Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Having brought him to Pilate, they began to load him with the charge that he called himself Christ, a king—unmistakably the Son of God, destined to sit at God's right hand. Otherwise they would have weighed him down with some other charge, being unsure whether he had really called himself the Son of God—had he not, by saying "You say so," affirmed that he was exactly what they said. So too, when Pilate asked him, "Are you the Christ?" he likewise said, "You say so"—so as not to seem to have answered any further out of fear of the authorities. [2] The Lord, then, stood for judgment; and he took his stand in judgment over his people. The Lord himself enters judgment together with the people's elders and its rulers, according to Isaiah. And from that point he fulfilled every scripture concerning his passion. "The nations raged there together, and the peoples devised empty things: earth's kings rose up in array, and the rulers massed themselves as one against the Lord and against his Anointed." The "nations" are the Romans who were with Pilate; the "peoples" are the tribes of Israel; the "kings," in Herod; the "rulers," in the chief priests. [3] For to Herod too, sent as a kind of gift from Pilate, he made good on the words of Hosea; for it had been prophesied of Christ, "And bound, they will lead him as a gift to the king." Herod, indeed, was delighted at the sight of Jesus, and heard not a single word from him. For like a lamb before its shearer, thus did he keep his mouth shut, since the Lord had granted him "a disciplined tongue, so that he would know how to speak forth a word in season"—that very tongue which, in the psalm, he was then proving "cleaved to his throat" by not speaking. [4] And Barabbas, guiltiest of all men, is granted his life as though he were the good one, while Christ, most righteous of all, is demanded for death as though he were a murderer. And two criminals are fixed up on crosses around him, so that he should indeed be reckoned among the wicked. As for his clothing, divided among the soldiers—partly given over by lot—Marcion has done away with that, in spite of the psalm's prophecy staring him in the face: "They divided my garments among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots." So take away the cross itself too, while you're at it! For the same psalm does not stay silent about that either: "They pierced my hands and my feet." The whole outcome is read there. "Dogs surrounded me; the synagogue of evildoers encircled me; all who watched me sneered with their noses; they spoke with their lips, and wagged their heads: He put his trust in God; let God rescue him now." So much, now, for the testimony about the garments—take the spoils of your own falsehood, for the whole psalm is Christ's garments! [5] But look, the elements too are shaken. For the Lord was suffering at their hands. If it had been the Creator's adversary who was injured, the sky, on the contrary, would have blossomed with lights, the sun would have exulted all the more in its rays, the day would have stood still all the more, gladly watching Marcion's Christ hanging on the gibbet! These proofs, too, would have suited my case even if they had not been foretold. "I will clothe the heaven," says Isaiah, "in darkness." This will be that day of which Amos also speaks: "And it will happen on that day, declares the Lord, that the sun will set while it is still midday" (there, too, is disclosed what the sixth hour signifies), "and I will darken the earth in broad daylight." The veil of the Temple, too, was torn, the angel bursting forth from it, abandoning the daughter of Zion like a watchman's hut in a vineyard and a shed in a cucumber-field. [6] Oh, how the thirtieth psalm persists in giving back Christ himself! He cries out to the Father, so that even dying, with his very last word, he might fulfill the prophets. Having said this, he breathed his last. Who did the breathing? The spirit itself? Or was it the flesh that breathed out the spirit? But the spirit cannot be the one to breathe itself out. One thing does the breathing-out, another is breathed out. If the spirit is what is breathed out, it must necessarily be breathed out by another. But if there had been nothing but spirit, it would be more accurate to say it "departed" than that it "breathed its last." So who, then, breathes out the spirit, if not the flesh—which both breathes, when it has the spirit, and thus breathes it out when it loses it? [7] Finally, if there was no flesh, but only a phantom of flesh, and the phantom too was only spirit, and the spirit breathed itself out and, in breathing out, departed—then without doubt the phantom departed along with the spirit, since the spirit that was the phantom departed, and phantom and spirit vanished together, nowhere to be seen. So nothing at all was left on the wood, nothing hung there even after the last breath, nothing was requested from Pilate, nothing taken down from the gibbet, nothing wrapped in a linen shroud, nothing laid in a new tomb. And yet it was not nothing. What, then, was it? If a phantom, then Christ was still present in it. If Christ had departed, then it was a phantom he had carried off with him. [8] It remains for heretical shamelessness to claim that what was left there was a phantom of a phantom! But if even Joseph knew it to be a real body, which he handled with such complete reverence—that Joseph who had refused to join the Jews' crime, "Blessed is the man who has not gone about following the counsel of the impious, nor taken his stand along the path of sinners, nor settled himself down among the seats of scoffers."
43.