Against Marcion 3.12

Challenge me now, as you usually do, over this comparison of Christ with Isaiah, contending that it fits in no respect. “For first,” you say, “Isaiah's Christ will have to be called Emmanuel, and then to take the power of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria against the king of the Assyrians. But this one who came was neither brought forth under a name of that kind nor engaged in any warfare.” But I will remind you to consider also what belongs with each of the two statements. For the interpretation of Emmanuel is added as well, “God with us,” so that you should look not only at the sound of the name but also at its sense. For the sound, Hebrew, that is “Emmanuel,” belongs to its own nation; but its sense, that is “God with us,” is common to all through translation. Ask, then, whether this phrase, “God with us,” which is “Emmanuel,” has been in use of Christ since Christ shone forth. And I think you will not deny it, since you yourself say “God with us,” that is, Emmanuel. Or if you are so foolish that, because with you he is called “God with us” and not “Emmanuel,” you therefore refuse to admit the coming of him whose proper title is to be called Emmanuel, as if this were not also “God with us,” you will find that among the Hebrews the Christians, and indeed the Marcionites, name Emmanuel when they mean to say “God with us”; just as every nation, in whatever sounds it says “God with us,” will be pronouncing Emmanuel, fulfilling the sound in the sense. But if Emmanuel is “God with us,” and “God with us” is Christ, who is even in us (“for as many of you as were dipped into Christ have put on Christ”), then Christ is as properly in the meaning of the name, “God with us,” as in the sound of the name, “Emmanuel.” And so it is established that he who was foretold as Emmanuel has already come, because what Emmanuel signifies has come, that is, “God with us.”