Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
So he also knew when it was fitting for him to suffer, whose passion the law prefigures. Of all the Jewish feasts he chose the day of Passover. For it was in this sacrament that Moses had proclaimed, "It is the Lord's Passover." And he showed his own longing for it too: "With longing have I longed to share this Passover meal at your side ere my suffering comes." O destroyer of the law—wanting even to keep the Passover! Surely it wasn't mutton he was craving? Or was he not the one who, like a sheep led to slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer opens not its mouth, was eager to fulfill the figure of his own saving blood? [2] He could have been handed over by any outsider at all—not to mention that this too would cancel out that psalm: "He who eats bread with me has lifted up his heel against me." He could have been betrayed without payment too. What great labor did the betrayer really put in, given that a man who openly confronted the people in public could hardly have been "betrayed" rather than simply seized? But that would have suited some other Christ, not the one fulfilling prophecies. For it is written: "Because they sold the righteous one." As for the amount and the outcome of the price—later returned by the repentant Judas and spent on the potter's field, as the Gospel of Matthew records—Jeremiah foretold it: "And they seized the thirty silver coins, that sum set as the value placed on him who was appraised, and paid them out for the field of the potter." [3] Having declared, then, that he had desired with desire to eat the Passover as his own (for it would be unworthy of a god to crave something not his own), he took the bread, gave it out among the disciples, and turned it into his body by declaring, "This is my body"—which is to say, my body's figure. But it could not have served as a figure unless there were a true body behind it; an empty thing, a mere phantom, cannot be turned into a figure of anything. Or if he pretended the bread was his body simply because he lacked a real body, then he ought to have handed over bread for us. That would have played right into Marcion's absurdity—that bread was crucified! Why then does he call bread his body, rather than a melon, which is what Marcion apparently used in place of a heart? Marcion fails to see that this figure of Christ's body is an old one, spoken by Jeremiah: "They plotted a plot against me, saying, Come, let us cast wood into his bread"—that is, the cross into his body. [4] So the illuminator of ancient things made sufficiently clear what he had meant the bread to signify all along, by calling his body bread. Likewise, in the mention of the cup, establishing the covenant sealed with his own blood, he confirmed the substance of his body. For no body's blood can exist except that of flesh. And even if some quality of body not made of flesh could be brought against us, it certainly could not have blood unless it were fleshly. [5] So the proof of the body rests on the testimony of the flesh, and the proof of the flesh rests on the testimony of the blood. And so that you may also recognize the ancient figure of blood in wine, Isaiah is at hand: "Who is this that comes from Edom, his garments red from Bozrah, so splendid in his stately robe, marching in the greatness of his strength? Why are your garments red, and your clothing like one who treads the winepress?" [6] The prophetic spirit, already contemplating the Lord as he came to his passion, clothed in flesh so as to suffer in it, marks out the bloodied garment of his flesh in the redness of these garments, trodden and pressed out by the force of the passion as in a winepress; because from it men descend, as it were, bloodied with the redness of wine. Genesis is far more explicit still, in the blessing of Judah, from whose tribe the fleshly lineage of Christ was to proceed—already sketching out Christ in Judah: "He will wash his robe in wine," it says, "and his garment in the blood of the grape"—robe and garment signifying flesh, and wine signifying blood. So now he consecrated his blood in wine, he who then had prefigured wine in blood.
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