Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Elsewhere it is my preference to clear away what the Marcionites find fault with in the creator. Here it is enough if the same traits turn up in Christ. Look — he too is unequal, inconsistent, fickle, teaching one thing and doing another: he commands giving to everyone who asks, yet himself refuses a sign to those who ask for one. For so long an age he hides his own light from mankind, yet he forbids hiding a lamp — insisting instead it be set on a lampstand, so that it may shine for everyone. He forbids returning a curse for a curse — still more, then, cursing outright — and yet he hurls "Woe!" at the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. Who is as like my God as this Christ is, if not that very God himself? [2] We have already fixed it firmly, more than once: he could in no way be branded a destroyer of the law if he had proclaimed a different God. That is why, on that occasion too, the Pharisee who had invited him to dinner turned over in his mind why he had not first washed before reclining at table, as the law required — a man who bore about him the God of the law. And Jesus went on to interpret the law for him, saying that they clean the outside of cup and dish, while their inward parts are full of robbery and wickedness — meaning that the cleanliness of vessels is to be understood, before God, as the cleanliness of men; for the Pharisee too had been reasoning within himself about the man, not about the unwashed cup. "So then," he says, "you scrub the exterior of the cup" — meaning the flesh — "yet leave what is within unpurified" — meaning the soul; and he adds, "Did not the one who fashioned the exterior" — the flesh — "likewise fashion what lies within?" — the soul? [3] By this saying he plainly showed that the cleanliness of man's outer and inner self belongs to the one God to whom each of them belongs — a God who ranks mercy above not only the washing of a man but even sacrifice. For he goes on: "Give as alms what you have, and everything will be clean for you." But even if some other god could have commanded mercy, it was certainly not before he was known. Furthermore, it is plain even here that they were not being rebuked concerning God, but concerning the discipline of the very God by whom, figuratively, the cleanliness of vessels, and, plainly, works of mercy, were being enjoined upon them. [4] So too he chides them for tithing their little garden herbs while passing over the call and the love of God. Whose call and love, if not that of the very God for whom, by the pattern of the law, they offered rue and mint out of their tithes? For the whole force of the reproach lay in this: that they took pains over trifles, owed, of course, to the one to whom they were not rendering the greater things, the one who said, "You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and your whole soul, and your whole strength" — the one who called you out of Egypt. Besides, the time would not yet have allowed Christ to demand a love so premature — indeed so bitterly premature — for a god so new and recent, not to say not yet even made public. [5] When he rebukes those grasping after the chief seats and the honor of greetings, he is likewise administering the creator's own doctrine — the very one who calls such rulers "archons of Sodom," who forbids trusting in princes, and even pronounces utterly wretched the man who places his hope in man. But if someone courts a position of primacy in order to boast over the services of others, then the one who forbade this kind of hoping and trusting in man has likewise rebuked those who court primacy. [6] He also inveighs against the teachers of the law themselves, for loading others with unbearable burdens which they themselves would not so much as touch with a finger — not thereby disparaging the burdens of the law, as though he detested it. For how could he be its detester, when at the very moment he was rebuking them for passing over the weightier matters of the law — mercy, and the call, and the love of God — not even calling these burdensome, let alone the tithing of rue and the cleaning of dishes? Indeed, he would rather have judged them excusable if they could not bear unbearable loads. But what burdens is he taxing them for? [7] Those which they themselves were piling up out of their own resources, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men, joining house to house for their own profit, so as to seize what belonged to their neighbors, extorting the people, loving gifts, chasing after payoffs, plundering the cause of the poor, so that the widow became their prey and the orphan their spoil. Of these same men Isaiah says: "Woe to those who are mighty in Jerusalem"; and again: "Those who demand tribute of you lord it over you." Who more than the teachers of the law? If these men displeased Christ, it was because they displeased their own — for he would never have gone knocking at teachers of a law not his own. [8] But why do they hear "Woe" also because they build monuments to the prophets slain by their own fathers — an act rather deserving praise, since by this work of piety they testified they did not consent to their fathers' deeds — unless he was not, after all, the "jealous" God whom the Marcionites accuse of visiting the guilt of ancestors upon their descendants down to the fourth generation? [9] But what "key" did the teachers of the law hold, if not the interpretation of the law? To its understanding neither did they themselves come near — not believing, evidently (for "unless you believe, you will not understand") — nor did they let others in, teaching, of course, the precepts and doctrines of men instead. So the one who rebuked them for neither entering themselves nor granting others entrance — is he to be reckoned a detractor of the law, or its champion? If a detractor, then those who shut the law's door ought to have pleased him too; if a champion, then he is no longer a rival of the law. [10] But all this he was piling up to blacken the creator, as though he were savage, since those who sinned against him would be liable to "Woe." Yet who would not rather fear to provoke a savage God by falling away from him? All the more, then, was he teaching that this God, whom he was representing as one to be feared, deserved to be all the more deeply owed. This is how Christ ought to have behaved — as the creator's Christ.
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