Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Let this serve as a kind of preliminary skirmish, still at the first stage, so to speak, fought from a distance. But since from this point on I see myself coming to close, decisive combat, I see that a few more lines must be drawn out in advance, along which the battle will be fought — namely, concerning the scriptures of the creator. For it is by these that I mean to prove Christ to belong to the creator, so that they may then be shown fulfilled in his own Christ; and for that I must first set out the form, and, if I may put it so, the very nature of these scriptures themselves — lest, once drawn into controversy when they are brought to bear on the case, the defense of the scriptures and the defense of the case get tangled together and blunt the reader's attention. [2] I therefore point to two causes of prophetic speech that our opponents need to recognize from here on. One is that future events are sometimes announced as though already accomplished. For it belongs to divinity to reckon as complete whatever it has decreed, since with God, for whom eternity itself governs a uniform state of all times, there is no difference of tense. And it is likewise proper to prophetic foresight to show what it foresees, even while it is foreseeing it, as already seen and thus already fulfilled — that is, as certain to happen in every respect — just as through Isaiah: 'I set my back to the scourges, my cheeks to blows, and I did not turn my face away from spitting.' [3] For whether Christ was already then speaking of himself, according to us, or whether the prophet was speaking of himself, according to the Jews, in either case something not yet done was being uttered as though already past. There is another kind, in which many things are foreshadowed figuratively through riddles, allegories, and parables, to be understood otherwise than as they are written. For we read that the mountains will drip sweetness, yet you are not to expect actual syrup from rocks or must from crags; and we hear that the land flows with milk and honey, yet you are not to believe that you will ever gather honeycakes from clods of earth — since God did not, after all, promise straightaway to be a well-digger and a farmer when he said, 'I will set rivers in a thirsty region, and box and cedar in the wilderness.' Likewise, when he foretells the conversion of the nations, saying, 'The beasts of the field will bless me, sirens and daughters of sparrows,' he surely does not mean to relay these good omens from the chicks of swallows, little foxes, and those monstrous, fabled songstresses. [4] And why should I say more about this kind of language? — when even the apostle of the heretics themselves interprets that very law which lets the ox tread out the grain with unmuzzled mouth as speaking not of oxen but of us, and claims that Christ was the companion rock supplying drink; teaching, further, that the two arguments about the sons of Abraham ran allegorically for the Galatians too, and suggesting to the Ephesians that what was foretold at the beginning about man, who would leave father and mother, and about two becoming one flesh, he recognizes as referring to Christ and the church.
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