Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Equipped with this understanding against the opinion of the pagans, let us turn instead to the objections raised by our own people. For among us there are some, whether overly simple or overly cautious in belief, who demand scriptural authority for this renunciation of the shows, and leaves itself unsettled, on the ground that this abstinence is not explicitly and by name laid down for the servants of God. Indeed we nowhere find it as plainly stated as this: "You shall not kill, you shall not worship an idol, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not commit fraud" -- laid down so expressly as: "You shall not go to the circus, you shall not watch the theater, the games, the arena." But we do find that the first verse of David bears on this very matter too: "Blessed is the man," he says, "who has not entered the assembly of the ungodly, and has not taken his stand on the path of the sinful, nor settled in the seat of plague." For even though he seems to have declared that man blessed because he did not join the council and the sitting of Jews plotting to have the Lord killed, still divine Scripture always extends widely, wherever, in keeping with the sense of the present matter, discipline too is reinforced by it -- so that here too this verse is not foreign to the prohibition of the shows. For if he called just a handful of Jews then a council of the wicked, how much more so so vast a gathering of the pagan populace? Are the pagans somehow less ungodly, less sinful, lesser foes of Christ than the Jews were on that day? What of this, too -- the rest fits as well: for at the shows people sit in a chair, and stand in a way -- they even call the passages and dividers of the seating-belts "ways," and the paths through the crowd on the slope; and "chair" too is the very name for the curved rows of seating. So, turning it about: "unhappy the man who has entered any assembly whatever of the ungodly, and has taken his stand on any path whatever of the sinful, and has settled in any seat whatever of plague." Let us understand it as said generally, when something else, once said specifically, admits also of a general interpretation -- for some things pronounced specifically carry a general sense too. When God warns or rebukes the Israelites on a point of discipline, he certainly means it for everyone; when he threatens Egypt and Ethiopia with destruction, he certainly passes judgment in advance on every sinning nation. Thus every sinning nation is "Egypt" and "Ethiopia," moving from the particular case to the general kind -- just as, conversely, every show is a "council of the wicked," moving from the general kind to the particular case.