Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] This proof, ready-made as it is, still needs from us a defense against the clamorous objections of the other side. For they say that Marcion did not so much invent the rule of separating law and gospel as restore it from corruption, long since adulterated. O Christ, most patient of lords, who endured for so many years the twisting of your own preaching — until, of course, Marcion came along to rescue you! [2] They set before us Peter himself and the other pillars of the apostolate, rebuked by Paul for not walking a straight path toward the truth of the gospel — rebuked, mind you, by that same Paul who was then still raw in grace, trembling lest he had run, or might be running, in vain, when for the first time he was conferring with the apostles who had gone before him. [3] If, then, still hot with the zeal of a new convert, he judged there was something to rebuke in their conduct with respect to Judaism — a merely occasional lapse in practice, mind you — seeing that he himself would later become all things to all men so as to win them all, a Jew to the Jews and, to those under the law, as one under the law — then you want this rebuke, which concerned conduct alone (and which would later please his own accuser), to be regarded as suspect even as evidence of a betrayal of the preaching about God. [4] And yet, on the unity of that preaching — as we read above — they had joined right hands, and by that very division of labor had struck a pact of partnership in the gospel; as he says elsewhere, "Whether I, then, or they, so we preach." And even where he describes certain false brothers who had crept in, wanting to carry the Galatians off to a different gospel, he himself shows that this corruption of the gospel was not aimed at transferring faith to another god and another Christ, but at preserving the discipline of the law — catching those men, that is, defending circumcision and observing days and months and seasons and years of the Jewish ceremonies, which they ought already to have recognized as done away with, in keeping with the Creator's own renewed arrangement, long since announced on this very point through his prophets: as through Isaiah, "The old things have passed away; behold, the new things I now make"; and elsewhere, "And I will establish a covenant, not such as I established with your fathers when I led them out of the land of Egypt." So too through Jeremiah, "Renew for yourselves a new renewal, and be circumcised to your God, and circumcise the foreskins of your hearts." [5] It was this circumcision, then, that the apostle was already insisting on, and this renewal by which he was likewise dissuading them from those old ceremonies — the very ones their own maker had professed, through Hosea, would one day cease: "I will put an end to all her rejoicing, her festal days, her monthly observances, her days of rest, and all her solemn rites." So too through Isaiah: "Your monthly observances and days of rest and the great gathering-day, I cannot bear; my soul loathes your fasts and appointed feasts." [6] But if the Creator himself had long since rejected all these things, and the apostle was proclaiming them already fit to be rejected, then the apostle's own judgment, agreeing as it does with the Creator's decrees, proves that the apostle preached no other god than the one whose decrees he wanted now acknowledged — branding as false apostles and false brothers, in this very matter, those who would drag the gospel of the Creator's Christ away from the newness the Creator had foretold and back to the oldness the Creator had rejected.
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