Read the document
Tertullian, De Monogamia · chs. 6-7 (ANF vol. IV)
Summarized rather than quoted: Tertullian grants the patriarchs their wives, then argues the indulgence served its season and God has since recalled it. The whole treatise argues one marriage only, even after a spouse's death.
Put it in context
Tertullian wrote De Monogamia as a Montanist, against the mainstream church of his own day, which he mocked for permitting remarriage. The church judged the movement heterodox.
The argument gave later Christians a way to affirm that the patriarchs acted lawfully while holding that the same permission no longer governed them. Its strength depends on a larger theological case for that change, not on a later verse that plainly revokes the earlier law.
What is disputed
Tertullian wrote in Latin, not Greek, and by the time of De Monogamia he was associated with the New Prophecy, which his opponents treated as sectarian. Whether that association discredits the argument, or merely explains its severity, is disputed; and typological handling of the patriarchs already appears earlier, so this is not the moment such reasoning began.
How I read this record
This is my conclusion from the source, not part of the quotation.
Tertullian gives an early, explicit form of the revoked-dispensation argument: the patriarchs acted lawfully for their time, but the permission no longer governs Christians. His case is theological rather than a citation of a later prohibition.
Open the sources
- De Monogamia at New Advent ↗ · The full treatise; see chapters 6 and 7.