Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Nor will it be tiresome to attend to the shorter letters too — there is flavor even in a few words. "The Jews had killed their prophets." I might well ask: what is that to the apostle of another god — and indeed the best of gods — who is not even said to condemn the sins of his own people, and who, by rejecting those same prophets, in a sense destroys them himself? What wrong, after all, did Israel commit in his eyes, if it killed men whom he too had already rejected, if he himself had first pronounced a hostile sentence against them? No — their offense was against their own God. It is the one whose injured party it is who charges the wrong; certainly it is anyone but the adversary of the one injured. Nor would he have burdened them further by charging them also with the Lord's murder, saying, "who both killed the Lord... and their own prophets" — though "their own" may well be the heretic's insertion. [2] For what is so bitter about it, if men who had already butchered their own god's prophets went on to kill Christ, the preacher of a different god? The whole point of the aggravation is that they had killed both the Lord and his servants. But if they killed one god's Christ and another's prophets, he has merely equated two impieties, not aggravated one by the other. Yet they were not on a level to be equated; so the charge could only be an aggravation if both crimes were committed against one and the same Lord under two headings. Therefore Christ and the prophets belong to the same God. [3] As for what he calls "our sanctification," which is "the will of God" — you can recognize it from the very things he forbids. "That you abstain," he says, "from fornication" — not from marriage; "that each one know how to possess his own vessel in honor." How? "not in the passion of lust, as the Gentiles do." Now lust is not attributed even by the Gentiles to marriage itself, but to excesses that are unnatural and monstrous forms of self-indulgence... Sanctity, then, stands opposed also to shamefulness and impurity — not excluding marriage, but excluding lust; it treats our "vessel" with the honor due to marriage. This passage I would handle without prejudice to a deeper, more complete holiness — favoring continence and virginity over marriage, yet not thereby prohibiting it. For it is destroyers of marriage, not devotees of chastity, that I am here beating back. [4] He says that those who remain until the coming of Christ, together with those who died in Christ and rise first, will be caught up in the clouds into the air to meet the Lord. I recognize in this the very thing the heavenly substances themselves — Jerusalem herself, who is above — marveled at long before, foreseeing it; and Isaiah proclaiming: "Who are these that fly here like clouds, like doves with their young, to me?" If Christ has prepared this ascent for us, then he is the Christ of whom Amos speaks: "who builds his ascent into the heavens" — for himself, certainly, and for his own. From whom, then, shall I now hope for this, if not from the one from whom I have heard it foretold? [5] What spirit does he forbid to be quenched, and what prophecies does he forbid to be counted as nothing? Not the Creator's spirit, surely, nor the Creator's prophecies, according to Marcion — for what he himself destroys, he has already quenched and made nothing of, and one cannot forbid the quenching of what one has already reduced to nothing. It falls to Marcion, then, to produce today, in his own church, a spirit of his god that need not be quenched, and prophecies that are not to be counted as nothing. And if he does produce what he imagines he has, let him know that we will put whatever it is to the test of the true form of spiritual and prophetic grace and power — that it foretell the future, reveal the secrets of the heart, and expound the mysteries. [6] Since he can produce and prove nothing of the kind, we will bring forward the Creator's own spirit alongside his prophecies, proclaiming him in his own words. And so it will be established what the apostle meant — namely, the things that were to come in the church of that God who, since he exists, has a spirit that is also at work, and a promise that is still being fulfilled. [7] Come, then — you who reject the flesh's deliverance, and who, whenever "body" appears in such passages, insist on reading it as something other than fleshly substance — how do you explain that the apostle distinguished all our substances by their proper names, and set them all together in a single prayer for salvation, wishing that "our spirit and body and soul be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord and Savior Christ"? [8] For he set down both soul and body — two things, as distinct as they are two. Although both soul and body have each their own particular quality, as does spirit too, still, when body and soul are named distinctly, the soul has its own proper name, needing no borrowing of the common word "body"; that word is left for the flesh, which, having no proper name of its own here, must of necessity use the common one. Indeed, besides spirit and soul, I know of no further substance within a person to which the label "body" might be applied, other than the flesh — understanding it under the name "body" every time it is not named outright; and all the more so here, where the thing called "body" is called by its own name.
16. ON THE SECOND EPISTLE TO THE THESSALONIANS.