Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] But so that we might approach him — and his dispositions and his will — more fully and more forcibly, he added the instrument of Scripture, for anyone who wishes to inquire about God, and having inquired, to find him, and having found him, to believe, and having believed, to serve him. [2] For from the very beginning of the world he sent forth men worthy, by the innocence of their righteousness, to know God and to make him known, men flooded with the divine Spirit, so that they might proclaim that God is one, who created the universe, who fashioned man out of the earth — this one is the true Prometheus — who ordered the world with fixed dispositions of times and appointed ends, [3] and further, what signs of his majesty as judge he has issued through rains, through fires, what disciplines he has laid down as owed to himself, what rewards he has set for those who ignore, abandon, or observe them — so that, when this age has run its course, he who is to judge will render to his worshippers the reward of eternal life, and to the profane an equally perpetual and unbroken fire, raising up all the dead from the beginning, re-forming them and reviewing them, for the reckoning of what each side has deserved. [4] We too once laughed at all this. We are from your own ranks. Christians are made, not born.
[5] Those we have called heralds are termed "prophets," from their office of foretelling. Their utterances, and likewise the powers they displayed as pledges of the divine faith, remain in the treasuries of literature, and they are not hidden away. The most learned of the Ptolemies, the one they surname Philadelphus, and the shrewdest in every branch of literature, when in his zeal for libraries he was rivaling, I believe, Pisistratus, among his other efforts at gathering records — records to which either age or some curiosity lent a claim to fame — on the recommendation of Demetrius of Phalerum, then the most respected of grammarians, whom he had put in charge, asked the Jews too for their books, their own native writings, which they alone possessed. [6] For it was from among themselves, and always to themselves, that the prophets had spoken, addressing, that is, God's own household nation, by the favor shown their fathers. Hebrews once, who are now Jews; hence Hebrew, too, the letters and the speech. [7] But so that this knowledge should not go unshared, this too the Jews granted Ptolemy: seventy-two translators were made available to him, men whom Menedemus the philosopher too, that champion of providence, looked up to for the harmony of their opinion. Aristeas has confirmed all this for you as well. [8] Thus he left the records laid open in Greek script; today, at the Serapeum, Ptolemy's library exhibits them alongside the Hebrew originals themselves. [9] And the Jews, too, read them publicly and freely. It's a liberty they pay tax for; every Sabbath it's open to all comers. Whoever listens will find God; whoever even makes an effort to understand will be forced to believe as well.