Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Now if he snatched at the name "Christ" the way a petty thief snatches at a purse, why did he also want to be called "Jesus" — a name far less expected among the Jews? For even if we, by God's grace, have come to understand his mysteries and recognize that this name too was destined for Christ, it does not follow that the matter is known to the Jews, from whom wisdom has been taken away. In fact, to this very day they hope for a Christ, not a Jesus, and they take "Christ" to mean Elijah sooner than Jesus. [2] He, then, who came under a name in which no "Christ" was presumed could only have come under the one name that alone was presumed. But since he mixed the two — the hoped-for and the unhoped-for — both parts of his design are defeated. For either "Christ" was assumed so that he might slip in, as it were, under the Creator's guise, and then "Jesus" clashes with that, since Jesus was not hoped for in the Creator's Christ; or "Jesus" was assumed so he might be taken for belonging to the other god, but "Christ" will not permit it, since Christ was hoped for as belonging to none but the Creator. [3] Which of these can hold together I do not know. But both will hold together in the Creator's Christ, in whom "Jesus" too is found. How so, you ask? Learn it here, alongside the Jews who share your error. When Hoshea son of Nun was appointed Moses' successor, was he not transferred from his former name and begun to be called Jesus? [4] "Certainly," you say. We say this was a figure of what was to come. For since Jesus Christ was to lead a second people — namely us, born in the deserts of this age — into a promised territory streaming with milk and honey — a figure for gaining eternal life, sweeter than anything else — and given that this outcome was not to arrive by way of Moses, not by the Law's discipline, but through Jesus, through the grace of the gospel, once we had been circumcised with a flint blade, that is, with the precepts of Christ [5] — for the rock was Christ — for this reason the man who was being prepared as an image of this mystery was also inaugurated with a figure of the Lord's own name, and surnamed Jesus. That this name was already Christ's own, Christ himself testified when he spoke to Moses. For who was speaking, if not the Creator's Spirit, who is Christ? So when, giving his charge, he said to the people, "Look, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, to keep watch over your journey and lead you into the land I have made ready for you; heed him and follow his word, do not resist him, for he will conceal nothing from you, seeing that my own name rests upon him" — a messenger is what he termed him, on account of the magnitude of the powers he would go on to display, and because of the office of a prophet announcing the divine will; but he called him Jesus because of the future mystery of his own name. [6] Again and again he confirmed that this name — which he himself had given him — was his own, since he had ordered him thenceforth to be called not "angel," nor "Hoshea," but "Jesus." Therefore, if both names belong to the Creator's Christ, so much the more do neither belong to a Christ who is not the Creator's — no more than the rest of the sequence does. From this point, then, a fixed and fair prescription must be laid down between us, binding on both sides alike: namely that not a single point ought to be shared by the christ belonging to the alien god and the Christ who belongs to the Creator. [7] For you, on your part, must likewise defend the difference, just as I must resist it: you will not be able to prove that the Christ of another god has come unless you show him to be utterly unlike the Creator's Christ; nor will I be able to vindicate him as the Creator's unless I show him to be exactly such as the Creator ordained. On the matter of names, then, I have already closed the case. I claim Christ for myself; I defend Jesus as my own.
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