The Witness Called Rumor

Whenever these statements and answers of ours — the ones truth puts forward of its own accord — press in on your conscience and pull it up short, that conscience which is a witness to its own ignorance, you run in a great hurry for one small altar of refuge: the authority of the laws. Those laws, of course, would never punish this offensive sect unless the men who made them had fully weighed what it deserved. [a]

Then what has kept the men who enforce the laws from weighing anything at all? In every other crime the laws forbid and punish in the same way, the penalty waits until it is called for by regular process. Take a murderer, for instance, or an adulterer. An inquiry is ordered into the particulars of the crime, even though everyone already knows what kind of crime it is. Whatever wrong a Christian has done ought to be brought into the open. No law forbids an inquiry; on the contrary, holding the inquiry serves the laws themselves. For how are you going to keep a law by guarding against what it forbids, if you cancel out the whole care of the guard by never finding out what it is you have to guard?

No law is entitled to keep the justice of its own case to itself. It owes that to the people from whom it demands obedience. A law that declines to show itself justified becomes an object of suspicion. So it is only natural that the laws against the Christians are thought just, and worth respecting and obeying, exactly as long as men stay ignorant of what they are for and what they are aiming at. Once that is seen, their sheer injustice comes to light, and they are spat out in disgust, along with the tools that go with them — the swords, the crosses, and the lions. An unjust law commands no respect. In my own opinion, though, you already suspect that some of these laws are unjust, since not a day goes by without your softening their harshness and their wrongness by some fresh debate and decision.

Then where, you will say to us, did such a character come from — one solid enough to have given the lawmakers their excuse for the charge? Let me ask on my side: what warrant did they have then, or you have now, that the charge is true? Rumor, you answer. Well now, is this not the thing your own poet calls [d]

Why an evil thing, if it always tells the truth? It never stops lying. Even at the moment it reports something true, it is not so free of the wish to lie that it does not weave the false in with the true — adding, subtracting, or muddling one fact into another. That is exactly its condition: it can only go on existing while it lies. It lives only for as long as it fails to prove anything. The moment it proves itself true, it falls; and, as though its job of carrying news were finished, it quits its post. From then on the thing is simply held to be a fact and goes by that name. Nobody says, to take an instance, “The report is that this happened at Rome,” or “The rumor goes that he has been given a province.” They say, “He has been given a province,” and “This happened at Rome.” No one mentions a rumor except where there is uncertainty, because nobody can be sure of a rumor, only of what he actually knows; and none but a fool believes a rumor, because no sensible man puts his trust in something uncertain.

However wide the circuit a report has traveled, it must at some point have started out of a single mouth. After that it creeps along somehow, from ear to tongue and tongue to ear, and it so buries the small mistake it began with that nobody stops to ask whether the mouth which first set it going was spreading a lie — which is what often happens, out of a rivalrous temper, or a suspicious turn of mind, or even the plain pleasure of inventing news. Still, it is a good thing that time brings everything out, as your own sayings and proverbs bear witness, and as nature herself attests: she has so arranged things that nothing stays hidden, not even what rumor has never reported.

Look, then, at the sort of witness you have put up against us. Up to this day it has not managed to prove the report it set going, though it has had all this time to recommend it to us. This name of ours arose in the reign of Augustus; under Tiberius its teaching came out into the clear and public light; under Nero the condemning of it grew strong — and you may weigh its worth and its character even from the person of the man who persecuted it. If that ruler was devout, then the Christians are godless; if he was just, if he was pure, then the Christians are unjust and impure; if he was not an enemy of the state, then we are enemies of our country. What sort of men we are, our persecutor himself shows, since of course what he punished was whatever was hostile to himself. And although every other institution set up under Nero has been torn down, this one of ours has stood firm — righteous, it would seem, precisely because it is unlike the man who attacked it.

Two hundred and fifty years, then, have not yet gone by since our life began. In that stretch of time there have been so many criminals; so many crosses have won immortality; so many infants slaughtered; so many loaves soaked in blood; so many lamps put out; so many incestuous unions. And to this day it is nothing but a report that fights against the Christians. No doubt it has a strong support in the wickedness of the human mind, and tells its lies with more success among cruel and savage men. The more inclined you are to spite, the readier you are to believe something evil; in short, men believe an evil that is false more easily than a good that is true.

Now if injustice has left any room in you for the prudence of looking into whether a report is true, justice plainly demanded that you examine who could have spread this one among the crowd, and so put it into circulation through the world. It cannot have been the Christians themselves, I suppose, since by the very constitution and law of all mysteries the duty of silence is laid on the initiate. How much more would that hold for such mysteries as are attributed to us, which, if let out, could not fail to bring instant punishment down on us from men's ready anger? So, since the Christians are not their own betrayers, it follows that it must have been outsiders. Then I ask: how could outsiders come by any knowledge of us, when even true and lawful mysteries shut every outsider out from watching them — unless the illicit ones are less exclusive? Well then, it is more in keeping with the character of outsiders both to be ignorant of the real state of a case and to invent a false account of it.

Our household slaves listened, perhaps, and peeped through cracks and holes, and got hold of our ways by stealth. What are we to say, then, when it is our own servants who betray us to you? It would be better, to be sure, for none of us to be betrayed by anyone; but if our practices really are so appalling, how much more fitting is it when honest outrage bursts through even the ties of loyalty inside a household? How could that loyalty endure what horrified the mind and terrified the eye? Here is another remarkable thing: that the man who was so overcome with agitation that he went off to turn informer did not also want to prove what he reported, and that the man who heard the informer's story did not care to see for himself — since surely the profit is equal for the informer who proves what he reports and for the hearer who satisfies himself that what he hears can be believed.

But you say that this is precisely what did happen: first came the rumor, then the display of the proof; first the hearsay, then the inspection; and after that, rumor received its commission. Now this, I must say, beats everything — that a thing which is supposedly being repeated forever was detected and made public once and once only; unless, of course, we have by now given up doing such things. But we are still called by the same offensive name, we are supposed to be still busy at the same practices, and we multiply from day to day. The more of us there are, the more we become objects of hatred. Hatred grows as the material for it grows. Now, seeing that the crowd of offenders keeps on advancing, how is it that the crowd of informers does not keep pace with it? To the best of my belief, even our way of life has become better known: you know the very days we assemble, so we are besieged and attacked and taken prisoner in the very meetings that are supposed to be secret. Yet who has ever come upon a half-eaten corpse among us? Who has detected the mark of a bite in our blood-soaked loaf? Who has discovered, by suddenly bringing a light into our darkness, any trace of impurity — I will not even say of incest — at our feasts? If we save ourselves by a bribe from being dragged before the public with a character like that, how is it that we are still being crushed? It is entirely in our own power not to be arrested at all; for who either sells or buys information about a crime, if the crime itself does not exist?

But why should I run down foreign spies and informers, when the charges you bring against us are ones we hardly publish with much noise ourselves — either as soon as you hear of them, if we have shown them to you first, or after you have found them out for yourselves, if for the time being they were hidden from you? For no doubt, when people want initiation into the mysteries, their custom is to go first to the master, the father of the sacred rites. Then he will say to the applicant: “You must bring an infant, as a guarantee for our rites, to be sacrificed, and some bread as well, to be broken and dipped in his blood. You also want lamps, and dogs tied together to knock them over, and scraps of meat to set the dogs going. And besides that, a mother is necessary for you, or else a sister.” And what is to be said if you have neither? I suppose in that case you could not be a genuine Christian.

Now do let me ask you: will such things, when they are reported by strangers, bear to be spread about as charges against us? It is impossible for such people to understand proceedings they take no part in. The first step of the process is carried through by trickery: our feasts and our marriages are invented and told over in whispers by ignorant people who had never before heard anything about Christian mysteries. And though afterward they cannot help picking up some knowledge of them, even then it is on the footing that others, whom they bring on the scene, are the ones who administer them. Besides, how absurd it is that the profane should know mysteries the priest does not! So they keep it all to themselves, then, and take it for granted; and these tragedies, worse than those of Thyestes or Oedipus, never come out into the light after all, and never find their way to the public. Not even more voracious bites take anything away from the credit of those said to be initiated, whether servants or masters.

If, however, none of these allegations can be proved true, then how immeasurable must be the grandeur of that religion which is plainly not outweighed even by the burden of these vast atrocities! You nations, pitiable and to be pitied, look at what we set before you as the promise our sacred system offers. It guarantees eternal life to those who follow and keep it; and on the other hand it threatens with the eternal punishment of a fire that never ends those who are profane and hostile; while to both alike it preaches a rising of the dead. We are not concerned just now with the doctrine of these things, which is discussed in its proper place. In the meantime, though, believe them, just as we do ourselves — for what I want to know is whether you are ready to reach them, as we do, by way of such crimes.

Come then, whoever you are: plunge your sword into an infant. Or if that is somebody else's office, then simply stand and gaze at the breathing creature dying before it has lived. At any rate, catch the fresh blood, hardly formed yet, and steep your bread in it; then feed yourself without stint, and recline at table while it is going on. Take careful note of the places where your mother or your sister may have made her bed; mark them well, so that when the shades of night have fallen on them — putting to the test, of course, how attentive each one of you has been — you may not make the awkward mistake of alighting on somebody else. You would have to make atonement if you failed of the incest. When you have carried all of that through, eternal life will be in store for you.

I want you to tell me whether you think eternal life is worth such a price. No, indeed — you do not believe it. And even if you did believe it, I maintain that you would be unwilling to pay the fee; or if willing, unable. But why should others be able if you are unable? Why should you be able if others are unable? What would you want immunity and eternity to cost you? Do you suppose that these things can be bought by us at any price at all? Do Christians have a different sort of teeth from other people? Wider jaws? Are they of a different nerve for incestuous lust? I think not. It is enough for us that what sets us apart from you is the truth, and nothing else.

We are said, in fact, to be the “third race” of men. What, a dog-headed race? Or the broad-shadow-footed? Or some underground Antipodes? If you attach any meaning to these names, then please tell us what the first and the second races are, so that we may learn something about this “third” one. [q]

Psammetichus thought he had hit on the ingenious discovery of the original human being. He is said to have removed certain newborn infants from all human company and to have entrusted them to a nurse whose tongue he had first cut out, so that, completely exiled from every sound of the human voice, they would form their speech without hearing it, and, drawing it from themselves alone, would show what that first nation was whose speech nature dictated. Their first utterance was bekkos, a word which means “bread” in the language of Phrygia; and so the Phrygians are supposed to be the first of the human race.

But it will not be out of place to make one observation, to show how much more readily your belief gives itself to empty things than to true ones. Is it in any way credible that the nurse kept her life after the loss of so important a member, the very organ of the breath of life — cut out, too, at the root, with her throat mutilated, which cannot be so much as wounded on the outside without danger, and the foul blood running back into her chest, and no food for so long a time? Come, suppose even that by the remedies of a Philomela she did keep her life, in the way the wisest people suppose, who account for the dumbness not by a tongue cut out but by a blush of shame. If she lived on those terms, she would still be able to blurt out some dull sound. And a shrill, unformed noise made by opening the mouth only, with no shaping of the lips, could be forced out of the bare throat even with no tongue to help. This, in all likelihood, the infants readily imitated, and all the more because it was the only sound there was; only they did it a little more neatly, since they had tongues. And then they attached a definite meaning to it.

Grant, then, that the Phrygians were the earliest race. It still does not follow that the Christians are the third. How many other nations come in due order after the Phrygians? Take care, though, that those you call the third race do not turn out to hold the first rank, since there is in fact no nation which is not Christian. Whatever nation was the first, it is nevertheless Christian now. It is ridiculous folly that makes you say we are the latest race and then in the same breath call us specifically the third.

But it is with respect to our religion, not our nation, that we are supposed to be the third; the series being the Romans, the Jews, and the Christians after them. Where, then, are the Greeks? Or if they are reckoned among the Romans as far as their worship goes — since it was from Greece that Rome borrowed even her gods — then where at least are the Egyptians, who have, so far as I know, a mysterious religion all their own? Now, if the people who belong to the third race are such monsters, what must we suppose those to be who came before them, in the first and the second place?