Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
"Woe," he says, "to that one through whom the Son of man meets betrayal." So it is settled that this "Woe" must be understood as a cry of imprecation and threat, to be charged to one who is angry and offended—unless Judas was going to get away scot-free with so great a crime. But if he was to go unpunished, the "Woe" is pointless; if he was not to go unpunished, then plainly he must be punished by the one against whom he committed the crime of betrayal. Furthermore, if he knowingly allowed a man he had himself taken into his own company to rush into so great a crime, then stop reproaching the Creator over Adam with charges that boomerang right back onto your own god as well: either he was ignorant, since he did not block by foreknowledge the man who was about to sin, or he was unable to stop it if he was ignorant, or he was unwilling even though he both knew and could—and so he must be judged malicious, for allowing his own man to perish through wrongdoing. [2] I advise you, then, to recognize the Creator in this too, rather than making your "good god" out to be his equal, against your own thesis. For Peter too, presumptuously blurting something out only to be marked down instead for denial, shows you a jealous God. Christ, being the prophesied one, had to be betrayed with a kiss, precisely because he was the son who was loved by the people with their lips. Brought before the assembly, they demand of him whether he is indeed the Christ. Which Christ would the Jews have been asking about, if not their own? Why then did he not at that point reveal a different one to them? "So that he might suffer," you say. That means the "good" god was still, at that point, plunging the ignorant deeper into crime! And yet, even had he declared it to them plainly, he would still have suffered: [3] "For if I tell you," he says, "you will not believe"—meaning that, not believing, they would have persisted in his murder regardless. And why would he not have suffered all the more, if he had declared himself to belong to another god, and thereby the Creator's adversary? So it was not for the sake of securing his own suffering that he held back, on that occasion too, from revealing himself as "another"; rather, because they were seeking to wring a confession out of his own mouth, and would not have believed him even if he had confessed—when they ought to have recognized him already from the works fulfilling the scriptures—it was proper to him to conceal himself from those to whom recognition was, by their own default, owed. [4] And yet, still reaching out a hand to them, he says: "From this time forward the Son of man shall sit at God's mighty right hand." For he was suggesting that he was the "Son of man" of Daniel's prophecy, and the one seated at God's right hand from David's psalm. So then, enlightened by this saying and by comparison with the scriptures as to whom he meant himself to be understood as, they say, "So you are the Son of God?" Whose God, if not the one they alone knew? Whose God, if not the one they remembered from the psalm saying to his Son, "Sit at my right hand"? But he answered, "You say so"—as if to say, not I. [5] And yet by this he confirmed that he was exactly what they had said, seeing that they ask again. And how will you prove that they had said it as a question rather than a statement—"So you are the Son of God?"—so that, since he had obliquely shown that he should be understood as the Son of God through the scriptures, they took it this way: "So you are indeed the Son of God, which you will not say outright"—and he, in just the same way, by saying "You say so," answered in the affirmative; and his pronouncement had exactly that force, so much so that they persisted in taking it in the sense his pronouncement carried.
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