The Thundering Legion

The story goes that Marcus Aurelius Caesar, the brother of that Antoninus, was drawn up for battle against the Germans and Sarmatians when his army was hard pressed by thirst, and he was at a loss. But the soldiers of the so-called Melitene legion, through the faith that has held them together from that time to this, knelt on the ground in the battle line facing the enemy, as is our own custom in prayer, and turned to supplication to God. [a] The sight was strange enough to the enemy, but the story goes that something stranger still followed at once. A thunderbolt drove the enemy to flight and destruction, while a downpour fell on the army of those who had called on God, which was on the very point of perishing from thirst, and revived it.

The story is told by writers far removed from our teaching who have cared to write about the times in question, and it has also been reported by our own people. The historians outside the faith, being strangers to it, set down the marvel but do not admit that it happened because of our prayers. Our own people, as friends of the truth, have handed on what happened in a simple and guileless way. [c] Among them is Apollinaris, who says that from that time the legion through whose prayer the wonder had happened received from the emperor a name suited to the event, being called in the Romans’ language the Thunderbolt Legion. [d]

Tertullian would be a trustworthy witness of these things. In the Latin Apology for the faith that he addressed to the Senate, which we have mentioned before, he confirms the story with greater and clearer proof. [e] He writes that letters of the most intelligent Emperor Marcus are still in circulation, in which the emperor himself testifies that when his army in Germany was on the point of perishing for lack of water, it was saved by the prayers of the Christians. And he says that this emperor also threatened death to those who tried to accuse us. [f] He adds further: “What sort of laws are these, then, which the impious, the unjust and the cruel enforce against us alone? Laws that Vespasian did not keep, though he had conquered the Jews; that Trajan partly set aside, forbidding Christians to be hunted out; that neither Hadrian, though he pried into every curious matter, nor the emperor called Pius ever ratified?” But let anyone take these things however he likes; we must move on to what came next. [g]

When Pothinus had died, a full ninety years old, with the other martyrs of Gaul, Irenaeus succeeded to the office of bishop of the church at Lyons that Pothinus had led. We have learned that in his youth he had been a hearer of Polycarp. [h] In the third book of his work Against Heresies he set out the succession of the bishops of Rome, and he ends his list with Eleutherus, whose times we are now examining, since it was in his day that he was writing the work. He writes as follows: [i]