Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] If these two properties of Jewish literature are for the moment sufficiently established, remember, reader, that they were established so that when we bring such a point to bear, the question is not reopened about the form of the text but about the state of the case. Since, then, the heretic's madness presumed that the Christ who came was one who had never been foretold, it followed that he had to contend that the Christ who had always been preached had not yet come; [2] and so he was forced to make common cause with the Jewish error and build his argument from it — as though the Jews, being certain themselves that a different Christ had come, had not merely spurned him as a stranger but killed him as an enemy, when they would surely have recognized him and paid him every religious honor had he been their own. [3] Apparently that shipmaster's law bound them — not Rhodian law, but Pontic — decreeing that Jews could not possibly err about their own Christ, when even if nothing of the sort had been foretold against them, the mere fact of being human, liable to deception, would have been enough to persuade us that Jews could err, being men, and no verdict should be assumed straight off against the judgment of people whom it was credible had erred. [4] Further, since it was also foretold that they would not recognize the Christ and would therefore kill him, it follows that he must be one who was both unrecognized and killed by those who were foretold to do just that to him. If you demand this proved, I need not unroll the scriptures that, in declaring Christ killable, thereby also affirm him knowable-by-ignorance (for unless he could be unrecognized, he obviously could not suffer); it will suffice for the present, reserving those texts for the discussion of the sufferings, to bring forward those prophecies which meanwhile prove Christ would go unrecognized — and briefly, since they show that all power of understanding was taken from the people by the Creator. [5] 'I will take away,' he says, 'the wisdom of their wise, and the understanding of their prudent men I will hide'; and, 'Hearing you will hear and not understand, and seeing you will see and not perceive; for this people's heart is grown fat, and their ears are dull of hearing, and they have shut their eyes, so that their ears would not catch the sound nor their eyes take in the sight nor their heart grasp the meaning and turn back, that I might restore them.' [6] For they had earned this dulling of their saving senses, honoring God with their lips while their heart was far from him. So if Christ was indeed being announced by the Creator who fixes the thunder fast and shuts up the wind and proclaims to men his own Christ, as the prophet Joel has it, and if all the hope of the Jews — not to mention even of the Gentiles — was fixed on the revelation of Christ, then without doubt it was foretold that they would fail to recognize and fail to understand, robbed of the powers of recognition and understanding, of wisdom and prudence, in the matter of what was announced, that is Christ — their leading wise men, that is the scribes, going astray over him, and their prudent men, that is the Pharisees, likewise, and the people too, set to catch the sound with their ears yet never hear — meaning, of course, Christ teaching — and to take in the sight with their eyes yet never see — meaning, of course, Christ working signs — in keeping with what is said elsewhere: 'And who is blind but my servants? and who is deaf but they that rule over them?' [7] And again, when through the same Isaiah he reproaches them: 'I have begotten and raised up sons, and they have rejected me; the ox knows its owner and the ass its master's stall, but Israel has not known me, and my people has not understood' — we for our part hold it certain that Christ has always spoken in the prophets, namely the Spirit of the Creator, as the prophet testifies: 'The person of our Spirit is Christ the Lord' — he who from the beginning, as the Father's stand-in acting in God's name, was both heard and seen; we know that his were the very words that even then reproached Israel for what they were foretold to do against him: 'You have forsaken the Lord and provoked the Holy One of Israel to wrath.' [8] But if you would rather refer all this reckoning of ancient Jewish ignorance to God himself rather than to Christ — unwilling even to grant that back then it was the Word and Spirit, that is the Creator's Christ, whom they despised and failed to recognize — even so you will be refuted. For since you do not deny that the Son and Spirit and substance of the Creator is his Christ, you must grant that those who did not recognize the Father could not have recognized the Son either, by reason of their sharing the same substance — of which, if the fullness was not understood, still less would a mere portion be, even though it is a partaker of that fullness. [9] With these points thus examined, it now becomes clear both how the Jews rejected Christ and how they killed him — not because they took him to be a stranger, but because they could not recognize him as one of their own. For how could a man be grasped as a stranger, if concerning him nothing had ever once been proclaimed, seeing that they could not even grasp him though he had always been proclaimed beforehand? For being understood or not understood is only possible for something that, by having the substance of a prior announcement, will have material for either recognition or error. What lacks such material admits no outcome of wisdom or its lack. [10] And this is exactly why they turned away from and persecuted Christ — not as a different god, but only as a man, one they judged a charlatan in his signs and a rival in his teaching; so that, precisely as their own — that is, as a Jew, but one who strayed from and destroyed Judaism — they brought that very man to judgment and punished him by their own law, certainly not about to condemn a stranger. So far is it from the truth that they seem to have understood Christ as a stranger, seeing that they did not even judge his humanity as that of a stranger.
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