Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
So I come now to that text which our own people put forward as license to indulge curiosity, and which heretics hammer away at to import their fussy over-questioning. 'It is written,' they say, 'seek and you shall find.' Let us recall when the Lord uttered this saying. I think it was in the very earliest days of his teaching, while everyone still doubted whether he was the Christ, while Peter had not yet declared him the Son of God, while even John had begun to have his doubts about him. Rightly, then, was it said at that time, 'seek and you shall find' — when he who was not yet acknowledged still needed to be sought — and this applies to the Jews. For the whole force of that rebuke belongs to those who had somewhere to seek Christ. 'They have,' he says, 'Moses and Elijah' — that is, the Law and the Prophets — proclaiming Christ, according to what he says elsewhere quite openly: 'Search the scriptures, in which you hope for salvation; for they speak of me.' This is what 'seek and you shall find' amounts to. And what follows plainly applies to the Jews as well: 'knock, and it shall be opened to you.' The Jews had once stood at God's side; then, cast out for their offenses, they began to be outside God; but the nations had never been at God's side at all, save for a drop from the bucket and dust from the threshing floor, and had always been outside. So how shall he who has always been outside knock at a door he never knew, into which he was never once received nor ever cast out? Rather it is the man who knows he was once inside and driven out who will knock, since he knows the door. Likewise 'ask and you shall receive' fits the one who knew from whom to ask, and to whom something had already been promised — that is, by God, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — whom the nations knew no better than they knew any promise of his. So too he spoke expressly to Israel: 'my mission,' he says, 'reaches no one but Israel's stray sheep, the flock now lost.' Not yet was he throwing to the dogs the bread meant for the children; not yet had he ordered the road taken to the nations. It was only at the end that he commanded them to go and teach and baptize the nations, soon to receive the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, who would lead them into all truth. And so it is this that makes them capable of it. But if the apostles themselves, destined as teachers for the nations, were themselves first to receive a teacher, the Paraclete, how much more will 'seek and you shall find' be beside the point for us, to whom the teaching was to come unsought, through the apostles, and to the apostles themselves through the Holy Spirit. All the Lord's sayings, to be sure, are set before everyone, and have come down to us through the ears of the Jews; but many of them, aimed at particular persons, established for us not a rule binding on us as our own but an example.