Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol III:
Tertullian: Part I: The Christians are Not the Cause of Public Calamities: There Were Such Troubles Before Christianity.

Chapter IX. 595 —The Christians are Not the Cause of Public Calamities: There Were Such Troubles Before Christianity.

But why should I be astonished at your vain imputations?  Under the same natural form, malice and folly have always been associated in one body and growth, and have ever opposed us under the one instigator of error. 596 Indeed, I feel no astonishment; and therefore, as it is necessary for my subject, I will enumerate some instances, that you may feel the astonishment by the enumeration of the folly into which you fall, when you insist on our being the causes of every public calamity or injury. If the Tiber has overflowed its banks, if the Nile has remained in its bed, if the sky has been still, or the earth been in commotion, if death 597 has made its devastations, or famine its afflictions, your cry immediately is, “This is the fault 598 of the Christians!” As if they who fear the true God could have to fear a light thing, or at least anything else (than an earthquake or famine, or such visitations). 599 I suppose it is as despisers of your gods that we call down on us these strokes of theirs. As we have remarked already, 600 three hundred years have not yet passed in our existence; but what vast scourges before that time fell on all the world, on its various cities and provinces! what terrible wars, both foreign and domestic! what pestilences, famines, conflagrations, yawnings, and quakings of the earth has history recorded! 601 Where were the Christians, then, when the Roman state furnished so many chronicles of its disasters? Where were the Christians when the islands Hiera, Anaphe, and Delos, and Rhodes, and Cea were desolated with multitudes of men? or, again, when the land mentioned by Plato as larger than Asia or Africa was sunk in the Atlantic Sea? or when fire from heaven overwhelmed Volsinii, and flames from their own mountain consumed Pompeii? when the sea of Corinth was engulphed by an earthquake? when the whole world was destroyed by the deluge? Where then were (I will not say the Christians, who despise your gods, but) your gods themselves, who are proved to be of later origin than that great ruin by the very places and cities in which they were born, sojourned, and were buried, and even those which they founded?  For else they would not have remained to the present day, unless they had been more recent than that catastrophe.  If you do not care to peruse and reflect upon these testimonies of history, the record of which affects you differently from us, 602 in order p. 118 especially that you may not have to tax your gods with extreme injustice, since they injure even their worshippers on account of their despisers, do you not then prove yourselves to be also in the wrong, when you hold them to be gods, who make no distinction between the deserts of yourselves and profane persons? If, however, as it is now and then very vainly said, you incur the chastisement of your gods because you are too slack in our extirpation, you then have settled the question 603 of their weakness and insignificance; for they would not be angry with you for loitering over our punishment, if they could do anything themselves,—although you admit the same thing indeed in another way, whenever by inflicting punishment on us you seem to be avenging them.  If one interest is maintained by another party, that which defends is the greater of the two. What a shame, then, must it be for gods to be defended by a human being!

Footnotes

Comp. The Apology, cc. xl. xli.  [And Augustine, Civ. Dei. iii.]

By the “manceps erroris” he means the devil.

Libitina.

Christianorum meritum, which with “sit” may also, “Let the Christians have their due.” In The Apology the cry is, “Christianos ad leonem.”

We insert this after Oehler. Tertullian’s words are, “Quasi modicum habeant aut aliud metuere qui Deum verum.”

See above, c. vii.

Sæculum digessit.

Aliter vobis renuntiata.

Absolutum est.