Their Gods and Our Prophets

Now I want this made clear to you as well. First: everything we say, having learned it from Christ and from the prophets who came before him, is alone true, and is older than every writer who has ever lived — and we do not ask to be accepted because we say the same things those writers said, but because we say what is true. Second: Jesus Christ alone has been begotten as Son to God in the proper sense, being his Word and firstborn and power, and by God’s will he became man and taught us these things for the changing and the bringing back of the human race. Third: before he became a man among men, certain beings got there first — I mean the evil demons I spoke of earlier — and through the poets told as things that had actually happened what they had in fact made up, in the same way that they worked up the foul and godless deeds alleged against us, for which there is neither witness nor proof. Here, then, is the proof we will bring forward. [a]

In the first place: though we say things much like what the Greeks say, we alone are hated because of the name of Christ; and though we do no wrong, we are put to death as sinners. Elsewhere people worship trees and rivers, mice and cats and crocodiles, and most of the animals that have no reason. Not even the same animals are honored by everyone: one is worshipped in one place and another in another, so that by each other’s judgment they are all irreligious, since they do not worship the same things. And this is the one charge you can bring against us — that we do not worship the same gods you do, and do not bring the dead drink offerings and the smell of burning fat and wreaths at their graves and sacrifices. You know perfectly well that the very same animals are counted gods by some, wild beasts by others, and sacrificial victims by others. [c]

In the second place: out of every race of people, we are the ones who used to worship Dionysus the son of Semele, and Apollo the son of Leto — who in their passion for males did things it is shameful even to name — and Persephone and Aphrodite, driven wild with desire for Adonis, whose mysteries you also celebrate; or Asclepius, or one or another of the beings called gods. Now, through Jesus Christ, we have come to despise them, though we are threatened with death for it, and we have given ourselves to the God who was never begotten and cannot suffer. We are convinced that he was never stung with lust for Antiope or the other women like her, nor for Ganymede; that he was never set free by that hundred-handed giant whose help Thetis obtained for him; and that he did not, in return for that, take care that Thetis’ son Achilles should destroy many of the Greeks for the sake of his concubine Briseis. We pity the people who believe such things, and we recognize the demons behind them. [d]

In the third place: after Christ went up into heaven the demons put forward certain men who said that they themselves were gods, and you not only did not persecute them — you thought them worthy of honors. There was a Samaritan named Simon, from a village called Gitto, who in the reign of Claudius Caesar performed mighty acts of magic in your imperial city of Rome, by the art of the demons at work in him. He was reckoned a god, and was honored by you as a god with a statue. The statue was set up in the river Tiber, between the two bridges, and carries this inscription in the language of Rome: SIMONI DEO SANCTO — “To Simon, the holy god.” Nearly all the Samaritans, and a few in other nations as well, acknowledge him as the first god and bow down to him. [h]

And a woman named Helen, who traveled around with him at that time and had before that been a prostitute, they say is the First Thought brought forth by him. There was also a man named Menander, himself a Samaritan too, from the town of Capparetaea, who became a disciple of Simon. He too was worked on by the demons, and we know that while he was in Antioch he deceived many by his magical art. He persuaded those who followed him that they would never die at all, and even now there are some who came from him and still hold this.

And there is Marcion, a man of Pontus, who is still alive today and still teaching those he persuades to believe in some other god greater than the Maker. Through the demons’ help he has made many people in every race speak blasphemies, and deny that God is the maker of this whole universe, and confess instead some other being, greater than he, who has done greater works. Everyone who takes his start from these men is called a Christian, as we said before — in the same way that people who do not share the same teachings among the philosophers still hold the name of philosophy in common. Whether they also do those foul deeds people tell stories about — the upsetting of the lamp, indiscriminate intercourse, eating human flesh — we do not know; but we do know that you neither persecute nor kill them, not even for their teachings. And we have a treatise composed against all the heresies that have arisen, which we will give you if you would like to read it.

As for us, so that we may do no wrong and commit no offense against God, we have been taught that it is the act of wicked men to set newborn children outside to die. First, because we see that nearly all such children — not only the girls, but the boys too — are brought up for prostitution. Just as the ancients are said to have kept herds of oxen or goats or sheep or grazing horses, so now you rear children for nothing but this shameful use; and for this defilement a crowd of women, and of men who live as women, and of people who do things there are no words for, stands ready in every nation. And you take fees and levies and taxes from them, when you ought to be cutting them out of your empire. [aj]

Anyone who uses such people may, on top of the godless and irreligious and unrestrained act itself, quite possibly be having intercourse with his own child, or a relative, or a brother. Some prostitute even their own children and their own wives, and some are openly castrated to be used as women, and they trace these rites back to the Mother of the gods; and beside every one of the beings you count as gods a serpent is painted, a great symbol and mystery. The things you do openly and applaud, as though the divine light had been turned upside down and were nowhere present — these you charge against us. That does no harm to us, who have nothing to do with any such thing; the harm falls on the people who do them and then bear false witness.

Among us the leader of the evil demons is called the serpent, and Satan, and the devil, as you can learn by searching our writings. Christ announced beforehand that he would be sent into the fire together with his army and the men who follow him, and that they would be punished for the age that has no end. God’s holding back from doing this yet is for the sake of the human race: he knows in advance that some are going to be saved by repentance — some who are perhaps not yet even born. In the beginning he made the human race able to think and to choose the truth and do what is right, so that no one at all has any defense before God; for they were born with reason and with the power to see. And if anyone refuses to believe that God cares about these things, he will either be admitting by a trick that God does not exist, or asserting that he exists but takes pleasure in evil, or that he stays like a stone, and that neither virtue nor vice is anything, but that people only reckon these things good or bad by opinion. That is the greatest irreligion and injustice. [q]

And again, we fear that one of the children set outside might not be picked up, but die, and that we should become murderers. So either we do not marry in the first place except to raise children, or, when we decline marriage, we live in complete self-control. And to help you understand that indiscriminate intercourse is no rite of ours: one of our number recently handed in a petition to Felix, the governor in Alexandria, asking permission for a doctor to remove his testicles. The doctors there said they were forbidden to do this without the governor’s permission. When Felix flatly refused to sign it, the young man stayed as he was, and was content with his own conscience and the agreement of those who thought as he did. And it does not seem out of place to us to mention here Antinous, who lived only a little while ago, and whom everyone was in a rush to worship as a god out of fear, though they knew both who he was and where he came from. [s]

Now someone may set this against us: what is to stop the one we call Christ, who was a man born of men, from having done the mighty works we speak of by magical art, and from looking like the Son of God because of it? So we will now give our proof. We do not trust people who merely make assertions; we are compelled to be convinced by those who prophesied before the events, because with our own eyes we see things that have happened and are happening exactly as they were foretold. This, we think, will look to you too like the greatest and truest proof.

There were, then, among the Jews certain men who were prophets of God, through whom the prophetic Spirit announced in advance things that were going to happen, before ever they happened. The kings who reigned among the Jews at the various times took the prophecies as they were spoken, when they were spoken, arranged in books by the prophets themselves in their own Hebrew tongue, and kept them carefully in their possession. When Ptolemy, king of Egypt, was building a library and trying to gather the writings of every people, he heard about these prophecies too, and sent to Herod, who was king of the Jews at that time, asking that the books of the prophets be sent to him. King Herod did send them, written in that Hebrew tongue. But when what was written in them turned out to be unintelligible to the Egyptians, Ptolemy sent again and asked him to dispatch men who would translate them into the Greek language. This was done, and the books have stayed with the Egyptians to this day. [u]

They are also everywhere among all the Jews. They read them and do not understand what is said in them; they count us their foes and their enemies, and, just as you do, they kill us and punish us whenever they are able — as you can well believe. In the Jewish war that has just been fought, Barchochebas, the leader of the Jewish revolt, gave orders that Christians alone were to be dragged off to terrible punishments unless they would deny Jesus the Christ and blaspheme.

In these books of the prophets, then, we found it announced beforehand that Jesus our Christ would arrive: born of a virgin, growing to manhood, healing every disease and every sickness and raising the dead, envied and unrecognized and crucified, dying and being raised and going up into heaven, and being, and being called, the Son of God. We found it foretold too that certain men would be sent out by him into every race of people to proclaim these things, and that people from the nations would believe in him more readily. He was prophesied of before he appeared — five thousand years before, in one place, and in another three thousand, and in another two thousand, and again a thousand, and another time eight hundred; for as the generations succeeded one another, prophet followed prophet.

Moses, then, who was the first of the prophets, said this in so many words: “A ruler will not fail from Judah, nor a leader from his thighs, until he comes for whom it is laid up; and he will be the expectation of the nations, binding his foal to the vine, washing his robe in the blood of the grape.” It is for you to make careful inquiry and learn up to what point the Jews had a ruler and king of their own. It was up to the appearing of Jesus Christ, our teacher and the interpreter of the prophecies no one understood — just as the divine and holy prophetic Spirit had said beforehand through Moses, that a ruler would not fail the Jews until the one came for whom the kingdom was laid up. For Judah was the forefather of the Jews, and it is from him that they got the name of Jews. And after his appearing you did become king over the Jews, and took possession of all their land. [x]

The words “he will be the expectation of the nations” meant that out of all the nations there would be people watching for him to come again. You can see this with your own eyes and be convinced of it by the fact: out of every race of people there are those who are watching for the one who was crucified in Judea — after whom the land of the Jews was at once handed over to you as spoil of war.

And the words “binding his foal to the vine, and washing his robe in the blood of the grape” were a symbol that revealed the things that would happen to Christ and the things he would do. For a donkey’s foal stood tied to a vine at the entrance of a village, and he told his companions to bring it to him then; and when it had been brought he mounted it, sat on it, and went into Jerusalem, where the great temple of the Jews was, which you later pulled down. And after that he was crucified, so that the rest of the prophecy might be completed.

For “washing his robe in the blood of the grape” announced beforehand the suffering he was going to undergo, cleansing by his blood those who believe in him. What the divine Spirit through the prophet called “his robe” is the people who believe in him, in whom the seed that comes from God — the Word — makes its home. And what is spoken of as “the blood of the grape” means that the one who was to appear would have blood, but not from human seed; from the power of God. And the first power after the Father of all and the Master God is the Word, who is also the Son; how he was made flesh and became man we will tell further on. For just as it was not a man who made the vine’s blood but God, so it was shown here that the blood would not come from human seed but from the power of God, as we said above.

And Isaiah, another prophet, prophesying the same things in other words, said this: “A star will rise out of Jacob, and a flower will spring up from the root of Jesse; and the nations will hope in his arm.” And a shining star has risen, and a flower has sprung up from the root of Jesse — this is the Christ. For he was born by the power of God through a virgin who came from the seed of Jacob, the father of Judah, who, as we have shown, was the father of the Jews; and Jesse was his forefather according to the oracle, while by lineal descent he was a son of Jacob and of Judah.

And hear again how Isaiah foretold in so many words that he would be born of a virgin. It was said this way: “Look, the virgin will conceive and bear a son, and they will say for his name, God with us.” Things that people counted unbelievable and impossible to happen — these God announced beforehand through the prophetic Spirit as going to happen, so that when they did happen they would not be disbelieved, but believed because they had been foretold. [ac]

But in case some people, not understanding the prophecy just quoted, bring against us the very charge we brought against the poets who said that Zeus went in to women for the sake of sex, let us try to make the words plain. “Look, the virgin will conceive” means that the virgin conceived without intercourse. If she had had intercourse with anyone at all, she would no longer have been a virgin; but the power of God came upon the virgin and overshadowed her, and made her, still a virgin, carry a child. And the angel of God who was sent to that same virgin at that time brought her good news, saying: “Look, you will conceive by the Holy Spirit and bear a son, and he will be called the Son of the Most High, and you will call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” So the men who set down their memories of everything about our Savior Jesus Christ taught us, and we believed them — since through Isaiah, whom we have just cited, the prophetic Spirit also said that he would be born in the way we described.

It is not right, then, to understand the Spirit and the power that come from God as anything other than the Word, who is also God’s firstborn, as Moses the prophet already mentioned made known; and it was this that came upon the virgin and overshadowed her and made her pregnant, not by intercourse but by power. And the name Jesus, in the Hebrew tongue, means Savior in the Greek language. That is why the angel also said to the virgin: “And you will call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” And that those who prophesy are carried along by nothing other than the divine Word — even you, I suppose, will say.

And hear where on earth he was going to be born, as another prophet, Micah, foretold. He spoke this way: “And you, Bethlehem, land of Judah, are by no means least among the leaders of Judah; for out of you will come a leader who will shepherd my people.” There is a village in the land of the Jews about four miles from Jerusalem in which Jesus Christ was born, as you can also find out from the census registers drawn up under Quirinius, your first procurator in Judea. [ag]