Against Marcion 4.27–4.32

I prefer to clear elsewhere the charges which the Marcionites bring against the Creator. For here it is enough if they are found in Christ too. See, he too is inconsistent, unstable, fickle, teaching one thing and doing another: he commands us to give to everyone who asks, and he himself does not give a sign to those who ask; for so long an age he hid his light from men, and yet he says a lamp is not to be hidden away, and insists that it must be set on a lampstand to give light to all; he forbids cursing in return, and much more surely cursing, and yet he heaps (woes) on the Pharisees and lawyers. Who (is) this Christ so like my God, if not his?

We have often established that he could in no way have been marked out as a destroyer of the law if he had proclaimed another god. That is why then too the Pharisee who had invited him to lunch was turning it over in his mind why one who went about with the God of the law had not first washed before reclining, according to the law. Jesus, however, even interpreted the law to him, saying that they cleaned the outside of the cup and the dish, but their inside was full of robbery and wickedness, to signify that the cleanness of vessels is to be understood before God as the cleanness of men; (and) since the Pharisee had been thinking to himself about a man, not about an unwashed cup, he says: “You wash the outside of the cup,” that is, the flesh, “but you have not cleansed your inside,” that is, the soul, adding: “Did not he who made the outside,” that is, the flesh, “make the inside also,” that is, the soul? By this saying he openly showed that the cleanness of the outer and the inner man belongs to the same God to whom both belong, who puts mercy before not only the washing of a man but even sacrifice. For he adds: “Give what you have as alms, and all things will be clean for you.” And even if another god could have commanded mercy, yet not before he was known. Moreover, it is clear here too that they were rebuked not about God but about the discipline of him who commanded them both the cleanness of vessels, figuratively, and works of mercy, plainly.

So too he reproves those who tithe their little herbs but pass over the calling and the love of God. The calling and love of what God, if not of him to whom they offered rue and mint as tithes according to the pattern of the law? For the whole reproach was this: that they cared for small things, surely toward the one to whom they did not render the greater, who says: “You shall love the Lord your God with all (your) heart and with all your soul and with all your strength, who called you out of Egypt.” Besides, the time would not have allowed Christ to demand so precocious, or rather so unripe, a love for a new and recent god, not to say one not yet made public.

When he also accuses those who seek the first places and the honor of greetings, he carries out the Creator's line, who calls such chiefs rulers of Sodom, who also forbids trusting in those set over us, and indeed pronounces the man most wretched who has hope in man. And if anyone aims at preeminence so as to glory in the services of others, the one who forbade such services by his ban on hoping and trusting in man also rebuked those who aim at preeminence.

He inveighs also against the lawyers themselves, because they burdened others with unbearable burdens which they themselves did not dare touch even with a finger; not censuring the burdens of the law as one who detested it. For how could he be its detester, who was just then accusing those who passed over the weightier things of the law — alms, and the calling and love of God — which are not even heavy, much less the tithes of rue and the cleaning of dishes? Besides, he would rather have thought them excusable if they could not carry what was unbearable. But what burdens does he censure? Those which they heaped up of their own, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men for their own advantage, joining house to house to take away what is their neighbor's, trampling the people, loving gifts, chasing rewards, plundering the judgments due to the poor, so that the widow might be their spoil and the orphan their prey. Of these the same Isaiah says: “Woe to those who are strong in Israel,” and again: “Those who make demands on you rule over you.” Who more than the lawyers? If these displeased Christ too, they displeased him as his own. For he would not have attacked at all the teachers of a law not his own.

But why do they hear (woe) also because they built tombs for the prophets killed by their fathers, when they were rather worthy of praise, since by that work of piety they were testifying that they did not consent to their fathers' deeds — unless he was a jealous God, such as the Marcionites accuse, exacting the sins of the fathers from the sons to the fourth generation?

And what key did the lawyers have but the interpretation of the law? To its understanding they neither went in themselves, not believing, of course — for “unless you believe, you will not understand” — nor let others in, since they taught rather the precepts and doctrines of men. Then is the one who rebuked those who neither entered themselves nor let others enter to be held a detractor of the law or its supporter? If a detractor, those who shut off the law should have pleased him; if a supporter, then he is no longer a rival of the law. But, they say, he was bringing all this in to blacken the Creator as cruel, since those who sinned against him would have (woe). And who would not rather fear to provoke a cruel God by falling away from him? So much the more, then, was he teaching that the one he presented as to be feared must be won over. So it befitted the Creator's Christ.

Rightly, then, he dislikes the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, who love God with their lips, that is, and not with their heart. “Beware,” he says to his disciples, “of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy,” not the preaching of the Creator. The Son hates those who are stubborn toward the Father; he does not want his own to be such toward him — not toward another — toward whom hypocrisy had also been committed, the example of which the disciples were to beware of. So (when) he forbids the Pharisees' example, he was forbidding it to be committed against the one against whom the Pharisees were committing it. So, since he had censured their hypocrisy, which surely concealed the secrets of the heart and overshadowed the hidden things of unbelief with superficial observances, and which, having the key of knowledge, neither entered itself nor let others enter, he therefore adds: “But nothing is covered that will not be laid open, and nothing hidden that will not be made known,” so that no one should think he was aiming at a revelation and recognition of a god formerly unknown and hidden; for he adds also that what they muttered within themselves or discussed among themselves — saying of him, that is, “This man casts out demons only by Beelzebul” — would come out into the open and be on men's lips through the proclamation of the gospel.

Then, turning to the disciples, he says: “But I say to you, my friends: do not be terrified by those who can only kill you and after this have no further power over you” — but Isaiah will be on the side of these, foretelling: “See how the righteous man is taken away, and no one takes notice” — “but I will show you whom you should fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has power to cast into Gehenna” — meaning the Creator, surely —; “so I tell you: fear him.” And in this passage it would be enough for me to say: he whom Christ commands to be feared he forbids to be offended, and he whom he forbids to be offended he commands to be won over; and the one who gives these commands belongs to him on whose behalf he secures fear, freedom from offense, and favor. But I have more to take from what follows: “For I say to you: everyone who confesses me before men, I will confess him before God.” Now those who confess Christ before men will have to be killed, surely suffering nothing further from men after being killed. These, then, will be the ones whom he forewarned above not to fear being merely killed; he put first that death was not to be feared, so that he might add that confession must be endured. “And everyone who has denied me before men will be denied before God,” surely by the one who would have confessed him had he confessed. For if he will confess the confessor, he is the one who will also deny the denier. Moreover, if the confessor is the one who has nothing to fear after being killed, the denier will be the one who has something to fear even after death. So since what is to be feared after death, namely the punishment of Gehenna, belongs to the Creator, the denier too belongs to the Creator. And if the denier, then the confessor too, who after being killed will suffer nothing from man, but would clearly suffer from God if he denied. And so Christ is the Creator's, since he shows that those who deny him must fear the Creator's Gehenna.

So after deterring them from denial there follows a warning that blasphemy must be dreaded: “Whoever speaks against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him.” If forgiving and retaining sin already savor of God as judge, then the Holy Spirit that must not be blasphemed will (also) be his who will not forgive the blasphemy, just as above the one who must not be denied was his who will kill even into Gehenna. And if Christ turns blasphemy away from the Creator, I do not know how he came as his adversary. Or if by these words too he blackens the Creator's severity, as one who will not forgive blasphemy and will kill even into Gehenna, it remains that the Spirit of that other god may be blasphemed and Christ denied with impunity, and that it makes no difference whether he is worshiped or despised; and that, as there is no punishment for contempt, so no reward is to be hoped for worship.

He forbids those brought before the authorities to think out their answer for the interrogation. “For the Holy Spirit,” he says, “will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say.” If there is a proof of this kind from the Creator, the precept will belong to him whose example went before it. The prophet Balaam in Numbers, summoned by King Balak to curse Israel, with whom Balak was going to battle, was at once filled with the Spirit, and pronounced not the curse for which he had come but the blessing which the Spirit suggested to him in that very hour, having declared beforehand to the king's messengers, and soon to the king himself, that he would pronounce what God had put into his mouth. These are the new teachings of the new Christ, which the servants of the Creator initiated long ago.

Here, to be sure, is a contrasting example of Moses and of Christ. Moses, when brothers were quarreling, intervenes of his own accord and rebukes the wrongdoer: “Why do you strike your neighbor?”, and is rejected by him: “Who appointed you master or judge over us?” Christ, on the other hand, when asked by someone to settle (the) division of an inheritance between him and his brother, refused his help, and that in so honest a cause. So then my Moses is better than your Christ, striving for peace between brothers and confronting injury. But of course he is the Christ of the most good god, who is no judge: “Who,” he says, “appointed me judge over you?” Could he find no other form of excuse, so as not to use the words with which a wicked man and an impious brother had thrown off the champion of honesty and piety? In short, he approved a bad saying by using it, and a bad deed by declining to make peace between brothers. Or was he indignant that Moses had been driven off with this saying, and therefore, in a like case of brothers disputing, wanted to shame them by recalling the same saying? Clearly, let it be so. For he himself had then been in Moses, the one who had heard such words, namely the Spirit of the Creator.

I think we have already sufficiently established elsewhere that the glory of riches is condemned by our God, who pulls the mighty down from their throne and lifts the poor from the dunghill. From him, then, will come the parable of the rich man who flattered himself on the yield of his fields, to whom God says: “Fool, this night they will demand your soul back; and whose will be what you have prepared?” So, in the end, King (Hezekiah), having boasted before the Persians of his treasures and the storehouses of his delights, heard hard words through Isaiah

Who would forbid us to take thought for the soul about food and for the body about clothing, except the one who provided these things for man beforehand, and who, since he supplies them from then on, rightly forbids anxiety about them as a rival to his own generosity; who also made the substance of the soul itself worth more than food, and shaped the material of the body itself to be worth more than a tunic; whose ravens too neither sow nor reap nor store up in barns and yet are fed by him; whose lilies and grass too neither weave nor spin and yet are clothed by him; whose Solomon too was most glorious and yet not more finely arrayed than any little flower? Besides, nothing is so abrupt as that one should provide and another should command us to be carefree about his provision, and he a disparager of him at that. In short, whether he does not want thought given to such trifles as a disparager of the Creator — trifles about which neither ravens nor lilies labor, since they are supplied unasked, of course, because they are cheap — will appear a little later. Meanwhile, why does he accuse them of little faith, that is, of what faith? Of the faith which they could not yet show in perfection to a God only just (re)vealed, since they were only now learning him, or of the faith which they owed the Creator on this very account, to believe that he supplies these things to the human race unasked, and not to take thought about them? For when he also adds, “For the nations of the world seek these things,” that is, by not believing in God, the founder and provider of all things, he was rebuking as of little faith toward the same God those whom he did not want to be like the gentiles, whom he was marking as unbelieving toward him. Moreover, when he adds, “But the Father knows that you need these things,” I shall first ask which Father Christ wants to be understood. If theirs, he points to the Creator and confirms him as good, since he knows what his children need; (if) his own, that other god, how does he know that food and clothing are necessary to man, when he supplied none of them? For if he had known, he would have supplied them. But if he knew what is necessary to man and still did not supply it, he failed to supply it either from malice or from weakness. And by declaring these things necessary to man, he surely confirmed them as good — for nothing evil is necessary — and he will no longer be a depreciator of the Creator's works and kindnesses, so that I have now settled what I put off above. Moreover, if another both provided and supplies what he knows is necessary to man, how does he himself promise these things? Or is he good at another's expense? “For seek,” he says, “the kingdom of God, and these things will be added to you,” surely by himself. But if by himself, what sort of god is he who will supply what belongs to another? If by the Creator, to whom they belong, who is he to promise another's things? If these things are to be added to the kingdom, to be restored in second place, the second place belongs to the one who also has the first; the food and clothing belong to the one to whom the kingdom also belongs. So the whole promise is the Creator's.

If the structure of parables and the matching of similitudes look to no one other than the one to whom they correspond in every respect, and we are servants — for we have God as Lord —, then we must gird our loins, that is, be free from the encumbrances of a trailing and entangled life, and likewise have lamps burning, that is, minds kindled by faith and shining with works of truth, and so wait for the Lord, that is, Christ. Returning from where? If from a wedding, he is the Creator's, whose weddings they are; if he is not the Creator's, not even Marcion himself would have gone to a wedding if invited, looking to his own god, the hater of weddings. So the parable fails in the person of the Lord if he were not one to whom weddings are fitting.

In the following parable too, he errs badly who assigns to the person of the Creator that thief whose hour, if the master of the house knew it, he would not let his house be broken into. For how can the Creator, Lord of the whole man, seem a thief? No one steals or breaks into what is his own; rather it is he who comes down upon what is another's and estranges man from his Lord. Moreover, since he shows us that the thief is the devil, whose hour, had man known it even in the beginning, he would never have been broken into by him, he therefore commands us to be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour we do not expect: not as though he himself were the thief, but as the judge, of course, of those who have not prepared themselves and have not guarded against the thief. So if he himself is the Son of Man, I hold him as judge, and in the judge I defend the Creator; but if in this place, under the name of the Son of Man, he shows the Creator's Christ so as to depict him as the thief whose coming we do not know, you have the rule laid down above that no one is a thief of his own property; and this too remains safe, that insofar as he presents the Creator as one to be feared, so far he is doing the Creator's business and belongs to him. So when Peter asked whether he was speaking the parable to them or to all, he sets forth, (that) is, for them and for all who would preside over the churches, a similitude of stewards: the one among them who has treated his fellow servants well in his lord's absence will, when the lord returns, be set over all his goods; but the one who has acted otherwise, when the lord returns on a day he did not expect, at an hour he did not know — that Son of Man, namely, the Creator's Christ, not a thief but a judge — will be cut off, and his portion will be put with the unbelievers. Accordingly, either here too he sets forth the Lord as judge, (as) he teaches there, or, if it is the most good god, he now affirms that he too is a judge, however little the heretic may like it. For they try to soften this sense when it is claimed for their god, as though it were a matter of peace and gentleness merely to cut off and to put a man's portion with the unbelievers, as if he had simply not been called, and were only returned to his own condition. As if this very thing were not done by judgment! What folly! What will be the outcome of those cut off? Is it not the loss of salvation? For they will be cut off from those who will attain salvation. And what is the state of the unbelievers? Is it not damnation? Or if those cut off and the unbelievers will suffer nothing, then equally, on the other side, those kept and the believers will gain nothing. But if those kept and the believers will gain salvation, those cut off and the unbelievers must on the other side lose it. This will be judgment, and whoever threatens it is the Creator's.

Whom else am I to understand as beating his servants with few or many blows, and requiring of them according to what he entrusted to them, than God who repays? Whom does he teach me to obey, if not one who rewards?

Your Christ proclaims: “I have come to cast fire on the earth,” he, the most good, lord of no Gehenna, who a little before had restrained his disciples from calling down fire on a most inhospitable village! When this other burned up Sodom and Gomorrah with a storm of fire; when it was sung (of him): “Fire will go before him and burn up his enemies”; when he threatened through Hosea, “I will send fire on the cities of Judah,” or through Isaiah, “Fire has blazed out from my indignation”: he must be lying, if he is not the one who sent forth his voice also from the burning bush. Consider what fire you insist is to be understood: even if it is a figure, by the very fact that he takes proofs for his meaning from my element, the one who uses what is mine is mine. The likeness of fire will belong to him to whom the reality of fire belongs. He himself will better interpret the nature of this fire when he adds: “Do you think I have come to send peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but separation.” “A sword,” indeed, is what is written, but Marcion emends it. As if separation too were not the work of a sword! So he who denied peace intends also a fire of overthrow. As the battle, so the burning; as the sword, so the flame; neither befits (your) lord. In short: “Father,” he says, “will be divided against son and son against father, and mother against daughter and daughter against mother, and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law and mother-in-law against daughter-in-law.” If the prophet's trumpet sounded this war among relatives in these very words, I fear that Micah was preaching for Marcion's Christ.

And therefore he pronounced them hypocrites, who could test the face of the sky and of the earth, but did not discern that time in which, of course, he ought to have been recognized, as he fulfilled everything that had been foretold of him and taught nothing different. Besides, who could have known the times of one who had nothing by which to prove them? He rightly reproaches them also for not judging what is right of themselves. Long ago he commanded this through Ezekiel: “Judge just and peaceable judgment”; through Jeremiah: “Do judgment and righteousness”; through Isaiah: “Judge for the orphan and justify the widow,” charging the vineyard of Sorek too that it had produced not judgment but an outcry. So he who had taught them to do it by precept was requiring them to do it of their own judgment as well. He who had sown the precept was also pressing for its overflow. And how absurd, that one should command us to judge justly who was destroying God the just judge! For they also discuss, by way of disparagement, the judge who sends a man into prison and does not bring him out until even the last farthing has been paid, as representing the Creator. To this I must respond with the same step. For as often as the Creator's severity is thrown up against us, so often does Christ belong to the one to whom he compels obedience through fear.

Again, how did he settle the question about the healing done on the sabbath? “Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ass or his ox from the manger and lead it to water?” So by acting according to the terms of the law he confirmed the law, not dissolved it, the law which commands that no work be done except what is to be done for every living soul — how much more a human one?

I demand everywhere that the parables fit. “The kingdom of God,” he says, “is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his garden.” Who is to be understood in the person of the man? Surely Christ, who, even if he is Marcion's, has been called the Son of Man; who received from the Father the seed of the kingdom, that is, the word of the gospel, and sowed it in the garden, surely in this world. Say now that it is in man; but since he said “in (his) garden,” and neither the world nor man is his but the Creator's, then he who sowed in his own ground is shown to be the Creator's. Or if, to escape this snare, they transfer the person of the man from Christ to the man who receives the seed of the kingdom and sows it in the garden of his heart, not even this material will fit anyone but the Creator.

As for the following similitude, I am really afraid that it may perhaps portend the kingdom of another god. For he compared it to leaven, not to unleavened bread, which is more familiar to the Creator. This is just the sort of conjecture that suits those who go begging for arguments. So I too will drive off vanity with vanity, saying that leavening too fits the Creator's kingdom, because after it comes the oven, or the furnace of Gehenna. For what sort of thing is it that the kingdom of the gentlest god should be one which even the heat of judgment follows with tearful harshness?

How often does he still show himself a judge, and in the judge the Creator! How often, surely, does he reject, and condemn by rejecting! As here too: “When the master of the house has risen” — to do what? what but what Isaiah said: “When he has risen to shatter the earth” — “and has shut the door” — surely to shut out the wicked, to whom, when they knock, he will answer, “I do not know where you are from,” and again, when they recount that they ate and drank in his presence and he taught in their streets: “Depart from me, all you workers of iniquity” — “there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” — where? outside, of course, where those shut out will be once the door is shut; so the punishment will come from the one by whom the shutting out into punishment is done — “when they see the righteous entering into the kingdom of God, but themselves held outside.” Held by whom? If by the Creator, who then will be inside receiving the righteous into the kingdom? The good god? Then what is the Creator doing there, holding outside in punishment those whom his adversary has shut out, when he would rather receive them himself, if anything, to spite his adversary? But that other too, when he is about to shut out the wicked, must either know that the Creator will hold them in punishment, or not know it. So either they will be held against his will, and he is less than the one who holds them, yielding to him unwillingly; or, if he wishes it to happen so, he himself has judged that it must be done so. And then he who is the author of the Creator's disgrace will be no better than the Creator. If there is no reason in believing that one punishes and another sets free, then both the judgment and the kingdom will belong to one; and since both belong to one, the one who judges is the Creator.

What sort of people does he command to be invited to lunch or dinner? The sort he had pointed out through Isaiah: “Break your bread for the hungry, and bring the beggars and those who have no roof into your house,” those, that is, who cannot repay this kindness. If Christ forbids seeking such repayment, promising it at the resurrection, the pattern is the Creator's, who is displeased with those who love gifts and chase rewards.

Weigh also which side the parable of the host fits better. “A certain man made a dinner and invited many.” Surely the preparing of the dinner figures the fullness of eternal life. I say first that strangers, bound by no tie of kinship, are not usually invited to dinner; certainly members of the household and relatives are invited more readily. So it is the Creator who invited, to whom the invited belonged, both through Adam, as men, and (through) the fathers, as Jews; not the one to whom they belonged neither by nature nor by privilege. Next, if the one who sends to the guests is the one who prepared the dinner, in this way too the dinner is the Creator's, who sent to remind the guests, already invited beforehand through the fathers, and to be reminded through the prophets; not one who sent no one to remind them and did nothing beforehand to invite them, but came down himself suddenly, inviting as soon as he became known, pressing people into the banquet as soon as he invited them, making the hour of dining and the invitation to dinner one and the same. The invited make excuses. If invited by another god, they did so rightly, because they were invited suddenly; if not rightly, then neither were they invited suddenly; but if they were not invited suddenly, then it was by the Creator, by whom they had been invited long ago, and whose invitation they had in fact declined back then, first saying to Aaron, “Make us gods to go before us,” and thereafter hearing with the ear and not hearing, namely the invitation of God, who says most pertinently to this parable through Jeremiah: “Hear my voice, and I will be your God and you will be my people, and you will walk in all my ways, whatever I command you” — see, the invitation of God — “and they did not hear,” he says, “and did not incline their ear” — see, the refusal of the people — “but they went off in the things that they desired in their evil heart”: “I have bought a field and I have purchased oxen and I have married a wife.” And he adds further: “And I sent to you all my servants the prophets” — this will be the Holy Spirit, who reminds the guests — “by day and before dawn, and my people did not hear and did not attend with their ears, and they hardened their neck.” When this was reported to the master of the house, he was then moved — good that he was moved, for Marcion denies that his god is moved; so in this too he is mine — and he orders a replacement to be gathered from the streets and lanes of the city. Let us see whether it is in the sense in which he says again through Jeremiah: “Have I become a wilderness to the house of Israel, or a land left untilled?” — that is: have I no one to choose, or nowhere to choose from? — “because my people said: We will not come to you.” So he sent to invite others still from the same city. Then, since there was room to spare, he commanded people to be gathered even from the roads and hedges, that is, us now, from the foreign nations, with that jealousy, namely, of which he speaks in Deuteronomy: “I will turn my face away from them and show what will be theirs at the last” — that is, that others will possess their place — “because it is a perverse generation, sons in whom there is no faith. They have made me jealous with what is no god and provoked me to anger with their idols; and I will make them jealous with what is no nation, with a foolish (nation) I will provoke them to anger” — with us, namely, whose hope the Jews groan over, which the Lord says they will not taste, Zion being left like a watchtower in a vineyard and a hut in a cucumber field, after it had refused even the last invitation, the one in Christ. What of this order, reviewed according to the Creator's arrangements and predictions, can apply to one who has neither an order nor an arrangement to fit the parable, who did his whole work at once? Or what will be his first invitation, and what the reminder in the second act? First some must make excuses, and afterward others must come together. But now he comes inviting both groups at the same time, from the city and from the hedges, against the mirror of the parable. Nor can he judge as disdainful those whom he never invited before, whom he is only now approaching. Or if he judges them as those who will despise the invitation in the future, then he also foretells as future their replacement by the gentiles. Clearly he is yet to come a second time; he is to come, however, I suppose, not to invite guests still, but by then to seat them at table. Meanwhile, you who interpret the invitation to this dinner as a heavenly banquet of spiritual fullness and delight, remember that the Creator's earthly promises of wine and oil and grain, and of the city itself, are likewise figures of spiritual things.

Who looks for the lost sheep and the lost coin? Is it not the one who lost it? And who lost it? Is it not the one who had it? And who had it? Is it not the one to whom it belonged? If, then, man is the property of no one but the Creator, the one who had him is the one to whom he belonged; the one who lost him is the one who had him; the one who sought him is the one who lost him; the one who found him is the one who sought him; the one who rejoiced is the one who found him. So the point of both parables is empty with regard to one to whom neither the sheep nor the coin, that is, man, belongs. For he did not lose, because he did not have; nor seek, because he did not lose; nor find, because he did not seek; nor rejoice, because he did not find. And so to rejoice over a sinner's repentance, that is, over the recovery of the lost, belongs to him who declared long ago that he prefers the repentance of a sinner to his death.