Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Every opinion and every piece of equipment belonging to the impious and sacrilegious Marcion we now call to account before his own gospel — the one he made his own by interpolating it. And to furnish it with credentials, he composed for it a kind of dowry, a work put together out of oppositions of contraries, entitled Antitheses, and forced into service to separate the Law from the Gospel; by which, splitting the two gods apart — and therefore making them different, the one belonging to one instrument (or, as it is more usual to say, testament), the other to the other — he meant thereby to win a patron, too, for his gospel understood according to the Antitheses. [2] I might have felled those Antitheses in close combat on their own ground, thrust by single thrust across the Pontic's darts, had it not been far more to the purpose to beat them down within the very gospel they mean to defend, and along with it. And yet it is easy enough to meet them by simple prescription — indeed so easy that I could grant them, allow them as valid, even say they work in our favor, so that the blindness of their own author should the more shame them: our own antitheses now, set against Marcion. [3] I confess, then, that one order ran its course under the old dispensation with the Creator, another under the new with Christ. I do not deny a difference between the records of speech, the precepts of virtue, the disciplines of the law — provided the whole diversity comes together in one and the same God, the very one, evidently, by whom it stands established that it was both arranged and foretold. [4] Long ago Isaiah proclaimed that out of Zion a rule would issue, with the Lord's utterance coming out of Jerusalem — plainly another rule and another utterance. He shall judge, it says, among the nations, and shall convert a great people — not, clearly, of the one nation of the Jews, but of the nations who, by that fresh rule of the gospel and that fresh utterance carried by the apostles, are judged and converted within themselves from their former error, at the very moment they believe; and thereupon their blades are hammered down into plough-blades, and their spear-shafts (a kind of hunting-lance) into pruning-hooks — that is, they turn minds once fierce and savage into upright sensibilities and workers of good fruit. [5] And again: Hear me, hear me, my people, and you kings, give ear to me, for a rule shall issue out from me, and my sentence to be a beacon for the nations — by which he had already judged and decreed that the nations too should be lit up by that same rule and utterance of the gospel. This shall likewise be the rule set out through David, without blemish, which, once perfected, turns the soul back — back, that is, from idols to God. This too shall be that utterance of which Isaiah himself declares: for the Lord shall bring a saying to a swift close upon the earth. [6] For the new testament is abridged, and freed from the law's tangled burdens. But why multiply proofs, when the newness to come is proclaimed by the Creator himself more plainly and clearly than daylight? Remember not the former things, and think not upon the things of old: what was old has now departed, fresh matters are rising up: behold, I fashion new things, which shall now spring up. Likewise through Jeremiah: Renew for yourselves a new renewal, and sow not among thorns, and cut away the uncircumcision covering your heart. And elsewhere: Behold, the days come, says the Lord, when I will accomplish for the house of Jacob and the house of Judah a new testament, not according to the testament which I arranged with their fathers on the day when I took hold of their arrangement to lead them out of the land of Egypt. [7] So plainly does the former testament signal something temporal — since it shows itself changeable — even while it promises, for what comes after, something eternal. For through Isaiah: Hear me and you shall live, and I will arrange for you an eternal testament, adding the holy and faithful things of David, so as to show that this testament was to run its course in Christ. The same one, of David's line, according to Mary's lineage — [8] he foretold him too, in figure, as coming forth as a rod from the root of Jesse. If, then, he said that other laws and other words and new arrangements of testaments were to come from the Creator, so that he even destined other and superior forms of the very sacrifices themselves — and destined them for the nations — Malachi saying, My will is not in you, says the Lord, and I will not accept your sacrifices from your hands, for out where the sun climbs to where it sinks, my name has been glorified among the nations, and in every place a sacrifice is offered to my name, and a pure sacrifice — that is, plainly, simple prayer from a clean conscience — then it is necessary that every alteration arising from renewal enter into diversity with the things it replaces, and into contrariety by way of that diversity. [9] For just as nothing is altered that is not made different, so nothing is different that is not, in some sense, contrary. The contrariety arising from the diversity, then, will be reckoned to belong to the same one to whom belongs the alteration arising from the renewal. He who arranged the alteration, the same instituted the diversity too; he who proclaimed the renewal, the same foretold the contrariety too. [10] Why do you interpret a difference of things as a distance of powers? Why do you twist antitheses of examples against the Creator, when you can recognize the same pattern in his own feelings and dispositions? I, he says, will strike, and I will heal; I, he says, will kill, and I will make alive — creating evils, that is, and making peace; for which you are also in the habit of charging him with fickleness and inconstancy, forbidding what he commands and commanding what he forbids. Why then have you not reckoned the antitheses too as belonging to the natural workings of a Creator ever at odds with himself? Nor, unless I am mistaken, could you even conceive of a world — even among your Pontics — except as built up out of the diversities of rival substances contending with one another. [11] You ought, then, first to have determined one god of light and another of darkness, so that on that basis you could then have asserted one god of the law and another of the gospel. As it is, it stands prejudged from what is plain: that the very forms whose works and character are established through the antitheses are the same forms in which the sacraments too stand established.
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