re: #490 Nyet

Tertullian goes into more detail:

II. i. We are accused of infamous secret atrocities,— infanticide, a feast of blood, and incest, although no proof has ever been forthcoming, and only rumour is responsible for the charge.

WE are called the most infamous of men on the charge of an infanticidal religious rite and a banquet thereat, and incest after the feast;—incest which dogs that overturn the lights (our pimps forsooth) bring about through the shamelessness which is occasioned by the darkness and impious lusts. Yet we are ever but called so, nor are you at any pains to drag into light what we have been so long charged with. Either therefore elicit the facts if you believe them, or forego belief if you have not brought them to light. Your want of straightforwardness lays you open to the preliminary objection that what you do not dare to investigate has in fact no existence. A very different duty from investigation is that which you bid your executioner carry out against the Christians, namely, not to make them say what they do, but to make them deny what they are.

The origin of this religion dates, as I have already said, from the time of Tiberius. On its first appearance the Truth encountered hostility from the prejudice it always excites. She had as many enemies as there were strangers to her: the Jews indeed peculiarly so, from jealousy; the soldiers, from habits of |24 extortion; even those of our own households 20, from the force of circumstances. We are daily beset, daily betrayed, we are unexpectedly seized, and oftenest in our actual assemblies and meetings. Yet who even thus ever chanced on a squalling infant? Who ever kept us for the judge with our mouths bloody as he found them, like Cyclops and Sirens? Who ever detected in their wives any traces of un-chastity? Who ever first found out and then concealed such crimes, or sold his information with the culprits in his grasp? If we are always escaping detection, when was our guilt made known? nay, by whom could it be divulged? Certainly not by the criminals themselves, since the duty of secrecy is imperatively demanded in all mysteries. The Samothracian and Eleusinian mysteries are kept secret; how much more, then, such as, if disclosed, would at once provoke human punishment and for which Divine wrath would be reserved? If then they are not themselves their own betrayers, it follows that outsiders must have furnished the information. And whence have outsiders derived their acquaintance with the facts? when from religious initiations the profane are always excluded, and precautions are taken against witnesses,—unless indeed the impious know less of fear!

The nature of rumour is known to all. As your own poet says 21—

‘Rumour is an ill, and none more swift.’

Why is Rumour an ill? because swift? because a |25 talebearer? or because generally false? for not even when in the act of bringing true news is it free from the taint of falsehood,—detracting from, adding to, altering the truth. Why, such is its condition of being, that it would not steadily persist unless it spread falsehood, and it only flourishes so long as it offers no proofs; since, when it has brought proofs, it ceases to exist, and hands over the fact as if its duty of news-bearing were discharged; and thenceforward it is held as a fact, and is called a fact. Nor does any one say for instance: ‘They say this happened at Rome;’ or, ‘There is a rumour that he is appointed to the province;’ but, ‘He is appointed to the province;’ and, ‘This happened at Rome.’ Rumour, a name for uncertainty, has no place where certainty exists. For would any but a rash man believe Rumour? A wise man trusts not to the uncertain. Any one can judge this, no matter how wide the circuit of its diffusion, no matter how strengthened by emphatic assertion. A tale which has originated at some time or other with a single authority, from him is bound to insinuate itself into the propagating channels of tongues and ears. And a flaw in the insignificant source so obscures the rest of the report, that it never strikes any one whether the first lips did not originate a falsehood, as often happens either from a jealous imagination or whimsical suspicion, or the mere love of lying which in some persons is not an acquirement, but innate. Well is it, then, that according to your own proverbs and maxims, ‘time reveals all things,’ in the |26 order of Nature which has so arranged it that nothing be long hidden, even though rumour has not disseminated it.

Justly, therefore, has Rumour alone all this time been privy to the crimes of the Christians. This is the informer you produce against us,—one which has never yet been able up to the present time to prove the charge it in times past cast in our teeth, though in so long a period of time it has strengthened it into a general belief.