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Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus The Apology for the Christians I IntraText Edition CT Copyright EuloTech 2007 - See also: Credits

IntraText CT is the hypertextualized text together with wordlists and concordances. Help: Overview - Text & search - Lists - Concordances - Glossary - For easier reading... - Table of Contents - See also: Index of footnotes Statistics and graphs (Occurrences: 42247. Words: 5977) PREFACE. CORRIGENDA. INTRODUCTION. ANALYSIS. CHAPTER I. I. 1. The injustice of condemning the Christian Religion unheard and unknown. CHAPTER II. We are denied the rights of ordinary criminals, and the use of torture is most inconsistently employed in our case. The name alone of 'Christian' is made criminal. CHAPTER III. The blindness of your hatred over-reaches itself, and involuntarily eulogizes us. CHAPTER IV. 2. We propose to refute and retort every charge you bring against us; but first let us examine the nature of the laws under which we are condemned. CHAPTER V. They are to be traced to an old decree, and to the rescripts of the worst emperors. CHAPTER VI. Your ancient decrees are perpetually being ignored by yourselves, both as regards personal and social questions, as well as religious restrictions. CHAPTER VII. II. i. We are accused of infamous secret atrocities,— infanticide, a feast of blood, and incest, although no proof has ever been forthcoming, and only rumour is responsible for the charge. CHAPTER VIII. Whereas natural instinct would revolt from such crimes, and the burdened conscience of one unwittingly led to perpetrate them would be intolerable. CHAPTER IX. You yourselves are guilty of sacrificing children and adults in your worship of various deities, and of eating blood in several loathsome rites and horrible repasts. Your knowledge of our horror of eating blood is evidenced by the tests which you apply to us. Incest, too, is one of your commonest crimes. CHAPTER X. II. i. We are accused of sacrilege and disloyalty. We shall prove that your gods are no gods; for they once were men. CHAPTER XI. And no reasons exist for their subsequent deification, since their aid in Nature is, and always has been, unnecessary; while their gross immoralities would rather condemn them to Tartarus than exalt them to Heaven. CHAPTER XII. Your gods are nothing but names of dead men, images made of the commonest materials, which you treat with the same indignities that you inflict upon us. CHAPTER XIII. In fact, you act most sacrilegiously towards your deities, both private and public. CHAPTER XIV. For you cheat them in your sacrifices, and mock them in your poetic and philosophic literature. CHAPTER XV. You insult them in your burlesques and at your theatres. CHAPTER XVI. You hold grotesque views respecting our Deity. We neither worship an ass's head, nor the Cross, nor the sun, nor a biformed monstrosity, resembling some of your gods. CHAPTER XVII. We worship One God, the omnipotent and invisible Creator, to whom Nature and the human Soul bear witness. CHAPTER XVIII. And He hath given us a revelation of Himself through the Scriptures and the Prophets, whose writings are open to all. CHAPTER XIX. The antiquity of these writings ensures their trustworthiness, for they are more ancient than your oldest records. CHAPTER XX. Their majesty and divinity are proved by the daily fulfilment of their predictions. CHAPTER XXI. We worship the same God as the Jews, but, unlike them, we acknowledge Christ the Son of God to be God. He is the true Word, Who, begotten eternally by His Father, and being co-essential with Him, was made Flesh. The Jews misunderstood His Advent, His work, and His doctrine. They put Him to death, but He rose from the dead, as was predicted, and after forty days ascended into Heaven. Meanwhile His Gospel is spread throughout the world by His disciples. CHAPTER XXII. We with your philosophers assert the existence of demons, spiritual beings of malefic power, who falsely claim to be divine. CHAPTER XXIII. These daemons and your gods are identical, as their own confession when confronted by a Christian will prove. You may further learn from them Who is the True God. Our dominion over the daemons is derived from the power of Christ. CHAPTER XXIV. Your charge of Sacrilege thus falls to the ground, for there can be no religious duties towards gods that have no existence. In any case, we claim the civil right of religious liberty, which you grant to every one but us. CHAPTER XXV. You claim that Roman prosperity is due to Roman piety. Yet your chief deities are foreigners, who once reigned on earth, and therefore must some time have worshipped your earliest deities. Besides, your elaborate piety is of later growth than your prosperity, which has in reality been advanced by your impieties. CHAPTER XXVI. All rule and sovereignty are in the hands of the One God Who is above all. CHAPTER XXVII. Your animosity against us is incited by demoniacal agency. CHAPTER XXVIII. 2. The same evil influence drives you to force us to sacrifice for the emperor's welfare. This we refuse to do, and therefore we are charged, secondly, with Disloyalty to Caesar. CHAPTER XXIX. Yet the gods are Caesar's creatures, and cannot have his welfare in their keeping. CHAPTER XXX. We offer for Caesar's welfare prayers to the True God in Whose power alone it is. CHAPTER XXXI. And our prayers for him are no pretence, but part of our religious duty. CHAPTER XXXII. And rendered necessary by our belief that the continuance of the Roman Empire delays the end of the world. CHAPTER XXXIII. We are much more truly loyal than you are; for we recognize the Divine will in the appointment of the Caesars, although we refuse to acknowledge the divinity of the Caesars themselves. CHAPTER XXXIV. 'Lord' is no proper title of Caesar, but belongs to God. CHAPTER XXXV. We are called 'public enemies' because we refuse to join in your useless acts of worship and lewd festivities. The real traitors are always found amongst yourselves, whether of lower or higher rank. CHAPTER XXXVI. We are necessarily well-disposed to every one, whether Caesar or neighbour. CHAPTER XXXVII. We are forbidden to retaliate, else we might easily take our revenge, either by secret means, or as of en enemies, or even by merely withdrawing from your midst, and leaving you defenceless against the attacks of the daemons. CHAPTER XXXVIII. The Christian society ought to be recognized by the law, since it is a harmless and unambitious association. CHAPTER XXXIX. III. i. The purposes of our assembly are pious, pure, and charitable. Our well-known love for each other is blamed, and our simple 'love-feast' denounced as extravagant. CHAPTER XL. 2. Our existence is supposed to provoke the anger of the gods and to be the cause of disaster to the empire. Yet such occurrences happened before the rise of Christianity. Your own gods, too, suffer in disasters which are supposed to come from them. The presence of the Christians in the world has tempered the violence of God's judgements. CHAPTER XLI. These judgements are attributable to your misdeeds. CHAPTER XLII. 3. We are accused of being worthless to trade, a charge sufficiently refuted by our habits of life. CHAPTER XLIII. We are certainly profitless to the bad, but this is a real gain. CHAPTER XLIV. The real loss to the state involved in your injustice to us is overlooked. CHAPTER XLV. Our ethical standard is far higher and more awe-inspiring than yours. CHAPTER XLVI. 4. Our sect is regarded as a school of philosophy, yet you refuse us the licence you grant to philosophers. In reality, we differ from the philosophers both in the extent and definiteness of our knowledge, and in our moral standard. CHAPTER XLVII. Philosophers have derived their wisdom from our Scriptures, which they have distorted, and they have vainly speculated on subjects not revealed. Heretics similarly have corrupted the New Testament. Many of our doctrines have been anticipatorily counterfeited by the agency of evil spirits. CHAPTER XLVIII. The philosophical speculation on the transmigration of souls is admitted, but our doctrine of the resurrection of the body scouted, and the mystery of our present existence forbids a hasty rejection of our belief respecting the future, though Nature illustrates it. On this subject revelation must suffice. CHAPTER XLIX. IV. Why do you censure us for holding tenets which are at least harmless, if not positively beneficial? CHAPTER L. Our sufferings are our triumph. Our endurance in your view redounds to our discredit; the fortitude of others to their honour. You may gain popularity by your injustice, but our sufferings and practical example continually attract new converts. APPENDIX. Credits Printed source Q. S. F. Tertulliani Apologeticus Adversus Gentes pro Christianis. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by T. H. BINDLEY, M.A., Merton College, Oxford. (Clarendon Press.) Source of the electronic transcription Tertullian Project – https://www.tertullian.org/ - Transcribed by Roger Pearse, 2004 ETML tagging IntraText editorial staff Publication details Greek text is rendered using the Scholars Press SPIonic font, free from https://www.tertullian.org/support.

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