And yet we have already brought in part of the proof, as it were, in sprinkling in the means by which it could be proved. But it is better to defer it, lest either we pursue it less fully by hurrying or wander too long in pursuing it.

In return for this postponement we now offer something more: the majesty of the Scriptures, if we do not prove them divine by their age, if their antiquity is doubted. Nor is this to be learned slowly or from elsewhere. Before your eyes are the things that will teach it: the world, the age, and events. Whatever happens was foretold; whatever is seen was heard before. That the earth swallows cities, that seas rob us of islands, that foreign and civil wars tear things apart, that kingdoms clash with kingdoms, that famine and plague and local disasters of every kind and frequent heaps of deaths lay waste, that the lowly are exchanged for exaltation and the exalted for lowliness, that justice grows rare and iniquity increases, that care for all good disciplines grows sluggish, that even the duties of the seasons and the functions of the elements go astray, that the form of natural things is disturbed by monsters and portents: all this was written with foresight. While we suffer it, it is read; while we recognize it, it is proved. A fit testimony to divinity, I suppose, is the truth of its foretelling. Here, then, among us faith in future things too is secure, as things already proved, because they were foretold together with those that are proved daily. The same voices sound, the same writings record, the same Spirit drives them; one time belongs to the prophecy that foretells the future. Among men, perhaps, time is divided as the prophecy is fulfilled, as the future is reckoned present, and then the present past. What wrong do we do, I ask you, in believing also the future, we who have already learned to believe in it by two steps?

But since we have stated that this school rests on the very ancient writings of the Jews, whereas most people know it to be rather new, as dating from the time of Tiberius (and we ourselves admit it), perhaps on this ground a question may be raised about its standing, as though it were hiding some presumption of its own under the shelter of a most distinguished religion, one at any rate permitted by law; or because, apart from age, we have nothing in common with the Jews in the restrictions on food, or the solemnities of days, or the very sign on the body, or in sharing their name, which surely ought to be the case if we were in service to the same God. But the common people too already know of Christ, as some man, such as the Jews judged him, so that anyone may the more easily have thought us worshipers of a man. But we are neither ashamed of Christ, since we rejoice to be reckoned under his name and condemned for it, nor do we think otherwise about God. We must therefore say a few things about Christ as God. Long ago the Jews enjoyed favor with God, when there was outstanding righteousness and faith in the founders of their race; from this there flourished for them both the greatness of their race and the loftiness of their kingdom, and so great a happiness that by the words of God by which they were taught they were warned beforehand how to win God's favor and not offend him. But how greatly they sinned, puffed up by confidence in their fathers to the point of turning aside, departing from the discipline into a profane way, their present outcome would prove, even if they did not themselves confess it. Scattered, wandering, exiled from their own soil and sky, they roam the world without a man or God as king, not allowed even by the right of strangers to greet their native land with so much as a footstep. When the holy voices threatened them with this beforehand, all of them always pressed the same point: that in the last courses of the age God would choose for himself, from every nation and people and place, worshipers much more faithful, to whom he would transfer his favor, and that more fully, because of their capacity for a fuller discipline. He came, then, who was foretold as coming from God to reform and enlighten it: that Christ, the Son of God. Of this favor and discipline, then, the Son of God was announced as the arbiter and teacher, the enlightener and guide of the human race; not, however, born in such a way that he need blush at the name of son or at his father's seed. It was not through incest with a sister, nor the violation of a daughter or another man's wife, that he had for father a god scaled or horned or feathered, or a lover turned into gold for Danaë. These divinities of yours are Jupiter's doings. But the Son of God has no mother from unchastity; even the one he seems to have had never married. But first I will explain his substance, and so the nature of his birth will be understood. We have already said that God fashioned this universe of the world by word and reason and power. Among your wise men too it is agreed that the Logos, that is, word and reason, seems to be the craftsman of the universe. For Zeno defines him as the maker who formed all things in their arrangement; the same, he says, is called fate and god and the mind of Jupiter and the necessity of all things. Cleanthes gathers these into spirit, which he affirms pervades the universe. And we too ascribe to the word and reason, and likewise to the power, through which we have said God fashioned all things, spirit as their proper substance: in it is the word when it speaks, reason is present when it arranges, and power presides when it accomplishes. This, we have learned, was brought forth from God, and in being brought forth was generated, and is therefore called Son of God and God, from unity of substance. For God too is spirit. When a ray is extended from the sun, it is a portion from the whole; but the sun will be in the ray, because it is the sun's ray, and the substance is not separated but extended. So from spirit comes spirit and from God God, as light is lit from light. The source of the material remains whole and undiminished, even if you borrow from it many offshoots of its quality: so too what has come forth from God is God and God's Son, and both are one. So also, spirit from spirit and God from God, he made a second in mode, in number, in rank, not in condition, and he did not withdraw from the source but went out from it. This ray of God, then, as was always foretold in the past, descended into a certain virgin and, formed as flesh in her womb, is born man mixed with God. The flesh, furnished with spirit, is nourished, grows up, speaks, teaches, works, and is Christ. Accept this story for now (it is like yours) while we show how Christ is proved, and who those are among you who put about rival stories of this kind beforehand to destroy the truth of this one. The Jews too knew that Christ would come, being those to whom the prophets spoke. For even now they await his coming, and there is no greater clash between us and them than that they do not believe he has already come. For two comings of his were signified: the first, already fulfilled in the lowliness of the human condition; the second, which hangs over the close of the age, in the loftiness of divinity made manifest. Not understanding the first, they thought that the second, which they hope for as more clearly foretold, was the only one. That they should not understand the former was the desert of their sin; for if they had understood it they would have believed, and if they had believed they would have obtained salvation. They themselves read that it is written that they are punished by the loss of wisdom and understanding, and of the use of eyes and ears. Since, then, they had presumed him only a man from his lowliness, it followed that they should think him a magician from his power, when with a word he cast demons out of men, gave light again to the blind, cleansed lepers, braced up paralytics, finally restored the dead to life with a word, and made the very elements serve him, calming storms and walking on the sea, showing that he was the Word of God, that is, the Logos, that primordial, first-begotten Word, accompanied by power and reason and supported by spirit, the same who by his word both made and had made all things. But at his teaching, by which the teachers and leaders of the Jews were refuted, they were so exasperated, especially because a huge multitude turned aside to him, that at last they brought him before Pontius Pilate, then governing Syria on behalf of Rome, and by the violence of their votes extorted that Jesus be handed over to them to be crucified. He himself had foretold that they would do this; that would be little, if the prophets had not also done so long before. And yet, fastened to the cross, he showed many signs proper to that death. For he dismissed his spirit with a word, of his own accord, anticipating the executioner's office. At the same moment the daylight was withdrawn, while the sun was marking the middle of its circuit. Those who did not know that this too had been foretold about Christ certainly thought it an eclipse. And yet you have that world-portent recorded in your archives. Then the Jews, when he had been taken down and laid in a tomb, surrounded it with great care, even with a large military guard, lest, since he had foretold that he would rise from death on the third day, his disciples should remove the corpse by stealth and deceive those already suspicious. But see, on the third day the earth was suddenly shaken, the mass that had blocked the tomb was rolled back, the guard was scattered in terror, and, with no disciples appearing, nothing was found in the tomb but the wrappings of the one buried. Nevertheless the leaders, whose interest it was both to spread a crime abroad and to recall from the faith a people tributary and subservient to them, put it about that he had been stolen by the disciples. For he did not show himself to the crowd, lest the impious be freed from their error, so that faith too, destined for no small reward, might stand firm through difficulty. But with certain disciples he spent forty days in Galilee, a region of Judea, teaching them what they were to teach. Then, having appointed them to the office of preaching throughout the world, he was enveloped in a cloud and taken up into heaven, much more truly than your Proculuses are wont to assert of Romulus. All these things about Christ Pilate, himself already a Christian in his conscience, reported to Tiberius, then Caesar. And the Caesars too would have believed in Christ, if either Caesars had not been necessary to the world, or Christians could also have been Caesars. The disciples too, spread through the world, obeyed the precept of their divine master; they too suffered much from the Jews who pursued them, and gladly, out of confidence in the truth, at last at Rome, through Nero's cruelty, sowed Christian blood. But we will show you as fit witnesses of Christ those very beings whom you adore. It is much if I call on those to make you believe the Christians on whose account you do not believe the Christians. Meanwhile, this is the order of our institution; we have set out the origin of both the school and the name, together with its founder. Let no one now cast infamy on it; let no one think otherwise, for it is not right for anyone to lie about his own religion. For by saying that he worships something other than he worships, he denies what he worships, and transfers worship and honor to another, and by transferring it no longer worships what he has denied. We say, and say openly, and while you torture us, torn and bloody, we cry out: We worship God through Christ. Think him a man, if you like; through him and in him God wills to be known and worshiped. To answer the Jews: they too learned to worship the Lord through a man, Moses. To meet the Greeks: Orpheus in Pieria, Musaeus at Athens, Melampus at Argos, Trophonius in Boeotia bound men by initiations. To look to you too, rulers of the nations: Numa Pompilius was a man, and he loaded the Romans with most laborious superstitions. Let Christ too have been allowed to set forth a divinity, a thing his own, not to soften rude and still savage men into civilization by stunning them with the multitude of so many divinities to be won over, as Numa did, but to open the eyes of men already polished, and deceived by their very refinement, to the knowledge of the truth. Inquire, then, whether this divinity of Christ is true. If it is the one by whose knowledge a person is reformed to the good, it follows that the false one should be renounced, once all that system is found out which, lurking under the names and images of the dead, produces belief in divinity through certain signs and miracles and oracles.

And so we say that there exist certain spiritual substances. Nor is the name new. Philosophers know of demons, Socrates himself waiting on the decision of his daimonion. Why not? since a daimonion is said to have clung to him from boyhood, one that plainly dissuaded him from good. All the poets know of them; even the unlearned crowd uses the word often in cursing. For it also pronounces Satan, the prince of this evil race, with the same word of execration, from the soul's own awareness. Even Plato did not deny angels. The magicians too are at hand as witnesses to both names. But how from certain angels, corrupted of their own will, a more corrupt race of demons arose, condemned by God together with the authors of their race and with that prince we have named, is learned in order from the holy writings. For now it will be enough to set out their activity. Their activity is the ruin of man. So spiritual malice began from the first with the destruction of man. Therefore on bodies they inflict diseases and certain bitter mishaps, and on the soul sudden and extraordinary violent derangements. Their subtlety and fineness give them access to both parts of man's substance. Spiritual powers can do much, so that, being invisible and imperceptible, they appear in their effect rather than in their action: as when some hidden blight in the air casts down fruit or grain in flower, kills it in the bud, wounds it in its ripening, and as when the air, tainted by some unseen cause, pours out its pestilential breaths. With the same obscurity of contagion, then, the breath of demons and angels also works corruption of the mind, with frenzies and foul madness, or savage lusts together with various errors, the chief of which is the one by which it commends these gods to the captured and deceived minds of men, so as to procure for itself its own food of savor and blood offered to statues and images. And what more choice pasture is there for it than to turn man from the thought of the true divinity by false deceptions? How it works these too I will explain. Every spirit is winged: angels and demons are so. So in a moment they are everywhere; the whole world is one place to them; what is done where they know as easily as they report it. Their speed is believed to be divinity, because their substance is unknown. So they sometimes want to be thought the authors of what they report. And they plainly are sometimes the authors of evils, but never of goods. They even picked up the dispositions of God when the prophets preached them, and they glean them now as the readings resound. So, taking from here certain fortunes of the times, they imitate divinity while they steal divination. As for oracles, with what skill they adjust their ambiguities to the outcome the Croesuses know, the Pyrrhuses know. Besides, the Pythian reported that a tortoise was being boiled with the flesh of a sheep in the way we have described: in a moment he had been in Lydia. From living in the air, near the stars, and in contact with the clouds, they can know the preparations of the sky, so that they promise rains they already feel. They are plainly beneficent too in the care of health. For first they injure, then they prescribe remedies, new or contrary, to produce a miracle, after which they stop injuring and are believed to have cured. Why should I go on about the other tricks, or even the powers, of spiritual deceit? the apparitions of the Castors, water carried in a sieve, a ship drawn along by a girdle, a beard turned red by a touch, so that stones might be believed gods and the true God not be sought?

Further, if magicians too produce apparitions and dishonor the souls of the dead, if they strike down boys to make them utter oracles, if they perform many marvels by juggling tricks, if they even send dreams, having the assisting power of angels and demons once invited, through whom even goats and tables are accustomed to divine, how much more would that power strive with all its strength to do of its own will and for its own business what it provides for another's trade! Or if angels and demons do the same as your gods, where then is the superiority of divinity, which must surely be believed higher than every power? Will it not, then, be more worthily presumed that it is they who make themselves gods, since they produce the same things that cause gods to be believed in, than that the gods are equal to angels and demons? They are distinguished by a difference of place, I suppose, so that because of their temples you think those gods whom elsewhere you do not call gods; so that one who flies over the sacred towers seems mad in one way, and one who leaps over the roofs of the neighborhood in another, and one power is declared in the man who cuts his genitals or his arms, another in the man who cuts his own throat. The outcome of the frenzy is the same, and the method of instigation is one. But enough of words; from here on, a demonstration of the thing itself, by which we will show that the quality of both names is one. Let someone be brought forward here, right before your tribunals, who is agreed to be driven by a demon. Ordered by any Christian to speak, that spirit will confess himself a demon as truly as elsewhere he calls himself a god falsely. Likewise let one be brought forward of those thought to be possessed by a god, who, breathing over the altars, conceive the deity from the fumes, who are cured by belching, who prophesy by panting. That very Virgin Caelestis, the promiser of rains, that very Aesculapius, the discoverer of medicines, who supplied another day to Socordius and Tenatius and Asclepiodotus when they were about to die: if they do not confess themselves demons, not daring to lie to a Christian, then and there shed the blood of that most impudent Christian! What is clearer than this deed? What more trustworthy than this proof? The simplicity of truth is in the open. Its own power stands by it; there will be no room for suspicion. Do you say it is done by magic or some such deceit? You will not say so, if your eyes and ears allow you. And what can be objected against what is shown with naked sincerity? If on the one side they really are gods, why do they lie that they are demons? Is it to oblige us? Then your divinity is already subject to Christians, and that cannot be counted divinity which is subject to man, and, if it adds anything to the disgrace, to its rivals. If on the other side they are demons or angels, why do they answer elsewhere that they act as gods? For just as those who are held to be gods would not have wished to call themselves demons if they were really gods, lest they depose themselves from their majesty, so too those whom you know outright as demons would not dare elsewhere to act as gods, if those whose names they use were gods at all. For they would fear to abuse the majesty of beings undoubtedly superior and to be feared. So this divinity that you hold is nothing, because, if it existed, it would neither be claimed by demons in confession nor denied by gods. Since, then, both parties agree in confessing, denying that they are gods, recognize that there is one kind, namely demons, truly on both sides. Now look for gods; for those you had presumed to be gods you know to be demons. And by the same work of ours, since these same gods of yours reveal not only that neither they themselves are gods nor any others, you learn at once also who is truly God, and whether it is he, and whether he alone, whom we Christians profess, and whether he is to be believed and worshiped as the faith and discipline of Christians are arranged. They will say then and there: “And who is that Christ with his story? Was he a man of the common condition? A magician? Was he stolen from the tomb by his disciples after death? Is he, in short, now among the dead below? Is he not rather in heaven, and coming from there with the shaking of the whole world, with the horror of the globe, with the lamentation of all, but not of Christians, as the power of God and the Spirit of God, the Word and Wisdom and Reason and Son of God?” Whatever you laugh at, let them laugh at it with you; let them deny that Christ will judge every soul from the beginning of time, with its body restored; let them say before the tribunal, if they like, that Minos and Rhadamanthus have been allotted this task, as Plato and the poets agree; let them at least refute the mark of their own disgrace and condemnation. They declare that they are unclean spirits, which ought to have been understood even from their foods, blood and smoke and the stinking pyres of cattle, and from the most impure tongues of their prophets themselves; let them deny that for their wickedness they are condemned in advance to that same day of judgment with all their worshipers and works. But all this mastery and power of ours over them is effective from naming Christ and from recalling what they expect to come upon them from God through Christ the judge. Fearing Christ in God and God in Christ, they are subjected to the servants of God and of Christ. So at our touch and breath, seized by the contemplation and representation of that fire, they depart even from bodies at our command, unwilling and grieving and blushing in your presence. Believe them when they speak the truth about themselves, you who believe them when they lie. No one lies to his own disgrace, but rather for his honor. Credibility is nearer to those who confess against themselves than to those who deny in their own favor. Such testimonies of your gods, in short, are wont to make Christians; by believing them as fully as possible we believe in Christ the Lord. They themselves kindle faith in our writings; they themselves build up the confidence of our hope. You worship them, so far as I know, even with the blood of Christians. They would not, then, wish to lose you, so profitable, so dutiful to them, nor to be put to flight some day by you when you become Christians, if they were allowed to lie under questioning by a Christian who wishes to prove the truth to you.