Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] He disdained, I suppose, to follow the order of our God, as though it displeased him, as though it were most in need of refutation. Being new, he wished to come in a new way — a son before any acknowledgment by a father, one sent before any authority from a commissioner — so that he himself might introduce a most monstrous kind of faith, one in which Christ was believed to have come before it was even known that he had existed. This too calls for examination: why did he not come after Christ? [2] For when I consider that his god was so very patient, through so long an age, of the bitterest of creators, all the while announcing his own Christ among men — for whatever reason he deferred both his own revelation and his own intervention — by that same reasoning I say he ought to have shown patience toward the creator in the matter of his Christ as well, letting him carry out his own arrangements, so that only once the whole business of that opposing deity and his opposing Christ had run its full course would he then have laid his own arrangements over it. [3] But as it stands, it was a change of heart over so much patience that made him fail to persevere to the very end of the creator's dispensation. He endured, pointlessly, having his Christ proclaimed, when he could not endure having him actually appear! Either it was without cause that he cut short the passage of that time which belonged to another, or it was without cause that he refrained so long from cutting it short. What held him back, or what threw him into confusion? Yet he is guilty on both counts: revealed so tardily after the creator, yet in such haste before the creator's own Christ. [4] He ought to have transferred authority from the one long ago, but not yet from the other. He should not have tolerated that one raging for so long, nor disturbed this one while it was still at rest! On both counts he falls short of the title of the best of gods — inconsistent and unsteady indeed, lukewarm toward the creator and hot toward Christ, and futile on both fronts. He held the creator back no more than he obstructed Christ. The creator stands exactly as he has always stood; Christ shall arrive precisely as the scripture concerning him has set down. Why show up after a creator he lacked the power to amend? Why be disclosed ahead of that creator's own Christ, whom he was unable to summon back? [5] Or if he did correct the creator, then he was revealed after him precisely so that what needed correcting could come first — in which case he ought likewise to have waited to correct that creator's Christ, becoming, in due course, that Christ's later corrector too, just as he was the creator's. It is another matter if he himself is to come again after that Christ — so that in his first coming he advanced against the creator, destroying his law and his prophets, but in a second coming advances against his Christ, refuting his kingdom. Then, at last, closing out his own order of events, then, perhaps, he might be believed in. But if his work is already complete as things stand, then he comes in vain, having nothing left, evidently, to accomplish.
5.