Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| The Calumny Against the Christians Illustrated in the Discovery of Psammetichus. Refutation of the Story.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter VIII.585
| 585 Compare The
Apology, c. viii. | —The Calumny
Against the Christians Illustrated in the Discovery of Psammetichus.
Refutation of the Story.
We are indeed said to be the “third
race” of men. What, a dog-faced race?586
| 586 Cynopæ. This
class would furnish the unnatural “teeth,” and
“jaws,” just referred to. | Or
broadly shadow-footed?587
| 587 Sciapodes with
broad feet producing a large shade; suited for the
“incestuous lust” above mentioned. | Or some
subterranean588
| 588 Literally, “which
come up from under ground.” | Antipodes? If you
attach any meaning to these names, pray tell us what are the first and
the second race, that so we may know something of this
“third.” Psammetichus thought that he had hit upon
the ingenious discovery of the primeval man. He is said to have removed
certain new-born infants from all human intercourse, and to have
entrusted them to a nurse, whom he had previously deprived of her
tongue, in order that, being completely exiled from all sound of the
human voice, they might form their speech without hearing it; and thus,
deriving it from themselves alone, might indicate what that first
nation was whose speech was dictated by nature. Their first utterance
was Bekkos, a word which means
“bread” in the language of Phrygia: the Phrygians,
therefore, are supposed to be the first of the human race.589
| 589 Tertullian got this
story from Herodotus, ii. 2. | But it will not be out of place if we make
one observation, with a view to show how your faith abandons itself
more to vanities than to verities. Can it be, then, at all credible that the
nurse retained her life, after the loss of so important a member, the
very organ of the breath of life,590
—cut out,
too, from the very root, with her throat591
mutilated, which cannot be wounded even on the outside without danger,
and the putrid gore flowing back to the chest, and deprived for so long
a time of her food? Come, even suppose that by the remedies of a
Philomela she retained her life, in the way supposed by wisest persons,
who account for the dumbness not by cutting out the tongue, but from
the blush of shame; if on such a supposition she lived, she would still
be able to blurt out some dull sound. And a shrill inarticulate noise
from opening the mouth only, without any modulation of the lips, might
be forced from the mere throat, though there were no tongue to help.
This, it is probable, the infants readily imitated, and the more so
because it was the only sound; only they did it a little more neatly,
as they had tongues;592
and then they
attached to it a definite signification. Granted, then, that the
Phrygians were the earliest race, it does not follow that the
Christians are the third. For how many other nations come regularly
after the Phrygians? Take care, however, lest those whom you call the
third race should obtain the first rank, since there is no nation
indeed which is not Christian. Whatever nation, therefore, was the
first, is nevertheless Christian now.593
| 593 This is one of the
passages which incidentally show how widely spread was
Christianity. | It is ridiculous
folly which makes you say we are the latest race, and then specifically
call us the third. But it is in respect of our religion,594
not of 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
amongst the Romans in regard to their superstition (since it was from
Greece that Rome borrowed even her gods), where at least are the
Egyptians, since these have, so far as I know, a mysterious religion
peculiar to themselves? Now, if they who belong to the third race are
so monstrous, what must they be supposed to be who preceded them in the
first and the second place?E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
