Quotes by Early Christian
and Jews
Regarding Abortion
Josephus, a first century Jew, priest, general and historian,
The law, moreover enjoins us to bring up all our offspring, and forbids women to
cause abortion of what is begotten, or to destroy it afterward; and if any woman
appears to have so done, she will be a murderer of her child, by destroying a
living creature, and diminishing humankind: if anyone, therefore, proceeds to
such fornication or murder, he cannot be clean.
Barnabas, an early Christian (100 AD), The Epistle of
Barnabas, "In the Way of Light," Thou shalt not take the name
of the Lord in vain. Thou shalt love thy neighbor more than thine own soul. Thou
shalt not slay the child by procuring abortion; nor, again, shalt thou destroy
it after it is born. Thou shalt not withdraw thy hand from thy son, or from thy
daughter, but from their infancy thou shalt teach them the fear of the Lord.
Didache [ 120 A.D.] The Didache,
or Teachings of the Twelve, is also believed to have originated in
Alexandria (though some think it came from Syria), probably during the first
decades of the second century. A church manual, divided into four parts, the Didache
treats Christian ethics, liturgical matters (baptism, fasting, the Eucharist,
the ministry and church government), and the Second Coming and end of the world.
And the second commandment of the Teaching; Thou shalt not
commit murder, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not commit paederasty,
thou shalt not commit fornication, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not practise
magic, thou shalt not practise witchcraft, thou shalt not murder a child
by abortion nor kill that which is begotten. Thou shalt not covet the
things of thy neighbour, 3. thou shalt not forswear thyself, thou shalt not bear
false witness, thou shalt not speak, evil, thou shalt bear no grudge. 4. Thou
shalt not be double-minded nor double-tongued; for to be double-tongued is a
snare of death. 5. Thy speech shall not be false, nor empty, but fulfilled by
deed. 6. Thou shalt not be covetous, nor rapacious, nor a hypocrite, nor evil
disposed, nor haughty. Thou shalt not take evil counsel against thy neighbour.
7. Thou shalt not hate any man; but some thou shalt reprove, and concerning some
thou shalt pray, and some thou shalt love more than thy own life.
Athenagoras, Second Century, Christian
philosopher from Athens who allegedly became a Christian while reading the
Scriptures in order to argue against them. Athenagoras’s familiarity with
pagan philosophy is evident in his works. Athenagoras wrote an Apology
(177) defending Christians to the Roman emperors Marcus Aurelius (ruled
161–180) and Commodus (ruled 180–192). In it he refuted three charges
brought against Christians: that Christians were atheists, that they practiced
incestuous immorality, and that they ate human flesh as part of their ritual.
Athenagoras argued that Christians, like the philosophers, recognized only one
God who is uncreated, immaterial, and known to the understanding alone. As for
the false gods, he wrote, the pagans did not even agree on who they were and,
further, they described them as doing immoral deeds. The wonders which the false
gods were thought to perform were really done by demons. Christians could not be
called immoral since they believed that it was wrong to sin even in one’s
thoughts and since they believed that sins would be punished eternally. Finally,
Athenagoras argued, no people would engage in cannibalism who refused to watch
combats in the circus, who did not expose infants to die, and who thought
abortion was wrong.
THE CHRISTIANS CONDEMN AND DETEST ALL CRUELTY,
What man of sound mind, therefore, will affirm, while such is our
character, that we are murderers? For we cannot eat human flesh till we have
killed some one. The former charge, therefore, being false, if any one should
ask them in regard to the second, whether they have seen what they assert, not
one of them would be so barefaced as to say that he had. And yet we have slaves,
some more and some fewer, by whom we could not help being seen; but even of
these, not one has been found to invent even such things against us. For when
they know that we cannot endure even to see a man put to death, though justly;
who of them can accuse us of murder or cannibalism? Who does not reckon among
the things of greatest interest the contests of gladiators and wild beasts,
especially those which are given by you? But we, deeming that to see a man put
to death is much the same as killing him, have abjured such spectacles. How,
then, when we do not even look on, lest we should contract guilt and pollution,
can we put people to death? And when we say that those women who use drugs to
bring on abortion commit murder, and will have to give an account to God for the
abortion, on what principle should we commit murder? For it does not belong to
the same person to regard the very fetus in the womb as a created being, and
therefore an object of God’s care, and when it has passed into life, to kill
it; and not to expose an infant, because those who expose them are chargeable
with child-murder, and on the other hand, when it has been reared to destroy it.
But we are in all things always alike and the same, submitting ourselves to
reason, and not ruling over it.
Minucius Felix, [A.D. 210]
"And now I should wish to meet him who says or believes
that we are initiated by the slaughter and blood of an infant. Think you that it
can be possible for so tender, so little a body to receive those fatal wounds;
for any one to shed, pour forth, and drain that new blood of a youngling, and of
a man scarcely come into existence? No one can believe this, except one who can
dare to do it. And I see that you at one time expose your begotten children to
wild beasts and to birds; at another, that you crush them when strangled with a
miserable kind of death. There are some women who, by drinking medical
preparations, extinguish the source of the future man in their very bowels, and
thus commit a parricide before they bring forth. And these things assuredly come
down from the teaching of your gods. For Saturn did not expose his children, but
devoured them. With reason were infants sacrificed to him by parents in some
parts of Africa, caresses and kisses repressing their crying, that a weeping
victim might not be sacrificed. Moreover, among the Tauri of Pontus, and to the
Egyptian Busiris, it was a sacred rite to immolate their guests, and for the
Galli to slaughter to Mercury human, or rather inhuman, sacrifices. The Roman
sacrificers buried living a Greek man and a Greek woman, a Gallic man and a
Gallic woman; and to this day, Jupiter Latiaris is worshipped by them with
murder; and, what is worthy of the son of Saturn, he is gorged with the blood of
an evil and criminal man. I believe that he himself taught Catiline to conspire
under a compact of blood, and Bellona to steep her sacred rites with a draught
of human gore, and taught men to heal epilepsy with the blood of a man, that is,
with a worse disease. They also are not unlike to him who devour the wild beasts
from the arena, besmeared and stained with blood, or fattened with the limbs or
the entrails of men. To us it is not lawful either to see or to hear of
homicide; and so much do we shrink from human blood, that we do not use the
blood even of eatable animals in our food.
John Chrysostom, John preached through many of Paul’s
letters ("I like all the saints," he said, "but St. Paul the most
of all—that vessel of election, the trumpet of heaven"), the Gospels of
Matthew and of John, and the Book of Genesis. Changed lives were his goal, and
he denounced sins from abortion to prostitution and from gluttony to swearing.
Additional Reading
