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| How the Steps in the Passion of the Saviour Were Predetermined in Prophecy. The Passover. The Treachery of Judas. The Institution of the Lord's Supper. The Docetic Error of Marcion Confuted by the Body and the Blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.
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Chapter XL.—How
the Steps in the Passion of the Saviour Were Predetermined in Prophecy.
The Passover. The Treachery of Judas. The Institution of the
Lord’s Supper. The Docetic Error of Marcion Confuted by the Body
and the Blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.
In like manner does He also know the very time it
behoved Him to suffer, since the law prefigures His passion.
Accordingly, of all the festal days of the Jews He chose the
passover.5070
In this Moses had
declared that there was a sacred mystery:5071
“It is the Lord’s passover.”5072
How earnestly, therefore, does He manifest the bent of His soul:
“With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before
I suffer.”5073
What a destroyer of
the law was this, who actually longed to keep its passover! Could it be that He
was so fond of Jewish lamb?5074
| 5074 Vervecina Judaica. In
this rough sarcasm we have of course our author’s contempt of
Marcionism. | But was it not
because He had to be “led like a lamb to the slaughter; and
because, as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so was He not to open
His mouth,”5075
that He so
profoundly wished to accomplish the symbol of His own redeeming blood?
He might also have been betrayed by any stranger, did I not find that
even here too He fulfilled a Psalm: “He who did eat bread with me
hath lifted up5076
| 5076 Levabit: literally,
“shall lift up,” etc. | his heel against
me.”5077
And without a price
might He have been betrayed. For what need of a traitor was there in
the case of one who offered Himself to the people openly, and might
quite as easily have been captured by force as taken by treachery? This
might no doubt have been well enough for another Christ, but would not
have been suitable in One who was accomplishing prophecies. For it was
written, “The righteous one did they sell for
silver.”5078
The very amount and
the destination5079
of the money, which
on Judas’ remorse was recalled from its first purpose of a
fee,5080
and appropriated to
the purchase of a potter’s field, as narrated in the Gospel of
Matthew, were clearly foretold by Jeremiah:5081
| 5081 This passage more
nearly resembles Zech. xi. 12 and 13 than anything in Jeremiah, although the
transaction in Jer. xxxii.
7–15 is noted by the
commentators, as referred to. Tertullian had good reason for mentioning
Jeremiah and not Zechariah, because the apostle whom he refers to
(Matt. xxvii.
3–10) had distinctly
attributed the prophecy to Jeremiah (“Jeremy the prophet,”
ver. 9). This is not the place to do more
than merely refer to the voluminous controversy which has arisen from
the apostle’s mention of Jeremiah instead
of Zechariah. It is enough to remark that Tertullian’s argument
is unaffected by the discrepancy in the name of the particular prophet.
On all hands the prophecy is admitted, and this at once
satisfies our author’s argument. For the ms. evidence in favour of the unquestionably correct
reading, τότε
ἐπληρώθη τὸ
ῥηθὲν διὰ
῾Ιερεμίου
τοῦ προφήτου,
κ.τ.λ.,
the reader is referred to Dr. Tregelles’ Critical Greek
Testament, in loc.; only to the convincing amount of evidence
collected by the very learned editor must now be added the subsequently
obtained authority of Tischendorf’s Codex
Sinaiticus. |
“And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of Him who
was valued5082
| 5082 Appretiati vel
honorati. There is nothing in the original or the Septuagint to meet
the second word honorati, which may refer to the
“honorarium,” or “fee paid on admission to a
post of honour,”—a term of Roman law, and referred to by
Tertullian himself. | and gave them for
the potter’s field.” When He so earnestly expressed
His desire to eat the passover, He considered it His own feast;
for it would have been unworthy of God to desire to partake of what was
not His own. Then, having taken the bread and given it to His
disciples, He made it His own body, by saying, “This is my
body,”5083
that is, the figure
of my body. A figure, however, there could not have been, unless there
were first a veritable body.5084
| 5084 Corpus
veritatis: meant as a thrust against Marcion’s
Docetism. | An empty thing, or
phantom, is incapable of a figure. If, however, (as Marcion might say,)
He pretended the bread was His body, because He lacked the truth of
bodily substance, it follows that He must have given bread for us. It
would contribute very well to the support of Marcion’s theory of
a phantom body,5085
| 5085 Ad vanitatem
Marcionis. [Note 9, p. 289.] | that bread should
have been crucified! But why call His body bread, and not rather
(some other edible thing, say) a melon,5086
| 5086 Peponem. In his De
Anima, c. xxxii., he uses this word in strong irony:
“Cur non magis et pepo, tam
insulsus.” |
which Marcion must have had in lieu of a heart! He did not
understand how ancient was this figure of the body of Christ, who said
Himself by Jeremiah: “I was like a lamb or an ox that is brought
to the slaughter, and I knew not that5087
| 5087 [This text,
imperfectly quoted in the original, is filled out by Dr. Holmes.] |
they devised a device against me, saying, Let us cast the tree upon
His bread,”5088
| 5088 So the Septuagint in
Jer. xi. 19, Ξύλον εἰς
τὸν ἄρτον
αὐτοῦ (A.V. “Let us destroy the
tree with the fruit”). See above, book iii. chap. xix. p.
337. | which means, of
course, the cross upon His body. And thus, casting light, as He always
did, upon the ancient prophecies,5089
| 5089 Illuminator
antiquitatum. This general phrase includes typical ordinances under the
law, as well as the sayings of the prophets. | He declared
plainly enough what He meant by the bread, when He called the
bread His own body. He likewise, when mentioning the cup and making the
new testament to be sealed “in His blood,”5090
affirms the reality of His body. For no
blood can belong to a body which is not a body of flesh. If any
sort of body were presented to our view, which is not one of flesh, not
being fleshly, it would not possess blood. Thus, from the evidence of
the flesh, we get a proof of the body, and a proof of the flesh from
the evidence of the blood. In order, however, that you may discover how
anciently wine is used as a figure for blood, turn to Isaiah, who asks,
“Who is this that cometh from Edom, from Bosor with garments dyed
in red, so glorious in His apparel, in the greatness of his might? Why
are thy garments red, and thy raiment as his who cometh from the
treading of the full winepress?”5091
The prophetic Spirit contemplates the Lord as if He were already on His
way to His passion, clad in His fleshly nature; and as He was to suffer
therein, He represents the bleeding condition of His flesh under the
metaphor of garments dyed in red, as if reddened in the treading and
crushing process of the wine-press, from which the labourers descend
reddened with the wine-juice, like men stained in blood. Much
more clearly still does the book of Genesis foretell this, when
(in the blessing of Judah,
out of whose tribe Christ was to come according to the flesh) it even
then delineated Christ in the person of that patriarch,5092
saying, “He washed His garments in
wine, and His clothes in the blood of grapes”5093
—in His garments and clothes the
prophecy pointed out his flesh, and His blood in the wine. Thus did He
now consecrate His blood in wine, who then (by the patriarch) used the
figure of wine to describe His blood.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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