Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] As for the two masters he denies can be served — because offending one is bound to mean defending the other — he himself makes clear who they are, setting God against mammon. As for who he means by mammon, if you have no interpreter, you can learn it from him directly. Warning us to secure, by worldly means, the support of friendships, on the model of that servant who, removed from his post, relieves his master's debtors by cutting down their bills, to provide himself a fallback — "And I," he says, "say to you, make yourselves friends out of the mammon of unrighteousness" — out of money, obviously, the very thing that servant dealt in. [2] We all know that money is the author and master of the whole world's unrighteousness. Seeing the Pharisees' greed enslaved to it, he aimed this saying at them: "You cannot serve God and mammon." And indeed the Pharisees, lovers of money, laughed at him for it — having plainly understood that "mammon" meant money — lest anyone suppose the Creator is meant by "mammon," and that Christ was calling them back from servitude to the Creator. What then? Learn from this, rather, that a single God is shown here by Christ. He named two masters, God and mammon — the Creator and money. And note: "you cannot serve God" — obviously the one they appeared to be serving — "and mammon," the one to whom they were in fact more devoted. [3] Now if he himself were acting as some other god, he would have shown not two masters but three. For the Creator too is a master, being God, and indeed more a master than mammon, and more to be heeded, precisely because more a master. What sense would it make for one who had called mammon a master, and coupled him with God, to pass over in silence the true master of them both — the Creator? Or did his silence amount to conceding that he, too, must be served, if all he denied was that one could serve himself and mammon together? So then, in setting up one God, he would have named the Creator too, had he been someone else — but instead he named the Creator, whom he set up as master without any other god beside him. [4] And this too will become clear — how the saying runs: "If you have proved unfaithful with the unrighteous wealth, who will entrust to you what is true?" — meaning, in unrighteous money, not in the Creator, whom even Marcion makes out to be just. "And if you have not been found faithful in what belongs to another, who will give you what is mine?" For whatever is unjust should have no place among the servants of God. But how was the Creator "another's" to the Pharisees — he who is the very own God of the Jewish nation? If, then, these words do not fall on the Creator but on mammon, then "Who will trust you with what is truer?" and "Who will give you what is mine?" cannot have been spoken by one who was, as it were, someone else, on behalf of some other god's grace. [5] For that is how it would seem, if, in branding them faithless toward the Creator rather than toward mammon, he had drawn the distinctions of another god by mentioning the Creator — refusing to entrust his own truth to men who had proved disloyal to the Creator. How can he then seem to be someone else here, unless the point is precisely to detach him from the very matter under discussion? [6] Again, if the Pharisees, justifying themselves before men, were setting their hope of reward on man, he was rebuking them in the very sense of the prophet Jeremiah: "Wretched is the man who puts his hope in man." And when he adds, "God knows your hearts," he was recalling the power of that God who called himself a lamp, examining the innermost thoughts and the heart. And when he touches on pride — "What is exalted among men is loathsome before God" — he sets Isaiah before our eyes: "For the day of the Lord Sabaoth is against every reviler and every proud man, against every high and lofty one, and they shall be brought low." [7] I can now gather why Marcion's god remained hidden for so long an age. He was waiting, I suppose, to learn all this from the Creator first. So he learned it, right up to the time of John, and only then set out to proclaim the kingdom of God, saying: "Until John it was the law and the prophets; from that point on, the kingdom of God is announced as good news." [8] As though we ourselves did not likewise recognize John as a kind of boundary marker set between old and new, at whom Judaism was to cease and from whom Christianity was to begin — yet not as though the closing of the law and prophetic writings, and the dawning of the gospel in which lies the kingdom of God, Christ himself, were the work of some other power. For if we have already shown that the passing of the old and the coming of the new are both preached by the Creator, and if John is shown to be the forerunner and preparer of the ways of the Lord who was to bring in the gospel and proclaim the kingdom of God, then from the very fact that John came, the one who was to follow John — as his forerunner — will himself be the Christ; and if the old things ceased and the new began with John standing between them, it will be no wonder that this belongs to the Creator's own design, so that it may be all the more surely proved by the very fact that the kingdom of God rises at the setting of the law and the prophets in John, and sets out from there. [9] "Let heaven and earth pass sooner" then, as the law and the prophets shall, "than one stroke of a letter" of the Lord's words. "For the word of our God," says Isaiah, "remains forever." For since Christ — that is, the Word and Spirit of the Creator — had already in Isaiah foretold John, that voice calling out amid the desert, "Make ready the way of the Lord," to the end that at his coming the order of the law and the prophets should thereafter cease — through fulfillment, not through destruction — and the kingdom of God be announced by Christ, he therefore added, all the more readily, that the elements would pass away sooner than his own words, confirming as well what he had said about John: that it had not passed away.
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