Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
God forbids the making of an idol as much as its worship. Since it must first exist before it can be worshiped, it is all the more urgent that it not be made at all, if it is not lawful to worship it once made. For this reason—to root out, that is, the very raw material of idolatry—the divine law proclaims: 'You shall not make an idol,' and joins to it: 'nor the likeness of anything that is in heaven, or on earth, or in the sea'—thus forbidding the servants of God, throughout the whole world, arts of this kind. Enoch had gone before, foretelling that all the elements, the whole substance of the world—whatever heaven, sea, and earth contain—would be turned into idolatry by demons and the spirits of the deserting angels, so that they might be consecrated in God's place, against God. So human error worships everything except the very maker of everything. Their images are idols; the consecration of images is idolatry. Whatever idolatry commits must necessarily be charged to the craftsman of any and every idol. Indeed that same Enoch, in his warning, condemns beforehand the worshipers of the image alongside its craftsmen. And further: 'To you I make this oath, you offenders, that on the day of blood and ruin, grief has been laid up for you—you who bow to stones, you who fashion figures of gold, silver, timber, rock, and clay, and who bow to phantoms, to demons, to spirits of the underworld, and to every deception outside true knowledge; from these you shall obtain no relief.' Isaiah too says: 'You are my witnesses, whether there is a God besides me.' And there were none then who fashion and carve, all of them vain, who make what pleases themselves, which will do them no good. And thereafter follows that whole pronouncement which condemns both the craftsmen and the worshipers alike. Its ending runs: 'Understand that their heart is dust and soil, and none of them can rescue his own soul.' And so too David says of the makers: 'Let those who fashion them come to resemble them.' What more, then, should a man of my slight memory bring forward? What further should I draw out of the Scriptures? As if the utterance of the Holy Spirit did not already suffice, or as if there remained room to argue whether the Lord pronounced his curse and sentence upon the artisans themselves in advance of pronouncing it on those who worship what they made.
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