o the stiffneckedness of the people in order to
protect them from the worst evil, polytheism.

Now the struggle with the Gnostics and Marcion, and the creation of a
New Testament had necessarily a double consequence. On the one hand, the
proposition that the "Father of Jesus Christ is the creator of the world
and the God of the Old Testament" required the strictest adherence to
the unity of the two Testaments, so that the traditional apologetic view
of the older book had to undergo the most rigid development; on the
other hand, as soon as the New Testament was created, it was impossible
to avoid seeing that this book was superior to the earlier one, and thus
the theory of the novelty of the Christian doctrine worked out by the
Gnostics and Marcion had in some way or other to be set forth and
demonstrated. We now see the old Catholic Fathers engaged in the
solution of this twofold problem; and their method of accomplishing it
has continued to be the prevailing one in all Churches up to the present
time, in so far as the ecclesiastical and dogmatic practice still
continues to exhibit the inconsistencies of treating the Old Testament
as a Christian book in the strict sense of the word and yet elevating
the New above it, of giving a typical interpretation to the ceremonial
law and yet acknowledging that the Jewish people had a covenant with
God.

With regard to the first point, viz., the maintenance of the unity of
the two Testaments, Irenaeus and Tertullian gave a most detailed
demonstration of it in opposition to Marcion,[628] and primarily indeed
with the same means as the older teachers had already used. It is Christ
that prophesied and appeared in the Old Testament; he is the householder
who produced both Old and New Testaments.[629] Moreover, as the two have
the same origin, their meaning is also the same. Like Barnabas the early
Catholic Fathers contrived to give all passages in the Old Testament a
typical Christian sense: it is the same truth which we can learn from
the prophets and again from Christ and the Apostles. With regard to the
Old Testament the watchword is: "Seek the type" ("Typum quaeras").[630]
But they went a step further still. In opposition to Marcion's
antitheses and his demonstration that the God of the Old Testament is a
petty being and has enjoined petty, external observances, they seek to
show in syntheses that the same may be said of the New. (See Irenaeus IV.
21-36). The effort of the older t