Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] But Christ forbids divorce, saying: Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery; and whoever marries a woman divorced by her husband is likewise an adulterer. In forbidding divorce this way, he makes marriage to a divorced woman unlawful. Moses, however, permits divorce in Deuteronomy: If a man takes a wife and lives with her, and it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes because some indecency has been found in her, he shall write for her a certificate of divorce, place it into her grasp, and dismiss her from his household. Do you now perceive the clash pitting Law against Gospel, Moses against Christ? [2] Plainly you do not, for you have not accepted that other Gospel of the same truth and the same Christ, in which, forbidding divorce, he settles the very question at issue himself: Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, commanded a bill of divorce to be given; yet at the outset things stood otherwise, for the one who fashioned them as male and female declared, The two shall be one flesh; what therefore God has joined, let no man put asunder. [3] By this answer he both protected Moses' ordinance, as his own, and set the Creator's institution straight, as being his own too, since he is the Creator's Christ. But since you are to be refuted from the very texts you have accepted, let me meet you on your own ground, as though I were arguing with your Christ. Did not he too, in forbidding divorce, while acknowledging as his Father the one who joined male and female, rather excuse than destroy Moses' ordinance? But suppose your Christ is teaching something contrary to Moses and the Creator; unless I can show he is not contrary, let him be mine. [4] For I say that he made this prohibition of divorce conditional — applicable to the case where a man divorces his wife in order to marry another. Whoever divorces his wife, he says, and marries another, commits adultery, and whoever marries a woman divorced by her husband is likewise an adulterer — precisely because she was divorced on grounds that made the divorce unlawful, namely so that another might be married; for a man who takes to wife one unlawfully divorced, treating her as though not divorced at all, is an adulterer. [5] For the marriage that has not been rightly dissolved still stands; and to marry while a marriage still stands is adultery. So then, if he forbade the divorcing of a wife only conditionally, he did not forbid it absolutely, and what he did not forbid absolutely, he permitted in other cases — wherever the reason for which he forbade it does not apply. And now he is teaching nothing contrary to Moses, whose precept he preserves at least in some measure, though I do not yet say he confirms it. Or, if you flatly deny that Christ permits divorce at all, how is it that you yourself dissolve marriages — neither joining male and female, and refusing the rite of baptism together with the eucharist to couples already wed elsewhere, unless together they plot against marriage's fruit — which is to say, against the Creator himself? Indeed, what does a husband do in your church if his wife commits adultery? Will he keep her? Surely not — for your very own apostle forbids that Christ's members be united to a harlot. [6] So then, even Christ has justice on his side as the champion of divorce's legitimacy. And thereby Moses stands confirmed by him, since he forbids divorce on the very same ground as Christ — except where indecency is found in the woman. For in the Gospel of Matthew too: Whoever divorces his wife, except for the cause of adultery, makes her commit adultery. And equally, whoever marries a divorced woman is reckoned an adulterer. But except for the cause of adultery, not even the Creator separates what he himself joined, since this same Moses elsewhere established that a man who took a wife by force could not divorce her for all time. [7] But if a marriage entered by compulsion holds, how much more one entered by mutual consent? — just as, on the authority of the prophet: You shall not divorce the wife of your youth. So then you have Christ everywhere freely following in the Creator's footsteps, both in permitting divorce and in forbidding it. You also have him, however you try to hide it, as the guardian of marriage, unwilling either to see it broken by forbidding divorce, or to see it kept with disgrace by then permitting divorce. Blush, you who refuse to join those whom your own Christ joined. Blush also, you who separate without the very cause for which even your Christ was willing that separation be made. [8] I must now also show from what source and toward what end the Lord drew this teaching. For it will then appear more fully that he did not aim at overturning Moses by this sudden interposing of the topic of divorce — since it was not, in fact, sudden, but rooted in the same mention of John. For John, rebuking Herod because, against the Law, he had married his dead brother's wife, who had a daughter by him (the Law not merely permitting but even commanding this, in the case of a brother who died childless, that seed be raised up for him by his brother, from his brother's own flesh) — John had been thrown into prison by that same Herod, and afterward put to death. [9] So then, having made mention of John, and certainly of the outcome of his fate, the Lord aimed the figure of unlawful marriages and adultery at Herod, pronouncing an adulterer even the man who marries a woman divorced by her husband, so as to weigh all the more heavily upon Herod's impiety — who had taken from her husband, by death no less than by divorce, a woman whose husband's own brother had a daughter by her, and on that account too unlawfully, from the prompting of lust and not of the Law, and had for that reason also killed the prophet who stood up for the Law. [10] This discussion of mine will also serve for the argument that follows, of the rich man tormented among the dead alongside the beggar taking his rest within Abraham's embrace. For that story too, so far as the surface of the text goes, is introduced abruptly, but as regards the intent of its meaning, it too hangs together with the mention of John ill-used and Herod ill-married and rebuked, shaping the fate of each — Herod's torments and John's refreshments — so that Herod might now hear: They have Moses and the prophets there; let them hear them. [11] But Marcion twists this elsewhere, so as to fix both rewards, whether torment or refreshment, in the world below as belonging to the Creator, assigned to those who obeyed the Law and the prophets, while reserving for his Christ and his god the heavenly bosom and haven. To this we shall answer, with the very Scripture opening his eyes, which distinguishes Abraham's bosom from the world below. For the world below, I take it, is one thing, and Abraham's bosom another. For it says a great gulf lies between those regions, forbidding passage from either side. [12] Nor indeed would the rich man have lifted up his eyes, and that from a distance, unless toward something above him, and from a great distance below toward a great height, across that immense gap of loftiness and depth. From this it is plain to anyone with sense, who has caught wind of the Elysian Fields, that a particular, bounded location exists, termed Abraham's embrace, meant to receive the souls of his offspring — even from among the nations, seeing that he stands as father of a multitude of nations counted to Abraham's credit, and this by the same faith by which Abraham believed God, under no yoke of the Law and no mark of circumcision. [13] That region, then, I call Abraham's bosom — not heavenly, indeed, but higher than the world below, meanwhile granting the souls of the just their repose, until all things reach their consummation fulfills the resurrection with the fullness of its reward, when that heavenly promise which Marcion claims for his own — as though it had not been proclaimed by the Creator — will then appear. [14] To that place Christ is building his own ascent into heaven, according to Amos — his own people's ascent, surely, where too is the eternal place of which Isaiah speaks: Who will announce to you the eternal place? — none other, surely, than Christ, walking in righteousness, speaking the straight way, hating injustice and iniquity. But if an eternal place is promised, and an ascent into heaven is being built by the Creator, who also promised that Abraham's seed would be like the stars of heaven — and that surely in view of a heavenly promise — then, that promise being kept intact, why should it not admit that Abraham's bosom is spoken of as a temporary receiving-place for the souls of the faithful, in which the image of the future is already sketched out, and a kind of bright foretaste of both judgments may already be seen? [15] I would also remind you heretics, while you are still in this life, that Moses and the prophets proclaim one God as Creator, and proclaim one Christ as his, and that both judgments — of punishment and of eternal salvation — rest with the one and only God, who kills and makes alive. No, you say, the voice of our god from heaven bade not Moses and the prophets be heard, but Christ: Hear him. And rightly so. For by then the apostles had already heard Moses and the prophets quite sufficiently, since it was by believing Moses and the prophets that they had come to follow Christ. [16] For never could Peter have declared, You are the Christ, had he not first heard and trusted Moses and the prophets, the sole heralds by whom Christ had thus far been made known. This faith of theirs, then, had deserved to be confirmed even by a voice from heaven, commanding that he be heard whom they had already recognized as the one announcing peace, announcing good things, proclaiming the eternal place, building for them their ascent into heaven. [17] But of them it was said, in the realm of the dead: They have Moses and the prophets there, let them hear them — of those, that is, who did not believe, or did not believe in this way at all: that after death there awaited the torments of pride in riches and glory in luxury, as announced by Moses and the prophets, and decreed by that God who casts the mighty down from their thrones and raises the poor up from the dung-heap. So then, since this difference of pronouncement on both sides fits the Creator perfectly well, no gulf need be set up between two divinities — only between the two conditions themselves.
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