Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] As some of you have dreamed up, our God is supposedly a donkey's head. Cornelius Tacitus planted this suspicion of just that sort. [2] For in the fifth book of his Histories, opening his account of the Jewish war with the origin of the nation, and arguing as he pleased about that origin, and about the nation's name and religion alike, he reports that the Jews, driven out of Egypt — or, as he supposed, exiles wandering the vast wastes of Arabia — when they were parched with thirst in a land utterly bare of water, made use of wild asses as guides to a spring, reckoning that the animals, after grazing, would be heading for a drink; and that out of gratitude for this they consecrated the likeness of that similar beast. [3] And from this, I take it, it was presumed that we too, as kin to the Jewish religion, are initiated into the same image. But that same Cornelius Tacitus — that most talkative teller of lies — reports in that very History that when Gnaeus Pompey took Jerusalem and for that reason entered the temple to spy out the secrets of the Jewish religion, he found no image there at all. [4] And surely, if anything was being worshipped that was represented by some effigy, it would be displayed nowhere more readily than in its own sanctuary — all the more so, since it feared no outside witnesses, worthless as its worship was. Only the priests were allowed to enter; even the sight of it was barred to everyone else by a hung curtain. [5] Yet you yourselves won't deny that you worship every kind of pack-animal, whole strings of gelded horses, along with their Epona. Perhaps this is held against us — that, among the worshippers of every kind of livestock and beast, we alone are the donkey-worshippers.
[6] But whoever thinks us devotees of the cross will be a fellow-worshipper of ours. When some piece of wood is being propitiated, the shape hardly matters, since the material is the same in kind; the form hardly matters, so long as that very thing is the body of a god. And yet how different, really, is Attic Pallas from a cross-beam, or Pharian Ceres, who stands for sale as a rough, unworked stake, a shapeless piece of wood? [7] Every piece of timber that is fixed upright is, in part, a cross. We worship a god who is whole and entire, if we worship one at all. We have already said that the origin of your gods was formed by sculptors starting from the cross. And you, too, adore Victories on your trophies, when the inmost frame of every trophy is a cross. [8] The whole religion of the Roman camp venerates the standards, swears by the standards, sets the standards above all the gods. All those arrays of images on the standards are so many ornaments hung on crosses; the streamers of the flags and banners are the robes of crosses. I commend your carefulness: you refused to consecrate crosses bare and unadorned.
[9] Others, rather more plausibly and with more show of reason, believe the sun is our god. We shall perhaps be reckoned with the Persians, though we don't worship the sun painted on a piece of linen, since we have it everywhere, in its own disc. [10] The suspicion, in fact, arose from this: it became known that we pray facing the east. But then again, plenty of you, out of the same wish to worship the heavenly bodies, move your lips toward sunrise. [11] Likewise, if we give ourselves over to rejoicing on the Sun's day, we do so for a reason quite different from sun-worship — we come second, after those who devote Saturn's day to idleness and feasting, straying, they too, from the Jewish custom, which they don't even recognize as such.
[12] But recently a fresh edition of our god has been published in this very city: some hired scoundrel, cheating the beasts of their due, put up a painting bearing this caption: "Ass-begotten — the Christians’ god." He had donkey's ears, one hoof, and was shown carrying a book and wearing a toga. We laughed at both the name and the shape. [13] But these people ought at once to worship, in due form, that two-shaped godhead of theirs — the gods they've taken on with heads mixed of dog and lion, horned with goat and ram, goat-legged from the loins, serpent-legged from the shins, winged at the sole or at the back.
[14] These points we've made in abundance, so as not to leave any rumor unanswered, as though out of a guilty conscience. Now let us turn to setting out our religion, and clear away all this once and for all.