Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
From this, then, we draw up our prescription: if the Lord Christ Jesus sent out apostles to preach, then no preachers are to be received except the ones Christ himself appointed — since no one knows the Father except the Son, and whomever the Son has chosen to reveal him to; and the Son appears to have revealed him to no one but the apostles whom he sent to preach, obviously, what he had revealed to them. And as to what they preached — that is, what Christ revealed to them — here too I lay down as prescription that this must be proved in no other way than through those very churches which the apostles themselves founded, by their own preaching to them, as much by living voice, as they say, as afterward by letters. If this is so, then it follows that every doctrine which agrees with those apostolic churches, the wellsprings and originals of the faith, is to be reckoned as truth, holding without question the chain of transmission: the churches got it from the apostles, who in turn got it from Christ, who got it from God; while every doctrine which smells of anything contrary to the truth of the churches and of the apostles of Christ and of God is to be condemned in advance as a lie. It remains, then, for us to demonstrate whether this our doctrine, whose rule we have already set out above, is to be reckoned as descending from the tradition of the apostles, and, by that same token, whether all the others descend from a lie. We hold communion with the apostolic churches on the ground that our teaching differs from theirs in nothing: that is the proof of the truth.