Wednesday, June 15 : Tertullian

Among his disciples Christ chose twelve chief ones whom he destined to be the teachers of the nations. Accordingly, after one of these had been struck off, he commanded the eleven others, on his departure to the Father, to “go and teach all nations” who were to be “baptized into the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” (Mt 28,19). So the apostles — whom this designation indicates as ‘the sent’ — on the authority of a prophecy which occurs in a psalm of David, immediately chose Matthias by lot in the place of Judas. They obtained the promised power of the Holy Spirit for the gift of miracles and tongues, and after first bearing witness to faith in Jesus Christ throughout Judaea and founding churches there, they next went out into the world and preached the same teaching of faith to the nations… Now what it was they preached – in other words, what it was that Christ revealed to them – can properly be proved in no other way than by those very churches that the apostles founded in person by directly declaring the Gospel to them, first by word of mouth and subsequently by their epistles. If, then, these things are so, it is manifest that all doctrine that agrees with the apostolic churches, which are the matrix and source of the faith, must be reckoned as true and undoubtedly containing that which those churches received from the apostles, the apostles from Christ and Christ from God.
maronite readings – rosary,team