Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] You have too the work of the apostles as it was foretold: 'How timely are the feet of those who bring good news of peace, who bring good news of good things' — not of war, nor of evil. The psalm answers likewise: 'Into all the earth their sound has gone out, and to the ends of the world their words' — carrying, that is, the law that issued from Zion and the Lord's word from Jerusalem — so that what is written might come to pass: 'Those far from my righteousness have drawn near to my righteousness and to my truth.' [2] When the apostles girded themselves for this task, they brought their report before the elders, the rulers, and the priests of the Jews. Was it not, you say, precisely as preachers of another god? On the contrary — it was of that very same God whose scripture they were, at that very moment, fulfilling to the letter: 'Depart, depart,' cries Isaiah, 'go out from there, and touch nothing unclean' — blasphemy against Christ, that is — 'go out from the midst of her' — that is, of the synagogue; 'separate yourselves, you who carry the vessels of the Lord.' [3] For already, according to what was written above, the Lord had revealed his holy arm — that is, his power, Christ — before the nations, so every nation and the remotest ends of the earth might see the salvation that came from God. So too, departing from Judaism itself, as they exchanged the law's bonds and burdens for gospel freedom, they were carrying out the psalm: 'Let us break their bonds and cast off their yoke from us' — this after, indeed, the nations had raged and the peoples plotted vain things; the kings of the earth took their stand, and the rulers assembled in opposition to the Lord and to his Christ. [4] What did the apostles then suffer? Every kind of unjust persecution, you say, at the hands of the men of the Creator, as though they were his enemies since they preached against him. And why, then, does the Creator not merely foretell that his own apostles would suffer this, but actually reproach it? [5] For he would neither have foretold the order of another god, whom on your view he did not even know, nor would he have reproached what he himself had brought about: 'See how the righteous man perishes, and no one lays it to heart; and just men are carried off, and no one takes notice; for the just man is carried off from before the face of injustice.' Who but Christ? 'Come,' they say, 'let us take away the righteous man, for he is of no use to us.' By foretelling both, then, and by adding afterward that Christ too would suffer, he likewise prophesied that his righteous ones — the apostles first, and after them all the faithful — would suffer the same, marked with that very sign of which Ezekiel speaks: 'The Lord says to me, Pass through the midst of the gate, through the center of Jerusalem, and set the mark of the Tau on the foreheads of the men.' [6] For this is the Greek letter Tau, and in our alphabet T — the shape of the cross — which he foreshadowed as destined to be on our foreheads in the true and catholic Jerusalem, in which the brothers of Christ, the sons of God, would render glory to God the Father, as the twenty-first psalm sings in the person of Christ himself to the Father: 'I will declare your name to my brothers; in the midst of the assembly I will sing a hymn to you.' For what was to happen today in his name and Spirit, he rightly foretold as his own future act. And a little further on: 'From you comes my praise in the great assembly.' And in the sixty-seventh: 'In the assemblies bless the Lord God' — so that Malachi's prophecy might likewise coincide with this: 'It is not my will,' says the Lord, 'and I will not accept your sacrifices; for from the rising of the sun to its setting my name has been glorified among the nations, and in every place a sacrifice is offered to my name, and a clean sacrifice' — that is, the rendering of glory, and blessing, and praise, and hymns. [7] Since all of this is found present in you as well — the sealing of foreheads, and the sacraments of the assemblies, and the purity of the sacrifices — you ought by now to burst out and say that it was the Spirit of the Creator who prophesied all this of your Christ.
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