Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Truth is older than everything, unless I am mistaken — and this too works in my favor: the antiquity that stands behind our divine literature, from which one may easily believe that it was the treasury from which every later wisdom drew. And if I were not already husbanding the bulk of this volume, I would run out this proof as well. What poet, what sophist, has not drunk deep from the fountain of the prophets? It was from there that the philosophers watered the thirst of their own wits, so that what they hold from us we now match against them. That is why, I think, philosophy itself was even banished by some peoples — I mean by the Thebans, the Spartans, the Argives. While men reaching for what is ours — driven, as we have said, by love of fame and a mere lust for eloquence — stumbled on something in the holy scriptures as they leafed through them out of sheer curiosity, they turned it to their own works, not quite believing it divine enough to keep them from tampering with it, and not quite understanding it, since even then it lay under a cloud, obscured even to the Jews themselves, to whom it properly belonged. And even where some simplicity of truth remained, human fussiness, all the more scornful of belief, wavered, and in the process muddled even the certainty it had found into uncertainty. For once they had found God, they did not go on to argue him as they had found him, but debated instead his quality, his nature, his dwelling place. Some assert he is incorporeal, others corporeal — so both the Platonists and the Stoics; some build him out of atoms, others out of numbers, as Epicurus and Pythagoras did; another out of fire, as it seemed to Heraclitus; and the Platonists make him one who cares for things, while the Epicureans, on the contrary, make him idle, unoccupied, and — if I may put it so — no one at all as far as human affairs go. The Stoics place him outside the world, turning this mass from without like a potter; the Platonists place him within the world, remaining inside what he governs, after the manner of a helmsman. So too about the world itself they differ, whether it was born or unborn, whether it will pass away or endure; so too about the state of the soul, which some claim is divine and eternal, others dissoluble — each man delivering or reshaping his verdict as he happens to feel.
Nor is it any wonder that the old document has been twisted by the wits of philosophers, since from that same seed certain men have adulterated even this newer plantation of ours to fit philosophical opinions, splitting off from the one road many crooked and untraceable byways. I mention this so that no one, noting the diversity within this sect of ours, should think we thereby put ourselves on a level with the philosophers, and judge the truth by the variety of its defenders. But we lay down, promptly and plainly, this rule against our own counterfeiters: that the standard of truth is the one that comes down from Christ, transmitted through his own companions — men whom these various latter-day commentators will be shown to postdate by no small margin.
Everything set up against the truth is built out of truth itself, the spirits of error working this rivalry. By them these counterfeits of the wholesome teaching have been smuggled in; by them certain fables too have been planted, meant either to weaken belief in the truth by resembling it, or rather to win credit for themselves at truth's expense — so that a man might refuse to believe the Christians precisely because he does not believe the poets or philosophers either, or, worse, might think the poets and philosophers all the more believable precisely because they are not Christians. And so we are laughed at for preaching that God will judge. Yet the poets and philosophers set up a tribunal in the underworld too, just the same. And if we threaten Gehenna — a hidden fire, a treasury of subterranean punishment — we are laughed down all the harder, though the dead have their own Pyriphlegethon, a river no different. And if we speak of Paradise, a place of divine delight set aside to receive the spirits of the saints, fenced off by a wall of fiery zone from the knowledge of the common world, the Elysian Fields got there first and staked the claim to belief.
Where, I ask you, did all this come from — so exactly matching what the philosophers and poets say? From nowhere but our own sacred writings. If it comes from our sacred writings, as coming from the earlier source, then ours are the more trustworthy and the more to be believed, since even their copies find credit. But if it comes from their own private notions, then our sacred writings will be taken for copies of the later material — which the very shape of things will not allow, for a shadow never precedes the body, nor an image the truth.