Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Come now, if you would rather exercise your curiosity well in the business of your own salvation, run through the apostolic churches, in which the very chairs of the apostles still preside in their own places, in which their own authentic letters are read aloud, sounding out their voice and representing the face of each one. Achaia lies closest to you -- there you have Corinth. Should Macedonia be within reach, Philippi awaits you there; if you can journey on into Asia, Ephesus is yours; and if you are close by Italy, you have Rome, from which authority lies ready at hand for us too. How fortunate is that church, on which the apostles poured out the whole of their teaching along with their own blood, where Peter is made equal to the Lord's own passion, where Paul is crowned with the death of John, where the apostle John, after being plunged into fiery oil and suffering nothing, is banished to an island. Let us see what she learned, what she taught -- in agreement, too, with the churches of Africa: she acknowledges a single God, the Lord who fashioned the whole world, and Jesus Christ, brought forth from the Virgin Mary, Son of the God who is Creator, together with the rising again of our flesh; she blends the Law and the Prophets together with the writings of the Gospels and the apostles, and from that mixture she drinks her faith; that faith she seals with water, clothes with the Holy Spirit, feeds with the Eucharist, exhorts to martyrdom -- and against this rule she receives no one. This is the teaching -- I will not even say now that it merely foretold the heresies to come, but rather the very teaching out of which the heresies came forth. Yet they are not of it, precisely because they arose against it. Even from the pit of the mild and excellent and necessary olive springs the harsh wild olive; even from the poppy-seed of the sweetest and most delightful fig springs the windy and useless wild fig. So too the heresies are of our own stock but not of our own kind -- wild growths from the seed of truth, but by way of a lie.