Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Come now, if you have read in David, "The Lord has reigned from the tree," I wait to hear how you understand it. Unless perhaps you think some king of wood is meant among the Jews, and not Christ, who from the moment of his passion on the tree, having conquered death, has reigned ever since. For even though death has reigned from Adam until Christ, why should it not be affirmed of Christ that he has ruled "out of the wood," given that from the timber of the cross, once he had died, he brought death's dominion to a close? [2] So too Isaiah: "For unto us," he says, "a child is born." What novelty is there in that, if he does not mean the Son of God? "And given to us, whose government is placed upon his shoulder." What king at all bears the emblem of his power upon his shoulder, rather than a diadem upon his head or a scepter in his hand or some mark upon his own robe? [3] But only the new king of the new ages, Christ Jesus, carried the power and the loftiness of his new glory upon his shoulder — that is, the cross — so that, according to the prophecy above, the Lord might thenceforth reign "from the tree." This wood Jeremiah too points out to you, foretelling the very words the Jews would one day say: "Come, let us cast wood into his bread" — that is, into his body. [4] This much God disclosed even within the gospel you yourselves favor, terming bread his body, so that from that too you might grasp that he had long since granted bread the figure of his flesh — the very flesh the prophet had already prefigured in bread, a mystery the Lord himself would later unfold. [5] If you still want a further announcement of the Lord's cross, psalm twenty-one is amply sufficient, holding within it the entire suffering of Christ, who even there gave voice to his own coming glory: "They have bored through," it says, "my hands and my feet" — exactly that harsh particular of crucifixion. And once more, as he begs his Father to rescue him: "Deliver me," he says, "out of the lion's jaws" — meaning death — and "from the horns of the wild oxen," my low estate — [6] that is, from the tips of the cross, as I have shown above. This cross neither David himself suffered, nor any king of the Jews, lest you think the passion of anyone else was foretold than of him who alone was so conspicuously crucified by the people. Now even if heretical stubbornness rejects and mocks all these interpretations, I will grant that no cross of Christ was signified by the Creator — but even by this he will not prove that the one who was crucified is someone else, [7] unless he can show that this very outcome of his was foretold by his own god, so that the difference in the manner of death — and thereby in the persons as well — may be vindicated by a difference in what was foretold. Otherwise, even without his Christ being foretold at all, let alone his cross, a mere prophecy of death, unqualified, suffices for my Christ. For since the manner of death was not specified, it could well have come about by crucifixion, only then to be assigned to some other Christ if it had been foretold of some other. [8] Unless he will deny that even the death of my Christ was foretold — all the more to his own embarrassment, since he announces his own Christ as having died though he denies he was born, while he denies mine, whom he confesses to have been born, could have died. But death and burial and resurrection alike I want to show, of my Christ, in that one utterance of Isaiah: "His burial has been taken away from the midst." [9] For he could not have had his burial taken away unless he had first been buried, nor could his burial have been taken away from the midst except through resurrection. Accordingly he adds: "Therefore he shall possess many as an inheritance, and shall divide the spoils of many, because his soul was given over to death." For the reason for this grace has been shown: namely, as a recompense for the wrong of death. And it has likewise been shown that he was to obtain these things after death — that is, through resurrection.
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