Tertullian — Against Marcion 4.41

‘Woe,’ he says, ‘through whom the Son of Man is betrayed.’ Therefore already that ‘woe’ stands to be understood as an outcry of imprecation and threat and to be assigned to one angry and offended—unless Judas was going to carry such a crime with impunity. But if with impunity, the ‘woe’ is empty; if not with impunity, then he is surely to be punished by the one against whom he committed the crime of betrayal. Further, if knowingly he allowed a man whom he himself had enrolled in his company to rush into such a crime, do not now reopen against the Creator concerning Adam what is also turned back on your god: either that he was ignorant who did not from providence block the one about to sin, or that he could not block if he was not ignorant, or that he was unwilling if he both knew and could—and so is to be judged malicious, who allowed his human to perish from a delict.

I therefore urge you rather to acknowledge the Creator also in this than to make against your own sentence a ‘best’ god equal to him. For by destining Peter, who spoke something presumptuously, rather to denial, he also shows you a zealous God. He also ought to be betrayed by a kiss—prophetic Christ of course, so that he would be the son of him who was loved with lips by the people. Led into the assembly, he is asked whether he himself is the Christ. About what Christ would the Jews have asked if not about their own? Why then did he not even then produce another to them? ‘So that he could suffer,’ you say—that is, so that that ‘best’ one might plunge those still ignorant into crime. Yet even if he had said it, he would have been going to suffer. For if I tell you, he says, you will not believe. Further, those not going to believe would have persevered in his killing. And why would he not all the more have been going to suffer if he had manifested himself as of another god and thereby the Creator’s adversary?

Therefore it was not so that he might suffer that he then also forbore to show himself another, but because they desired to wring a confession from his mouth, and yet even if he confessed they would not believe—who ought to have recognized him from works fulfilling the scriptures. So it belonged to him to have hidden himself, to whom recognition was owed of its own accord. And yet still stretching a hand to them: From now on, he says, the Son of Man will be sitting at the right hand of the power of God. For he was suggesting that he was from Daniel’s prophecy the Son of Man and from David’s psalm the one sitting at God’s right hand. And so enlightened from that saying and the scripture comparison as to whom he wanted to be understood: Therefore, they say, are you God’s Son? Of whose God, if not the one alone they knew? Of whose God, if not the one whom they remembered in the psalm saying to his Son: Sit at my right hand?

But he answered: You say so—as if: not I? Yet he confirmed that he is what they had said, while they ask again. But how will you prove they pronounced interrogatively and not themselves confirmatively: Therefore you are God’s Son—so that, because he had obliquely shown through the scriptures that he was to be understood as God’s Son, they sensed: ‘Therefore you are God’s Son,’ which you do not want to say openly? And so he too answered confirmatively ‘You say,’ and so was his pronunciation that they persevered in what the pronunciation meant.