Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
I am not so well off — or rather, I am not so badly off — that I need to put the apostles on trial. But since these utterly perverse people drag out that rebuke to cast suspicion on the doctrine handed down earlier, I will answer as if for Peter's sake: Paul himself said he had become all things to all people — a Jew to the Jews, not-a-Jew to those not Jews — so as to win them all. So it was for the sake of times, persons, and circumstances that they rebuked certain things, the very things into which they themselves, equally for the sake of times, persons, and circumstances, fell — just as Peter might have rebuked Paul for circumcising Timothy while himself forbidding circumcision. Let those who sit in judgment on the apostles see to that. It is well that Peter is even matched with Paul in martyrdom. But even if Paul was caught up to the third heaven and carried into paradise and heard certain things there, those things cannot be supposed to have equipped him for some other, more instructed doctrine, since the very condition of their disclosure was that they be revealed to no man. But if that unknown something has leaked out to somebody's private knowledge, and some heresy claims to follow it, then either Paul is guilty of betraying a secret, or someone else was afterward caught up into paradise and ought to be produced, someone to whom it was permitted to speak what Paul was not allowed even to murmur.