Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] But if someone preaching a new god wanted thereby to exclude the old god's law, why does he lay down nothing at all about this new god, but only about the old law — unless it is because, faith in the Creator remaining intact, only his law was meant to lapse? Just as that psalm had already sung ahead of time: "Let us tear apart their fetters, and throw off their yoke from us" — a text which set the nations raging and the peoples scheming empty designs; the rulers of the earth rose in arms and the princes assembled as one in opposition to the Lord and to his Anointed. [2] And certainly, if Paul had been preaching a different god, there would have been no debate at all over whether the law need be kept — since it plainly would have had nothing to do with a new lord who was the law's own rival. The sheer novelty and otherness of that god would have swept away not just the issue of an old, foreign law, but any mention of it at all. But here was the whole state of the question: that since the same god of the law was being preached in Christ, it was his law that was being set aside. [3] Faith, then, stood firm throughout in the Creator and his Christ, while it was conduct and discipline that wavered. Some debated the eating of food offered to idols, others the veiling of women, others marriage or divorce, some even the hope of resurrection — about God, no one. For had this too been a matter of debate, it too would be found in the apostle, and indeed as the chief of all questions. [4] But if truth suffered corruption regarding the rule of God after the time of the apostles, then it follows that apostolic tradition suffered nothing of the kind regarding the rule of God in its own time — and no tradition of the apostles is to be recognized except the one that is set forth today in their own churches. Now you will not find a single church of apostolic pedigree that does not hold to Christian faith in the Creator. And if these were corrupted from the very start, which ones, pray, will be sound? The ones opposed to the Creator, no doubt! [5] Produce, then, some church of your own with apostolic pedigree, and you will have won the point. Since, then, it is established in every way that from Christ down to Marcion there was, within the rule of this mystery, no other god than the Creator, our proof already stands sufficiently fortified, by which we have shown that the heretic's notion of a god took its rise from the separation of gospel and law; and the earlier principle stands established too: that no god is to be believed in whom man has composed out of his own private notions — unless, that is, he plainly speaks as a prophet, that is, not out of his own notions. [6] And if this can be said of Marcion, it must also be proved. There was nothing here that needed reworking. For it is by this very wedge of truth that every heresy is driven out: when Christ is shown to be the vehicle of no other god than the Creator.
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