Note (return) — Chapter V

With regard to the first point, viz., the maintenance of the unity of the two Testaments, Irenæus and Tertullian gave a most detailed demonstration of it in opposition to Marcion,628 and primarily indeed with the same means as the older teachers had already used. It is Christ that prophesied and appeared in the Old Testament; he is the householder who produced both Old and New Testaments.629 Moreover, as the two have the same origin, their meaning is also the same. Like Barnabas the early Catholic Fathers contrived to give all passages in the Old Testament a typical Christian sense: it is the same truth which we can learn from the prophets and again from Christ and the Apostles. With regard to the Old Testament the watchword is: "Seek the type" ("Typum quæras").630 But they went a step further still. In opposition to Marcion's antitheses and his demonstration that the God of the Old Testament is a petty being and has enjoined petty, external observances, they seek to show in syntheses that the same may be said of the New. (See Irenæus IV. 21-36). The effort of the older teachers to exclude everything outward and ceremonial is no longer met with to the same extent in Irenæus and Tertullian, at least when they are arguing and defending their position against the Gnostics. This has to be explained by two causes. In the first place Judaism (and Jewish Christianity) was at bottom no longer an enemy to be feared; they therefore ceased to make such efforts to avoid the "Jewish" conception of the Old Testament. Irenæus, for example, emphasised in the most naïve manner the observance of the Old Testament law by the early Apostles and also by Paul. This is to him a complete proof that they did not separate the Old Testament God from the Christian Deity.631 In connection with this we observe that the radical antijudaism of the earliest period more and more ceases. Irenæus and Tertullian admitted that the Jewish nation had a covenant with God and that the literal interpretation of the Old Testament was justifiable. Both repeatedly testified that the Jews had the right doctrine and that they only lacked the knowledge of the Son. These thoughts indeed do not attain clear expression with them because their works contain no systematic discussions involving these principles. In the second place the Church itself had become an institution where sacred ceremonial injunctions were necessary; and, in order to find a basis for these, they had to fall back on Old Testament commandments (see Vol. I., chap. 6, p. 291 ff.). In Tertullian we find this only in its most rudimentary form;632 but in the course of the third century these needs grew mightily633 and were satisfied. In this way the Old Testament threatened to become an authentic book of revelation to the Church, and that in a quite different and much more dangerous sense than was formerly the case with the Apostolic Fathers and the Apologists.