Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
To smear the apostles with some charge of ignorance, then, they bring up how Peter, and those with him, were rebuked by Paul. "See," they say, "something was lacking in them" — building on this the further claim that a fuller knowledge could have come along afterward, of the kind that fell to Paul when he corrected his predecessors. Here too I can say to these deniers of the Acts of the Apostles: "First show us who this Paul is — what he was prior to becoming an apostle, and by what path he came to that office" — since on other questions too they lean on him heavily. For it is not enough, when he himself professes to be an apostle turned from a persecutor, for any careful believer simply to take his word for it — seeing that not even the Lord bore witness about himself. Yet they would have us believe without Scripture, so that we may believe against Scripture. Still, let them show, from this very passage they cite about Peter being rebuked by Paul, that Paul introduced some other shape of the gospel beyond the one Peter and the rest had already delivered. And yet — transformed from persecutor into preacher, he is brought by brothers to the brothers as one brother among others, to those very men from whom, in turn, he had received the faith through the apostles. Then, as he himself relates, he went up to Jerusalem to get to know Peter — by the proper office and right, that is, of that same faith and preaching. For those men would not have marveled that a persecutor had become a preacher, nor would they have gone on to glorify the Lord because his former adversary Paul had come over, if Paul had been preaching anything contrary. And so they gave him the right hand of fellowship, a sign of concord and agreement, and arranged between themselves a division of labor — not a splitting of the gospel, and not that one should preach one thing and the other something else, but that one should preach to one group and the other to another: Peter to the circumcision, Paul to the nations. As for the rest, if Peter was rebuked because, having eaten together with the Gentiles, he then began to withdraw from their company out of regard for certain persons, that was plainly a fault of conduct, not of preaching. For this did not mean that a different God than the Creator, or a different Christ than the one born of Mary, or a different hope than the resurrection, was being proclaimed.