Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Then he writes that he went up to Jerusalem after fourteen years to seek out Peter and the other apostles for their backing, to lay before them about the rule of his gospel, lest he should have been running, or should be running, in vain for so many years, in case he were preaching anything at variance with their pattern. So eager was he to be approved and confirmed by those men whom you would rather have us suppose, whenever it suits you, more attached to Judaism. [2] But when he says that not even Titus was circumcised, he is already beginning to show that the whole question was one of circumcision alone, stirred up by a lingering defense of the law on the part of those he therefore calls false and smuggled-in brothers — men bent on establishing nothing other than the law's continued force, out of a faith in the Creator that was, no doubt, otherwise sound, and thereby perverting the gospel — not by tampering with the text so as to fashion a different Christ for the Creator, but by clinging to the old discipline in a way that shut out none of the Creator's law. [3] "Because of false brothers, smuggled in," he says, "who slipped in to spy out our freedom, which we have in Christ, so that they might reduce us to slavery — we did not yield to that subjection, not even for a moment." Let us attend to the sense itself and to its occasion, and the tampering with the text will become apparent. When he says first, "But not even Titus, who was with me, though a Greek by birth, was forced into circumcision," and then goes on, "because of false brothers, smuggled in," and so on, he is plainly beginning to give the reason for a contrary course of action, showing why he did what he did — something he would neither have done nor explained, had the reason for doing it not arisen. [4] Now tell me, if you will — had those false brothers not slipped in to spy out their freedom, would they have yielded to subjection? I think not. So they yielded because there were men on whose account they yielded. This was appropriate for a faith still raw and still hesitating over the observance of the law, with the apostle himself under suspicion of having run, or of running, in vain. [5] And so those false brothers, spying out Christian liberty, had to be thwarted, lest they drag it off into Jewish servitude before Paul knew he had not run in vain, before the earlier apostles had given him their right hands, before he undertook, by their assessment, the task of preaching to the nations. He therefore yielded of necessity for the time, and on this basis his circumcising of Timothy and bringing shaved men into the temple, as recorded in the Acts, makes good sense — so much so that it agrees with the apostle's own admission that he became a Jew to the Jews to win the Jews, and lived under the law for the sake of those under the law, and likewise for the sake of those smuggled-in brothers, and became all things to all men in the end, that he might win them all. [6] If they insist that this passage too be read in that light, no one will doubt this either: that Paul was a preacher of that God and that Christ whose law, though he was excluding it, he had nonetheless for a time admitted, to suit the times — a law he would have had to sweep away at once had he been putting forward a new god. It is a good sign, then, that Peter and James and John gave Paul their right hands, and struck an agreement over the division of labor — Paul to the nations, they to the circumcision — only asking that he remember the poor, and this too according to the law of the Creator, who cherishes the poor and needy, as we already established earlier in dealing with your gospel. [7] So it stands proved that the question concerned the law alone, in the very passage that shows what was fitting to keep from the law. But he rebukes Peter for not walking uprightly toward the truth of the gospel. Certainly he rebukes him — but for nothing other than an inconsistency of conduct, which he varied according to the standing of the people present, out of fear of those who were of the circumcision — not for any perversity regarding the divinity, a matter on which he would have opposed him to his face just as he opposed others; and this against Peter himself, for so much smaller a matter as ambiguous conduct, he did not spare him. So how do the Marcionites expect this to be believed? [8] Let the apostle go on, then, denying that a man is justified by works of the law, but by faith — yet faith in the same God to whom the law also belongs. For he would not have troubled himself to distinguish faith from the law, had a difference of divinity itself already made the distinction, if such a difference had existed. Rightly did he not rebuild what he had torn down. And the law had been due for tearing down ever since the voice of John cried out in the wilderness: "Prepare the ways of the Lord," so that the valleys and hills and mountains might be filled and leveled, and the crooked and rough places made straight and level — that is, the hardships of the law turned into the ease of the gospel. He had also remembered by then that the psalm's own hour had arrived: "Let us tear apart their chains, and throw off their yoke from us" — the psalm out of which the nations raged and the peoples schemed emptily, the kings of the earth took their stand and the rulers banded in a single plot to oppose the Lord and oppose his Anointed — so that now man might be justified by the freedom of faith, not by the servitude of the law, because the just man lives by faith. [9] And if the prophet Habakkuk foretold this, you have the apostle too confirming the prophets, just as Christ did. The faith, then, by which the just man will live belongs to that same God whose law does not justify the laborer. Accordingly, if there is a curse in the law and a blessing in faith, you have both set forth by the Creator: "See," he says, "I have set before you a curse and a blessing." You cannot claim a difference of authors just because there is a difference of things, when both are set forth by one and the same author. And why Christ was made a curse for us, on the apostle's own teaching, makes it plain how much he sides with us — that is, in accordance with the Creator's faith. [10] For it is not the case that, because the Creator pronounced, "Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree," Christ must therefore be thought to belong to another god, and to have been cursed by the Creator already, then, in the law. And how could the Creator have cursed beforehand one he does not even know? Why is it not rather more fitting for the Creator to have given his own Son over to his own curse, than for that god of yours to have subjected him to a curse — and on behalf of a man not his own, at that? In short, if this seems harsh in the Creator, in the case of his own Son, it is just as harsh in your god's case too; but if it is reasonable in your god's case, it is just as reasonable in mine — indeed more so in mine. [11] For it is easier to believe that the blessing meant for man through Christ's curse belongs to the one who had already, at some point, set before man both curse and blessing, than to believe it of one who never professed either, on your account. "We have received," he says, "the spiritual blessing through faith" — the faith, of course, by which the just man lives, according to the Creator. This, then, is what I am saying: that the faith belongs to that God to whom the form of grace of that faith belongs. And when he adds, "for you are all children of faith," he shows what heretical industry has erased above — namely, the mention of Abraham, by which the apostle elsewhere affirms us to be children of Abraham through faith, and in line with that mention he here too marks us as children of faith. But how else could we be children of faith, and whose faith, if not Abraham's? [12] For if Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him for righteousness, and on that ground earned the title of father to many nations, and we too, by believing God, are justified all the more, just as Abraham was, and likewise obtain life, just as the just man lives by faith — then it follows that just as he pronounced us above to be sons of Abraham, in respect of the father's faith, so here too he calls us children of faith, through which Abraham had been promised as father of nations. The very fact that he was calling faith back from circumcision — was he not seeking to establish as sons of Abraham, who had himself believed while still uncircumcised in the flesh? In short, the faith of one god cannot be admitted to the pattern of a different god, in such a way that it reckons believers for righteousness, makes the just live, and calls the nations children of faith. All of this belongs to the one with whom it was already known beforehand.
4.