Tertullian in two places quotes the important passage Isaiah 42:6 “φῶς εἰς ἔθνων,” once in the Adversus Marcionem, and once in the passage adapted from the Adversus Marcionem for the Adversus Judaeos.1 Curiously, he translates this passage differently to suit the different contexts of the two works. In the Adversus Judaeos he writes “lucem gentium,” whereas in the Adversus Marcionem he writes “lucem nationem.” I shall discuss the different contexts inspiring the different translations and look at some of the theological consequences of this language choice.
Johannes Quasten notes that Chapters 9-14 of the Adversus Judaeos are adapted from the second of three drafts of the Adversus Marcionem and suggests that they are most likely spurious.2 This is in line with the nineteenth-century scholarship of John Kaye and August Neander on the subject.3 Certainly the passage in the Adversus Judaeos is rougher and less complete. While it is possible that the Adversus Judaeos was an earlier, more hastily written book that Tertullian later expanded and adapted for the Adversus Marcionem, in this essay we shall assume that Quasten and Kaye are correct that the Adversus Judaeos passage was sloppily adapted at a later date by another author trying to complete the unfinished work—not by Tertullian himself.
Quasten categorizes the Adversus Marcionem as a controversial treatise, whereas he classifies the Adversus Judaeos as an apologetic work.4 While these are not hard and fast categorizations that Tertullian would have had in mind when writing them, these classifications do reflect certain tendencies in the writings that bear significance in their analysis. Quasten begins his article on the Adversus Marcionem by pointing out that it is by far the longest surviving work of Tertullian. He also points out that this is the third and most complete version of Tertullian's refutation of Marcion.5 These two points are important insofar as they tell us that this work is one that Tertullian spent a lot of time thinking about and cared a lot about. Moreover, there seems to be agreement among scholars that the Adversus Marcionem was written over the course of 207-212 AD, whereas there is no such confidence as to the dating of the Adversus Judaeos, of which the authorship—much less the dating—poses many problems. This is significant because it makes conclusions about the Adversus Judaeos difficult, since the context is so unsure.
In Adversus Judaeos Chapter 12, Tertullian is in the midst of providing a series of Old Testament quotations interpreted such that they provide evidence of Jesus as the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies. This usage of Old Testament Testimonia to give credibility to Christianity in a Jewish context is standard practice amongst early Christians, especially noted by scholars since Rendel Harris. In fact, Harris specifically mentions Tertullian's Adversus Judaeos as an example of his theory. The important point that Harris makes is that “the case of Tertullian against the Jews does not properly belong with these [dialogues between Christians and Jews], as it is not cast in the form of a dialogue and follows closely the lines of the collectors of Testimonia.”6 The Old Testament is seen not merely as a tool for Jewish polemic but also as important for helping Christians understand their own position and role as the fulfillment of Judaism. Whether or not there was a popular genre of handbooks that this work of Tertullian fits into, as Harris argues, the patterns he observes inform our analysis of Tertullian by reminding us that this use of Old Testament scripture is by no means a unique or isolated usage. Rather, it is an integral part of early Christian life and theologizing.
According to Quasten, Book 3 of the Adversus Marcionem “deals with the Christology of Marcion. Against his [Marcion's] claim that the Messias foretold under the Old Dispensation had not yet come, Tertullian shows that the Christ who appeared here on earth is no other than the Saviour proclaimed by the prophets, and sent by the creator.”7 In chapter 20 of the Adversus Marcionem and 12 of the Adversus Judaeos, Tertullian provides interpretations of passages in the Old Testament that promise to bring the faith to the gentiles. The two passages that he uses are Psalms 2:7-8 and Isaiah 42:6-7. Both of these passages are interpreted as referring to the Son (Jesus Christ) bringing truth to the gentes. He argues that what David was to Judea, Christ is to the whole world. He claims that the universality of Christianity is what Judaism is supposed to be. Thus, Christ’s Gospel is itself Jewish, but it is meant for the enlightenment of all peoples. The truth contained in the Jewish faith is also to be given for the gentes and the correction of those who either wander in indecision or stray from the truth.8 This interpretation of Isaiah is crucial to the argument that Jesus is the one prophesized in the Old Testament. In the context of the Adversus Marcionem, however, the goal of this argument is to defend the Old Testament scriptures to an audience favourable to Jesus, which is the opposite of the goal of the Adversus Judaeos, which attempts to defend Jesus to an audience who believes in the Old Testament.
Tertullian, unlike other church fathers, wrote in Latin. This is significant because it means that his quotations are translated rather than taken directly from the Septuagint or the Hebrew Old Testament. Because we have a discrepancy in the translations of Isaiah 42:6, we can assert three possibilities for the origin of his Latin text: first, that Tertullian was using two different translations of the Latin Bible; second, that he was making his own translations; or third, that he was primarily using one Latin translation but adapting it as necessary for different contexts. Quasten seems inclined to think that Tertullian was making his own translations from the Greek for the Adversus Marcionem, writing:
J. Quispel … demonstrates that the biblical quotations, whether Marcionite or Catholic, were turned by Tertullian himself and do not depend on some previously existing version … this does not exclude the possibility that Tertullian knew of an existing Catholic translation of the Bible and consulted it occasionally but his texts differ considerably from Cyprian's as well as the Vulgate.9
More recently, in a thorough study of many arguments in favour of Harnack and Quispel's varying positions, Dieter Roth came to the conclusion that at least the quotations of Marcion came from a Greek text, whether or not the biblical quotations did as well.10 If this is so, then Tertullian is both perfectly capable and in the habit of making his own translations from the Greek and so would likely have done so at least in the more thorough Adversus Marcionem.
This point is interesting insofar as it is the Adversus Judaeos reading that is ultimately adopted by the Vulgate. This could suggest that the Adversus Judaeos passage is of a later date when the trends in language use that would ultimately influence the Vulgate were starting to form, or—albeit less likely—it could mean that the Adversus Judaeos was an earlier pre-Montanist work that was more influential because it did not have the Montanist sentiments. Alternatively, if (as seems most likely) it was written later by someone making an adaptation of Tertullian’s Adversus Marcionem, it is possible that the later author had a Latin Old Testament text and changed Tertullian’s quotations to accord with his text. I am disinclined towards this position, as I think it might be possible to show that the translations are adapted to fit the different contexts.
Adrian Hastings notes that the word natio receives special treatment in the Vulgate. He writes, “The Vulgate does not, in point of fact, use the word very many times—only six in the whole of the New Testament. It prefers gens and populus. There is no clear Vulgate distinction between gens and natio. Nevertheless, its uses of natio are often in particularly important texts.”11 Although Tertullian came before the Vulgate, Hastings's observation may or may not apply more broadly to early Christian Latin, the common usage of which would have been reflected in the Vulgate. If natio is not only a less common but also a more important word than gens, it could very well be significant that Tertullian uses natio in the passage that is better elucidated in the more important book.
Ralph Mathisen discusses some of the subtle differences between gens and natio and how the terminology of personal identity changed beginning in the third century.12 He sees gens as the more specific term, since it is generally used to refer to ethnicity, whereas natio at different times could refer to ethnicity or locality.13 However, consultation of the articles on the two words in the Oxford Latin Dictionary does not support such a clear distinction, as we can find usage of gens to refer to locality in at least four different authors.14 Although natio comes from nascor, which has strong racial connotations, it can have local connotations as well: definitions four and five, as well as the citations chosen, provide evidence of natio being used to refer to locality.15 There is some suggestion that natio is a subset of gens; however, even that is not clear.16
Most interesting, however, is definition 2a of gens, which is almost closer to the Greek word βάρβαρος than ἔθνος, emphasising the non-Romanness of the other gentes.17 Does this word have connotations of non-Jewishness in Christian literature? Does this imply some kind of relationship between Jews and Romans through Christianity? Perhaps this is a stretch. And why does he use natio in the more important work against Marcion? I have come across no evidence of natio with this particular connotation except in this work, although it certainly has very similar and closely related meanings at times.
If we accept definition 2a as being a plausible (and certainly the most interesting) meaning for gens in the context of the Adversus Judaeos and assume that natio has a distinct connotation in the Adversus Marcionem, then there are a few possible conclusions we can draw regarding the contrast between the two passages. One possibility is that the Adversus Judaeos was more concerned with pointing out the importance of the inclusion of the other, or non-Jew, and thus when revising the Adversus Marcionem passage, the author determined that the word natio was insufficient for this purpose and so revised his language choice for the Jewish context. There are two problems with this possibility: first, that it assumes that gens is the more important word while natio is the more general—which seems unlikely, given that gens is a much more common word based on the observations of Hastings mentioned above; and second, it assumes that the writer of the Adversus Judaeos is the one more clever and careful with language, whereas scholars tend to think that this part of the Adversus Judaeos is spurious precisely because it is too sloppily written for a genius like Tertullian.18 A more likely possibility is that Tertullian wanted to attract attention to this passage by using the less common and thus more powerful word natio in the Adversus Marcionem, and that the later author of the Adversus Judaeos changed it for some combination of the three following reasons: a) that he wanted to change a few things to make the work seem fitted to a different context rather than plagiarized wholesale and so exchanged a less common word for a more common synonym; b) that he had some concept of the above mentioned heightened subtlety for the Jewish context and missed the importance of natio; and c) that he was familiar with a Latin translation of Isaiah that used gens, and after comparison thought his other translation fit the Jewish context better.
Whereas I have in this essay taken on faith that the scholars are correct in their conclusion that the later parts of the Adversus Judaeos are spurious and inferior to Tertullian’s other work, this particular context has suggested some potential cleverness in the use of differing translations for different contexts that could be of the caliber of a scholar like Tertullian. This study, however, has only been concerned with a single word in the Adversus Judaeos and does not in any way pretend to be a complete or definitive study of the work in general. However, I have considered extraordinarily subtle distinctions that could bear fruit with more careful study.
