Note 61 — VII. TERTULLIAN. 160–240 (?) A.D.

“For they that are after the Flesh do mind the things of the Flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.... So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.... Therefore, brethren, we are debtors not to the flesh, to live after the flesh. For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die; but if ye, through the spirit, do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.” (Rom. viii., 5, &c.) A more spiritual apprehension of ‘divine verities,’ if we may so say, than the apparently more equivocal utterance of the same great reformer elsewhere. Here it is well to observe, once for all that the whole significance of the utterances of St. Paul upon flesh-eating depends upon the bitter controversies between the older Jew and the newer Greek or Roman sections of the rising Church. It is, in fact, a question of the lawfulness of eating the flesh of the victims of the Pagan and Jewish sacrificial altars—not of the question of flesh-eating in the abstract at all. In fine, it is a question not of ethics, but of theological ritual. It is greatly to be lamented that the confused and obscure translation of the A. V. has for so many centuries hopelessly mystified the whole subject—as far, at least, as the mass of the community is concerned.