Today I have selected a guest writer. He is a Christian who wrote extensively, including the treatise “An Answer to the Jews.” In it he offers proofs to the Jews that Jesus of Nazareth is their promised Messiah. Following are portions of chapters 12 and 13. Tertullian wrote this around A. D. 200. Since this is an old-time writing, you may appreciate it better if you take your time and read it more than once. It will be worth the effort to grasp the insight into fulfilled prophecy that a Christian had who was born only 50 years after the death of the apostle John. [Items in brackets are by me.]
Tertullian wrote:
Look at the universal nations thenceforth emerging from the vortex [whirlpool] of human error to the Lord God the Creator and His Christ; and if you dare to deny that this was prophesied, forthwith occurs to you the promise of the Father in the Psalms, which says, “My Son art Thou; to-day have I begotten Thee. Ask of Me, and I will give Thee Gentiles as Thine heritage, and as Thy possession the bounds of the earth” [Psalm 2:7-8]. For you will not be able to affirm that “son” to be David rather than Christ; or the “bounds of the earth” to have been promised rather to David, who reigned within the single (country of) Judea, than to Christ, who has already taken captive the whole orb with the faith of His gospel…
Therefore, since the sons of Israel affirm that we err in receiving the Christ, who is already come, let us put in a demurrer [objection] against them out of the Scriptures themselves, to the effect that the Christ who was the theme of prediction is come; albeit by the times of Daniel’s prediction [Dan. 9:24-27] we have proved that the Christ is come already who was the theme of announcement. Now it behooved Him to be born in Bethlehem of Judah. For thus it is written in the prophet: “And thou, Bethlehem, are not the least in the leaders of Judah: for out of thee shall issue a Leader who shall feed my People Israel” [Micah 5:2-4]…
A second time, in fact, let us show that Christ is already come, (as foretold) through the prophets, and has suffered, and is already received back in the heavens, and thence is to come accordingly as the predictions prophesied. For, after His advent, we read, according to Daniel [9:26], that the city itself [Jerusalem] had to be exterminated; and we recognize that so it has befallen…
Therefore, since the Jews still contend that the Christ is not yet come, whom we have in so many ways approved to be come, let the Jews recognize their own fate,–a fate which they were constantly foretold as destined to incur after the advent of the Christ, on account of the impiety with which they despised and slew Him…
And because they had committed these crimes, and had failed to understand that Christ “was to be found” [John 1:41, 45] in “the time of their visitation,” [Luke 19:41-44]… Since, therefore, the Jews were predicted as destined to suffer these calamities on Christ’s account, and we find that they have suffered them, and see them sent into dispersion [Deut. 28:64; Luke 21:22-24] and abiding in it, manifest it is that it is on Christ’s account that these things have befallen the Jews, the sense of the Scriptures harmonizing with the issue of events and of the order of the times.