their hands, and the joints unfolded their inborn mobility; the crippled in their limbs to rise up, and now they carried back on their own the beds on which, a little before, they had been borne on the necks of others; the deprived of sight to see, and now they beheld heaven and the day with no eyes newly created? 46.1. He was, I say, one of us who healed at a single word, by one intercession, a hundred or even more men afflicted with various weaknesses and diseases? 2. At whose voice, at a simple command, the raging and mad seas laid themselves flat, and the whirlwinds and tempests of the storms subsided? who walked with unwetted foot over the deepest gulfs, trod the sea's back, the very waves being astounded, and nature yielding into servitude? 3.
who fed five thousand of those who followed Him with five loaves, and — that it might not seem a mere illusion to those unbelieving and hard men — heaped up the folds of twelve baskets with the fragments of what was left over? 4. Was He one of us who bade souls, long since breathed forth, return into their bodies; who bade those buried come forth from their mounds, and on the third day after burial be freed from the wrappings of the embalmers? 5. Was He one of us who saw through what each man was pondering, what they kept concealed in dark thoughts within the hearts of the silent? 6. Was He one of us who, when He uttered a single voice, was reckoned by different peoples speaking in discordant tongues to use the familiar sounds of words, each man his own speech? 7.
Was He one of us who, while He delivered to His followers the offices of a sure religion, suddenly filled the whole world, and by the revelation of His name's immensity showed how great and who He was? 8. Was He one of us who, having laid aside His body, showed Himself in ready light to countless numbers of men; who both spoke and heard converse, taught, chastised, and admonished; who — lest they should think themselves deceived by empty imaginings — showed Himself once, again, and often in familiar conversation; who even now appears to most upright, undefiled, and loving men, not through vain dreams but through the aspect of pure simplicity, 9.
whose name, when heard, puts to flight noxious spirits, imposes silence on soothsayers, renders the diviners unable to consult, makes the actions of arrogant magicians come to nothing — not, as you say, by the horror of the name, but by the license of a greater power? 47.1. And these things, indeed, set forth in summary, we have not brought forward as though the greatness of the Doer were to be discerned in these powers alone. For how great these are, or of what triviality and sport they will be found, will be known if it is once handed down to be understood from what kingdoms He came to us, and of what deity He came as minister! 2.
These things indeed were done and accomplished by Him, not that He might vaunt Himself with vain ostentation, but that hard and unbelieving men might know that what was promised was not false, and might from the kindness of the works begin to learn to suspect who the true God was. 3. At the same time we wish this too to be known — since, as has been said, the enumeration of His deeds has been made in summary — that Christ not only had power to do the things He did, but even surpassed the established decrees of the fates. 4. For if, as is clear and certain, weaknesses and sufferings of the body — deafness, maiming, dumbness, the contraction of the sinews, and the loss of sight — happen and are imposed by the decrees of the fates, and if Christ alone corrected, restored, and healed these:
it is clearer than the sun itself that He was more powerful than the fates, since He loosed and conquered those things which had been bound fast by perpetual bonds and by an immovable necessity. 48.1. 'But in vain,' says someone or other, 'do you claim so much for Christ, since we know and have known that other gods too have given remedies to very many sufferers and have cured the diseases and ailments of many men.' 2. — I do not inquire, I do not demand, which god, or at what time, aided whom, or whom, when broken, he restored to health: this alone I desire to hear — whether, without the addition of any material thing, that is, of any medicine, He bade diseases fly away from men at a touch;
whether He commanded and brought it about that the cause of the ailments should die out, and that the bodies of the feeble should return to their proper natures. 3. For Christ is known — either by laying His hand on the ailing parts, or by the command of a simple word — to have opened the ears of the deaf, driven blindness from the eyes, given speech to the dumb, loosed the bonds of the joints, given walking to the crippled, and to have healed with a word and command leprous blotches, agues, dropsies, and all the other kinds of ailments which some cruel importunity willed that human bodies should endure. 4. What have all the gods done like this, by whom you say help was brought to the sick and endangered? Who, if ever, as report has it, they granted a remedy to some, either bade some food be taken, or
drink a potion of some quality, or lay the juices of herbs and grasses upon the troublesome parts, or walk, or rest, or abstain from something that might do harm. 5. That this is nothing great, nor worthy of the amazement of any wonder, is plain, if you will attend: for physicians too heal thus — a creature born of the earth, not resting on the truth of knowledge but placed within a conjectural art, and wavering amid the estimates of guesses. 6. But there is no virtue in removing by medicines the things that hurt: these are benefits of things, not the powers of those who cure; and, though it be praiseworthy to know by what medicine or by what art each may be cured, the place of this praise is set not in a god but in a man. 7.
For it is no disgrace to the latter to have made a man's health better by things taken from without; but it is unbecoming to a god not to be able of Himself and through Himself, but to furnish health and safety by the aids of external things. 49.1. And since you compare the benefits of health given by other deities with those of Christ, how many thousands of the feeble would you have us show you, how many afflicted with wasting diseases who obtained no remedy at all, though they went as suppliants through all the temples, though prostrate before the faces of the gods they swept the very thresholds with kisses, though they wearied Aesculapius himself, the giver, as they proclaim, of health, with prayers and invoked him with most wretched vows, so long as life remained to them? 2.
Do we not know of some who died of their own maladies, others who grew old under the torments of their diseases, others who began to fare more perilously after they had worn away days and nights in continual prayers and in the expectation of piety's reward? What profit is it, then, to point out one or perhaps another who were cured, when to so many thousands none has come to aid, and all the shrines are full of the wretched and unhappy? 3. Unless perchance you will say that help is brought to the good by the gods, but the miseries of the wicked are despised. — Yet Christ helped good and bad alike, nor was anyone repulsed by Him who, in hard straits, sought aid against the assault and injuries of fortune. 4.
For this is proper to the true God and to royal power: to deny His kindness to none, and not to reckon whether one deserves it or not, since it is natural weakness that makes a man a sinner, not the choice of will and judgment. 5. Moreover, to say that help is brought to the labouring by the gods according to merit — this is to set in the midst and make doubtful the very thing you assert: so that both he who has been made whole may seem to have been saved by chance, and he who has not may be believed not to have been able to expel his ailment by divine power, not by reason of merit but by reason of weakness. 50.1.
What of the fact that these powers, which have been set forth by us in summary — not as the greatness of the matter demanded — He not only performed Himself by His own might, but, what was more sublime, permitted many others also to try and to do with the addition of His name? 2. For when He saw that you would be deniers of the deeds done by Him and of the divine work, lest any suspicion should lurk that He had bestowed those gifts and benefits by magic arts, out of that immense multitude of the people who, in admiration, followed after His grace, He chose fishermen, artisans, rustics, and men of that unlearned sort, who, sent through the various nations, might accomplish all those miracles without any deceits and aids. 3.
By a word He checked the torments of writhing limbs, and by a word they too checked the writhings of frenzied sufferings. By a single command He drove the demons from bodies, and restored their senses to the senseless; and they too, by no other command, restored to health and steadiness those tormented under the demons' assaults. 4. He wiped away the marks of whitening leprosies by the touch of His hand, and these too by a not unlike touch reconciled the features of bodies. 5. He bade the oozing and swollen vitals recover their native dryness, and His servants in this manner stayed the wandering waters, and bade them glide away from the bodies' destruction along their own channels. 6.
He, within the delay of a single word, curbed from feeding the ulcers of a boundless mouth that refused to endure healing; and they too, not otherwise, compelled the stubbornness of the savage canker to submit to a scar, its spreading being circumscribed. 7. He gave walking to the lame, sight to blind eyes, and recalled the dead to life; and no less did these too relax the contraction of the sinews, fill with light eyes already lost, and bid the deceased return from their tombs by a reversal of the funeral rites. 8. Nor was there anything done by Him, while all stood astonished in wonder, which He did not grant to be done by those little and rustic men, and subject to their power. 51.1.
What say you, O incredulous, difficult, and hard minds — did that Capitoline Jupiter of yours give to any mortal such a power? Did he endow with such a right the Curio or the Pontifex Maximus, or rather the flamen Dialis, which is his special office? 2. I will not say, that he might raise the dead, nor restore light to the blind, nor give back to the crooked and dissolved the posture of their limbs — but that he might repress a pustule, a hangnail, or a papule, either by the command of the voice or by the touch of the hand. 3. Was that, then, a human thing, or could such a right be given, such license proceed, from a mouth fed on earthly filth — and not something divine and sacred, or, if the matter admits of any exaltation, more than divine and sacred? 4.
For if you yourself do what you can and what is befitting to your own strength and power, wonder has nothing to cry out at; for you have done what you were able, and what your might ought to have furnished, so that there was one and the same equality of the work and of him who wrought it. 5. But to be able to transcribe your right into a man, and to give and share for the doing what you alone can do, to a most frail creature — this belongs to a power set above all things, and containing under itself the causes of all things, and the natures of reasons and faculties. 52.1. Come now, let there come, I pray, through the fiery zone, the magician Zoroaster from the inner world (that we may agree with Hermippus the author),
and let there come with him the Bactrian, whose deeds Ctesias sets forth in the first book of his Histories; the Armenian, grandson of Zostrianus, and the intimate Pamphylus of Cyrus; Apollonius, Damigero, and Dardanus; Belus, Julianus, and Baebulus; and if there be any other who is reported to have held the chief place and name in such tricks: 2. let them permit one from the people to fit together the mouths of the dumb for the office of giving speech, to unstop the ears of the deaf, to restore the natures of eyes without any lights created in them, and to bring back sense and life into limbs long since grown cold. 3.
But if this is a hard matter, and the powers to accomplish such works cannot permit it to others, let them do it themselves, and let them do it with their own rites — whatever malignant herb the bosoms of the earth nourish, whatever powers that murmur of words contains, and the necessities joined to incantations, we do not grudge it, let them add it; we do not forbid it, let them gather it: 4. we would fain make trial and learn whether with their own gods they can effect what has been repeatedly done by rustic Christians with bare commands. 53.1.
Cease, O ignorant ones, to turn things so great into slanders — which will do no harm to Him who wrought them, but will bring peril upon you, peril, I say, not small, but set in matters most excellent, in things of the first rank, seeing that the soul is a precious thing, and nothing can be found dearer to man than himself. 2. Nothing, as you feign, magical, nothing human, deceptive or crafty, no fraud lay hidden in Christ, though you may deride Him after your custom and dissolve into the wantonness of guffaws. 3. That God was sublime, God from the innermost root, God from unknown
kingdoms, and sent as a Saviour from the God who is Prince of all; whom neither the sun itself, nor any stars (if they perceive), nor the rulers, nor the princes of the world, nor lastly the great gods, nor those who, feigning themselves gods, terrify the whole race of mortals, could know or even suspect whence or who He was — and rightly so. 4. But when, stripped of the body which He bore about in a tiny portion of Himself, He suffered Himself to be seen and to be known of what magnitude He was, all the elements of the world, terrified by the newness of things, were thrown into confusion: the earth trembled and quaked, the sea was poured back from its depths, the air was wrapped in globes of darkness, the fiery orb of the sun stiffened, its heat grown cold. 5.
For what remained to be done, after He was recognized as God, who long since was judged to be one of us? 54.1. But you do not believe that these things were done. Yet those who beheld them being done and saw them enacted under their own eyes, the best of witnesses and most trustworthy authorities, both believed them themselves and handed them down to be believed by us of later times, with no slight attestations. 2. Who these may be, you perhaps ask? Nations, peoples, tribes, and that incredulous human race which, unless the matter had been manifest and clearer than the very light, as the saying is, would never have lent the assent of its credulity to things of this kind. 3.
But shall we say that the men of that time were so utterly vain, lying, stupid, and brutish, as to feign that they had seen what they never saw, and to publish by false testimonies, or confirm by childish assertion, things which had never happened at all; and that, when they might have lived with you in harmony and led lives of unbroken fellowship, they took upon themselves gratuitous hatreds, and were held in an accursed name? 55.1. But if, as you say, that history of the facts is false, whence in so short a time was the whole world filled with this religion? Or how could nations, scattered in their regions, sundered by the winds and the vaults of heaven, come together into one mind? 2.
Were they enticed by bare asseverations, led on into empty hopes, and did they willingly, in rash desperation, cast themselves into perils of life, when they had seen nothing of the kind that could rouse them by any marvel to these worships of their novelty? 3. Nay, rather, because they perceived all these things to be done both by Him and by His heralds, who, sent through the whole world, carried the benefits of the Father and the gifts of God to the minds of men — conquered by the very power of the truth, they gave themselves to God, and counted it no great loss to expose their limbs to you and to offer their vitals to be torn. 56.1. 'But our writers set these things forth falsely; they magnified into the immense their petty deeds, and enlarged their scant matters with too ambitious a proclamation.' 2.
— And would that all things could have been committed to writing — both what was done by Him and what was accomplished by His heralds with equal right and power. So great a force of miracles would make you the more incredulous, and you might perhaps find a foothold whereby it might seem most like the truth that increments had been added to the facts, and falsehoods inserted into the writings and commentaries. 3.
But neither could all things be written down, or come to the ears of all, being done among nations unknown and ignorant of the use of letters; or, if any were committed to letters and writings, through the malevolence of demons — whose care and study it is that this truth should be intercepted — and of men like unto them, certain things were interpolated and added, some changed and withdrawn in their words, syllables, and letters, so as both to hinder the belief of the prudent and to corrupt the authority of the deeds. 4. But let it never be that Christ, whoever He was, should be reckoned by these attestations of letters, since His cause is committed to this alone: that, if the things we say be established as true, He may by the confession of all be shown to have been God. 57.1. 'You do not believe our writings':
— and we do not believe yours. 'You concoct falsehoods about Christ': — and you boast vain and false things about your gods; for no god fell from heaven, nor contrived your affairs with his own hands, nor by a like reason detracted from our affairs and religions. 2. 'These things were written by men': — and those too were written by men, expounded in mortal speech; and whatever you intend to say about our writers, take these same things as said of yours also, and hold them with equal weight. 3. You wish that the things comprised in your writings be true: — then you must needs confess that the things consigned to letters in ours are true. You accuse our matters of falsehood:
— and we accuse yours of falsehood. 4. 'But ours,' you say, 'are more ancient, and on this account most full of faith and truth': — as though, forsooth, antiquity were not the most prolific mother of errors, and had not itself brought forth those very things which have devised most shameful and ignominious marks against the gods in disgraceful fables. 5. For ten thousand years ago could not false things also have been both heard and believed? Or is it not most like the truth that credit lies rather with things near and neighbouring than with things distant by long stretches of space? 6. For these things are asserted by witnesses, those by opinions; and it is far more likely that there is less of fiction in recent things than in those removed by ancient obscurity. 58.1.
'But they were written by unlearned and rude men, and therefore are not to be believed with easy hearing.' — See rather whether this be not the stronger reason why they should be defiled by no lies, being brought forth with a simple mind, and ignorant of amplifying by allurements. 2. 'The language is trivial and mean.' — For truth never courted false show, nor does what is proved and certain suffer itself to be led about through the longer circuit of speech. Syllogisms, enthymemes, definitions, and all those ornaments by which credit is sought for an assertion aid those who suspect, but do not demonstrate the lineaments of truth. 3.
For the rest, he who knows what that thing is which is spoken of neither defines nor collects into syllogisms nor pursues the other artifices of words, by which hearers are wont to be captivated and drawn to assent to a matter by the constraint of a circumlocution. 59.1. 'Your writings,' he says, 'are beset with barbarisms and solecisms, and defiled with the deformity of faults.' 2. — A truly childish and narrow-minded reproach, which if we admit it as true, let us cast out of our uses certain kinds of fruits, because they are born with thorns and other refuse, which can neither nourish us nor yet hinder us from enjoying that which chiefly comes first and which nature willed to be most wholesome for us. 3.
For what harm does it do, I ask, or what dullness does it impart to the understanding, whether a thing be uttered with a heavy sound or with a bristling harshness, whether that be given a circumflex which ought to be given an acute, or that be given an acute which ought to have been circumflexed? Or how is that which is said any the less true, if one errs in number, or case, or preposition, or participle, or conjunction? Let that pomp of speech, that discourse marched out by rule, be kept for public assemblies, for lawsuits, for the forum and the courts, and be granted to those men who, seeking out the enticements of pleasures, have poured all their zeal upon the ornaments of words. When the matter treated is one removed from ostentation, it is what is said that must be looked to, not with what elegance it is said; not what soothes the ears, but what benefits it brings to the hearers.
especially since we know that even certain men devoted to wisdom not only cast off all cultivation of speech, but even, when they could have spoken more ornately and copiously, deliberately pursued a common lowliness of style, lest, forsooth, they should corrupt the sternness of their gravity and vaunt themselves rather in sophistic display. And indeed it is the mark of a dissolute heart to seek pleasure in serious matters; and when your business is with men who are ill and sick, to pour sweeter sounds into their ears, rather than to apply medicine to their wounds. And yet, if you look to the truth, no speech is by nature pure, and none likewise faulty.
For what natural principle is there, or what law written into the constitution of the world, that this should be called 'a wall' (masculine) and this 'a chair' (feminine), since these things have no sex distinguished into feminine and masculine kinds, nor can anyone, however learned, teach me what these very words 'he' and 'she' are, or why from these one should designate the male sex, while what follows is applied to the feminine kinds? These are human conventions, and by no means necessary for all, established for the practical use of speech; for this 'wall' (feminine) perhaps and this 'chair' (masculine) might have been said without any reproach, if it had so pleased men to say from the beginning, and had been kept in common usage by the succeeding ages.
And yet, O you who accuse our doctrines of the foulness of vices, do not you yourselves have these very solecisms in those greatest and most admired books of yours? Do you not say one thing 'these skins' (neuter) and another 'these skins' (masculine); 'heaven' now masculine, now neuter; and likewise not 'cap' both masculine and neuter, and 'crocus' both masculine and neuter, and 'strait' both masculine and neuter? Is it not laid down among you 'this bread' now neuter, now 'this bread' masculine; 'this blood' now masculine, now neuter; 'candelabrum' and 'yoke' by the same rule as 'yoke' (masculine) and 'candelabrum' (masculine)? For if single nouns cannot have more genders than one apiece, nor can the same words belong to this gender and that—for one gender cannot pass over into another—
then he who pronounces masculine genders by feminine rules sins just as much as one sins who sets masculine articles before feminine kinds. Yet we observe you too bringing forth masculine things in the feminine, and feminine in the masculine, and those you call neuter in both this way and that, without any distinction. Either, then, there is no fault in using these indifferently, and you accuse us in vain of being deformed by the obscenity of solecisms; or, if it is certain that individual words ought to be explained by their proper rules, then you too are entangled in like faults—however many Epicadi, Caesellii, Verrii, Scauri, and Nisi you may keep at your fingertips.
"But if Christ was God," they say, "why did he appear in the form of a man, and why was he slain in human fashion?" Could that invisible Power, possessing no bodily substance, have brought itself into the world and lent itself to it, taken part in the councils of mortals, in any other way than by assuming some covering of more solid matter—one that might receive the fixing of eyes upon it, and upon which the gaze of the dullest contemplation might be able to fasten itself? For what mortal is there who could see him, who could discern him, if he had chosen to bring himself to the earth such as his primal nature is, and such as he himself willed not to be in either his quality or his divine power?
He therefore assumed the form of a man, and enclosed his power under the likeness of our kind, so that he might be seen and beheld, might utter words and teach, and might carry out all those things for the sake of which he had come to be done in the world—the command and arrangement of the supreme King being preserved. "Why then," one says, "could not the supreme King accomplish, without a feigned man, those things he had decreed were to be done in the world?" If it had to be done just as you say, perhaps he would have done it so; because it did not have to be, he did it otherwise.
Why he willed it in this manner and did not will it in that, the causes lie hidden, wrapped up and scarcely comprehensible to any—causes which perhaps you might have been able to receive, had you not long since been prepared not to receive them, and had you not fashioned yourself for a face of unbelief before that thing was set forth to you which you sought to know and to hear. "But he was slain in human fashion." Not he himself: for the falling of death cannot befall divine things, nor can that which is one and simple, and compacted of no gathering of parts, slip away by the dissolution of destruction. "Who then was seen to hang upon the cross, who died?" The man whom he had put on and bore about with himself. "It is incredible to tell, and wrapped in blind obscurities."
If you will, it is not blind, but set forth by a very close analogy. If, at the time when the Sibyl, pouring out her presages and those oracles, was full—as you say—of the power of Apollo, she had been cut down and slain by impious robbers: would Apollo be said to have been killed in her? If Bacis, if Helenus, Marcius, and other prophets likewise, while soothsaying, had been deprived of life and light: would anyone say that those had perished by the law of mortality who, speaking through their mouths, unfolded the ways of things to those who inquired?
That death which you speak of was the taking-on of a man, not of himself; of the thing borne, not of the bearer. Nor would so great a Power have submitted even to endure this, had not the matter had to be accomplished, and the inexplicable plan of destiny had to be laid open through sealed mysteries. "What are these," you will ask, "sealed and obscure mysteries?" They are such as no men can know, nor even those who are called the gods of the world can reach in any part by suspicion or conjecture, save those whom he himself has deemed worthy to impart with the gifts of so great a knowledge, and to lead into the hidden recesses of the inner treasure. For you see, if he had not willed hands to be laid upon him by anyone, he would have had to strive with the utmost exertion to keep his enemies from himself, or by his universal power to keep them off entirely.