Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] The devil has counterfeited the truth in various ways. At times he has tried to shake it by seeming to defend it. He claims there is a single Lord, the almighty maker of the world, so that he can turn even this oneness into a heresy. He claims that it was the Father in person who descended into the virgin's womb, was himself born from her, he himself suffered — in short, that he himself is Jesus Christ. But the serpent trips over himself here, because when he tempted Jesus Christ after John's baptism, he attacked him as the Son of God, certain — even on the evidence of the very scriptures he was then using to construct his temptation — that God had a Son: [2] "If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become loaves"; and again, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here; for it is written that he has commanded his angels concerning you" — the Father, of course — "that they will lift you in their hands, so that you never strike your foot against a stone." [3] Or will he now accuse the Gospels of lying, saying: "That was Matthew's and Luke's affair; as for me, I went straight to God himself, I tempted the Almighty face to face — that is exactly why I approached him, and exactly why I tempted him; otherwise, if he really were the Son of God, would I ever have condescended to bother with him?" No — the devil himself has been a liar from the beginning, and if he has ever suborned some man to be his tool, Praxeas is such a man. [4] For this fellow was the first to bring this brand of perversity out of Asia to Rome — a restless character to begin with, and further puffed up by boasting of his martyrdom, on the strength of nothing but a short, plain spell of discomfort in prison; even had he handed over his body to be burned, he would have gained nothing by it, since he lacks God's own love, the very gifts of which he went on to assault. [5] For this same man, when the bishop of Rome had already acknowledged the prophecies of Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla, and, on the strength of that acknowledgment, was bringing peace to the churches of Asia and Phrygia, forced him — by lying about those prophets and their churches, and by pleading the authority of his predecessors — to recall the letters of peace he had already sent out and to abandon his plan of admitting the gifts. So it was that Praxeas did the devil's business twice over at Rome: he drove out prophecy and brought in heresy, he put the Paraclete to flight and crucified the Father. [6] The Praxean weeds sown here too had sprouted, while most people slept in the simplicity of their doctrine; but they were later exposed by the one through whom God willed it, and seemed even to have been pulled up. In fact their teacher had by then guarded himself with a recantation of his error, and the signed document is still kept among the "psychics," among whom the affair was then transacted. [7] After that, silence — until, later still, our acknowledgment and defense of the Paraclete separated us from the psychics. But those weeds had by then scattered their seed everywhere; and so for a good while it lay low under a cover of hypocrisy and stubborn vitality, and now it has broken out again. But it too will be uprooted again, if the Lord wills it, in this present campaign; if not, on his own day all the adulterated crops will be gathered together and burned, along with every other stumbling-block, in the unquenchable fire.