Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] But again, on yet another blind reading, they run headlong into two men — an old one and a new — because the apostle warns us to strip away the old man, corrupted by deceitful desires, and to be made new in the disposition of our mind, clothing ourselves instead with the new man, fashioned after God in righteousness and genuine holiness — so that here too, splitting man into two substances, they can pin perpetual corruption on the "old" one, meaning the flesh. [2] But if we go by substances, the soul is no more the "new man" for being later, nor is the flesh the "old" for being earlier: for how little time separates the hand of God from the breath he blew into it? [3] I would even dare say that even if the soul is far earlier than the flesh, the very fact that the soul was waiting to be filled makes the flesh the earlier one: for every completion and perfection, even though it comes last in order, is first in effect — that thing is more truly "first" without which the earlier things cannot exist at all. [4] If the flesh is the "old man," at what point did it turn old? Right from the start? Yet Adam was, at that point, wholly new, and nothing brand-new has ever counted as old. And in fact, from the moment of the blessing on procreation onward, flesh and soul come into being together, with no reckoning of time between them, since they are sown together in the womb — as I have shown in my treatise on the soul: [5] they share one conception, one birth. These two men, distinct indeed in substance but not in age, are thus brought forth as a single being, since neither one exists before the other. It is far quicker to say that we are wholly old or wholly new all at once than to explain by what means we could be one without the other. [6] But the apostle plainly identifies what the "old man" is: "Put off," he says, "the old man according to your former manner of life" — not according to the age of some substance. For he does not tell us to put off the flesh, but — as he shows elsewhere too when he calls certain things "fleshly" — he is accusing deeds, not bodies. [7] Of these very deeds he goes on here to say: "Lay aside falsehood, and let each of you speak what is true to the person next to him, since we belong to one another as parts of a single body." [8] "Feel anger if you must, but do not sin by it; do not let the sun set while your rage still burns, and give the devil no foothold." [9] "Whoever was in the habit of stealing must steal no longer; let him labor instead, doing honest work with his own hands, so he has something to hand over to whoever is in want." [10] "No rotten word should pass your lips — only what serves to build others up as the occasion demands, so that it does good to those listening." [11] "Do not bring sorrow to God's Holy Spirit, by whom you carry the seal that marks you for the day you are ransomed." [12] "Let all bitterness, and wrath, and clamor, and blasphemy be taken away from you, along with all malice: [13] but be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God also in Christ forgave you." [14] So then, those who reckon the flesh to be the "old man" — why do they not hasten their own death, so that, the old man having been put off, they might at last meet the apostle's commands? [15] For we, who hold that our entire practice of faith must be carried out through the body — indeed, through the flesh, whose mouth speaks only the best of words, whose tongue refrains from blasphemy, whose heart refrains from resentment, whose hands work and give — we maintain that both the "oldness" and the "newness" of man refer to a moral, not a substantial, difference. [16] And so we recognize equally that the man who, according to his former manner of life, was "old," is the same man said to be "corrupted according to the lusts of deceit" — just as he is called "old according to his former manner of life," not according to the flesh through everlasting destruction — but rather that this same man, his flesh kept safe, is saved just as he is, having been stripped, as it were, of a vicious way of life, not of bodily substance.