Tertullian, An Answer to the Jews 2

Let us now move forward and define the heart of the matter with precision. Why should anyone think that God—the Founder of the universe, the Governor of the world, the Shaper of man, the Sower of all nations—gave his law through Moses to a single people and withheld it from the rest? If he had not given it to everyone, he would never have allowed Gentile proselytes to approach it at all. But because it fits both the goodness and the equity of the One who shaped the human race, he gave the same law to every nation, ordering it to be kept at the specific times, through the specific people, and in the specific manner he chose.

At the very beginning, he gave Adam and Eve a law: do not eat from the tree planted in the middle of Paradise. Disobedience meant certain death. That one command would have been enough, had they kept it. In that law given to Adam we already recognize every commandment that later sprouted through Moses: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. You shall not kill, commit adultery, steal, or bear false witness. Honor your father and mother. You shall not covet what belongs to another (Genesis 2:16-17; Exodus 20:1-17). This primordial law, given in Paradise, is the matrix of all God's commandments.

Had they loved the Lord their God, they would not have broken his command. Had they loved their neighbor—that is, themselves—they would have rejected the serpent's lie. They would not have committed suicide by cutting themselves off from immortality through disobedience. They would have avoided theft, since they would not have secretly tasted the fruit. They would not have hid from the Lord their God among the trees. They would not have become accomplices to the devil's false claim that they would become like God. They would not have offended their Father, who formed them from the clay of the earth as from a mother's womb. Had they not coveted another's property, they would never have touched the forbidden fruit.

Thus in this universal, primordial law—which God sanctioned to be observed in the fruit of the tree—we find every commandment of the later law already implanted, waiting to be published and to sprout in its appointed season. The God who later teaches the law is the same One who first sent the commandment; it belongs to him to instruct later those he first formed as righteous. Why should it surprise us that the One who instituted discipline also increases it, or that the One who began the work also perfects it?

I maintain that long before Moses received the written law on stone tablets, an unwritten law existed—naturally understood and kept by the fathers. How else was Noah found righteous, unless the justice of natural law had gone before him? How was Abraham called God's friend, except through the equity and justice of that same natural law? How was Melchizedek named priest of God Most High, unless there were already those who offered sacrifices to God before the Levitical priesthood existed? The law came to Moses only after the Exodus, after a long interval of time—four hundred and thirty years after Abraham.

From this we see that God's law did not begin with Moses, or at Horeb, Sinai, or the desert. It began earlier, first in Paradise, then with the patriarchs, and only later was it reformed for the Jews at set times. We must therefore stop treating the Law of Moses as the principal law. It is a subsequent law, which God gave to the nations at a specific moment, promised through the prophets to reform for the better, and foretold would be observed only temporarily—just as it was given at a specific time through Moses. We cannot strip God of his power to reform the law's precepts according to the condition of the times for the salvation of humanity.

Anyone who insists the Sabbath must still be kept as a remedy for salvation, and circumcision on the eighth day under threat of death (Genesis 17:10-14), must prove that the righteous of the past kept the Sabbath or were circumcised, and so became God's friends. If circumcision purifies a man, why did God not circumcise Adam when he created him, or after he sinned? God established him in Paradise as uncircumcised and appointed him its keeper. Since God did not institute Adam as circumcised or Sabbath-keeping, it follows that he also praised Abel—uncircumcised, not keeping the Sabbath—accepting his sacrifice offered in simplicity of heart, while rejecting Cain's, who did not offer rightly.

God also delivered Noah, uncircumcised and not keeping the Sabbath, from the Flood. He translated Enoch, the most righteous, uncircumcised and not keeping the Sabbath, from this world before he tasted death—showing us that we too can please God without the burden of the Mosaic law. Melchizedek, priest of God Most High, uncircumcised and not keeping the Sabbath, was drawn into the priesthood of God. And Lot, Abraham's brother, proves that a man can be rescued from the burning of Sodom without observing the law, purely on the merit of his own justice.