Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Next follows the salvation that comes to the house of Zacchaeus. On what ground? Did that man too believe Christ had come from Marcion's god? Yet the cry of that blind man, 'Have mercy on me, Jesus, Son of David,' was still ringing in everyone's ears, and the whole crowd was giving praise to God — not Marcion's god, but David's. And indeed Zacchaeus, though a foreigner by race, had perhaps caught some breath of the scriptures through contact with Jews — or rather, even without knowing Isaiah, he had already fulfilled his precepts. 'Break your bread,' it says, 'for the hungry, and bring the homeless into your house': this he was doing at that very moment, taking the Lord into his own house and feeding him. 'And if you see one naked, clothe him': this he was at that very moment promising, offering half his substance to every work of mercy, dissolving the bonds of his harsher contracts and releasing the oppressed into relief, and tearing up every unjust record, saying, 'And if I have extorted anything from anyone by false charge, I restore it fourfold.' And so the Lord said, 'Today salvation has come to this house.' [2] He bore witness that the very things the Creator's prophet had commanded are the things that bring salvation. But when he says, 'For the Son of Man has come to save what was lost,' I no longer dispute merely that he came to save what had been lost — whose it had been, and to whom it belonged when lost, is the very thing he had come to save — but I direct the question to another stage of the argument entirely. That the question concerns man is beyond doubt. [3] Since man consists of two substances, body and soul, we must ask from which kind of substance he appears to have been lost. If from the body, then the body was lost, not the soul. What had been lost, the Son of Man saves; therefore the flesh too has salvation. If it was lost from the soul, then the soul's loss is what salvation is aimed at; the flesh, which was not lost, is already safe. If the whole man was lost, from both substances together, then it follows necessarily that the whole man is saved, and the heretics' claim denying the flesh's salvation is shattered. And at the same stroke, the Christ of the Creator is confirmed, since it is in accordance with the Creator that he was promising the salvation of the whole man. [4] The parable of the servants too, who are judged according to the reckoning of their master's invested money, shows God to be a judge — even on the side of severity — not merely honoring the man who was found to have gained, but stripping away even what a man seemed to possess. And if here too the heretic wants to make out the Creator as harsh, taking up what he did not lay down and reaping what he did not sow, here too he only instructs me in the very Master whose money he teaches me to put to interest.
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