Others, with greater regard to good manners, it must be confessed, suppose that the sun is the god of the Christians, because it is a well-known fact that we pray towards the east, or because we make Sunday a day of festivity. What then? Do you do less than this? Do not many among you, with an affectation of sometimes worshipping the heavenly bodies likewise, move your lips in the direction of the sunrise? It is you, at all events, who have even admitted the sun into the calendar of the week; and you have selected its day, [673] in preference to the preceding day [674] as the most suitable in the week [675] for either an entire abstinence from the bath, or for its postponement until the evening, or for taking rest and for banqueting. By resorting to these customs, you deliberately deviate from your own religious rites to those of strangers. For the Jewish feasts on the Sabbath and "the Purification," [676] and Jewish also are the ceremonies of the lamps, [677] and the fasts of unleavened bread, and the "littoral prayers," [678] all which institutions and practices are of course foreign from your gods. Wherefore, that I may return from this digression, you who reproach us with the sun and Sunday should consider your proximity to us. We are not far off from your Saturn and your days of rest.

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Footnotes:

[672] Comp. The Apology, c. xvi.

[673] Sunday.

[674] Saturday.

[675] Ex diebus.

[676] On the "Coena pura," see our Anti-Marcion, p. 386, note 4.

[677] See Leviticus 24:2; also 2 Chronicles 13:11. Witsius (Ægyptiaca, ii. 16, 17) compares the Jewish with the Egyptian "ritus lucernarum."

[678] Tertullian, in his tract de Jejun. xvi., speaks of the Jews praying (after the loss of their temple, and in their dispersion) in the open air, "per omne litus."