Chapter II. The Charges Usually Brought Against Us by Those Who Try to Slander Our Doctrines

For in the first place any one might naturally want to know who we are that have come forward to write. Are we Greeks or Barbarians? Or what can there be intermediate to these? and what do we claim to be, not in regard to the name, because this is manifest to all, but in the manner and purpose of our life? For they would see that we agree neither with the opinions of the Greeks, nor with the customs of the Barbarians.

What then may the strangeness in us be, and what the new-fangled manner of our life? And how can men fail to be in every way impious and atheistical, who have apostatized from those ancestral gods by whom every nation and every state is sustained? Or what good can they reasonably hope for, who have set themselves at enmity and at war against their preservers, and have thrust away their benefactors? For what else are they doing than fighting against the gods?

And what forgiveness shall they be thought to deserve, who have turned away from those who from the earliest time, among all Greeks and Barbarians, both in cities and in the country, are recognized as gods with all kinds of sacrifices, and initiations, and mysteries by all alike, kings law-givers and philosophers, and have chosen all that is impious and atheistical among the doctrines of men? And to what kind of punishments would they not justly be subjected, who deserting the customs of their forefathers have become zealots for the foreign mythologies of the Jews, which are of evil report among all men?

And must it not be a proof of extreme wickedness and levity lightly to put aside the customs of their own kindred, and choose with unreasoning and unquestioning faith the doctrines of the impious enemies of all nations? Nay, not even to adhere to the God who is honoured among the Jews according to their customary rites, but to cut out for themselves a new kind of track in a pathless desert, that keeps neither the ways of the Greeks nor those of the Jews?

These then are questions which any Greek might naturally put to us, having no true understanding either of his own religion or of ours. But sons of the Hebrews also would find fault with us, that being strangers and aliens we misuse their books, which do not belong to us at all, and because in an impudent and shameless way, as they would say, we thrust ourselves in, and try violently to thrust out the true family and kindred from their own ancestral rights.

For if there was a Christ divinely foretold, they were Jewish prophets who proclaimed His advent, and also announced that He would come as Redeemer and King of the Jews, and not of alien nations: or, if the Scriptures contain any more joyful tidings, it is to Jews, they say, that these also are announced, and we do not well to misunderstand them.

Moreover they say that we very absurdly welcome with the greatest eagerness the charges against their nation for the sins they committed, but on the other hand pass over in silence the promises of good things foretold to them; or rather, that we violently pervert and transfer them to ourselves, and so plainly defraud them while we are simply deceiving ourselves. But the most unreasonable thing of all is, that though we do not observe the customs of their Law as they do, but openly break the Law, we assume to ourselves the better rewards which have been promised to those who keep the Law.