Lactantius, Divine Institutes 5.3

These men had no will to fabricate, nor any cunning to do so, because they were unskilled. Indeed, who could? An unlearned man cannot invent a coherent, self-consistent story when the most learned philosophers — Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Zeno — contradicted one another and themselves. That is the nature of falsehoods: they cannot hold together. By contrast, the tradition these men handed down is true, so it is consistent at every point, entirely self-agreeing, and therefore persuasive, because it rests on a steady rational foundation. They did not invent this religion for profit or advantage. Their lives, both in precept and in practice, renounced pleasure and despised everything the world counts as good. They not only accepted death for their faith; they knew in advance they would die, they foretold it, and they warned that all who followed their teaching would suffer harsh and unspeakable things.

Yet the opponent affirms that Christ, driven out by the Jews, gathered a band of nine hundred men and turned bandit. Who dares challenge such authority? We are to believe it outright — perhaps some Apollo revealed it to him in a dream. Countless bandits have perished in the past and perish daily; you yourself have condemned many. Which of them, after his cross, was ever called not merely a man but a god? Perhaps you believed the story because you yourselves consecrated a murderer, Mars, as a god — something you would never have done had the Areopagites crucified him. While denying Christ’s wonders, the opponent tries to show that Apollonius performed equal or even greater feats. It is striking that he passes over Apuleius, whose many marvels are commonly recorded. Why, then, does no one worship Apollonius as a god — unless you alone, worthy of such a deity, with whom the true God will punish you for eternity? If Christ counts as a magician because he worked wonders, Apollonius is certainly the more skilled: when Domitian tried to punish him, he simply failed to appear in court. How different from Christ, who was seized and nailed to the cross. Perhaps the opponent means to charge Christ with arrogance for claiming to be God, so that Apollonius may seem more modest — though he allegedly did greater things, he did not arrogate divinity to himself.

I pass over a detailed comparison of their works now, having exposed the fraud and trickery of the magical art in the previous two books. I deny that anyone exists who does not desire above all to obtain after death what even the greatest kings crave. Why do men build magnificent tombs, erect statues, commission portraits? Why do they strive, through famous deeds or even death for their fellow citizens, to win the good opinion of posterity? Why, finally, did you choose to raise this detestable monument of your intellect, founded as it were on mud, unless you hope for immortality through the memory of your name? It is therefore foolish to suppose Apollonius did not want what he would certainly have desired if he could — for no one rejects immortality, especially when you admit that some worshiped him as a god and that his statue, under the name Hercules Alexicacus, is still honored by the Ephesians. He could not be believed a god after death, because it was established he was a man and a magician; thus he laid claim to divinity under a foreign title, since he could not and dared not do so in his own name. But our Christ could be believed God because he was no magician, and he was believed because he truly was God. I do not say this to prove Apollonius is not a god because he refused the title, but to show that we are wiser: we do not instantly ascribe divinity to marvels, as you do, who accepted a god on the strength of petty portents.

It is no wonder that you, so far removed from God’s wisdom, understand nothing of what you have read. The Jews, who from the beginning had read the prophets to whom God’s mystery was entrusted, still did not know what they were reading. Learn, then, if you have any heart: we do not believe Christ is God because he worked wonders, but because we saw that everything the prophets foretold was fulfilled in him. He passed over the wonders: we would have taken him for a magician, as you do now and the Jews did then, had not all the prophets, with one spirit, predicted beforehand that he would do those very things. And so we believe him God not so much because of his wondrous works as because of that very cross, which you lick like dogs — since the cross, too, was foretold. He did not receive the faith of divinity from his own testimony — for who can be believed when speaking of himself? — but from the testimony of the prophets, who sang long before, with one spirit, all that he did and suffered. That can never happen for Apollonius, Apuleius, or any magician.

After pouring out such delirious ravings of ignorance, after trying to uproot the truth entirely, he dared to title his books ‘Truth-loving’ — a label hostile to God. O blind heart, O mind blacker than Cimmerian darkness! He may have been a disciple of Anaxagoras, for whom snow served as ink. But it is the same blindness to call falsehood truth and to brand truth as mendacity. Clearly a crafty man sought to hide a wolf under a sheep’s skin, that with a deceitful title he might lead the reader astray. Yet grant it was ignorance, not malice: what truth have you brought us, except that you, the defender of the gods, have in the end betrayed them? You heaped praise on the highest God — confessing him King, Greatest, Maker of all, Fountain of good, Parent of all, Creator and Sustainer of the living — then you stripped your own Jupiter of his kingdom and reduced him to the rank of a servant, deprived of supreme power. Your own epilogue therefore convicts you of the error of foolish vanity. You affirm that gods exist, yet you subject them and enslave them to the very God whose religion you try to overthrow.