Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
1| His suffering, then, had already been foretold by the prophets; foretold too was his bodily birth; the time of his taking a body had also been announced in advance; and plain as well was the reason for his becoming flesh: that the offspring sprung from injustice and licentiousness, which were doing outrage to just deeds and ways of life, might be destroyed, and that the whole inhabited world might come to share in wisdom and self-control, once the law decreed by the Savior had prevailed in the souls of nearly all people, once reverence for God had been strengthened and superstition wiped out. It was superstition that devised not only the slaughter of irrational animals but also the offering of human victims and the accursed pollution of altars, when, following the laws of the Egyptians and the Assyrians, people slaughtered righteous souls before images of beaten bronze or molded figures.
2| And so Memphis and Babylon reaped the fruit fitting for such worship: they have been laid waste and left uninhabited, together with their ancestral gods. I do not say this from hearsay; I was there myself, I inquired into it, and I became an eyewitness of the pitiable fate of these cities. Memphis is a desert, Memphis where Moses, at God's command, shattered the arrogance of Pharaoh, then the mightiest of kings, and brought down his army, victorious over many great nations and fortified with full armor, not with volleys of arrows or the hurling of javelins, but by holy prayer alone and gentle supplication.
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