Against Marcion 3.16

Now, if he snatched up the name of Christ as a petty thief snatches a gift-basket, why did he also wish to be called Jesus, a name not so much looked for among the Jews? For if we, having by God's grace attained an understanding of his mysteries, recognize that this name too was destined for Christ, it does not follow that the matter will be known to the Jews as well, from whom wisdom has been taken away. Indeed, to this day they hope for a Christ, not a Jesus, and they interpret Elijah as the Christ rather than Jesus. Why then did he also come in that name in which the Christ was not presumed to come? He could have come in that name alone which alone was presumed. But when he mixed the two, the expected and the unexpected, both his plans are defeated. For if he was called Christ in order to creep in for the time being as though he were the Creator's, the name Jesus is against it, because Jesus was not expected in the Creator's Christ; or if he was called Jesus to be taken for another's, the name Christ does not allow it, because a Christ belonging to anyone but the Creator was not expected. Which of these can stand, I do not know. But both will stand in the Creator's Christ, in whom the name Jesus is also found. “How?” you say. Learn this too with your partners in error, the Jews. When Hoshea son of Nun was appointed successor to Moses, he is certainly changed from his former name and begins to be called Jesus. “Certainly,” you say. This we say was first a figure of what was to come. For since Jesus Christ was to lead the second people (which we are, born in the deserts of the world) into the land of promise flowing with milk and honey, that is, into the possession of eternal life, than which nothing is sweeter; and since this was to come about not through Moses, that is, not through the discipline of the law, but through Jesus, that is, through the grace of the gospel, when we had been circumcised with a knife of stone, that is, with the precepts of Christ (for the rock is Christ): therefore that man who was being prepared as an image of this mystery was also consecrated with the figure of the Lord's name, being named Jesus. Christ himself testified even then that this name was his own when he was speaking to Moses. For who was speaking, if not the Spirit of the Creator, who is Christ? When, then, he said to the people in his command: “Behold, I send my angel before your face, to guard you on the way and bring you into the land which I have prepared for you; attend to him and hear him, and do not disobey him; for he will not hide from you, since my name is upon him,” he called him an angel because of the greatness of the mighty works he was to perform, and because of the office of a prophet, announcing the divine will; but he called him Jesus because of the mystery of his own future name. For he confirmed as his own the name which he himself had given him, since he had commanded that from then on he be called not Angel nor Hoshea but Jesus. So if both names fit the Creator's Christ, then both are unfitting for a Christ not the Creator's, as is the rest of his course. In short, from here on a sure and just prescription must be set between us, necessary to both sides, by which it is determined that the Christ of another god ought to have nothing at all in common with the Creator's Christ. For you must maintain the difference just as we must oppose it, since neither will you be able to prove that another god's Christ has come unless you show him to be far different from the Creator's Christ, nor will we be able to claim him for the Creator unless we show him to be such as the Creator appointed. As for the names, we have now closed the matter: I claim Christ for myself, I defend Jesus as mine.