Tertullian, Against Marcion 18

You are trying to drive a wedge into the outcome, I think, denying that the passion of the cross was preached in Christ of the Creator, and arguing further that we should not believe the Creator exposed his Son to this kind of death, since he himself cursed it: "Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree" (Deuteronomy 21:23). But I set aside the sense of this curse, which deserves careful handling, from the bare preaching of the cross—the very point now under fire—because the proof of things precedes argument in other matters as well. First, I will teach the figures.

And this sacrament had to be foreshadowed in the preaching precisely because the more incredible it was, the more it would become a scandal; and the more magnificent it was, the more it had to be veiled if preached nakedly, so that the difficulty of understanding might drive people to seek the grace of God. So first, Isaac: when his father gave him as a sacrifice and he carried the wood himself, he already signified Christ's outcome—handed over as a victim by his Father, bearing the wood of his own passion. And Joseph, too, figures Christ—if only in this one thing, lest I delay the argument: he suffered persecution from his brothers on account of the grace of God, just as Christ suffered from the Jews, carnally his brothers.

When the Father blesses him in these words—"The beauty of his horns is like that of a unicorn; with his horns he will gore the nations, even to the ends of the earth"—no rhinoceros or two-horned minotaur was destined to be the unicorn, but Christ was signified in it, a bull on account of both dispositions: fierce to some as judge, gentle to others as savior, whose horns are the extremities of the cross. For even on the yardarm, which is a part of the cross, the extremities are called horns, while the unicorn is the middle pole. By this virtue of the cross and in this horned manner, he now gathers all nations through faith, lifting them from earth to heaven, and then he will gather them through judgment, casting them down from heaven to earth.

The same holds true elsewhere in the same Scripture, when Jacob spiritually curses Simeon and Levi—that is, the scribes and Pharisees, for their census derives from them—saying: "Simeon and Levi have completed iniquity from their own heresy, by which they persecuted Christ; may my soul not come into their counsel, and may my liver not rest in their assembly, because in their indignation they killed men—that is, prophets—and in their concupiscence they struck the sinews of the bull, that is, Christ, whom, after the death of the prophets, they crucified by nailing his sinews." But it is vain to reproach them with butchery after the homicides of someone's ox.

Now, what was Moses doing at that moment when Jesus fought Amalek, praying with hands spread wide while seated? In such an astonishing crisis, he ought rather to have fallen on his knees, beating his chest, rolling his face on the ground—unless, in the place where the Name of the Lord was doing battle, those who would someday fight the devil also needed the posture of the cross, through which Jesus would carry off the victory. And again, after every likeness of anything was forbidden, why did Moses set up a bronze serpent on a pole, hung as a spectacle of salvation? Was he not also intending the power of the Lord's cross, by which the serpent, the devil, was exposed, and by which, to each one wounded by spiritual serpents, yet looking at it and believing in it, healing from the bites of sins and salvation were proclaimed from then on? (Numbers 21:9)