Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] On the sabbath too I put this point up front: the question could never even have arisen unless Christ went about as lord of the sabbath. There would have been no dispute over why he was destroying the sabbath, if he were bound to destroy it. But he would have been bound to destroy it only if he belonged to another god — and in that case no one would have marveled at his doing what suited him. So they marveled precisely because it did not suit the creator-god to go about, and to attack his own sabbath. [2] And to knock down at the outset every such point, so we needn't retread the same ground every time my opponent leans his argument on some novelty of Christ's institution, let this be laid down once for all as the rule: the novelty of each institution was disputed only because up to that point nothing had been published about a novelty of divinity — nor was it disputed, nor can it be twisted from the mere novelty of some institution that a divinity other than the creator's has thereby been sufficiently demonstrated in Christ, once it is established that the very novelty pronounced by the creator was, in Christ, nothing to marvel at. In any case, one would first have had to set out this other god before introducing his teaching, since it is the god who lends authority to the teaching, not the teaching to the god — unless of course Marcion learned his letters, so perversely, not from a master, but learned his master from letters. [3] The rest of the sabbath question I steer as follows. If Christ overturned the sabbath, he did it following the creator's own precedent; for at the siege of the city of Jericho, when the ark of the covenant was carried around the walls for eight days, sabbath included, by the creator's own command the sabbath was broken by that very operation — as those suppose who think the same of Christ, not knowing that neither Christ nor the creator ever destroyed the sabbath, as I shall soon show. And yet even then, through Joshua — note the name — the sabbath was shaken, so that this too might be referred forward to Christ. [4] Even if it was out of hatred that he pursued the most solemn day of the Jews, so that Christ might be shown not to be the Jews' god, still it was out of hatred of the sabbath that the creator too spoke, so that Christ would merely be following him, echoing the cry from Isaiah's mouth: 'Your new moons and sabbaths my soul hates.' But however these words are to be taken, we know that in a case of this kind a blunt defense is called for against a blunt attack. [5] Now let me argue the actual matter itself, in which Christ's teaching looked as if it were destroying the sabbath. The disciples were hungry that day; they had plucked ears of grain with their hands and rubbed them out; by preparing food they had broken the holiday. Christ excuses them, and stands accused of violating the sabbath; the Pharisees accuse him, and Marcion seizes on the status of the controversy (if I may play a little with my Lord's own truth) — a question of both scripture and intent. For from scripture is drawn the creator's color of defense, and from Christ's intent his own — as in the example of David, who entered the sanctuary on a sabbath day and boldly ate the loaves set out before the presence, breaking them in doing so. [6] For David remembered that this privilege had been granted to the sabbath from the very beginning on which that day was first established — I mean, permission from fasting. For when the creator had forbidden the gathering of manna on two successive days, he permitted it only on the day of preparation, so that the day's provision gathered beforehand might free the following sabbath's holiday from fasting. [7] Well then, the Lord followed that same rationale in his so-called 'destruction' of the sabbath; well then, he expressed the very same disposition of the creator, in the honor of not fasting on the sabbath. In short, he would only then have destroyed the sabbath — and the creator with it — if he had commanded his disciples to fast on the sabbath, against the standing rule of both scripture and the creator's intent. [8] But since he did not defend the disciples outright, but excused them; since he pleaded human necessity as an advocate on their behalf; since he holds the honor of the sabbath's not being made sorrowful in higher regard than its being kept idle; since he puts David and his companions on the same footing of guilt and pardon as his own disciples; since it pleases him precisely because the creator allowed it, and since it is by that very example that he himself is so good — is he, for all that, a stranger to the creator? [9] Next the Pharisees watch to see whether he would perform healings on the sabbath, so as to accuse him — certainly as a breaker of the sabbath, not as the preacher of some new god; indeed I may as well keep hammering this one point everywhere: nowhere was any other Christ ever preached. But on the whole the Pharisees were wrong about the law of the sabbath, not noticing that it forbade rest from works only conditionally, under a specific category of works. For when it speaks of the sabbath day, 'You shall do no work of yours on it,' by saying 'of yours' it defined it as human work, whatever a man does by his own craft or business, not divine work. [10] But the work of salvation and wholeness belongs not to man but properly to God. Just as, again, the law says, 'You shall do no work on it, except what shall be done for any soul' — that is, in the case of freeing a soul; because a work of God can be done even through a man, for the salvation of a soul, yet it comes from God — the very thing Christ the man was going to do, because he was also God. It is with this sense of the law in mind that, wishing to bring them round to it, he questions them, through the healing of the withered hand: 'Is it lawful on the sabbaths to do good, or not? To save a life, or to destroy it?' [11] — so that, by allowing that particular work which he was about to do for a soul, he might remind them which works the sabbath law forbade, namely human ones, and which it commanded, namely divine ones, done for any soul whatsoever. He is called Lord of the sabbath because he was guarding the sabbath as his own property. Even if he had destroyed it, he would have had every right to, as the one who instituted it in the first place. [12] But in fact he did not destroy it at all, precisely as its lord — from which it can now already be seen that not even in the carrying of the ark around Jericho was the sabbath destroyed by the creator. For that too was a work of God, which he himself had commanded, and which he had arranged for the sake of the souls of his people caught in the peril of war. [13] And if somewhere he professed hatred of sabbaths, saying 'your sabbaths,' he was reckoning them as belonging to men, not to himself — the sabbaths kept by a people full of transgressions without fear of God, honoring God with their lips and not their heart, on their own sabbaths — that is, on whatever observances of his discipline they carried out, he made a different case altogether; observances which, through that same prophet afterward, he pronounces true and delightful and not to be profaned. [14] So Christ did not abolish the sabbath outright at all; he upheld its law both earlier, in the matter of the disciples, working on behalf of a soul (for to the hungry he granted the comfort of food), and now too, in curing the withered hand, everywhere driving it home by his deeds, 'I have not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it' — if Marcion has not already stopped his own mouth with that saying. For he fulfilled the law here too, in interpreting its condition, in illuminating the distinction between kinds of work, in doing what the law excepts from the sabbath's holiday-rest, in making that very sabbath day — holy from the beginning by the father's blessing — holier still by his own good deed, on which day, precisely, he administered divine relief, something the adversary's god would have had to do on other days instead, for fear of adorning the creator's sabbath, for fear of rendering to the sabbath the works owed it. [15] On which day, if Elisha the prophet also restored the Shunammite woman's dead son to life, you can see, Pharisee — and you too, Marcion — that it was long ago the creator's practice to do good on sabbaths, to save a life and not destroy it, and that Christ brought nothing new that was not already in keeping with the creator's own pattern, gentleness, mercy, and even preaching. For here too he re-enacts the prophecy of a particular kind of healing: withered hands grow strong again, just as withered knees do in the paralytic.
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