An alternative theory of | Tertullian and the Eusebian fiction postulate
Web Publication by Mountain Man Graphics, Australia
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Tertullian Bishop of Carthage |
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As we have remarked already, three hundred years
have not yet passed in our existence.
Why does Tertullian not write that two hundred years
have not yet passed in our existence?
Tertullian is simply one of the legions of pseudomous names invented by Eusebius.
Tertullian, (ca.160 – ca.220 AD) AD NATIONES. TRANSLATED BY DR. HOLMES Chapter 9 - THE CHRISTIANS ARE NOT THE CAUSE OF PUBLIC CALAMITIES: THERE WERE SUCH TROUBLES BEFORE CHRISTIANITY But why should I be astonished at your vain imputations? Under the same natural form, malice and folly have always been associated in one body and growth, and have ever opposed us under the One instigator of error. Indeed, I feel no astonishment; and therefore, as it is necessary for my subject, I will enumerate some instances, that you may feel the astonishment by the enumeration of the folly into which you fall, when you insist on our being the causes of every public calamity or injury. If the Tiber has overflowed its banks, if the Nile has remained in its bed, if the sky has been still, or the earth been in commotion, if death has made its devastations, or famine its afflictions, your cry immediately is, "This is the fault of the Christians!" As if they who fear the true God could have to fear a light thing, or at least anything else (than an earthquake or famine, or such visitations). I suppose it is as despisers of your gods that we call down on us these strokes of theirs. As we have remarked already, three hundred years have not yet passed in our existence; but what vast scourges before that time fell on all the world, on its various cities and provinces! what terrible wars, both foreign and domestic! what pestilences, famines, conflagrations, yawnings, and quakings of the earth has history recorded! Where were the Christians, then, when the Roman state furnished so many chronicles of its disasters?
TERTULLIAN: Bishop of Carthage, in Africa; ex-Pagan born about 160, died 220. He was "the first of the Latin theological writers; ... and the first witness to the existence of a Latin Bible ... Tertullian's canon of the O.T. included the deutero- canonical books -- [i.e. the forged apocrypha]. ... He also cites the Book of Henoch [Enoch] as inspired, ... also recognizes IV Esdras and the Sibyl." (CE. xiv, 525.) He was the most violent distribist of them all in promoting the Christian religion, but renounced Christianity after 200 and became equally violent in propagating the extravagant heresy of Montanus. In this recantation of faith he gave evidence that he was in error in his former complete acceptance of Christianity as the last word and irrevocable posture in revealed truth, -- and revealed his own errant credulity. In attacking the heretics -- before he became one, of the most preposterous sect, -- he thus formulates the assurance of the finality of Christian Faith: "One has succeeded in finding definite truth, when he belie lies. ... After we have believed, search should cease." (Against Heresies, ch. xi; ANF. iii, 248.) Tertullian is noted for several declamations regarding the assurance of faith which have become famous, as they are fatuous: "Credo quia incredibilis est -- I believe because it is unbelievable"; and, like Paul's "I am become a fool in glorying," he vaunts thus his own folly: "Other matters for shame I find none which can prove me to be shameless in a good sense, and foolish in a happy one, by my own contempt for shame. The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed [to believe it] because men must needs be ashamed of it. And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And He was buried and rose again; the fact is certain because it is impossible." (De Carne Christi, ch. v; ANF. iii, 525.) Reasoning thus, -- or quite without reason -- Christians yet believe these confessed absurdities and impossibilities. Tertullian denounces the sin of theater-going, and in this awful illustration he invokes his God to witness of one of his lies to God's glory: "We have the case of the woman -- the Lord Himself is witness -- who went to the theater, and came back possessed. In the outcasting (exorcism), accordingly, when the unclean creature was upbraided with having dared to attack a believer, he firmly replied: 'And in truth I did most righteously, for I found her in my domain.'" (De Spectaculis, ch. xxvi; ANF. iii, 90.) In one of his sumptuary diatribes on woman's dress -- yet a favorite theme of the Vicars of God, though nowadays the complaint is of nether brevity -- he warns and assures: "to us the Lord has, even by revelations, measured the space for the veil to extend over. For a certain sister of ours was thus addressed by an angel, beating her neck," and telling her that she had as well be "bare down to your loins" as any elsewhere below the neck. (On the Veiling of Virgins, ch. xvii; ANF. iv, 37.) And he expresses the clerical concept of women, saying that "females, subjected as they are throughout to men, bear in their front an honorable mark of their virginity." (Ib. ch. x, p. 33.) The celibate Fathers all glorified the suppression of sex: "Marriage replenishes the earth, virginity fills Paradise," says St. Jerome. (Adv. Jovianum, I, 17; N&PNF. vi, 360.) The Fathers regarded Woman as did St. Chrysostom: "a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a painted ill!" Good Father Tertullian, in his Exhortation to Chastity, has chapters captioned: "Second Marriage a Species of Adultery," and "Marriage Itself Impugned as akin to Adultery." (On Chastity, chs. ix, x; ANF. iv, 55.) Strongly, and upon what seems good physiological reason, he "denies the virginity of Mary, the mother of Christ, in part, though he affirms it [oddly] ante partum." (CE. xiv, 523.) Father Tertullian was strong in advocacy of virginity not alone feminine, but of the men, exclaiming, "So many men-virgins, so many voluntary 128 eunuchs" (Ib.). He commends with marked approval the fanatical incitation of the Christ to self-mutilation "for the kingdom of heaven's sake" (Mt. xix, 11), and avers that to this same cause was due Paul's much-complained-of "thorn in the flesh," saying: "The Lord Himself opens the kingdoms of heaven to eunuchs, as being Himself a virgin; to whom looking, the apostle [Paul] also -- for this reason -- gives the preference to continence (I Cor. vii, 1, 7, 37, 40). ... 'Good,' he says, 'it is for a man not to have contact with her, for nothing is contrary to good except evil."' (On Monogamy, ch. iii; ANF. iv, 60.) For like reason it was, he assures, that Noah was ordered to take two of each animal into the ark, "for fear that even beasts should be born of adultery. ... Even unclean birds were not allowed to enter with two females each." (Ib. ch. iv; p. 62.) Father Tertullian shares the fantastic notions of natural history stated by Bishop St. Barnabas; in proof of the eternal renovation of all things, Tertullian says: "The serpent crawls into a cave and out of his skin, and uncoils himself in a new youth; with his scales, his years, too, are repudiated. The hyena, if you observe, is of annual sex, alternately masculine and feminine. ... The stag, feeding on the serpent, languishes -- from the effects of the poison -- into youth." (On the Pallium, ch. iii; ANF. iv, 7.) Magic admirably supplements nature and medical remedies as cure for the scorpion's sting, assures Father Tertullian: "Among cures certain substances supplied by nature have very great efficacy; magic also puts on some bandages." (Scorpiace, ch. i; ANF. iii, 633.) Like all the credulous ex-Pagan Fathers of Christianity, Tertullian is a confirmed Sibyllist, and believes the forged Pagan oracles as inspired truth of God. Citing several of her "prophecies," he assures with confidence: "And the Sibyl is thus proved no liar." (Pallium, ch. ii; ANF. iv, 6.) Tertullian admits, in a tu quoque argument, that the Christians are sun-worshippers: "You [Pagans] say we worship the sun; so do you." (CE. xiv, 525; Ad. Nationes, xiii; ANF. iii, 123.) He is in common with the Fathers in the belief in magic and astrology, which since Christ, however, are turned into holier channels in token of His divinity: "But Magi and astrologers came from the East (Matt. ii). We know the mutual reliance of magic and astrology. The interpreters of the stars, then, were the first to announce Christ's birth, the first to present gifts. ... Astrology now-a-days, forsooth, treats of Christ -- is the science of the stars of Christ; not of Saturn, or of Mars. But, however, that science has been allowed until the Gospel, in order that after Christ's birth no one should thenceforward interpret anyone's nativity by the heaven." (On Idolatry, ch. ix; ANF. iii, 65.) In common with all the Fathers, Tertullian appeals to the Phoenix as proof supreme of the resurrection of the body. It will be noticed, that the modern false translators of our Bibles have slipped in another bit of falsification by suppressing the word "phoenix" in the passage quoted by Tertullian, and have substituted the word "palm-tree" to express the flourishing state of the righteous, as there depicted: 129 "Then take a most complete and unassailable symbol of our hope [of resurrection], subject alike to life and death. I refer to the bird which is peculiar to the East, famous for its singularity, marvelous from its posthumous life, which renews its life in a voluntary death; its dying day is its birthday, for on it it departs and returns: once more a phoenix where just now there was none; once more himself, but just now out of existence; another, yet the same. What can be more express and more significant for our subject; or to what other thing can such a phenomenon bear witness? God even in His own Scripture says: 'The righteous shall flourish like the phoenix' [Greek Septuagint: Dikaios os phoenix anthesei; Ps. xcii, 12]. Must men die once for all, while birds in Arabia are sure of a resurrection?" (Tert., On the Resurrection of the Flesh, ch. xiii; ANF. iii, 554.) Father Tertullian vouches, too, with the other Fathers, for the bogus official Report of Pilate to Caesar, and for Pilate's conversion to Christianity, saying: "All these things Pilate did to Christ; and now in fact a Christian in his own convictions, he sent word of Him to the reigning Caesar, who was at the time Tiberius. Yes, and even the Caesars would have believed on Christ, if either the Caesars had not been necessary for the world, or if Christians could have been Caesars." (Apol. ch. xxi; ANF. iii,. 35.) Father Tertullian gives fall credence to the fable of the Septuagint, and assures the Emperors: "To this day, at the temple of Serapis, the librariis of Ptolemy are to be seen, with the identical Hebrew originals in them." (Apology, to the Rulers of the Roman Empire, I, xviii; ANF. iii, 32.) And, as all the other Fathers, he gives full faith and credit to the Pagan gods, as "effective witnesses for Christ"; -- "Yes, and we shall prove that your own gods are effective witnesses for Christ ... "Yes, and we shall prove that your own gods are effective witnesses for Christ. ... Against the Greeks we urge that Orpheus, at Piera, Musaeus at Athens, (etc.) imposed religious rites. ... Numa Pompilius laid on the Romans a heavy load of costly superstitions. Surely Christ, then, had a right to reveal Deity." (Apol. ch. xxi; ANF. iii, 36.) Like the other Fathers, Tertullian is also in the ranks of patristic forgers of holy fables, being either the author or the publisher of "The Passion of the Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas," the fabulous Martyrdom of two of the Church's most celebrated bogus Saints, annexed to his accredited works. (ANF. iii, 699-706.)-- extracted from Joseph Wheless,