Some of Tertullian’s utterings in this connection have
caused an intense confessionally
motivated discussion in the scholarly debate. Catholics
have tended to discover here
an early conception of transubstantiation, whereas
Reformed Protestants disagree. The
reason is some very ambiguous formulations of Tertullian.
He says that Christ designed
the bread to be the figure of his body – coropori sui
figuram panis dedisse (Adversus
Marcionem III,19,4, cf.
IV,40–3-4), and that Christ is represented in the bread – ipsum
corpus suum representat (Adversus
Marcionem I,14).
The discussion has turned about what is meant by the
terms “figura” and “representare”.
Is the presence of Christ in bread and wine to be
understood concretely or symbolically?
Let us go to the relevant texts:
This tree it is which Jeremiah likewise gives you
intimation of [Psalm 96,10 LXX)]71, when he prophesies to the Jews, who should
say, “Come, let us destroy the tree with the fruit, (the bread) thereof,”[Jeremiah
11,19 LXX] that is, His body. For so did God in your own gospel even reveal the
sense, when He called His body bread; so that, for the time to come, you
may understand that He has given to His body the figure of bread, whose
body the prophet of old figuratively turned into bread, the Lord Himself
designing to give by and by an interpretation of the mystery (Adversus
Marcionem III, 19, 3–4)
The context of Tertullian is his refutation of Marcion’s
dualism. The Old Testament that Marcion rejects contains prophecies about
Christ. The revelation is a continuum and that which is symbolically uttered in
The Old Testament is fulfilled in Christ and in the Eucharist. Jeremiah’s
prophecy foretells the concreteness of Christ’s body and his sacrifice.
Then, having taken the bread and given it to His
disciples, He made it His own body, by saying, “This is my body”, that is,
the figure of my body. A figure, however, there could not have been, unless
there were first a veritable body. An empty thing, or phantom, is incapable
of a figure. If, however, (as Marcion might say,) He pretended the bread
was His body, because He lacked the truth of bodily substance, it follows that
He must have given bread for us. It would contribute very well to the support
of Marcion’s theory of a phantom body, that bread should have been crucified!
But why call His body bread, and not rather (some other edible thing, say) a
melon which Marcion must have had in lieu of a heart! He did not understand how
ancient was this figure of the body of Christ, who said Himself by Jeremiah: “I
was like a lamb or an ox that is brought to the slaughter, and I knew not that
they devised a device against me, saying, Let us cast the tree upon His
bread,” which means, of course, the cross upon His body. And thus, casting
light, as He always did, upon the ancient prophecies, He declared plainly
enough what He meant by the bread, when He called the bread His own
body. He likewise, when mentioning the cup and making the new testament
to be sealed “in His blood,” affirms the reality of His body. For no blood can
belong to a body which is not a body of flesh. (Adversus Marcionem IV,
40, 3–4)
In this passage, Tertullian once again comments on
Marcion’s dualism by using the text from Jeremiah, but there is added a new
element: He rejects Marcion’s docetism. Christ could not have been a phantom,
as Marcion maintained. If Jesus was a phantom, he could not have celebrated the
Last Supper, making the New Testament to be sealed in his blood. Therefore, as
the body and blood foretold in Jeremiah were a figure of Christ and were
fulfilled in him, so too the bread and wine used during the Last Supper were a
figure of Christ representation through the Eucharistic elements. The believer
receives the body and blood of Christ through the Eucharist. (Øyvind Norderval,
“The Eucharist in Tertullian and Cyprian,” in The Eucharist—Its Origins and
Contexts, ed. David Hellholm and Deiter Sänger, 3 vols. [Wissenschaftliche
Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 376; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017], 2:944-45)
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