predictions of the future, the excellence of the precepts, and the assertion of the government of all by One Being. My soul being thus taught of God I understand how the writings of the Gentiles lead to condemnation, but the sacred Scriptures to freedom from this world's slavery, liberating us from thousands of tyrants, and giving us, not indeed what we had not received, but what we had once received but had lost through error."
Tatian, with all the energy of a convert, loudly proclaimed the truth which satisfied him. He goes on to shew (cc. xxxi.–xli.) that the Christian religion was a "philosophy" far more ancient than that of the Greeks. He compares Homer and Moses, "the one the oldest of poets and historians, the other the founder of our barbarian wisdom." The comparison proves the Christian tenets older than those of the Greeks, and even than the invention of letters. After enumerating numerous variant opinions as to the date, parentage, and poetry of Homer, he remarks upon such discordant testimony as proving the history untrue; so different from the unanimity common among Christians. "We reject everything," he says, "which rests upon human opinion; we obey the commandments of God and follow the law of the Father of immortality. The rich among us follow philosophy, and our poor are taught gratuitously. We receive all who wish to be taught, aged women and striplings: every age is respected by us. . . . We do not test them by their looks, nor judge them by their outward appearance. In body they may be weak, but in mind they are strong. . . . What we do keep at a distance is licentiousness and falsehood." His mention of the women who received Christian instruction leads him to a digression in defence of them. The Gentiles scoffed, he says, at them, and alleged that the Christians talked nonsense among them. Tatian retorts (cc. xxxiii. xxxiv.) by pointing to the disgrace the Greeks cast upon themselves, not only by their unbecoming conduct to women generally, but by the statues they erected to courtesans and wanton poetesses. "All our women," bursts forth Tatian, "are chaste; and our maidens at their distaffs sing nobler songs about God than a Sappho." The Greeks should repudiate the lesson of immorality which their statues had immortalized and the foul practices inculcated by indecent writers, and turn to Christianity which enjoined truth and purity of thought and life. "I do not," says Tatian (c. xxxv.), "speak of these things as having merely heard about them. I have travelled much; I have studied your philosophy (al. rhetoric, cf. Eus. H. E. iv. 16, and Otto's note here), and your arts and inventions. At Rome I saw the multitude of statues you have collected there. And, as the result, I have turned from Roman boastfulness, Athenian exaggeration, ill-connected doctrines, to the barbaric Christian philosophy."
He now returns to the subject started in c. xxxi., after one word in deprecation of the sneer at himself: "Tatian, the man so superior to the Greeks, so superior to the numberless teachers of philosophy, has opened up a new vein of learning—the doctrines of the barbarians!" Whether Homer was contemporary with the Trojan war, or a soldier under Agamemnon, or even lived before the invention of letters, Moses yet lived long before either the building or taking of Troy. In proof of this, Tatian appeals to the Chaldeans, Phoenicians, and Egyptians. E.g. Berosus, the Babylonian historian, "a most competent authority," spoke of the wars of Nebuchadnezzar against the Phoenicians and Jews which happened 70 years before the Persian rule, and long after the age of Moses. Phoenician historians, such as Theodotus, Hypsicrates, and Mochus had referred to events connected with Hiram of Tyre, whose date was somewhere about the Trojan war. Both Solomon and Hiram lived long after Moses. The Egyptians were noted for the accuracy of their chronicles, and Ptolemy, the priest of Mendes, spoke of the departure of the Jews from Egypt as having taken place under the leadership of Moses under king Amosis. This king, according to him, lived in the time of the Argive king, Inachus, after whose reign, dating 20 generations, the taking of Troy was reached. Therefore, if Moses was a contemporary of Inachus, he lived some 400 years before the Trojan war. It was not till after the time of Inachus that the most illustrious deeds of gods and men in Greece were committed to writing and became known. Such records, therefore, were far less ancient than the time of Moses. Tatian sums up (c. xl.) by affirming it self-evident that Moses was of far greater antiquity than the ancient heroes, wars, or gods (demons). Men ought, therefore, to believe the more ancient authority in preference to the Greeks, who had borrowed from Moses, as from a spring, without acknowledgment (al. unconsciously); and in many cases had perverted what they took. Moses was, moreover, older than all the writers before Homer, e.g. than Linus, the teacher of Hercules, who lived in the generation before the Trojan war, than Orpheus, who was a contemporary with Hercules, and than the wisest of the wise men of Greece, e.g. Minos—so famous for his wisdom, shrewdness, and legislative powers—who lived in the 11th generation after Inachus; Lycurgus, the Lacedemonian lawgiver, who was born long after the taking of Troy; Draco, Solon, Pythagoras, and those seven wise men, the oldest of whom lived about the 50th of those Olympiads which began about 400 years after the taking of Troy.
The treatise is a defence of Christianity rather than of Christians, and not so much a defence of doctrines as an answer or oration to those who sneered at them. He depicts Christianity as contrasting by its goodness, wisdom, and truth with the heathenism which revelled in vice, foolishness, and error. Unlike other apologists, there is little care to discuss Thyestean banquets (cf. c. xxv.), or refute want of patriotism (c. iv.) His weapons are weapons of offence rather than of defence. In Tatian "barbaric (i.e. Christian) philosophy" dares to carry the war into the enemy's camp, and scorn is turned upon the scorners. It is a typical specimen of the class to which the lrrisio Gentilium Philosophorum of HERMIAS also belongs.
