Tertullian — Against Marcion 3.5

With these I would have played as if still from a first step and as if from far off. But from here already about to fight to the sure and hand-to-hand, I see some lines even now to be drawn ahead, to which there will be fighting—namely to the Creator’s scriptures. For according to them about to prove that Christ was the Creator’s, as afterward fulfilled for his Christ, I must also demand the form and, so to speak, nature of the scriptures themselves, lest then, drawn into controversy when they are applied to cases, with their own and the cases’ defense mixed they blunt the reader’s attention.

I therefore allege two causes of prophetic speech to be recognized from here by our adversaries: one, by which futures are sometimes announced as already completed. For it both belongs to divinity to count whatever it has decreed as perfected—because there is not with it a difference of time, with which eternity itself directs a uniform status of time—and it is more familiar to prophetic divination to show that which it looks ahead to, while it looks ahead, as already seen and so already discharged—that is, in every way about to be—as through Isaiah: I gave my back to whips, but my cheeks to palms, and I did not turn my face away from spittings. For whether Christ already then was pronouncing in himself, according to us, or the prophet about himself, according to the Jews, still what was not yet done sounded as already completed.

Another species will be that by which very many things are figured ahead through enigmas and allegories and parables, to be understood otherwise than they are written. For we also read that mountains will drip sweetness—yet not so that you hope must from rocks or boiled-down wine from cliffs—and we hear a land flowing with milk and honey—yet not so that you believe you will ever press cakes and Samian ware from clods—because God did not at once promise himself a water-drawer and farmer saying: I will put rivers in a thirsty region and in the desert boxwood and cedar; just as also preaching about the nations’ conversion: The beasts of the field will bless me, sirens and daughters of sparrows—not of course about to bring back lucky omens from swallows’ chicks and little foxes and those monstrous and fabulous songstresses.

And why say more of that kind? When even the heretics’ apostle interprets the very law indulging free mouth to threshing oxen not about oxen but about us, and alleges the rock, companion for supplying drink, to have been Christ, teaching likewise also the Galatians that two arguments of Abraham’s sons ran allegorically, and suggesting to the Ephesians that what was preached in the beginning about a human—about to leave father and mother and the two about to be unto one flesh—he recognizes as unto Christ and the church.