Tertullian — Against Marcion 3.18

On the outcome itself, I think, you try to force a difference, denying that the passion of the cross was preached for the Creator’s Christ, and arguing besides that it is not to be believed the Creator exposed his Son to that kind of death which he himself had cursed: Cursed, he says, is everyone who hangs on a tree. But I put off the sense of this curse, worthily, from the mere preaching of the cross — which is now the chief question — because elsewhere the proof of the facts also goes before the reason. I will teach first from the figures. And of course this sacrament especially had to be figured in preaching — the more incredible, the more it would be a scandal if preached bare, and the more magnificent, the more it had to be veiled, so that the difficulty of understanding would seek the grace of God.

And so first Isaac, when handed over by the father as a victim and himself carrying the wood, was already then marking Christ’s exit — yielded by the Father as victim and bearing the wood of his own passion. Joseph too was going to figure Christ — if only by this, so I do not delay the run: that he suffered persecution from his brothers because of God’s grace, as Christ also from the Jews, brothers after the flesh — when he is blessed by the father even in these words: His beauty is a bull’s, his horns the horns of a unicorn; with them he will fan the nations alike to the end of the earth.

Not that a rhinoceros was being destined as unicorn, nor a two-horned minotaur, but Christ was being signified in him — a bull for either arrangement: to some fierce as judge, to some gentle as savior — whose horns would be the ends of the cross. For even on the yardarm, which is part of the cross, the extremities are called horns, and the unicorn is the stake of the middle post. By this power of the cross, then, and horned in this way, he even now fans all the nations through faith, lifting them from earth to heaven, and then through judgment he will fan them, casting them from heaven to earth. The same will also be the bull elsewhere in the same scripture, when Jacob spiritually curses Simeon and Levi — that is, the scribes and Pharisees (for from them their census is drawn): Simeon and Levi finished iniquity from their heresy, by which of course they persecuted Christ; into their counsel let my soul not come, and on their station let my liver not lie, because in their indignation they killed men — that is, the prophets — and in their desire they cut the bull’s sinews — that is, Christ’s — whom after the prophets’ murder they raged against by nailing his sinews with nails. Otherwise it is empty if after someone’s cattle-slaughter he rebukes them for butchery. But now Moses — why then only, when Joshua was fighting against Amalek, does he pray with hands spread while sitting, when in affairs so startling he ought rather to have recommended prayer with knees set down and hands beating the breast and face rolling on the ground — unless because there, where the Lord’s name was fighting, about to fight someday against the devil, the habit of the cross was also necessary, through which Jesus would bring back victory? Again the same Moses, after every likeness of a thing was forbidden — why did he set out a bronze serpent placed on wood in the habit of one hanging, as a saving spectacle? Or was he here too aiming the force of the Lord’s cross, by which the serpent-devil was published, and for anyone hurt by spiritual snakes, yet looking and believing on it, healing of the bites of sins and salvation from then on was preached?