Tertullian, Against Marcion 40

He knew exactly what He was doing, and He knew precisely when He had to suffer, since the Law had already sketched out His passion in advance. Out of every Jewish festival, He picked the Passover, because Moses had already declared the mystery: the Passover belongs to the Lord. That is why He let His desire show: 'I have earnestly wanted to eat this Passover with you before I suffer' (Luke 22:15). Oh, you destroyer of the Law, who still wanted to keep the Passover! No doubt the fresh green rites of Judaism had charmed Him. Or was it that He Himself — led like a sheep to slaughter, silent like a sheep before its shearer — was aching to fulfill the figure of His saving blood (Isaiah 53:7)? He could have been handed over by any random stranger, so I would not even have to say this psalm was fulfilled: 'The one who eats my bread has lifted his heel against me' (Psalm 41:9). He could have been betrayed for nothing. After all, what great effort did the betrayer expend on a man who, by offending the people to their faces, could not have been seized more easily than invaded? But that scenario would have suited some other Christ, not the One who actually fulfilled the prophecies. Scripture says: 'Because they sold the Righteous One' (Zechariah 11:12-13). And the exact amount and final disposition of the price — later, when Judas repented and the silver was returned and used to buy the potter's field, as Matthew's Gospel records (Matthew 27:3-10) — Jeremiah had already foretold: 'They took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of the One they valued — or honored — and gave them for the potter's field' (Jeremiah 32:9).

So, having confessed that He had longed to eat the Passover with His own — for it would have been unfitting for God to long for something alien — He took bread, distributed it to the disciples, and made it His body by saying, 'This is My body,' that is, the figure of My body (Luke 22:19). But a figure cannot exist unless the reality exists. A phantom, an empty thing, cannot take on a figure. Or if He called bread His body because He lacked a body, then He should have given bread for us — making a mockery of Marcion's fantasy, so that bread might be crucified. But why call bread His body and not a gourd, which Marcion kept in place of a heart? He fails to grasp that this was an ancient figure of Christ's body, spoken through Jeremiah: 'They plotted against me, saying, Come, let us put wood into his bread' — that is, the cross into His body (Jeremiah 11:19). Therefore the Illuminator of ancient things has made it perfectly clear what He meant by bread: by calling His body bread, and by establishing the covenant in the cup, sealed with His blood, He confirmed the substance of the body (Luke 22:20). No body can have blood except a fleshly one. Even if someone posits a non-fleshly quality of body, it still would not have blood except as flesh. So the proof of the body rests on the testimony of the flesh, and the proof of the flesh rests on the testimony of the blood.

And so that you may also recognize the ancient figure of blood in wine, Isaiah steps forward: 'Who is this coming from Edom, with crimsoned garments from Bozrah? Who is this, glorious in His apparel, marching in the greatness of His strength? Why are Your garments red, and Your clothes like one who treads in the winepress?' (Isaiah 63:1-3). The prophetic Spirit, as if already gazing on the Lord coming to His passion, clothed in flesh so that He might suffer in it, marks the blood-stained condition of the flesh by the redness of the garments — trampled and pressed by the violence of the passion, as in a winepress, because from there men descend as if bloodied by the redness of wine. Even more plainly, Genesis in the blessing of Judah — from whose tribe the lineage of Christ's flesh would arise — was already sketching Christ in Judah: 'He will wash His robe in wine and His garment in the blood of the grape' (Genesis 49:11), identifying the robe and garment as flesh, and the wine as blood. So now He has consecrated His blood in wine, He who then prefigured wine as blood.