Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Christ knew where John's baptism came from. So why did he ask as though he didn't know? He knew the Pharisees would not answer him. So why ask at all, to no purpose? Was it so as to judge them out of their own mouths, or out of their own hearts? Refer this too, then, to the Creator's defense and to a comparison with Christ, and consider now what would have followed if the Pharisees had actually answered the question. Suppose they had declared John's baptism merely human — they would have been stoned on the spot. Some Marcion-against-Marcion would then arise to say: O best of gods, O god so unlike the Creator's ways — knowing full well that men were about to rush headlong, he himself pushed them over the cliff! This is precisely the treatment the Creator receives regarding the tree's commandment. Yet John's washing had its origin in heaven. And why, Christ asks, did you not believe him? So the one who had wanted John believed, and was about to rebuke them for not believing him, was the very one whose sacrament John was administering. Certainly, when they refused to declare what they thought, since he too returns the trick — I will not tell you either by what authority I do these things — he paid them back evil for evil. [3] Render to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's. What will be God's? Whatever bears the likeness of Caesar's coin — namely his image and likeness. He therefore commands that man be rendered to the Creator, since it is in the Creator's image and likeness, name and material, that man is stamped. Let the god of Marcion go find himself a coinage of his own; Christ orders that the denarius bearing man's image be rendered to man's own Caesar, not to a stranger's — unless, of course, one who has no denarius of his own is exempt of necessity. [4] It is a just and worthy rule that in every question the sense of the answer ought to bear on the point of the question; to answer one inquiry with something else altogether is the mark of a madman. All the more, then, let that be far from Christ which does not even suit an ordinary man. The Sadducees, deniers of the resurrection, questioning him on that very point, had put to the Lord a case drawn from the law: a woman who, by the law's own command, had married seven brothers in succession as each died — whose wife was she to be reckoned in the resurrection? [5] This was the substance of the question, this the very matter of the inquiry. To this Christ necessarily replied. He feared no one, so that he cannot be seen either to have dodged the question or to have used the occasion to hint at something he did not otherwise teach openly. He answered, then, that the children of this age marry. See how exactly this bears on the case. Since the question concerned the age to come, in which he was about to rule that no one marries, he laid down here where marrying and being given in marriage belong — in this present life where people also die. But those whom God has judged worthy of possessing that age and of rising up from among the dead do not take spouses, nor are wed to one another, because they are no longer going to die, once they have become like the angels, made children of God and children of the resurrection. [6] Since, then, the sense of an answer must be directed at nothing other than the point of the question, if that sense fully resolves the very thing asked, the Lord's answer means nothing other than what settles the question. You have here both the times when marriage is permitted and when it is forbidden — not as a matter in its own right but arising strictly from the question about resurrection. You have too a confirmation of the resurrection itself, and the whole of what the Sadducees were asking, without their inquiring about some other god or about their own particular marriage-law. [7] But if you make Christ answer questions he was not asked, you are saying he could not have answered the question he actually was asked — caught out, that is, by the cleverness of the Sadducees. Now, beyond the point already established, I will go back over the arguments that hang together against this. Having gotten hold of the text of scripture, they have gone through it in reading like this: 'But those whom the god of that age has judged worthy.' They attach 'of that age' to 'god,' so as to make out another god of that age; whereas it should be read: 'But those whom God has judged worthy' — so that, with the pause made here after 'God,' 'of that age' belongs to what follows: 'worthy of possessing that age and the resurrection.' [8] For the inquiry was not about God, but about the condition of that age — whose wife a woman would be after the resurrection, in that age. So too they twist the answer about the marrying itself, as if 'The children of this age marry and are given in marriage' were said of men whom the Creator permits to marry, while they themselves, whom the god of that age — a different one, of course — has judged worthy of the resurrection, already, even now, do not marry, because they are not children of this age; whereas, having been asked about the marriages of that age, not of this one, he had denied precisely those he was asked about. [9] And so those who caught the full force of both the wording and the pronunciation and the pause understood nothing other than what bore on the matter under inquiry. Hence the scribes said: Teacher, you have spoken well. For he had confirmed the resurrection by setting out its form, against the opinion of the Sadducees. In the end, he did not reject the testimony of those who had assumed he had answered in this way. [10] But if the scribes reckoned Christ the son of David, while David himself calls him Lord, what has this to do with Christ? David was not correcting the scribes' error; he was securing honor for Christ, confirming him as Lord rather than merely son of David — which would not suit one bent on destroying the Creator. But how fitting an interpretation this is on our side! For the one who had once been called son of David by that blind man — a title he then let pass, having no scribes present at the time — now, of his own accord, deliberately brought it up in front of them, so as to show that he whom the blind man, following the scribes' teaching, had proclaimed only son of David, was also his Lord — rewarding, indeed, the blind man's faith, by which he had believed him son of David, while striking at the scribes' tradition, by which they did not also know him as Lord. Whatever added luster to the Creator's Anointed — that alone, and nothing besides, is the ground on which the Creator's own Anointed would find his defense.
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