The God We Worship

Like a good many other people, you are under the impression that our god is a donkey’s head. Cornelius Tacitus was the first to put that idea into people’s minds. In the fifth book of his Histories he opens the story of the Jewish war with an account of where the nation came from, and theorizes as he pleases about its origin, its name and its religion. He says that after the Jews were released from Egypt — or, as he would rather have it, thrown out — they crossed the vast plains of Arabia, where water is scarce, and were at the point of death from thirst; that they followed a herd of wild donkeys, which they guessed were going to water after grazing, and so came upon a spring; and that out of gratitude they then consecrated the head of an animal of that kind. And since Christianity is closely related to Judaism, people assumed, I suppose, that we are devoted to worshiping the same image. [a]

But this same Cornelius Tacitus — a man whose name means “silent,” and who is anything but silent when there is a lie to be told — informs us in that same work that when Gnaeus Pompey took Jerusalem he went into the temple to see the secrets of the Jewish religion, and found no image there. Yet surely, if worship were being paid to anything you could see, the shrine is exactly where it would be on display — all the more so because there the worship, however unreasonable, had nothing to fear from outside eyes. Only the priests were allowed into the holy place, and a curtain hung across it kept everyone else from seeing in.

You will not deny, however, that you yourselves worship every kind of pack animal — not parts of them, but the whole animals — along with their goddess Epona. Perhaps that is what you hold against us: that while your worship takes them all in, we pay our respects only to the donkey.

Then there are those of you who think we bow down to a cross. If so, you share that worship with us. If you pay homage to a piece of wood at all, the shape hardly matters when the material is the same; the form is beside the point if you have the god’s own body. And how far apart, after all, are the Athenian Pallas and the trunk of a cross, or the Ceres of Pharos, put up for sale uncarved — a rough stake, a piece of shapeless timber? Every stake set upright is part of a cross. What we honor, if you insist on putting it that way, is a god whole and entire. We have already shown that your own gods come from shapes modeled on the cross. But you worship victories too, and in your trophies the cross is the heart of the trophy. The whole religion of the Roman camp is a worship of the standards: the standards are set above all the gods. Every image decking out a standard is a cross’s jewelry; every hanging on your standards and banners is a cross’s robe. I admire your devotion — you were not going to consecrate crosses naked and unadorned.

Others, better informed and closer to the truth, believe that our god is the sun. On that reckoning we shall be counted Persians, though we do not worship the sun’s disk painted on a piece of linen, seeing that he has himself everywhere in his own disk. The idea has no doubt come from the well-known fact that we turn east to pray. But plenty of you, in your own way, move your lips toward the sunrise, sometimes with the excuse of worshiping the heavenly bodies. In the same way, if we give Sunday over to rejoicing — for a reason a long way from sun-worship — we look something like those of you who set aside Saturn’s day for rest and good living, though they too are far from Jewish ways, of which in fact they know nothing.

Recently a new edition of our god was put on public show in this city. It began with a criminal who hired himself out to dodge the wild beasts in the arena. He exhibited a picture with this caption: The God of the Christians, Donkey-Born. It had a donkey’s ears, one hoofed foot, a book in its hand and a toga on its back. The name and the figure both gave us a laugh. But our opponents should have paid their respects to this two-formed divinity on the spot, since they have already acknowledged gods with the heads of dogs and lions, with the horns of a buck and a ram, with a goat’s loins, with snakes for legs, with wings sprouting from back or foot.

We have gone into all this at greater length than was strictly needed, so that it cannot be said we willingly let any rumor against us go unanswered. Now that we have cleared ourselves completely, we turn to showing what our religion actually is.

The object of our worship is the one God, who by the word of his command, the wisdom of his ordering and the might of his power brought this whole mass of a world out of nothing, with everything arrayed in it — elements, bodies, spirits — for the glory of his majesty. That is why the Greeks gave it the name kosmos. [j]

The eye cannot see him, though he is visible. He cannot be taken in, though in his kindness he is shown to us. He is beyond anything we can think, though our minds do form a conception of him. That is exactly why he is both real and great. Ordinarily, whatever can be seen and handled and thought of is less than the eyes that take it in, the hands that soil it, the faculties that find it out; but what has no limit is known only to itself. It is this that gives us some notion of God while he stays beyond all our conceiving: the very fact that we cannot fully grasp him gives us the idea of what he actually is. He is set before our minds in a greatness that overflows them — known and unknown at once. And this is the crowning guilt of the human race: that they refuse to recognize the One of whom they cannot possibly be ignorant.

Would you like the proof from the works of his hands — so many and so great, holding you up and keeping you alive, giving you your pleasures and striking you with awe? Or would you rather have it from the testimony of the soul itself? The soul lies under the heavy weight of the body, is led astray by corrupting habits, drained by lusts and passions, enslaved to false gods; and yet the moment it comes to itself, as a man does after too much food, or sleep, or an illness, and gets back something of its natural health, it speaks of God — using that word and no other, because that is the proper name of the true God.

Everyone’s lips carry the words: “God is great.” “God is good.” “What God gives.” It bears witness too that God is judge, when it cries out: “God sees.” “I put myself in God’s hands.” “God will pay me back.”

What a witness this is — the soul that is Christian by nature! And when it says such things it does not look toward the Capitol but toward the sky. It knows that the throne of the living God is there, because it came down from him and from that place.

But so that we might come to a fuller and more authoritative knowledge of God himself, and of his plans and his will, he added a written revelation, for anyone whose heart is set on looking for him — so that looking he may find, finding he may believe, and believing he may obey. [m]

From the first he sent men into the world as his messengers: men whose spotless righteousness made them fit to know the Most High and to make him known, men filled with the Holy Spirit, so that they could announce that there is only one God, who made all things, who formed man out of the dust of the ground. (He is the true Prometheus, who set the world in order by arranging the seasons and their course.) These men went on to set before us the proofs of his majesty that he has given in his judgments by flood and by fire; the rules he laid down for keeping his favor; and the repayment stored up for ignoring them, abandoning them, or keeping them — since at the end of everything he is going to sentence his worshipers to everlasting life and the wicked to the doom of a fire that neither ends nor breaks off, raising all the dead again from the first of them on, remaking and renewing them so that either payment can be handed out.

Once these things were a joke to us as well. We are of your stock and your nature: Christians are made, not born. The preachers we have been speaking of are called prophets, from the duty that belongs to them of announcing what is to come. Their words, and the wonders they performed so that people would trust their authority from God, are still with us in the written treasures they left, and those are open to anyone.

Ptolemy, called Philadelphus, was the most learned of his line and at home in literature of every kind; he was competing, I imagine, with Pisistratus in his passion for books. Among the other remains of the past that were famous for their age or for some special interest of their own, he applied to the Jews for their writings — at the suggestion of Demetrius of Phalerum, the most celebrated scholar of his day, whom he had put in charge of the business. I mean the writings that are theirs alone and in their own tongue, which they alone possessed; for their prophets had always come from among themselves, a people dear to God for their fathers’ sake, and had always spoken to them. In ancient times the people we now call Jews went by the name of Hebrews, so both their writings and their speech were Hebrew.

But so that the books would not be unintelligible, the Jews supplied that too: they gave Ptolemy seventy-two translators, men whom the philosopher Menedemus — well known for insisting that the world is governed by providence — respected as sharing his views. Aristeas gives the same account. So the king left these works unlocked to everyone, in Greek. To this day, at the temple of Serapis, Ptolemy’s libraries are there to be seen, with the Hebrew originals themselves in them. The Jews read them publicly as well; they are in the habit of going to hear them every Sabbath, at the price of a tax. Anyone who listens will find God in them; anyone who takes the trouble to understand will have no choice but to believe.

The first thing that gives these writings their authority is their great age. With you too it counts as a kind of religion to demand belief on that ground alone. Well then: all the substances and materials, the origins, the classes and the contents of your oldest writings; most of the nations and cities famous in the records of the past and noted in the annals for their antiquity; the very shapes of your letters, which reveal events and keep them safe; and — I think I am still inside the mark — your very gods, your temples and oracles and sacred rites: all of them are younger than the work of one single prophet, in whom you have the treasury of the whole Jewish religion, and therefore of ours as well. [q]

If you happen to have heard of a man called Moses, I will speak of him first. He goes as far back as Inachus of Argos; he comes before Danaus, your most ancient name, by nearly four hundred years — seven short of it; and he is a thousand years earlier than the death of Priam. I might also say that he is five hundred years earlier than Homer, and I would have people to back me. The other prophets, though later, are still — even the most recent of them — as far back as the first of your philosophers, lawgivers and historians.

What stands in the way of setting out the grounds for these statements is not so much the difficulty of the subject as its sheer size: the work is not hard, only long. It would take the patient study of many books and busy fingers counting. The histories of the oldest nations would have to be ransacked — the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Phoenicians — and the men of those nations who have information to give would have to be called in as witnesses: Manetho the Egyptian, Berosus the Chaldean, Hiram the Phoenician king of Tyre; and their successors too, Ptolemy of Mendes, Demetrius of Phalerum, King Juba, Apion, Thallus, and the man who reviews them all, the Jew Josephus, his people’s own defender of their ancient history, who either confirms the others or refutes them. The Greek public registers would have to be compared as well, and the dates of events fixed, so that the chronological links could be opened up and the reckonings of the various annals made to give light. We would have to travel abroad into the histories and the literature of every nation.

In fact we have already brought part of the proof before you, in the hints we gave as to how it is to be done. But it seems better to put off the full discussion, in case we hurry it and do not carry it through, or handle it thoroughly and make too long a digression.

To make up for that delay, we bring to your notice something of even greater importance: we point to the majesty of our Scriptures, if not to their age. If you doubt they are as old as we say, we offer proof that they are from God. And you may convince yourselves of it at once, without going very far. Your instructors are all in front of you: the world, the age, and the event. [t]

Everything that is happening around you was announced beforehand; everything you now see with your eye was heard beforehand with your ear. Cities swallowed by the earth; islands stolen by the sea; wars, with the upheavals they bring from outside and from within; kingdoms colliding with kingdoms; famines and plagues, massacres in one place and killing sicknesses that empty whole regions; the lowly lifted up and the proud brought down; righteousness wearing away, sin growing, and less and less interest in anything good; the very seasons and elements leaving their ordinary course, monsters and portents taking the place of nature’s own shapes — all of it was foreseen and predicted before it came to pass. While we are suffering these things, we read of them; as we examine them, they are proved.

And the truth of a prophecy is, I think, the demonstration that it came from above. So among us there is a settled confidence about what is still to come, as about things already proved to us; for they were predicted alongside what we see fulfilled day by day. The same voices utter them, the same books record them, the same Spirit breathes in them. To prophecy, foretelling the future, all time is one. Among people a distinction of times may be made while the fulfillment is going on: what was future we think of as present, and then what was present we count as past. So how are we to blame, I ask you, for believing in things to come as though they already were, when we have these two stages as the grounds of our faith?