To the Nations

Contents

1. 1.1Those who come to know Christianity stop hating it and join it, and unlike real wrongdoers, Christians are not ashamed of their way of life but confess it gladly.
2. 1.2Magistrates torture others to make them confess but torture Christians to make them deny, and never investigate the crimes they claim Christians commit.
3. 1.3Since Christians are condemned only for confessing the name, the charge is against a name, and the name “Christian” (from “anointed”) is harmless.
4. 1.4Christians are hated for their name, like Socrates for truth, even when their lives visibly improve, and their true marks are wisdom, self-restraint, chastity, compassion, truth, and freedom.
5. 1.5Some who are called Christians are wicked, but Christians disown them, and the wickedness belongs to the individuals, not to the name.
6. 1.6Appealing to the laws does not help, because even laws require an inquiry into the deed, and a law that will not be examined is suspect and unjust.
7. 1.7The charges of ritual murder and incest rest only on rumor, which has never been proved in all the years Christians have been watched and arrested; no one would buy eternal life at such a price.
8. 1.8Tertullian mocks the name “third race” for Christians, ridiculing the tale of Psammetichus's experiment to find the first nation and asking who, then, the first and second races are.
9. 1.9Christians are blamed for every disaster, yet disasters came long before Christians, and gods who need men to avenge them are weak.
10. 1.10Tertullian turns the charge of neglecting the gods back on the pagans, who sell, tax, mock, and parody their own gods and give the same honors to their dead.
11. 1.11The slander that Christians worship an ass's head comes from Tacitus, who contradicts himself, and pagans themselves worship asses and all kinds of animals.
12. 1.12Pagans who mock Christians as worshippers of the cross themselves venerate crosses in their wooden idols, in the frames of their statues, and in their military standards.
13. 1.13Christians are thought to worship the sun because they pray eastward and keep Sunday, but pagans themselves honor the sun and have even borrowed Jewish sabbath customs.
14. 1.14A renegade Jew paraded a caricature of the Christians' god as a donkey-eared figure, but pagans themselves worship many gods with animal heads.
15. 1.15Pagans who accuse Christians of killing infants themselves expose and drown their newborns in defiance of the law, and commit worse acts besides.
16. 1.16The charge of incest at Christian meetings is turned back on the pagans, whose exposed children and casual unions make incest common, as a recent case at Rome showed.
17. 1.17Christians are called disloyal because they will not swear by the emperor's genius or call him a god, yet it is pagans who rebel, mock, and curse the emperors.
18. 1.18Christians are called obstinate for despising death, yet pagans praise the same courage in their heroes and still hire themselves out daily to the sword, the beasts, and the fire.
19. 1.19Christian courage rests on hope of resurrection and judgment, beliefs that pagans mock though their own poets and philosophers teach the return of souls and a judgment after death.
20. 1.20Since the pagans are guilty of everything they charge against Christians, they should correct themselves first, and if they did, they would become Christians.
21. 2.1Tertullian takes up Varro's three kinds of theology, natural, mythical, and national, and argues that none of them can yield a true god, since true divinity must be certain, pure, and common to all.
22. 2.2Philosophers, lacking the fear of God that is the beginning of wisdom, disagree endlessly about the gods, borrowing scraps of Scripture and distorting them.
23. 2.3The elements cannot be gods: the world either had a beginning and so is not eternal, or else Varro's reasons for calling the elements living beings point instead to an unseen mover behind them.
24. 2.4The Greek word for god does not come from “running,” as some claim, but was borrowed from the name of the true God, who is unseen and distinct from matter; the philosophers' speculations about the heavens are futile.
25. 2.5People thank the physician, not the medicine, and blame the robber, not the sword; so the orderly service of the elements should lead them to the Maker who rules the elements, not to worship the elements themselves.
26. 2.6The heavenly bodies suffer eclipse and loss, which no god could suffer, so they are ruled by another; still, worshipping them is a lesser error than the gods of myth.
27. 2.7The heroes and gods of myth were men, many of them wicked, and pagans cannot both honor the poets who tell of their crimes and deny those stories while basing rites on them.
28. 2.8Local gods are unknown even to their own towns, and the Egyptians worship animals and even a man: Serapis, Tertullian argues, was really the patriarch Joseph, deified for his grain policy.
29. 2.9Tertullian mocks Varro's classes of Roman gods and the deified Romans, Aeneas the deserter, Romulus the fratricide, and others, who were worth less than many ordinary people never deified.
30. 2.10Tertullian retells the tale of Larentina, a harlot won by Hercules at dice and later deified, to show how cheaply the Romans hand out divinity.
31. 2.11Tertullian lists the minor Roman deities assigned to every stage of conception, birth, childhood, and marriage, including indecent wedding gods, to show the absurdity of such worship.
32. 2.12Tracing the gods to their origin in Saturn, Tertullian ridicules the myths of his birth and the allegory of Saturn as time, and argues from history and the Sibyl that Saturn and his line were men.
33. 2.13If men became gods after death, someone higher must have made them so, and no merit can explain it, since the stories of Saturn and Jupiter are full of incest, violence, and lust.
34. 2.14Hercules, Aesculapius, and Theseus did nothing that ordinary men have not surpassed, and their vices and crimes make them unworthy of heaven.
35. 2.15Pagans have set humans and animals among the stars and invented gods for sorrow, death, and every door, hinge, and slope, yet these things happen everywhere even where such gods are unknown.
36. 2.16Those who discovered crops or invented arts deserve no divinity, since the things they found already existed by the gift of the Creator, and later craftsmen have surpassed them.
37. 2.17Rome's empire was not a reward for its religion, which it plundered in conquering others; the one God who orders the times gives and takes away kingdoms.