Tertullian, Apology 2

Suppose we really are the worst criminals. Why, then, do you treat us differently from our peers — that is, from every other guilty person — when identical offenses demand identical handling? Other defendants speak for themselves or hire advocates to proclaim their innocence; the right to answer and to argue stands open because no one may be condemned without a defense or a hearing. Yet Christians alone are forbidden to say anything that could clear their case, uphold the truth, or keep the judge from acting unjustly. You demand only what public hatred requires: confession of the name, not examination of the crime. If you investigate a homicide or sacrilege or incest or treason, you are not satisfied with the mere admission of the label; you insist on the details — quality, number, place, manner, time, accomplices, associates. With us, nothing of the sort, even though it should be extracted with equal force: whatever is falsely alleged, how many infanticides each has tasted, how many incests each has concealed, which cooks and which dogs were present. Oh, the governor's glory if he could uncover someone who had already eaten a hundred infants! Yet we find that investigation itself is barred in our case.

When Pliny Secundus governed the province, he executed some Christians and stripped others of rank, but the sheer multitude unsettled him. He consulted Emperor Trajan, reporting that beyond their obstinate refusal to sacrifice he had discovered nothing about their rites except that they met before dawn to sing to Christ as God and to bind themselves by discipline against homicide, adultery, fraud, perfidy, and other crimes. Trajan replied that such people must not be sought out, but if brought before the court they must be punished. A verdict tangled by necessity! He denies they should be investigated as innocent, yet orders them punished as guilty. He spares and rages, feigns ignorance and takes notice. What are you doing to yourselves with this judgment? If you condemn, why not also investigate? If you will not investigate, why not also absolve? Military posts scour the provinces for robbers; every citizen becomes a soldier against enemies of the state, and inquiry reaches accomplices and associates alike. Only the Christian may not be investigated — only presented — as if investigation would produce anything but the presentation itself. So the accused is presented, then condemned — a man no one wanted to find, who, I suspect, earned punishment not because he was guilty but because, unsearched, he was discovered.

Thus you do not follow the standard form of judging crimes: you torture others who deny in order to extract a confession, but you torture Christians alone to force a denial. If Christianity were truly a crime, we would deny it and you would compel confession by torture. You do not think crimes should go uninvestigated because you are certain they are admitted by the mere confession of the name — yet even today, when a confessed murderer admits what murder is, you still extort a formal admission. More perversely still, you presume our crimes from the confession of the name, then use torture to make us withdraw that confession, so that in denying the name we equally deny the crimes you presumed from it.

I suspect you do not actually want us to perish, you who consider us the worst. You typically tell murderers: "Deny, and I will have you torn apart if you persist in confessing." If you do not act that way toward the guilty, then you judge us most innocent — since you do not want us to persist in a confession you know is condemned by necessity, not justice. A man cries, "I am a Christian." He tells you what he is; you want to hear what he is not. Presidents of truth, you labor to hear a lie from us alone. "This is what I am," he says, "the very thing you asked about. Why twist me the wrong way? I confess, and you twist. What would you do if I denied?" You hardly trust others who deny; us, if we deny, you believe at once. Let that perversity alarm you, lest some hidden force serve you against the form and nature of judgment, against the laws themselves. Unless I am mistaken, the laws order the guilty to be punished, not concealed; they prescribe that the confessed be condemned, not absolved. Senatorial decrees, imperial mandates, the empire whose ministers you are — all define this. Your rule is civil, not tyrannical. Under tyrants torture serves as punishment; under you it is reserved for questioning. Keep your law for them up to the point of confession; if confession forestalls it, the charge collapses. A sentence is required; the guilty must be removed by right, not excused. No one strives to absolve him; that is not permitted; therefore no one is compelled to deny.

You regard the Christian — a man charged with every crime, enemy of gods, emperors, laws, morals, all nature — and you compel him to deny so you can absolve a man you cannot absolve unless he denies. You transgress the laws. You want him to deny his guilt so you can make him innocent, and unwillingly so, no longer guilty of the past. Where does this perversity come from? So that you do not even reflect that a spontaneous confession deserves more credence than a forced denial; or that, compelled to deny, he does not deny from conviction; and once absolved, he may laugh at your rivalry, again a Christian, after leaving the tribunal. Since in everything you treat us differently from other criminals, insisting on this one point — that we be excluded from that name (for we are excluded if we do what non-Christians do) — you can see that the case involves no crime, but the name, which a certain rival doctrine pursues, first ensuring that men do not want to know for certain what they know for certain they do not know. Therefore they believe about us what is unproven, and refuse to investigate lest they prove we are not what they prefer to believe, so that the name of that rival doctrine, on presumed rather than proven crimes, may be condemned from its own confession alone. Hence we are tortured for confessing, punished for persisting, absolved for denying — because it is a battle over the name. Finally, why do you read "Christian" from the tablet, but not "homicide"? If the Christian is a homicide, why not "incestuous"? Or whatever else you believe we are? In us alone is it shameful or distasteful to pronounce the names of crimes? If the Christian is guilty of no crime, the name is intensely hostile — if the crime consists only of the name.