Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] He brings forward the tax collector chosen by the Lord as his proof text, as though the man had been chosen by an adversary of the Law, an outsider to the Law, a stranger profane to Judaism. He has forgotten Peter — a man of the Law, and yet not merely chosen but rewarded with the testimony of a recognition granted by the Father. Nowhere had he read that Christ was to be heralded as the beacon and the hoped-for anticipation of the nations. On the contrary, he actually proved the Jews right, by saying that the physician is not needed by the healthy but by those who are ill. [2] For if by the sick he meant to signify the pagans and tax collectors whom he was choosing, then he was confirming that the Jews were the healthy ones, for whom he denied that a physician was necessary. If this is so, he came down badly to destroy the Law, as though curing a sickness, when in fact those who kept it were in good health and had no need of a physician. [3] But what sort of thing is it, to propose the simile of the physician and then not carry it through? For just as no one calls a physician for the healthy, so too no one calls one for those as utterly foreign as man is to the god of Marcion — a man who has his own author and protector, and from that one, rather, his own physician, Christ. This is exactly what the simile prejudges: that the physician is supplied, rather, by the one to whom the sick belong. [4] But where, then, does John come into the picture? Suddenly Christ, and suddenly John too. Everything is like this in Marcion's scheme — things that in fact have their own full and proper order under the Creator. But of John I shall say more elsewhere; for now the points immediately at hand must be answered. Here I shall maintain this: that I will show both John suits Christ and Christ suits John, precisely as the Creator's prophet suits the Creator's Christ — and so let the heretic blush, for having frustrated himself in vain over the order of John. [5] For if John had administered nothing at all — if he were not, as Isaiah foretold, the voice shouting out in the desert, readying the Lord's paths by his announcement and his praise of repentance; if he had not even baptized Christ himself along with the rest — then no one would have challenged the disciples of Christ, who ate and drank, by comparison with the pattern of John's disciples, who fasted and prayed constantly. Because, if there had stood some real difference between Christ and John and each one's flock, there would have been no basis for demanding a comparison, and the whole point of the challenge would fall away. [6] For no one would have been surprised, and no one would have been troubled, if the preachings of rival, distinct divinities failed to agree also in their disciplines — when they had not first agreed on the authority behind those disciplines. So true is it that Christ was John's and John was Christ's in turn, each belonging to the Creator, both preachers and teachers out of the Law and the Prophets. Otherwise Christ would have rejected John's discipline as belonging to a different god, and would have defended his own disciples as rightly walking a different way — initiated, that is, into a different and opposing divinity. But as it is, he humbly gives the reason why the sons of the bridegroom cannot fast so long as the bridegroom is with them, while promising that they will fast afterward, once the bridegroom has been taken from them. He does not defend his disciples so much as excuse them, as men not unreasonably rebuked; nor does he reject John's discipline, but rather concedes it — allotting it to John's own time, just as he assigns his own discipline to his own time — a discipline he would otherwise have rejected, and John's rivals he would have defended, had it not already been, from the start, his own. [7] I hold fast to my Christ, even under the name of bridegroom, of whom the Psalm says: He himself comes forth like a bridegroom from his chamber; his going forth is from the height of heaven, and his circuit reaches to its farthest height. He it is, too, who through Isaiah rejoices toward the Father: Let my soul exult in the Lord, he says, for he has wrapped me in the robe of deliverance and the mantle of rejoicing, and set a turban about me as on a bridegroom, and adorned me as a bride. For in himself he reckons the church also, of which the same Spirit says to him: And you shall put them all about you like a bride's ornaments. [8] This bride Christ summons to himself through Solomon too, by the calling of the nations — for you have read: Come, my bride, from Lebanon — with the mention of Lebanon aptly thrown in, the mountain that among the Greeks lends its name to frankincense; for it was from idolatry that he was betrothing the church to himself. Deny now, if you dare, most demented Marcion, that you are demented. Look — you are attacking the Law even of your own god. He does not join marriages, does not admit those already joined, baptizes no one who is not celibate or a eunuch, reserves baptism for death or for divorce. Why, then, do you make Christ his bridegroom? That name belongs to the one who joined male and female, not to the one who separated them. [9] You have also gone wrong over that saying of the Lord in which he appears to distinguish new things from old. You have been puffed up over the old wineskins, and had your brains knocked out by the new wine, and so you have sewn a patch of heretical novelty onto the old — that is, the earlier — gospel. In this, I would like to learn, where is there room for a second creator? When through Jeremiah he commands, Make yourselves a new newness, does he not turn them away from the old things? When through Isaiah he declares, The old things have passed away, and behold new things which I am making, does he not turn them toward new things? Long ago we established this position: that the fulfillment of the old promises, promised rather by the Creator, is displayed by Christ, beneath the rule of a single self-same God, who owns both what is old and what is new. [10] For neither does a man put new wine into old wineskins who does not also have old wineskins, nor does anyone sew a new patch onto an old garment unless he also happens to have the old garment. A man does not do a thing that need not be done, when he has the means to do it if it did need to be done. And so, if he directed the comparison toward this end — to show that he was separating the newness of the gospel from the oldness of the Law — he was thereby demonstrating both that the newness was his own, and that the oldness from which he was separating it need not be marked out as belonging to a stranger, since no one joins what is his own to what belongs to another simply in order to separate it from what belongs to another. [11] Separation presupposes a joining, out of which it arises. So too, the thing he was separating he was showing to have once been joined in one, just as it would not have been separated if it had not first been so. And yet we grant this kind of separation — by way of reformation, of enlargement, of advancement — just as fruit is separated from seed, though the fruit comes from the seed: so too the gospel is separated from the Law, while it is advanced out of the Law — other than it, but not alien to it; different from it, but not contrary to it. [12] Nor is the form of speech in Christ something new. When he puts forward similitudes, when he refutes questions by argument, he is drawing on the seventy-seventh Psalm: I will open my mouth, it says, in a parable — that is, a similitude; I will utter dark sayings — that is, I will expound questions. If you had wanted to prove him a man of some other nation, you should certainly have proved it from the distinctive character of his speech.
12.