Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
So it's no wonder he had no use for the hypocrisy of the Pharisees — lips that loved God, not hearts. 'Watch yourselves,' he tells the disciples, 'against that Pharisee leaven — hypocrisy itself' — not a rejection of the Creator's preaching. The Son hates the defiant of the Father; he does not want his own people turning out that way toward him — nor toward some other god into whose service hypocrisy might have crept, whose example the disciples would need warning against. So it's the Pharisees' example he's forbidding. He was warning them off admitting into service to him the very thing the Pharisees admitted into service to their own object of worship. Since, then, he had just been indicting their hypocrisy — concealing the secrets of an unbelieving heart, papering over them with a veneer of official duty, holding the key of knowledge and neither going in himself nor letting others in — he adds: 'Nothing is covered that will not be uncovered, and nothing hidden that will not be known.' No one should imagine he's threatening some revelation and recognition of a hitherto unknown, hidden god here, since he goes right on to what they were muttering and debating among themselves — namely, saying of him, 'This man drives out demons only by Beelzebub' — words destined to come out into the open and onto the lips of men once the gospel got published. Then, turning to the disciples: 'I say to you, my friends, do not be afraid of those whose power stops at killing the body, leaving them nothing further they can do to you afterward. But I will show you whom to fear: fear the one who, after he has killed, has power to cast into hell' — plainly meaning the Creator; 'so I tell you, fear him.' At this point it would be enough for me that the one he commands us to fear is also the one he forbids us to offend, and the one he forbids us to offend is also the one he commands us to please — and whoever gives these orders belongs to the very god by fearing, not offending, and by pleasing whom, one attends to one's own interest. But I have more to draw from what follows. 'I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before men, I will acknowledge before God.' Now those who acknowledge Christ will be killed in the sight of men, with nothing further to suffer at their hands after the killing. These, then, are the very people he warned above not to fear being merely killed; that's why he put the 'killing not to be feared' first, so as to follow it with 'confession to be endured': 'And whoever denies me before men will be denied before God' — before that same God, obviously, who would have been about to acknowledge him had he confessed. For if it's the acknowledger he will acknowledge, it's the very same one who will deny the denier. Further, if the confessor is the one who has nothing to fear after being killed, the denier must be the one who has something to fear even after death. So since it is the Creator's business to be feared after death — the penalty of hell, that is — the denier is therefore a denier of the Creator. But if he's a denier of the Creator, then the confessor — who after being killed has nothing further to suffer from man — is plainly going to suffer something from God if he denies. And so Christ belongs to the Creator, since he shows that anyone denying him has good cause to dread the Creator's hell. After scaring off denial, there follows a warning about a blasphemy to be dreaded even more: 'Whoever speaks against the Son of Man will be forgiven; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.' Now if both the forgiving and the withholding of an offense smack of a God who is Judge, then this must be the Spirit not to be blasphemed against — since it will not forgive blasphemy — just as, above, he must be the one not to be denied, since he will go on to kill even into hell. But if Christ keeps blasphemy itself away from the Creator, I do not see how he could have come as his adversary. Or if by these very words — not going to forgive blasphemy, and going to kill even into hell — he is blackening the Creator's severity, then it follows that the other, different god's spirit may be blasphemed with impunity and Christ denied, with no difference at all between worshipping him and despising him — and just as there's no penalty for contempt, so no reward should be hoped for from worship either. Having brought them before the authorities, he forbids them to fret in advance about their answer: 'For the Holy Spirit,' he says, 'will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say.' If a lesson of this kind belongs to the Creator, then the command belongs to the one whose example came first. The prophet Balaam, in Numbers, was called on by Balak the king to put a curse on Israel — a people that king was set on fighting — yet at that very instant a spirit took hold of him and produced, in place of the curse he had come to deliver, the blessing the spirit prompted then and there, after he had first told both the messengers sent by the king and, later, the king in person that he would utter nothing but what God set in his mouth. These are the 'new teachings' of the 'new Christ' — teachings the Creator's own servants had already initiated long ago! Look, here's a plainly opposite example — Moses against Christ. Moses, on his own initiative, steps between quarrelling brothers and rebukes the one in the wrong: 'Why are you striking your neighbor?' And he gets thrown back at him: 'Who made you a ruler or judge over us?' Christ, on the other hand, when asked by a certain man to settle a division of inheritance between him and his brother, refused his help — in a cause that was, moreover, thoroughly just. So my Moses already comes off better than your Christ, caring about peace between brothers, stepping in against injustice. But no — this is supposedly the Christ of the good God who is not a judge: 'Who made me a judge over you?' He could find no other excuse to use — except the very one by which a wicked man and an impious brother had once shaken off an advocate for right and duty. In using that line, he thereby endorsed both the bad line and the bad deed — the refusal to settle peace between brothers. Or did he perhaps take it badly that Moses had been driven off with that very saying, and so, faced with a parallel case of brothers in dispute, chose to embarrass them with a reminder of that same saying? Just so. For it was that very Spirit — the Creator's Spirit — who had been in Moses when he heard those words, and was now the one hearing them again. I think I have already sufficiently shown elsewhere that our God condemns the glory of riches, pulling the powerful down off their thrones and lifting the poor up out of the dunghill. To him, then, belongs the parable of the rich man congratulating himself on the yield of his fields, to whom God says, 'Fool, this very night they will demand your soul back; and the things you have prepared — whose will they be?' In just the same way, the king who boasted through Isaiah of his treasuries and storehouses of luxuries among the Persians got a bad hearing for it.
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