Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] I will drop this line of argument now, confident that once I have shown what your gods actually are, I will have demonstrated, straight from the truth itself, what they are not. So then, as far as your gods go, all I see are the names of certain long-dead ancients, all I hear are myths, and all I recognize in your sacred rites is myth dressed up as ritual: [2] and as for the statues themselves, my only complaint is that their materials are siblings of ordinary household pots and utensils — indeed made from those very same pots and utensils, as if by some destiny, transformed by consecration, an artist's skill working the transfiguration, and doing so, I might add, most disgracefully, sacrilegiously, in the very act of manufacture — so that in fact it can serve as some comfort in our punishments, we who are made to suffer on account of these very gods, that they themselves suffer the identical treatment merely to come into being.
[3] You hang Christians on crosses and stakes: but what statue is not first shaped out of clay upon a cross-shaped frame of stakes? Your god's body is first fastened to a gibbet before it is ever consecrated. [4] You claw at Christians' flanks with hooked irons: yet on your gods, over every limb, the adze, the plane, and the rasp bear down far more forcefully. We are beheaded: your gods exist headless until the lead and glue and dowel-pegs arrive. We are thrown to the beasts: certainly the very beasts you dedicate to Liber and Cybele and the Heavenly Goddess. [5] We are burned alive: so were your gods, from the very first lump of raw material. We are condemned to the mines: that is where your gods are quarried from. We are exiled to islands: and it is not unusual for one of your gods to be born or to die on an island too. If divinity is established by these very things, then the punished are being consecrated, and our tortures ought to be called divine honors!
[6] But of course your gods, we are told, feel none of these injuries and insults done to their manufacture — just as they feel none of your homage either. What impious talk, what sacrilegious abuse! Gnash your teeth, foam at the mouth! You are the very same people who never took issue with a certain Seneca when he railed at your superstition at greater length and more bitterly than we do. [7] So then, if we refuse to worship the cold statues and images of your dead — likenesses so lifelike that kites and mice and spiders can tell exactly what they are — does not our rejection of a recognized error deserve praise rather than punishment? Can we possibly be said to harm beings we are perfectly certain do not exist at all? What does not exist suffers nothing from anyone, precisely because it does not exist.