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| Chapter XXI.
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Chapter XXI.
But having asserted that our religion is supported by
the writings of the Jews, the oldest which exist, though it is
generally known, and we fully admit that it dates from a comparatively
recent period—no further back indeed than the reign of
Tiberius—a question may perhaps be raised on this ground about
its standing, as if it were hiding something of its presumption under
shadow of an illustrious religion, one which has at any rate undoubted
allowance of the law, or because, apart from the question of age, we
neither accord with the Jews in their peculiarities in regard to food,
nor in their sacred days, nor even in their well-known bodily sign, nor
in the possession of a common name, which surely behoved to be the case
if we did homage to the same God as they. Then, too, the common people
have now some knowledge of Christ, and think of Him as but a man, one
indeed such as the Jews condemned, so that some may naturally enough
have taken up the idea that we are worshippers of a mere human being.
But we are neither ashamed of Christ—for we rejoice to be counted
His disciples, and in His name to suffer—nor do we differ from
the Jews concerning God. We must make, therefore, a remark or two as to
Christ’s divinity. In former times the Jews enjoyed much of
God’s favour, when the fathers of their race were noted for their
righteousness and faith. So it was that as a people they flourished
greatly, and their kingdom attained to a lofty eminence; and so highly
blessed were they, that for their instruction God spake to them in
special revelations, pointing out to them beforehand how they should
merit His favor and avoid His displeasure. But how deeply they have
sinned, puffed up to their fall with a false trust in their noble
ancestors, turning from God’s way into a way of sheer impiety,
though they themselves should refuse to admit it, their present
national ruin would afford sufficient proof. Scattered abroad, a race
of wanderers, exiles from their own land and clime, they roam over the
whole world without either a human or a heavenly king, not possessing
even the stranger’s right to set so much as a simple footstep in
their native country. The sacred writers withal, in giving previous
warning of these things, all with equal clearness ever declared that,
in the last days of the world, God would, out of every nation, and
people, and country, choose for Himself more faithful worshippers, upon
whom He would bestow His grace, and that indeed in ampler measure, in
keeping with the enlarged capacities of a nobler dispensation.
Accordingly, He appeared among us, whose coming to renovate and
illuminate man’s nature was pre-announced by God—I mean
Christ, that Son of God. And so the supreme Head and Master of this
grace and discipline, the Enlightener and Trainer of the human race,
God’s own Son, was announced among us, born—but not so born
as to make Him ashamed of the name of Son or of His paternal origin. It
was not His lot to have as His father, by incest with a sister, or by
violation of a daughter or another’s wife, a god in the shape of
serpent, or ox, or bird, or lover, for his vile ends transmuting
himself into the gold of Danaus. They are your divinities upon whom
these base deeds of Jupiter were done. But the Son of God has no mother
in any sense which involves impurity; she, whom men suppose to be His
mother in the ordinary way, had never entered into the marriage
bond.104
But, first, I shall discuss His essential
nature, and so the nature of His birth will be understood. We have
already asserted that God made the world, and all which it contains, by
His Word, and Reason, and Power. It is abundantly plain that your
philosophers, too, regard the Logos—that is, the Word and
Reason—as the Creator of the universe. For Zeno lays it down that
he is the creator, having made all things according to a determinate
plan; that his name is Fate, and God, and the soul of Jupiter, and the
necessity of all things. Cleanthes ascribes all this to spirit, which
he maintains pervades the universe. And we, in like manner, hold that
the Word, and Reason, and Power, by which we have said God made all,
have spirit as their proper and essential substratum, in which
the Word has in being to give forth utterances, and reason abides to
dispose and arrange, and power is over all to execute. We have been
taught that He proceeds forth from God, and in that procession He is
generated; so that He is the Son of God, and is called God from unity
of substance with God. For God, too, is a Spirit. Even when the
ray is shot from the sun, it is still part of the parent mass; the sun
will still be in the ray, because it is a ray of the sun—there is
no division of substance, but merely an extension. Thus Christ is
Spirit of Spirit, and God of God, as light of light is
kindled.105
The material matrix
remains entire and unimpaired, though you derive from it any number of
shoots possessed of its qualities; so, too, that which has come forth
out of God is at once God and the Son of God, and the two are one. In
this way also, as He is Spirit of Spirit and God of God, He is made a
second in manner of existence—in position, not in nature; and He
did not withdraw from the original source, but went forth. This
ray of God, then, as it was always foretold in ancient times,
descending into a certain virgin, and made flesh in her womb,
is in His birth God and man
united. The flesh formed by the Spirit is nourished, grows up to
manhood, speaks, teaches, works, and is the Christ. Receive meanwhile
this fable, if you choose to call it so—it is like some of your
own—while we go on to show how Christ’s claims are proved,
and who the parties are with you by whom such fables have been set a
going to overthrow the truth, which they resemble. The Jews, too, were
well aware that Christ was coming, as those to whom the prophets spake.
Nay, even now His advent is expected by them; nor is there any other
contention between them and us, than that they believe the advent has
not yet occurred. For two comings of Christ having been revealed to
us: a first, which has been fulfilled in the lowliness of a human
lot; a second, which impends over the world, now near its close, in all
the majesty of Deity unveiled; and, by misunderstanding the first, they
have concluded that the second—which, as matter of more manifest
prediction, they set their hopes on—is the only one. It was the
merited punishment of their sin not to understand the Lord’s
first advent: for if they had, they would have believed; and if they
had believed, they would have obtained salvation. They themselves read
how it is written of them that they are deprived of wisdom and
understanding—of the use of eyes and ears.106
As, then, under the force of their pre-judgment, they had convinced
themselves from His lowly guise that Christ was no more than man, it
followed from that, as a necessary consequence, that they should hold
Him a magician from the powers which He displayed,—expelling
devils from men by a word, restoring vision to the blind, cleansing the
leprous, reinvigorating the paralytic, summoning the dead to life
again, making the very elements of nature obey Him, stilling the storms
and walking on the sea; proving that He was the Logos of God, that
primordial first-begotten Word, accompanied by power and reason, and
based on Spirit,—that He who was now doing all things by His
word, and He who had done that of old, were one and the same. But the
Jews were so exasperated by His teaching, by which their rulers and
chiefs were convicted of the truth, chiefly because so many turned
aside to Him, that at last they brought Him before Pontius Pilate, at
that time Roman governor of Syria; and, by the violence of their
outcries against Him, extorted a sentence giving Him up to them to be
crucified. He Himself had predicted this; which, however, would have
signified little had not the prophets of old done it as well. And yet,
nailed upon the cross, He exhibited many notable signs, by which His
death was distinguished from all others. At His own free-will, He with
a word dismissed from Him His spirit, anticipating the
executioner’s work. In the same hour, too, the light of day was
withdrawn, when the sun at the very time was in his meridian blaze.
Those who were not aware that this had been predicted about Christ, no
doubt thought it an eclipse. You yourselves have the account of the
world-portent still in your archives.107
Then, when His
body was taken down from the cross and placed in a sepulchre, the Jews
in their eager watchfulness surrounded it with a large military guard,
lest, as He had predicted His resurrection from the dead on the third
day, His disciples might remove by stealth His body, and deceive even
the incredulous. But, lo, on the third day there a was a sudden shock
of earthquake, and the stone which sealed the sepulchre was rolled
away, and the guard fled off in terror: without a single disciple
near, the grave was found empty of all but the clothes of the buried
One. But nevertheless, the leaders of the Jews, whom it nearly
concerned both to spread abroad a lie, and keep back a people tributary
and submissive to them from the faith, gave it out that the body of
Christ had been stolen by His followers. For the Lord, you see, did not
go forth into the public gaze, lest the wicked should be delivered from
their error; that faith also, destined to a great reward, might hold
its ground in difficulty. But He spent forty days with some of His
disciples down in Galilee, a region of Judea, instructing them in the
doctrines they were to teach to others. Thereafter, having given
them commission to preach the gospel through the world, He was
encompassed with a cloud and taken up to heaven,—a fact more
certain far than the assertions of your Proculi concerning
Romulus.108
| 108 Proculus was a Roman
senator who affirmed that Romulus had appeared to him after his
death. | All these things
Pilate did to Christ; and now in fact a Christian in his own
convictions, he sent word of Him to the reigning Cæsar, who was at
the time Tiberius. Yes, and the Cæsars too would have
believed on Christ, if either the Cæsars had not been necessary
for the world, or if Christians could have been Cæsars. His
disciples also, spreading over the world, did as their Divine Master
bade them; and after suffering greatly themselves from the persecutions
of the Jews, and with no unwilling heart, as having faith undoubting in
the truth, at last by Nero’s cruel sword sowed the seed of
Christian blood at Rome.109
Yes, and we
shall prove that even your own gods are effective witnesses for
Christ. It is a great matter if, to give you faith in Christians,
I can bring forward the authority of the very beings on account of whom
you refuse them credit. Thus far we have carried out the plan we laid
down. We have set forth this origin of our sect and name, with this
account of the Founder of Christianity. Let no one henceforth charge us
with infamous wickedness; let no one think that it is otherwise than we
have represented, for none may give a false account of his religion.
For in the very fact that he says he worships another god than he
really does, he is guilty of denying the object of his worship, and
transferring his worship and homage to another; and, in the
transference, he ceases to worship the god he has repudiated. We say,
and before all men we say, and torn and bleeding under your tortures,
we cry out, “We worship God through Christ.” Count Christ a
man, if you please; by Him and in Him God would be known and be
adored. If the Jews object, we answer that Moses, who was but a
man, taught them their religion; against the Greeks we urge that
Orpheus at Pieria, Musæus at Athens, Melampus at Argos, Trophonius
in Bœotia, imposed religious rites; turning to yourselves, who
exercise sway over the nations, it was the man Numa Pompilius who laid
on the Romans a heavy load of costly superstitions. Surely Christ,
then, had a right to reveal Deity, which was in fact His own essential
possession, not with the object of bringing boors and savages by the
dread of multitudinous gods, whose favour must be won into some
civilization, as was the case with Numa; but as one who aimed to
enlighten men already civilized, and under illusions from their very
culture, that they might come to the knowledge of the truth. Search,
then, and see if that divinity of Christ be true. If it be of such a
nature that the acceptance of it transforms a man, and makes him truly
good, there is implied in that the duty of renouncing what is opposed
to it as false; especially and on every ground that which, hiding
itself under the names and images of dead, the labours to convince men
of its divinity by certain signs, and miracles, and
oracles.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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