Tertullian — Against Marcion 3.19

Come now: if you have read in David, The Lord has reigned from the wood, I wait to hear what you understand — unless perhaps you think some timber-king of the Jews is meant, and not Christ, who from then, by the wood’s passion, overcame death and reigned. For if death reigned from Adam until Christ, why should Christ not be said to have reigned from the wood, from which wood of the cross, having died, he shut out death’s reign? So also Isaiah: For a child is born to us — what is new if he is not speaking of God’s Son? — and he is given to us whose rule is made upon his shoulder. Which of all kings wears the badge of his power on the shoulder, and not a diadem on the head or a scepter in the hand or some mark of his own dress? But only the new Christ Jesus of new ages lifted on the shoulder the power and height of his new glory — the cross, of course — so that according to the earlier prophecy the Lord would from then reign from the wood.

Jeremiah also puts this wood to you, preaching of what the Jews would say: Come, let us cast wood into his bread — that is, into his body. For so the Lord also in your gospel revealed, calling bread his body, so that from here already you may understand he gave bread the figure of his body, whose body earlier the prophet figured into bread, the Lord himself later going to interpret this sacrament. If you still seek the preaching of the Lord’s cross, Psalm 21 can already satisfy you enough, holding Christ’s whole passion, singing even then his glory: They have dug, he says, my hands and my feet — which are the cross’s own atrocities. And again, when he implores the Father’s help: Save me, he says, from the lion’s mouth — that is, of death — and from the unicorn’s horns my humility — that is, from the tips of the cross, as we showed above. Which cross neither David himself suffered nor any king of the Jews, lest you think another’s passion is prophesied than his who alone was so notably crucified by the people.

Now even if heretical hardness spits out and mocks all these readings, I will grant it that no cross of Christ is signified by the Creator — because not even from this will it prove that the one crucified is another — unless perhaps it shows this exit of his preached by its own god, so that a diversity of passions, and thus also of persons, may be claimed from a diversity of preachings. Otherwise, with not even his Christ preached, much less his cross, prophecy of death alone is enough for my Christ. For from this — that the quality of death was not published — it could also have come about through the cross, then to be charged to another only if it had been preached toward another. Unless he will not even want my Christ’s death prophesied — so that he may blush the more if he announces his own Christ dead, whom he denies born, yet denies mine mortal, whom he confesses birth-able. But I want to show my Christ’s death and burial and resurrection with Isaiah’s one voice saying: His burial has been taken up from the midst. For he would not have been buried unless dead, nor his burial taken up from the midst unless through resurrection. Then he added: Therefore he himself will have many as inheritance and will divide many’s spoils, because his soul was handed over into death. For when the cause of this grace was shown — that is, for the injury of a holy death — it was shown together that he would obtain these after death, of course through resurrection.