9. Tertullian, Against Marcion, 3.22-3.23 (2nd cent. CE - 3rd cent. CE)
| 3.22. You have the work of the apostles also predicted: How beautiful are the feet of them which preach the gospel of peace, which bring good tidings of good, not of war nor evil tidings. In response to which is the psalm, Their sound is gone through all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world; that is, the words of them who carry round about the law that proceeded from Sion and the Lord's word from Jerusalem, in order that that might come to pass which was written: They who were far from my righteousness, have come near to my righteousness and truth. When the apostles girded their loins for this business, they renounced the elders and rulers and priests of the Jews. Well, says he, but was it not above all things that they might preach the other god? Rather (that they might preach) that very self-same God, whose scripture they were with all their might fulfilling! Depart, depart, exclaims Isaiah; go out from thence, and touch not the unclean thing, that is blasphemy against Christ; Go out of the midst of her, even of the synagogue. Be separate who bear the vessels of the Lord. Isaiah 52:11 For already had the Lord, according to the preceding words (of the prophet), revealed His Holy One with His arm, that is to say, Christ by His mighty power, in the eyes of the nations, so that all the nations and the utmost parts of the earth have seen the salvation, which was from God. By thus departing from Judaism itself, when they exchanged the obligations and burdens of the law for the liberty of the gospel, they were fulfilling the psalm, Let us burst their bonds asunder, and cast away their yoke from us; and this indeed (they did) after that the heathen raged, and the people imagined vain devices; after that the kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers took their counsel together against the Lord, and against His Christ. What did the apostles thereupon suffer? You answer: Every sort of iniquitous persecutions, from men that belonged indeed to that Creator who was the adversary of Him whom they were preaching. Then why does the Creator, if an adversary of Christ, not only predict that the apostles should incur this suffering, but even express His displeasure thereat? For He ought neither to predict the course of the other god, whom, as you contend, He knew not, nor to have expressed displeasure at that which He had taken care to bring about. See how the righteous perishes, and no man lays it to heart; and how merciful men are taken away, and no man considers. For the righteous man has been removed from the evil person. Isaiah 57:1 Who is this but Christ? Come, say they, let us take away the righteous, because He is not for our turn, (and He is clean contrary to our doings). Wisdom 2:12 Premising, therefore, and likewise subjoining the fact that Christ suffered, He foretold that His just ones should suffer equally with Him - both the apostles and all the faithful in succession; and He signed them with that very seal of which Ezekiel spoke: The Lord said to me, Go through the gate, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set the mark Tau upon the foreheads of the men. Now the Greek letter Tau and our own letter T is the very form of the cross, which He predicted would be the sign on our foreheads in the true Catholic Jerusalem, in which, according to the twenty-first Psalm, the brethren of Christ or children of God would ascribe glory to God the Father, in the person of Christ Himself addressing His Father; I will declare Your name unto my brethren; in the midst of the congregation will I sing praise unto You. For that which had to come to pass in our day in His name, and by His Spirit, He rightly foretold would be of Him. And a little afterwards He says: My praise shall be of You in the great congregation. In the sixty-seventh Psalm He says again: In the congregations bless the Lord God. So that with this agrees also the prophecy of Malachi: I have no pleasure in you, says the Lord; neither will I accept your offerings: for from the rising of the sun, even unto the going down of the same, my name shall be great among the Gentiles; and in every place sacrifice shall be offered unto my name, and a pure offering Malachi 1:10-11 - such as the ascription of glory, and blessing, and praise, and hymns. Now, inasmuch as all these things are also found among you, and the sign upon the forehead, and the sacraments of the church, and the offerings of the pure sacrifice, you ought now to burst forth, and declare that the Spirit of the Creator prophesied of your Christ. 3.23. Now, since you join the Jews in denying that their Christ has come, recollect also what is that end which they were predicted as about to bring on themselves after the time of Christ, for the impiety wherewith they both rejected and slew Him. For it began to come to pass from that day, when, according to Isaiah, a man threw away his idols of gold and of silver, which they made into useless and hurtful objects of worship; Isaiah 2:20 in other words, from the time when he threw away his idols after the truth had been made clear by Christ. Consider whether what follows in the prophet has not received its fulfilment: The Lord of hosts has taken away from Judah and from Jerusalem, among other things, both the prophet and the wise artificer; that is, His Holy Spirit, who builds the church, which is indeed the temple, and household and city of God. For thenceforth God's grace failed among them; and the clouds were commanded to rain no rain upon the vineyard of Sorech; to withhold, that is, the graces of heaven, that they shed no blessing upon the house of Israel, which had but produced the thorns wherewith it had crowned the Lord, and instead of righteousness, the cry wherewith it had hurried Him away to the cross. Isaiah 5:6-7 And so in this manner the law and the prophets were until John, but the dews of divine grace were withdrawn from the nation. After his time their madness still continued, and the name of the Lord was blasphemed by them, as says the Scripture: Because of you my name is continually blasphemed among the nations Isaiah 52:5 (for from them did the blasphemy originate); neither in the interval from Tiberius to Vespasian did they learn repentance. Therefore has their land become desolate, their cities are burnt with fire, their country strangers are devouring before their own eyes; the daughter of Sion has been deserted like a cottage in a vineyard, or a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, Isaiah 1:7-8 ever since the time when Israel acknowledged not the Lord, and the people understood Him not, but forsook Him, and provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger. Isaiah 1:3-4 So likewise that conditional threat of the sword, If you refuse and hear me not, the sword shall devour you, Isaiah 1:20 has proved that it was Christ, for rebellion against whom they have perished. In the fifty-eighth Psalm He demands of the Father their dispersion: Scatter them in Your power. By Isaiah He also says, as He finishes a prophecy of their consumption by fire: Because of me has this happened to you; you shall lie down in sorrow. Isaiah 50:11 But all this would be unmeaning enough, if they suffered this retribution not on account of Him, who had in prophecy assigned their suffering to His own cause, but for the sake of the Christ of the other god. Well, then, although you affirm that it is the Christ of the other god who was driven to the cross by the powers and authorities of the Creator, as it were by hostile beings, still I have to say, See how manifestly He was defended by the Creator: there were given to Him both the wicked for His burial, even those who had strenuously maintained that His corpse had been stolen, and the rich for His death, even those who had redeemed Him from the treachery of Judas, as well as from the lying report of the soldiers that His body had been taken away. Therefore these things either did not happen to the Jews on His account, in which case you will be refuted by the sense of the Scriptures tallying with the issue of the facts and the order of the times, or else they did happen on His account, and then the Creator could not have inflicted the vengeance except for His own Christ; nay, He must have rather had a reward for Judas, if it had been his master's enemy whom they put to death. At all events, if the Creator's Christ has not come yet, on whose account the prophecy dooms them to such sufferings, they will have to endure the sufferings when He shall have come. Then where will there be a daughter of Sion to be reduced to desolation, for there is none now to be found? Where will there be cities to be burnt with fire, for they are now in heaps? Where a nation to be dispersed, which is already in banishment? Restore to Jud a its former state, that the Creator's Christ may find it, and then you may contend that another Christ has come. But then, again, how is it that He can have permitted to range through His own heaven one whom He was some day to put to death on His own earth, after the more noble and glorious region of His kingdom had been violated, and His own very palace and sublimest height had been trodden by him? Or was it only in appearance rather that he did this? God is no doubt a jealous God! Yet he gained the victory. You should blush with shame, who put your faith in a vanquished god! What have you to hope for from him, who was not strong enough to protect himself? For it was either through his infirmity that he was crushed by the powers and human agents of the Creator, or else through maliciousness, in order that he might fasten so great a stigma on them by his endurance of their wickedness. |
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