Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Let the scorpion still strike, brandishing his murderous god — I will shudder, plainly, at that foul blast of blasphemy stinking from a heretic's mouth; and yet I will embrace even such a God on the confidence of reason — the very reason by which he pronounced himself more than a murderer, out of the mouth of his own Wisdom, in the voice of Solomon. Wisdom, he says, has slaughtered her sons. Wisdom is sophia. She has slaughtered them wisely, since it is unto life, and rationally, since it is unto glory. [2] O the genius of that parricide! O the artistry of that crime! O the argument of a cruelty that killed for this very reason — so that the one she killed should not die! And so what follows? Wisdom is sung with hymns at the exits — for the exit of martyrs too is sung. Wisdom, in the open squares, discourses on constancy — for it is well that she slaughters her sons. [3] Trusting, upon the highest walls, she speaks — for according to Isaiah one man there cries out, 'I belong to God'; and a second calls himself 'by the name Jacob'; and a third writes upon his own hand 'unto Israel.' What a mother, this! I too long to be numbered among her children, that she might put me to death; I long for that death, so as to be made her child. Yet does she merely put her children to death, or does she likewise refine them? For elsewhere too I hear God declaring: I will melt them down as one melts gold in fire, and try them as silver is tried. [4] Through the torments of fires and punishments, no doubt — through the assaying trials of faith's martyrdoms. The apostle too knows what sort of God he has described, when he writes: if God did not spare his own Son, but handed him over for us, how will he not also, along with him, freely give us all things? See how divine Wisdom slaughtered even her own son, her firstborn and only-begotten — a son certain to live again, indeed to bring the rest back to life as well. [5] I may say, borrowing God's own wisdom, that Christ is the one who delivered himself up on account of our transgressions. Wisdom has now even butchered herself. Words like this savor not merely by sound but by sense, and are meant to be heard not only by the ears but by the mind. He who does not understand and yet believes calls God cruel. And yet a sentence stands even for one who fails to understand it, meant precisely to check the rashness of understanding it any other way. [6] For, it says, who has grasped what the Lord intends? Or who ever served as his adviser, so as to teach him, or who ever pointed out to him understanding's path? Yet the world was permitted to appease the Diana of the Scythians, or the Mercury of the Gauls, or the Saturn of the Africans, with a human victim, and even today in Latium, in the middle of the city, human blood is tasted for Jupiter — and no one objects, or fails to presume some rationale, or grants that his god's will simply cannot be weighed. [7] If our God too had demanded martyrdoms for himself under the name of his own sacrifice, who would have reproached him for a deadly religion, for mournful rites, an altar turned pyre, a priest turned undertaker — and would he not rather have counted more blessed the man whom God had eaten?