Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] How, again, did he handle the question raised over the healing done on the Sabbath? 'Which of you fails, on a Sabbath day, to untie his own ox or donkey from its stall and bring it to drink?' So then, by acting according to the very terms of the law, he confirmed the law rather than dissolving it — a law that forbids any work being done except what would be done for any living creature, and how much more, then, for a human being? Everywhere I recognize the consistency demanded of the parables. 'The kingdom of God,' he says, 'resembles a mustard seed, which a certain man picked up and planted within his garden plot.' [2] Whom are we meant to picture as that man? Christ, surely — since Marcion's own text still names him Son of Man — for it was he who accepted the kingdom's seed from the Father, that is, the gospel's message, and set it growing in a garden that was his own, meaning the world, or if you prefer, within mankind itself. But given his words 'within his garden plot,' and given that neither the world nor mankind is property of that alien god but of the Creator, it must follow that whoever planted it in ground belonging to himself stands revealed as the Creator. Or supposing they dodge this trap by shifting the man's identity away from Christ, making him instead the man who accepts the kingdom's seed and plants it deep in the soil of his own heart — even on that reading the material fits no one except the Creator. For how could it be the kingdom of the mildest of gods, when it is followed by the tearful austerity of the fervor of judgment? [3] I suspect, indeed, that the next parable too points to the kingdom of a different god. For he compares it to leaven, not to unleavened bread, which is more properly the Creator's. This conjecture fits well enough with men who go begging for arguments. And so I too will drive out vanity with vanity, and say that fermentation likewise fits the Creator's kingdom, since after it comes the oven or furnace of hell. [4] How many more times will he show himself as judge, and in the judge, the Creator? How many more times does he cast out and condemn by rejecting? As here too: 'When the master of the house has risen up' — risen to do what, if not what Isaiah said: 'When he rises to shatter the earth'? — 'and has shut the door,' shutting it, of course, to exclude the unrighteous. To those knocking he will answer, 'I do not know where you are from.' And when they list all they ate and drank in his presence, and how he taught in their streets, he will add: 'Depart from me, all you workers of iniquity. In that place there will be wailing, and the grinding together of teeth.' Where? [5] Outside, obviously, where the excluded will be, the door shut against them by him. So there will be a punishment consisting precisely in exclusion, when they see the righteous entering into the kingdom of God while they themselves are held outside. Held by whom? If by the Creator, then who is it inside taking the righteous in under the kingdom's roof? The good god? What business, then, does the Creator have there, detaining outside as punishment those whom his adversary has already expelled — men who ought to be taken up by that adversary rather, and all the more to that adversary's chagrin? [6] But also, the one who is about to exclude the unrighteous must either know that the Creator will detain them in punishment, or not know it. So then, either they will be detained against his will — in which case he who does the detaining is lesser than the one who yields to him unwillingly — or, if he wishes it done this way, then he himself has decreed it be so, and the very author of the Creator's alleged infamy will be no better than the Creator. If none of this holds together on any rational ground — the notion that one punishes while another liberates — then judgment and kingdom alike belong to one and the same; and since both belong to one, the one who also judges is the Creator.
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