Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] For when he enjoins persistence and urgency in prayer, he sets out the parable of the judge compelled to hear a widow by the urgency and persistence of her pleading. So he shows that it is the judge who is God to be prayed to — not himself, unless he himself is the judge; he further added that vengeance would be executed by God for his elect. If then he who will be judge is also the avenger, he has proven the Creator the better God, since it is he whom he shows to be the avenger of his elect who cry to him day and night. And yet, when he introduces the Creator's own temple, and portrays a pair of men worshipping within it with opposite dispositions — the Pharisee in pride, the tax collector in humility — and so has the one go down condemned and the other justified, then by teaching precisely the discipline by which one ought to pray, he has established as the one to be prayed to here too the very God from whom they were to receive that discipline of prayer, whether it condemns pride or justifies humility. [2] I find in Christ neither the temple, nor the worshippers, nor the tribunal of any other god — only the Creator's. It is him he bids men worship in humility, as the one who lifts up the humble, not in pride, as though he cast down the proud. What other god does he show me to be worshipped? By what discipline? By what hope? None, I think. For the very prayer he taught, we have proven belongs to the Creator. It is another matter if he even refuses to be worshipped, on the ground that he is a supremely good God, generous of his own accord and unasked. [3] But 'who is good,' he says, 'but God alone?' — not as though, out of two gods, he had shown one to be the best, but that there is one God alone who is good, being good precisely as he is the only God. And good he certainly is, he who rains on the just and the unjust, and makes his sun rise on the good and the bad, sustaining, feeding, and even helping the Marcionites. [4] Finally, when asked by a certain man, 'Good Master, what must I do to possess eternal life?' he demanded whether the man knew — that is, kept — the Creator's precepts, so as to bear witness that eternal life is acquired by the Creator's precepts. And when the man affirmed that he had kept all the chief ones from his youth, he said, 'One thing you lack: sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me.' [5] Come now, Marcion, and all you heretics who now share his pity and his shame — what will you dare say? Did Christ rescind the earlier precepts — not to kill, not to commit adultery, not to steal, not to bear false witness, to honor father and mother? Or did he both keep those and add what was lacking? Yet even this precept of generosity to the needy is spread everywhere through the Law and the Prophets, so that this most glorious keeper of the commandments was being led on to hold money far dearer than he should. [6] So this too stands firm in the gospel: 'I did not arrive to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but instead to bring them to completion.' At the same stroke he freed everything else from doubt, by making it plain that the title 'God' and the title 'the good one' both attach to a single being, and that eternal life, the heavenly treasure, and his own person all belong to that same one whose precepts, by supplementing them, he both preserved and increased — a point to be recognized here too from Micah, who says: 'If it has been told you, O man, what is good, or what the Lord requires of you, except to practice justice, to cherish mercy, and to walk humbly, ready in step, with the Lord your God?' [7] For Christ too, being man, announces what is good: knowledge of the Law — 'You know the commandments,' he says; to do judgment — 'Sell what you have,' he says; to cherish mercy — 'and give to the needy,' he says; to walk humbly alongside the Lord — 'and come, follow me,' he says. [8] The Jewish people had from the beginning been so distinctly divided by tribes and clans and families and households that no one could easily be unaware of his own lineage, even apart from the recent Augustan census, perhaps still pending at that time. But Marcion's Jesus — even granting, since he seemed a man, that no one doubted he was born — since on Marcion's showing he was not really born, could have had no public record of his lineage at all, but must have been reckoned as simply one of those whose origin, one way or another, was unknown. [9] When, then, the blind man heard him passing by, why did he cry out, 'Jesus, Son of David, take pity on me!' — unless it was that, without rash guesswork, he was reckoned Son of David — that is, of David's family — through his mother and brothers, from whom this had at some point plainly reached him by report? Now those going ahead rebuked the blind man, that he should be silent. Rightly so — because he was shouting, not because he was lying about being son of David. Or else show me that those who rebuked him knew Jesus was not the son of David, so that we might believe that was why they told the blind man to be silent. [10] But even if you could show that, it would be far easier to suppose they were simply ignorant than that the Lord could have let a false proclamation about himself stand unchecked. But the Lord is patient. Yet he is no confirmer of error — indeed he is the very one who unmasks the Creator's truth — for he refrained from lifting the man's blindness until after the man could still go on regarding Jesus as David's son. Instead, to keep you from slandering his patience, and from foisting on him some pretext of pretended silence, and from denying him to be son of David, he confirmed the blind man's proclamation in the plainest way possible — by the very reward of healing and by his testimony to faith. 'Your faith,' he said, 'has saved you.' [11] What do you want the blind man to have believed? That Jesus had come down from that other god to overthrow the Creator, to tear down the Law and the Prophets? That it was not he who was the promised one sprung from Jesse's stock and born of David's own line, who likewise rewards the blind? But I think the blind of that day were not yet blind in Marcion's fashion, that this should have been the faith of that blind man — a faith he believed on hearing the cry, 'Jesus, Son of David.' [12] And he who both recognized this in himself and wished it recognized by all, granted the man's faith — though it already saw better than eyes, though it already possessed the true light — the outward sight as well, so that we too might learn both the rule and the reward of faith at once. Whoever wishes to see Jesus must believe him David's son through the census of the virgin's line. Whoever does not so believe will not hear from him, 'Your faith has saved you,' and so will remain blind, plunging into the antithesis, and that very antithesis plunging down with him. For so does one blind man lead another. [13] For if once, at the recovery of Zion, blind men had opposed David and resisted his admission — in figure of a people, likewise blind, who would one day refuse to admit Christ, David's son — then Christ, acting in the opposite way, came to the aid of a blind man instead, precisely so as to show by this that he was not the one who is not the son of David — being good to the blind, by the very opposite of that spirit, whom David had ordered to be struck down. And why did he grant favor to faith, and indeed to what you'd call a mistaken faith? Why, because in this too he is son of David — let me hurl the antithesis back where it belongs. [14] For those who had opposed David were blind men; but here, a man of that same flesh had presented himself as a suppliant to the son of David. So, being in a manner satisfied by his plea, the son of David, now appeased, restored his sight, together with the testimony of the faith by which the man had believed this very thing — that the son of David was the one to be entreated. And yet, I think, it was men's insolence that had offended David, not his health.
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