Tertullian's An Answer to the Jews: The Earliest Major Latin Refutation of Judaism

Added: 2026-06-10

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[00:00:33]Hello, this is the Catholic state where we talk about the Jewish question from a Catholic perspective. The year is AD200.

[00:00:41]There is no council of Nika. There is no Christian Roman Empire. Constantine has not yet been born. And already one of the earliest and most systematic answers to a question that still divides the world has been written in Carthage by a North African lawyer turned Christian writer. Has the Mosaic covenant been fulfilled and superseded by the new covenant established by Christ?

[00:01:08]Tertulan's answer is unambiguous.

[00:01:11]Circumcision has ended. Temple sacrifice has ended. The Mosaic law as abiding ceremonial code has ceased. The Messiah has come and the Catholic Church is the true Israel of God. This is Tertullian's adversis Judeos and answer to the Jews.

[00:01:30]Today we examine it.

[00:01:35]Quintus Septius Floren Tertullianus or Tertullian was born around AD 155 in Carthage, trained as a Roman lawyer and converted to Christianity around AD 197.

[00:01:52]He was the earliest major Latin theological writer whose work survived to us in any substantial quantity and his vocabulary shaped Catholic dogma for centuries.

[00:02:03]Trinitas, persona, substantia as applied to the mystery of the trinity. These terms entered Catholic theological Latin through his influence. One caveat must be stated plainly. Tertullian later abandoned the church and joined the Montinist heresy, dying outside Catholic communion around AD220.

[00:02:25]He is not therefore technically numbered among the fathers of the church in the strict sense. He is more accurately the foundational figure of Latin Christian theology whose Orthodox works the tradition receives while acknowledging his tragic end. Answer to the Jews is recognized as belonging to his Orthodox preontinist period and its doctrine conforms throughout to Catholic teaching.

[00:02:55]Chapter 1 tells us how this treaties came to be. A public debate in Carthage between a Christian and a Jewish procolitite ran all day and collapsed into what Tertullian calls a cloud of noise obscuring the truth. He took up his pen to settle in writing what the crowd could not settle in the street.

[00:03:13]The treaties advances four arguments that interlocked as a single case. One, the Mosaic law was always temporary.

[00:03:22]circumcision, Sabbath, and temple sacrifice were signs pointing forward to spiritual realities in Christ, not eternal institutions.

[00:03:31]Two, the prophets themselves foretold that a new covenant would replace the old. This is not a Christian imposition, but a biblical promise God made to Israel through her own prophets. Three, Daniel's 70 weeks prove mathematically that the Messiah had to come before the destruction of the second temple. And since the temple is gone, he must already have come. For the Catholic Church is the true Israel, the younger people who, as Genesis 25:23 foretold, inherit what the elder forfeited.

[00:04:08]Tertullian was not writing in isolation.

[00:04:11]A generation earlier, St. Justin Martyr had argued many of the same points in Greek. Tertullian represents the emergence of this same tradition in Latin which is why these two texts together form the antinine foundation of the entire advers Judeaos library.

[00:04:31]Tertullan opens his theological argument with the oracle given to Rebecca from the Dwey.

[00:04:39]Two nations are in thy womb, and two peoples shall be divided out of thy womb. And one people shall overcome the other, and the elder shall serve the younger.

[00:04:50]Both peoples are called a nation. Both are called a people. Neither can claim a monopoly on the name. What distinguishes them is the divine judgment on the order of birth. The elder is Israel, prior in time, first to receive the law, given the land and the prophets. Tertullian acknowledges this priority of grace fully, but the elder forfeited it, not suddenly, but through a long pattern of infidelity. He catalogs the record from Israel's own scriptures. The golden calf at Sinai, the worship of Bal under Jeroboam, the faithlessness that fills the prophetic books from Isaiah to Malachi, the rejection of Christ was the culmination of this history, its definitive and irrevocable end. The younger people, the church from the Gentiles had served idols, but they turned from the dewy reigns. How you turn to God from idols to serving the living and the true God.

[00:05:50]Tertullian draws the consequence in the sharpest language the text permits. The posterior people, the church from the nations, has attained the grace of divine favor from which Israel has been divorced. That word divorced is Tertillian's own from chapter 1. The covenant bond was real. The divorce was real. And the prophets themselves had long employed the same marriage imagery for Israel's covenant with God, making Tertullian's language not invention, but exugesus of the prophetic text itself.

[00:06:28]Chapter 2 demolishes the claim that the Mosaic law is the eternal universal form of God's moral order.

[00:06:36]If circumcision and the Sabbath were binding from the beginning, what do we do with the righteous men who preceded Moses? Abraham was a friend of God before circumcision. Mechisedc was named priest of the most high without Levitical ordination. Noah was preserved from the flood without the ceremonial code. All of them were righteous before Si. Before the stone tablets, there was an unwritten natural law universally understood and kept by the patriarchs.

[00:07:10]The Mosaic law was a subsequent particular articulation of this moral order given to one people at one moment, adapted to their condition, and always designed to yield to a fuller dispensation.

[00:07:24]The natural moral law endures. The ceremonial provisions, circumcision, Sabbath, temple, sacrifice were always temporary, always ordered toward their own fulfillment in Christ.

[00:07:40]Chapters 3 and 4 apply this logic directly. On circumcision, Abraham was justified by faith in Genesis 15. His circumcision followed in Genesis 17. The sequence is the argument. Circumcision was in Tertullian's phrase a sign of that time not a prerogative titled to salvation. The prophets pointed beyond the carnal sign to a spiritual reality from the dewy reams. Be circumcised to the Lord and take away the fores of your hearts, ye men of Judah. The spiritual circumcision of the heart, fulfilling what Jeremiah prophesied, replaces the carnal sign accomplished in the sacramental life of the new covenant. On the Sabbath, God commanded Joshua to march the priests with the ark around Jericho for seven consecutive days, which necessarily included a Sabbath. On that day, the people marched and fought by direct divine command. The temporal observance was never absolute.

[00:08:43]Against the temporary weekly rest, Tertullian sets the eternal Sabbath of Isaiah.

[00:08:49]There shall be month after month and Sabbath after Sabbath, and all flesh shall come to adore before my face, says the Lord. The perpetual worship of all nations before God is the true Sabbath.

[00:09:01]The weekly rest was its shadow.

[00:09:07]Chapter 5 uses the typology of Cain and Abel. Cain the elder offered the fruits of the earth, a carnal earthly gift.

[00:09:15]Abel the younger offered the first things of his flock. God accepted Abel and rejected Cain. This is the figure of the two peoples. The elder offering earthly sacrifice, the younger of the spiritual. The decisive text is Malachi from the Dewey rings.

[00:09:32]I have no pleasure in you, says the Lord of hosts, and I will not receive a gift of your hand. For from the rising of the sun even to the going down, my name is great among the Gentiles. And in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to my name a clean ablation.

[00:09:48]God himself through his own prophet announces the rejection of the localized Levitical system and its replacement by a clean ablation offered everywhere across all nations. Traditional Catholic theology has consistently identified that clean oblation with the holy sacrifice of the mass, the unbloody sacrifice of Calvary offered on every Catholic altar from the rising to the setting sun. Tertullian plants this prophetic route in the second century.

[00:10:15]The tradition will tend it for 20 more.

[00:10:21]The transition to chapter 6 is the hinge of the entire treaties. If the prophets announce a new covenant, someone must have established it. The question is not whether it is coming. Jeremiah settles that from the dwar. Behold, the day shall come, says the Lord, and I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not according to the covenant which I made with their fathers and the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. God explicitly contrasts the new covenant with the Mosaic one. The new is not like the old.

[00:10:56]The only remaining question is chronological. Has the one who brings this new law already come? That is what Tertullian now proves from Daniel.

[00:11:09]Chapters 7 and 8 deliver the intellectual climax of the treatise from the dewy reim. 70 weeks are shortened upon thy people, and upon thy holy city, that transgression may be finished, and sin may have an end, and iniquity may be abolished, and everlasting justice may be brought, and vision and prophecy may be fulfilled, and the saint of saints may be anointed.

[00:11:37]70 weeks of years, 490 years are decreed over Israel and Jerusalem. Within this window, the Messiah will be anointed, vision and prophecy will be sealed, and the holy city will be destroyed.

[00:11:52]Tertullan then painstakingly traces the chronology from the first year of Darius through the Persian kings, through Alexander the Macedonian, through the Tomies in Egypt to Augustus in Tiberius.

[00:12:07]Whether every calculation is accepted or not, the point is unmistakable. The prophetic clock does not point to a Messiah thousands of years in the future. It points to the age in which Christ appeared. The logical structure of the argument must be stated clearly.

[00:12:25]Daniel's prophecy requires the Messiah to arrive and be cut off within the 70 weeks after which the holy city will be destroyed. The city was destroyed in AD70. Therefore, the Messiah must already have come and come before AD70.

[00:12:42]Both premises are accepted by Tertullian's Jewish interlocutors.

[00:12:46]Daniel is in their scripture and Jerusalem's destruction is a historical fact known to everyone in the Roman world. The conclusion is inescapable. He calculates that Christ was born in the 41st year of Augustus and that the passion occurred under Tiberius Caesar, naming the exact Roman councils of that year in the month of March at the Passover on the day the lamb was slain.

[00:13:09]His challenge remains since Christ's passion, vision, and prophecy have been sealed. Let the Jews exhibit subsequently to Christ any volumes of prophets visible miracles wrought by any angels, such as those which in bygone days the patriarchs saw until the advent of Christ who has now come. No such prophets have appeared under the Mosaic Order since the temple fell. The silence is itself a fulfillment.

[00:13:41]In chapters 9-14, Tertullian addresses the deepest objection. If Jesus was truly the Messiah, why did he come in loneliness rather than triumph? His answer, scripture prophesies two distinct advents of the Messiah, the first in suffering and rejection, the second in glory and universal dominion.

[00:14:01]Israel fixed her gaze on the second and missed the first. And the first was typified throughout the Old Testament with extraordinary precision. Consider Isaac when Abraham was commanded to sacrifice his beloved son on Mount Mariah. Genesis records he laid upon him the wood for the Holocaust. The son carrying the wood of his own sacrifice up the mountain. This is the son of God carrying his cross to Calvary. The type was laid down a thousand years before the event. Consider the bronze serpent.

[00:14:35]When Israel was afflicted by fiery serpents in the wilderness, God commanded, "Make a brazen serpent and set it up for a sign, which when they that were bitten looked upon, they were healed." And our Lord himself interprets the type. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up. The instrument of death lifted high, healing those who look upon it in faith. The cross was always coming.

[00:15:06]And Moses at the battle of Amalach standing with arms extended through the hours of combat. When Moses lifted up his hands, Israel overcame prefigures the victory won by the precise posture of the crucifixion. As for the destruction of Jerusalem, this is not a historical footnote, but the fulfillment of divine judgment explicitly prophesied. Isaiah had written, "Your land is desolate. Your cities are burnt with fire. Your country strangers devour before your face. The Lord himself foretold in Matthew 23 and 24. The temple fell. The sacrifice ceased. The priesthood was scattered. Not as an accident of Roman military power, but as the visible historical seal of a covenant that had reached its divinely appointed end at Calvary.

[00:15:59]Two prophetic fulfillments must suffice.

[00:16:01]The Emanuel prophecy. Therefore, the Lord himself shall give you a sign.

[00:16:06]Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emanuel. The Jewish objection is that Jesus bore a different name.

[00:16:15]Tertullian's reply is this. Emanuel is not a personal name, but a title, God with us. And the entire proclamation of the incarnation is precisely that God has come to dwell among us. The substance is fulfilled. The passion Psalm 21 had predicted the precise mechanics of crucifixion a millennium before Rome invented it. They have dug my hands and feet. I have numbered all my bones and they have looked and stared upon me. The piercing of hands and feet, the garments divided by lot written under David, fulfilled on Golgtha.

[00:16:56]The significance of Tertullan is not that Catholics believe something because Tertullian taught it. The significance is that already in AD 200 before Nika before Constantine before the great councils a Christian writer is arguing from scripture and substantially the same way that the later fathers the medieval theologians and the councils would argue. The doctrinal continuity across 20 centuries is not coincidence.

[00:17:22]It is the mark of a faith that does not change because it does not originate in any single century. Tertullian was among the earliest Latin writers to state with systematic precision what the apostles had taught. In chapter six of this very treatise, he states his thesis without qualification.

[00:17:42]That old law has ceased and the promised new law is now in operation. And centuries later, the council of Florence formally defined the same doctrine in contante domino.

[00:17:54]The Holy Roman Church firmly believes, professes, and teaches that the matter pertaining to the law of the Old Testament, the Mosaic law after our Lord's coming ceased.

[00:18:05]This is dogma. Florence was not creating a new doctrine. It was formally defining what the church had always taught, what the fathers had always proclaimed, and what Tertullan had already argued from scripture in 2 century Carthage. There is no parallel covenant. There is no dual path theology. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism. Extra ecclesium nula salos. Outside the church, there is no salvation. The social kingship of Christ demands that all nations and all souls recognize him as Lord. When Catholics pray for the conversion of the Jewish people, as Holy Mother Church has always prayed, as she prayed in her ancient Good Friday liturgy, we do so out of supernatural charity, desiring for them the fulfillment of what was promised to their forefathers. The old covenant's locked box has one key, Jesus Christ. As St. Paul declares in the epistle to the Galatians, if you be Christ, then you are the seed of Abraham, ears according to the promise.

[00:19:07]Christ is king. His church is the new Israel. His doctrine does not change.

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