The Sabbath was not violated in the case of Jericho, and yet it certainly was there violated! Tertullian adds that if Christ hated the Sabbath he was in this like the Creator himself, who declares [Isa. 1:14] that he hates it. He forgets that the Creator has expressly declared his great regard for the Sabbath by this very prophet [chap. 58:13, 14], and overlooks the fact that what God hates is the hypocritical conduct of the people as set forth in Isaiah 1. In his fourth book against Marcion, chapter xvi., Christ is mentioned as the Lord of the Sabbath, but nothing is said bearing upon Sabbatic obligation. In chapter xxx., of this same book, he alludes to the cure wrought by Christ upon the Sabbath day, mentioned in Luke 13:11-16, and says, "When, therefore, he did a work according to the condition prescribed by the law, he affirmed, instead of breaking, the law," etc.
In the twelfth chapter of this book, however, he asserts many things relative to Christ. He says that the disciples in rubbing out the ears of corn on the Sabbath "had violated the holy day. Christ excuses them and became their accomplice in breaking the Sabbath." He argues that as the Sabbath from the beginning, which he here places at the fall of the manna though elsewhere dating it from the creation, had never been designed as a day of fasting, the Saviour did right in justifying the act of the disciples in the cornfield. And he terms the example of David a "colorable precedent" to justify the eating of the corn. But though he represents the Saviour as "annulling the Sabbath" at this time, he also asserts that in this very case "he maintains the honor of the Sabbath as a day which is to be free from gloom rather than from work." He justifies the Saviour in his acts of healing on the Sabbath, declaring that in this he was doing that which the Sabbath law did not forbid. Tertullian next affirms precisely the reverse of many things which he has advanced against the Sabbath, and even answers his own objections against it. Thus he says:--
"In order that he might, whilst allowing that amount of work which he was about to perform for a soul, remind them what works the law of the Sabbath forbade--even human works; and what it enjoined--even divine works, which might be done for the benefit of any soul, he was called 'Lord of the Sabbath' because he maintained the Sabbath as his own institution. Now, even if he had annulled the Sabbath, he would have had the right to do so, as being its Lord, [and] still more as he who instituted it. But lie did not utterly destroy it, although its Lord, in order that it might henceforth be plain that the Sabbath was not broken by the Creator, even at the time when the ark was carried around Jericho. For that was really God's work, which he commanded himself, and which he had ordered for the sake of the lives of his servants when exposed to the perils of war." Book iv. chap. xii.