Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] "According to these things," he says, "their fathers used to treat the prophets." O the shape-shifting Christ, now the destroyer, now the champion of the prophets! He destroyed them as a rival, winning over their disciples to himself; he claimed them as a friend, mocking their persecutors. But to the exact degree that Marcion's claim that Christ championed the prophets he had come to destroy would not fit Christ, to that same degree it fits the Creator's Christ that he should mock the persecutors of the prophets — prophets he was fulfilling in everything — whether because it belongs more to the Creator to lay the fathers' wrongdoing upon their children, or because it belongs to a god who does not even punish a man's own offenses to do no such thing. [2] "But he was not immediately defending the prophets," you say, "if he wanted the wickedness of the Jews confirmed, on the ground that they had not dealt piously even with their own prophets." Yet here there was no wickedness in the Jews to be reproached — rather they deserved praise and approval, if they mocked the men whose destruction, after so long an age, the supremely good god was at last moved to bring about. But I suppose, by now, he is not "supremely good" any longer — by now he has struck some deal with the Creator, and is no longer wholly the god of Epicurus. [3] For look: he turns to cursing, and shows himself to be one who knows how to be offended and to grow angry. For he says "Woe!" But we are given a puzzle about the quality of that word, as though it were not so much a curse as a warning. And what difference does it make, when even a warning does not come without the sting of a threat, especially once made bitterer by that "Woe"? Both the warning and the threat belong to one who knows how to be angry. For no one warns and no one threatens against someone doing a thing unless he means to punish the deed; and no one punishes unless he knows how to be angry. [4] Others do acknowledge the word as a curse, but want Christ to have pronounced this "Woe" not, strictly speaking, out of his own judgment, but because the "Woe" belongs to the Creator, and he meant to set the Creator's harshness against his own earlier gentleness in the blessings, so as to commend by contrast his own forbearance. As if it were not entirely fitting for the Creator — who furnishes both roles, being both a good god and a judge — that, having led off with kindness in the blessings, he should follow with severity in the curses, the full range of discipline being needed to teach both the pursuit of blessing and the avoidance of cursing. [5] For thus he had already declared beforehand: "Look, before you I have placed a blessing and a curse" — words which even foreshadowed this very arrangement of the gospel. Otherwise, what sort of person is this, who, in order to insinuate his own goodness, sets the Creator's harshness against it? Weak indeed is the commendation that props itself up by tearing another down. [6] Yet by opposing the Creator's harshness to him, he has only confirmed that the Creator is to be feared. And if he is to be feared, then he is surely more to be obeyed than ignored — and now Marcion's Christ is starting to teach obedience to the Creator! Then, if the "Woe" against the rich belongs to the Creator, it follows that Christ was not offended by the rich, but the Creator was; and Christ endorses the Creator's case against the rich — I mean their pride, their vanity, their worldly pursuits, and their neglect of God, through which they earn a "Woe" from the Creator. [7] But how can it not belong to the very same one to condemn the rich who has just above approved the poor? No one condemns the opposite of what he has approved. So then, if the curse against the rich is credited to the Creator, the blessing on the poor must be defended as belonging to the same one — and the whole of Christ's work is now the Creator's. And if the blessing on the poor is assigned to Marcion's god, then the curse against the rich must be laid on him too, and now the Creator becomes his equal — as much good as he is just — and there is no longer room for the distinction by which two gods are made; and once the distinction is removed, what remains is that one god must be proclaimed the Creator. [8] So then: if "Woe" is indeed the voice of cursing, or of some rather stern rebuke, and it is aimed by Christ at the rich, I am bound to prove the Creator likewise a scorner of the rich, just as I have proved him the advocate of the poor, so as to show Christ, even in this saying, to be the Creator's Christ. He did indeed enrich Solomon — but because, given the choice, Solomon preferred to ask for what he knew was pleasing to God, wisdom and understanding, and had thereby also earned the right to riches, though he had not wished for them any the more. And yet it is not incongruous for God to grant riches either, since through them the rich are also aided in giving comfort, and many works of justice and love are carried out by their means. [9] But the vices that accompany riches are what the gospel too assigns its "Woe" to the rich for: "For," he says, "you have received your consolation" — that is, from riches, from their glory and worldly fruits. So too in Deuteronomy Moses says: "Lest, when you have eaten and are full, and have built great houses, and your flocks and herds and silver and gold have multiplied, your heart be lifted up and you forget the Lord your God." So too he strikes at King Hezekiah, puffed up with his treasures and glorying in them rather than in God, before the envoys who had come from Persia, through Isaiah: "Behold, the days are coming, and all that is in your house shall be taken away, and what your fathers have amassed shall be carried off to Babylon." [10] So too, through Jeremiah he likewise decrees: "Let the wealthy not exult over their wealth, but let the one who exults, exult in God." So too he inveighs against the daughters of Zion through Isaiah, puffed up with finery and the abundance of riches, thundering there too against the noble and the proud: "Hell has enlarged its soul and opened wide its mouth, and the renowned and the great and the rich shall go down" (this will be Christ's "Woe" over the rich), "and man — the man exalted by riches — shall be humbled, and the man honored for his wealth shall be dishonored." [11] Of these again it is said: "Behold, the Lord of hosts shall throw the glorious into confusion along with their strength, and the lofty shall be brought low, and the exalted shall fall by the sword." Who more than the rich? Since it is they, of course, who have received their consolation — glory, honor, loftiness — from their riches. And turning us away from them, in the forty-eighth psalm he says: "Do not fear when a man grows rich, and when the glory of his house is increased, for when he dies he takes nothing with him when he departs, nor does his splendor descend along with him." Likewise in the sixty-first: "Do not set your desire on riches, and if they shine, do not set your heart on them." [12] Finally, that very same word "Woe" was long ago aimed by Amos at the rich awash in luxuries. "Woe," he says, "to those who sleep on beds of ivory and lounge in luxury on their couches, who eat lambs from the flock and fattened calves from the herd, clapping along to the sound of instruments" — as though these things would last, and not as though they were passing away — "who drink strained wine and anoint themselves with the finest ointments." [13] So then, even if I could show the Creator only warning against riches, without also condemning the rich in advance, in the very same word Christ himself uses, no one would doubt that the threat against the rich pronounced through Christ's "Woe" was added by the very one from whom the warning against those same things — riches — had already gone before. For a threat is simply the sequel to a warning. He heaps "Woe" too on the well-fed, because they shall hunger; on those currently laughing, since mourning is what awaits them. Answering these stand the words set opposite the blessings, spoken earlier by the Creator: "Behold, those who serve me shall be filled, but you shall hunger" — precisely because you are filled now; and "Behold, those who serve me shall rejoice, but you shall be put to shame" — you who now laugh shall surely weep. For just as the psalm has it: "Those sowing amid tears shall gather a harvest amid joy," so in the gospel, those sowing in laughter — that is, out of joy — shall reap in tears. These the Creator long ago set down together; Christ has only renewed them by distinguishing them, not by changing them. [14] "Woe to you, when men shall bless you! According to these things did their fathers treat the false prophets." Just so does the Creator, through Isaiah, charge the followers of human blessing and human praise: "My people, those who call you blessed lead you astray, and they confound the paths of your feet." He forbids elsewhere any trust at all in man, and so too any trust in the praise of man, as through Jeremiah: "Cursed is the man who puts his hope in man." [15] And indeed in Psalm 117: "It is better to trust in God than to trust in man, and it is better to hope in God than to hope in princes." So the Creator has rejected everything that is courted from man, let alone praise of it. And to reproach false prophets praised and blessed by their fathers belongs to him just as much as to reproach prophets harassed and rejected — for just as the injuries done to the prophets were not unconnected to their God, so too the favors shown to the false prophets would not have displeased him, unless he were the God of the prophets.
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