“We are of your stock and nature: men are made, not born, Christians.”

We are of your stock and nature: men are made, not born, Christians.

Tertullian · The Apology (Apologeticus) · ANF III, Apology, Chapter XVIII

Addressed to pagan magistrates who treated the Christians as a foreign tribe. It is the sentence that makes conversion, rather than descent, the whole of what a Christian is — and it is aimed at readers who had themselves once laughed at the claim.