on heretics and the Bible

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Back to a book I am not reading for review but for my own education, Jaroslav Pelikan's The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, book 1 in his series The Christian Tradition. The first chapter discusses the interaction of Greek philosophy and Christian theology. But I enjoyed this quote he used from Tertullian.
In this manner heretics either wrest plain and simple words to any sense they choose by their conjectures, or else they violently resolve by a literal interpretation words which imply a conditional sense and are incapable of a simple solution, as in this passage. Against Marcion 4.19.6b.
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