The breath of our nostrils, the anointed of the LORD, was taken in their pits, of whom we said, Under his shadow we shall live among the nations.
All Commentaries on Lamentations 4:20 Go To Lamentations 4
Tertullian of Carthage
AD 220
We indeed, who know for certain that Christ always spoke in the prophets, as the Spirit of the Creator (for so says the prophet, “The person of our Spirit, Christ the Lord,” who from the beginning was both heard and seen as the Father’s vicegerent in the name of God). We are well aware that his words, when upbraiding Israel, were the same as those that it was foretold that he should denounce against him: “You have forsaken the Lord and have provoked the holy One of Israel to anger.” If, however, you would rather refer to God the whole imputation of Jewish ignorance from the first, instead of to Christ, through an unwillingness on their part to allow that even in ancient times the Creator’s word and Spirit—that is to say, his Christ—was despised and not acknowledged by them, you will even in this subterfuge be defeated. For when you do not deny that the Creator’s Son and Spirit and Substance is also his Christ, you must allow that those who have not acknowledged the Father have failed likewise to acknowledge the Son through the identity of their natural substance; for if in Its fullness It has baffled human understanding, much more has a portion of It, especially when partaking of the fullness. Now, when these things are carefully considered, it becomes evident how the Jews rejected Christ and killed him; not because they regarded him as a strange Christ but because they did not acknowledge him, as though he were their own. For how could they have understood the strange One, concerning whom nothing had ever been announced, when they failed to understand him about whom there had been a perpetual course of prophecy? That admits of being understood or being not understood, which, by possessing a substantial basis for prophecy, will also have a subject matter for either knowledge or error; while that which lacks such matter admits not the issue of wisdom. So that it was not as if he belonged to another god that they conceived an aversion for Christ and persecuted him, but simply as a man whom they regarded as a wonder-working juggler and an enemy in his doctrines. They brought him therefore to trial as a mere man and one of themselves too—that is, a Jew (only a renegade and a destroyer of Judaism)—and punished him according to their law. If he had been a stranger, indeed, they would not have sat in judgment over him. So far are they from appearing to have understood him to be a strange Christ, that they did not even judge him to be a stranger to their own human nature.
