Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] As the little work runs to its close, some points that keep recurring must now be briefly gone over again, while others, having come up rather too often already, may be passed by. I am weary of engaging further over the law, having so many times already proved that its very concession affords no argument for a second god in Christ — a law, that is, preached and promised toward Christ by the Creator himself — so that this very epistle seems, more than most, to exclude the point. [2] But we have also shown often enough already that the apostle constantly speaks of God as judge, and behind the judge one who punishes, and behind the one who punishes, the Creator. So here too, when he says, "For I am not ashamed of the gospel; for in it lies God's power leading to salvation for every believer, the Jew before all and the Greek as well, since in it God's righteousness stands revealed, out of faith unto faith" — without doubt he assigns both gospel and salvation to the just God, not to the "good" one, if I may put it in the heretic's own terms — the God who carries a man across from the faith of the law to the faith of the gospel, both being, of course, his own law and his own gospel. For he also says that wrath is revealed from heaven against the impiety and injustice of men who hold the truth captive in injustice. [3] Whose wrath is this? The Creator's, surely. Then the truth too will belong to the one whose wrath it is, the wrath that is to be revealed as vengeance for the truth. And he adds further: "We know that God's judgment is according to truth" — thereby proving both that this very wrath, from which judgment for the sake of truth proceeds, and, again, the truth of that same God whose wrath he has just proved by proving the judgment. It is one thing if the Creator, angered, avenges some other god's truth, held captive in injustice — quite another if it is his own. [4] What pitfalls Marcion has dug in this epistle above all, by stripping out what he pleased, will be plain from the integrity of our own text. For me it is enough to take up what he simply failed to notice needed erasing, as if by carelessness or blindness. For if God will judge the hidden things of men — both of those who sinned under the law and of those without the law, since these too, ignorant of the law, do by nature the things of the law — then surely the God who judges is the one to whom both the law and that very nature belong, nature standing in for the law to those ignorant of it. And how will he judge? [5] "According to my gospel," he says, "through Christ Jesus." Then both gospel and Christ belong to the very one to whom law and nature belong, since through the gospel and through Christ they will be vindicated by that God's judgment, which is, as above, "according to truth." So the reasoning by which wrath is defended as revealed from heaven can belong to none but the God of wrath; and here too the sense, coherent with what went before, in which the Creator's judgment is proclaimed, cannot be referred to some other god who neither judges nor grows angry, but to that God to whom — since these things, judgment I mean and wrath, are his — the means by which they are carried out, the gospel and Christ, must also of necessity belong. [6] And so he inveighs against transgressors of the law, men who teach "do not steal" and steal, speaking as a man of God's law, not touching the Creator himself in this way — the Creator who, in forbidding theft, nonetheless commanded the plundering of the Egyptians' gold and silver, as they twist other passages back against him in the same fashion. Did the apostle really fear to bring open reproach on a God from whom he did not fear to have defected? [7] Yet he attacked the Jews so hard that he flung at them the prophetic rebuke: "Because of you the name of God is blasphemed." How perverse, then, that he himself should blaspheme the very God for whose blaspheming he reproaches the wicked! He also sets circumcision of the heart above uncircumcision; with the God of the law, circumcision of the heart is what counts, not of the flesh — by spirit, not by letter. And if this is the circumcision of Jeremiah — "be circumcised in the foreskins of your heart" — as also of Moses — "circumcise your hard-heartedness" — then the spirit that circumcises the heart belongs to the very one whose letter reaps the flesh, and the Jew who is one in secret belongs to the very one whose Jew is one openly, since the apostle would not even wish to call a man "Jew" unless he were the servant of the Jews' own God. [8] "Then, law; now, the righteousness of God through faith in Christ." What is this distinction? Did your god serve the Creator's arrangement, giving him a time and a law of his own — or was the God of that time the same as the God of now? The law belongs to the one to whom the faith of Christ belongs too; what separates them is a change of administration, not a change of deity. [9] He counsels those made righteous through faith in Christ, and not through the law, to hold peace toward God. Toward which God? One toward whom we were never enemies — or the one against whose law and nature we rebelled? For if peace applies to the one with whom there was war, then it is to him we shall be justified, and Christ, by whose faith we are justified, will belong to him, since it is to peace with him that his enemies must at some point be reduced. [10] "But the law came in besides," he says, "that the trespass might abound." Why? "That grace might abound the more," he says. Whose grace, if not the very one whose law it is? Unless the Creator inserted the law on purpose to arrange business for the grace of some other god — a rival god, not to say an unknown one — so that, just as sin had reigned in death under him, so grace too might reign in righteousness unto life through Jesus Christ, his own adversary! [11] Was it for this that the Creator's law shut up everything under sin, and brought the whole world under guilt, and stopped every mouth, so that no one might boast through it — all so that grace might be reserved for Christ's glory — not the Creator's glory, but Marcion's? [12] Here too I can lay groundwork on the substance of Christ, in view of the question to come. "For you have been made dead to the law," he says, "through the body of Christ." So: the body of Christ — and "body" can be argued, granted, not to mean flesh outright. But whatever the substance, when he names the body of the one he goes on to say rose from the dead, no body can be understood but that of flesh, the very flesh to which the law of death was pronounced. [13] But look — he also speaks up for the law, laying the blame instead on sin as the true culprit. What then shall we say? "Is the law sin? Certainly not." Blush, Marcion. Certainly not. The apostle abhors this charge against the law. "But I did not know sin except through the law." [14] What a supreme commendation of the law is this — that through it sin was not allowed to lie hidden! So it was not the law that seduced, but sin, through the occasion given by the commandment. Why do you lay to God's charge what his law's own apostle does not dare lay to the law's charge? Indeed he piles it on further: "The law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good." [15] If he venerates the Creator's law like this, I do not see how he can be tearing him down. Who separates two gods, one just, one good, when the one whose commandment is both good and just must be believed to be both? And if he also affirms that the law is spiritual, then he affirms it prophetic too, and figurative too. From this too I must establish that Christ was preached figuratively in the law — which is exactly why he could not be recognized by all the Jews.
14.