Against Marcion 4.41–5.2

“Woe,” he says, “to him through whom the Son of Man is betrayed.” So it is now established that “woe” must be understood as an outcry of imprecation and threat, and attributed to one who is angry and offended, unless Judas was to carry off so great a crime with impunity. But if with impunity, the “woe” is empty; if not with impunity, then surely he was to be punished by the one against whom he committed the crime of betrayal. Moreover, if he knowingly allowed a man whom he himself had taken into his company to rush into so great a crime, then stop raking up against the Creator, in the case of Adam, charges which are turned back on your god too: either that he did not know, since he did not in foresight stand in the way of the one about to sin; or that he could not stand in the way, if he did (not) fail to know; or that he did not want to, if he both knew and could, and so must be judged malicious, since he allowed his own man to perish through sin. I advise you, then, to recognize the Creator in this one too, rather than make the most good god equal to him, against your own opinion. For by destining Peter, who had spoken somewhat presumptuously, to denial, he shows you a jealous God. He had to be betrayed with a kiss too, as the Christ of prophecy, namely as the Son of him who was loved by the people with their lips.

Brought into the council, he is asked whether he is the Christ. About what Christ would the Jews have asked, if not their own? Why then did he not, even then, reveal another to them? So that he could suffer, you say; that is, so that that most good one might plunge people who were still ignorant into crime. And yet even if he had told them, he would have suffered. “For if I tell you,” he says, “you will not believe.” Moreover, not believing, they would have persisted in putting him to death. And why would he not have been all the more likely to suffer, if he had revealed (himself) as belonging to another god, and therefore as the Creator's adversary? So it was not in order to suffer that even then he refrained from showing himself to be another, but because they were eager to wring a confession from his mouth, and yet would not believe him even if he confessed, they who ought to have recognized him from the works that fulfilled the Scriptures. So it was fitting that one to whom recognition was owed without asking should conceal himself. And yet, still reaching out a hand to them, he says: “From now on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God.” For he was suggesting that he was the Son of Man from Daniel's prophecy and the one seated at the right hand of God from David's psalm. So, enlightened by this saying and by comparison with Scripture as to whom he wished to be understood as, they say: “So you are the Son of God?” Of what God, if not the one whom alone they knew? Of what God, if not the one whom they remembered saying to his Son in the psalm, “Sit at my right hand”? (But he answered, “You say so,” as if to mean, “Not I.”) On the contrary, he confirmed that he was what they had said, while they were questioning him again. But how will you prove that they too spoke interrogatively and not affirmatively — “So you are the Son of God” — in the sense that, because he had indirectly shown through the Scriptures that he was to be understood as the Son of God, they took it thus: “So you are the Son of God, which you will not say openly”? And so he too answered “You say so” affirmatively; and so much was this his meaning that they persisted in what his words implied.

For having brought him to Pilate they began to charge him with calling himself Christ the King, no doubt (the Son of God who would sit at God's right hand). Otherwise they would have pressed him with some other charge, uncertain whether he had called himself Son of God, (un)less he had said “You say so” in such a way as to mean that he was what they said. To Pilate too, when he asked, “Are you the Christ?”, he (answered) likewise, “You say so,” lest from fear of authority he should seem to have answered more fully.

So the Lord was set up in judgment — “And he has set his people in judgment; the Lord himself comes into judgment with the elders and rulers of the people,” according to Isaiah — and from then on he fulfilled everything written about his passion: “The nations raged together, and the peoples plotted vain things; the kings of the earth stood up and the rulers gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ.” The nations were the Romans who were with Pilate; the peoples, the tribes of Israel; (the kings) are seen in Herod, (the rulers) in the chief priests. For when he was sent by Pilate to Herod as a gift, he kept faith with the words of Hosea, who had prophesied of Christ: “And they will lead him bound as a present to the king.” Herod was indeed delighted at seeing Jesus, and heard no word from him. For “like a lamb before its shearer so he did not open his mouth,” because the Lord had given him the tongue of discipline to know when he ought to utter a word — that tongue, namely, which he said in the psalm cleaves to his throat, and which he then proved by not speaking.

And Barabbas, most guilty in his life, is granted as though he were good, while Christ, most righteous, is demanded for death as a murderer. And two criminals too are crucified on either side of him, so that he might be reckoned among the wicked. His clothing, divided by the soldiers partly (and partly) given over to the lot, Marcion has plainly removed, with an eye to the prophecy of the psalm: “They divided my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing.” Then remove the cross itself too. For the same psalm is not silent about it: “They pierced my hands and feet.” The whole outcome is read in it: “Dogs surrounded me, the synagogue of evildoers besieged me. All who looked at me mocked me with sneering noses; they spoke with their lips and shook their heads: He hoped in God; let him deliver him.” What use now is it to remove the testimony of the garments? Keep the spoils of your falsification: the whole psalm is the garments of Christ.

But see, the elements too are shaken. For their Lord was suffering. Otherwise, if it had been their adversary who was harmed, the sky would have blossomed with lights, the sun would have exulted the more in its rays, the day would have stood still the longer, gladly watching Marcion's Christ hanging on the gibbet. These arguments would have suited my case even if these things had not been foretold: “I will clothe the heaven with darkness,” says Isaiah; this will be the day of which Amos too says: “And it will be on that day, says the Lord, the sun will set at noon” — you have the sixth hour indicated too — “and it will grow dark over the earth.” The veil of the temple too was torn, by the bursting out of the angel abandoning the daughter of Zion like a watchtower in a vineyard and a hut in a cucumber field. O how he persisted in expressing himself even in the thirtieth psalm! He cries out to the Father: … , so that even while dying he might fulfill the prophets with his last cry. With this word he breathed out his spirit. Who did? Did the spirit breathe out itself, or the flesh the spirit? But the spirit could not breathe itself out. What breathes out is one thing, what is breathed out another. If the spirit is breathed out, it must be breathed out by another. But if he had been spirit alone, he would rather have been said to have departed than to have breathed out. Who, then, breathes out the spirit but the flesh, which both breathes while it has the spirit and so breathes it out when it loses it? In short, if it was not flesh but a phantom of flesh, and a phantom was spirit, and the spirit breathed itself out and by breathing out departed, then without doubt the phantom departed when the spirit, which was the phantom, departed, and the phantom was nowhere to be seen along with the spirit. Did nothing, then, remain on the wood, nothing hang there even after the breathing out? Was nothing asked of Pilate, nothing taken down from the gibbet, nothing wrapped in the linen, nothing laid in the new tomb? But it was not nothing. What then was it? If a phantom, then the spirit was still in it. If the spirit had departed, then it had taken the phantom away with it. It remains for heretical shamelessness to say that the phantom of a phantom remained there; but of course Joseph knew it was a body that he handled with all piety, that Joseph who had not consented with the Jews in their crime, a blessed man, who did not walk in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of the pestilent.

The one who buried the Lord had to be foretold too, and even then deservedly blessed, if prophecy did not pass over even the service of those women who came together at the tomb before dawn with the spices they had prepared. For of this he speaks through Hosea: “And they will seek my face; before dawn they will watch for me, saying: Let us go and return to the Lord, for he has torn and he will heal us; he has struck and he will have mercy on us; he will heal us after two days; on the third day we shall rise again.” For who would not believe that these words were turning over in the minds of those women, between the grief of their present bereavement, by which they seemed to themselves to have been struck by the Lord, and the hope of his resurrection, by which they thought they would be restored? But since the body was not found, his burial had been taken away from the midst, according to Isaiah. And two angels also appeared there. God's word, which stands on two witnesses, used generally to employ about that many attendants. The women too returning from the tomb and from that vision of angels Isaiah foresaw: “Women,” he says, “coming from the vision, come,” namely to announce the Lord's resurrection.

And it is well that the disciples' unbelief persisted, so that our defense might stand firm to the end: that Christ Jesus revealed himself to the disciples as no other than the Christ of the prophets. For when two of them were on a journey and the Lord had joined them, without its being apparent that it was he, and even feigning ignorance of what had happened, they said: “But we thought that he was the redeemer of Israel,” surely meaning their own Christ, that is, the Creator's. So far had he been from revealing himself to them as another. Otherwise they would not have thought him the Creator's; and when he was thought to be the Creator's, he would not have tolerated this opinion of himself if he were not the one he was thought to be. Or he himself will be the author of error and a betrayer of the truth, contrary to the title of the most good god. But neither after the resurrection did he show himself to them as other than the one they had told him they thought he was. He plainly inveighed against them: “O foolish and slow of heart in not believing all that he spoke to you.” What had he spoken? That he belonged to another god? Prove it, and I surrender. Or the same things the angels said to the women: “Remember what he said to you in Galilee, saying that the Son of Man must be betrayed and crucified and rise on the third day”? And why “must,” unless because it had been so written by God the Creator? So he rebuked them as men offended at the passion alone and doubtful about the resurrection announced to them by the women, and because of this they had not believed that he was the one they had thought him to be. So, wishing them to believe what they had thought, he confirmed that he was the one they had thought him to be, namely the Creator's Christ, the redeemer of Israel.

And as for the reality of his body, what could be clearer? When they hesitated whether he might be a phantom, or rather believed him to be a phantom, he says: “Why are you troubled, and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; for a spirit does not have bones, as you see that I have.” And Marcion was unwilling to erase from his gospel certain things that tell against him — deliberately, I suppose — so that, from what he could have erased and did not, it might either be denied that he erased what he did erase, or be said that he had good reason to erase it; and he spares only those passages which he subverts no less by misinterpreting than he would by deleting. So he wants it to have been said thus: “A spirit does not have bones, as you see me having,” as though “as you see me having” referred to the spirit, that is, not having bones, like a spirit. And what is the reason for this contortion, when he could simply have said: “Because a spirit does not have bones, as you see me not having”? And why does he offer to their inspection his hands and feet, which are members made of bones, if he did not have bones? Why does he add, “And know that it is I,” whom, of course, they had known before as having a body? Or if he was a phantom through and through, why did he rebuke them for believing him a phantom? But in fact, when they still did not believe, he asked for food, so as to show that he had teeth too.

We have fulfilled our undertaking, I think. We have exhibited Jesus Christ, in his teachings, sayings, affections, thoughts, mighty works, sufferings, and even his resurrection, as the Christ of the prophets and none other than the Creator's, since also, in sending the apostles to preach to all nations, he commanded them in fulfillment of the psalm: that their sound should go out into all the earth and their words to the ends of the earth. I pity you, Marcion: you have labored in vain. For the Christ Jesus in your gospel is mine.

Nothing is without an origin except God alone. And just as origin comes first in the state of all things, so it must also come first in the examination of them, so that one may be clear about their state; for you cannot discern what a thing is like unless you are sure that it is, once you have learned where it comes from. And so, brought by the order of this little work to this subject, I ask Marcion also for the origin of the apostle Paul: I, a new sort of disciple and the hearer of no one else, who for the present believe nothing except that nothing is to be believed rashly, and that whatever is believed without knowledge of its origin is believed rashly; and who with every right bring this inquiry to careful scrutiny, since a man is affirmed to me as an apostle whom I do not find in the roll of the apostles in the Gospel. Then, hearing that he was chosen afterwards by the Lord, when the Lord was already at rest in heaven, I judge it a kind of lack of foresight if Christ did not know beforehand that he needed him, but, when the office of the apostolate had already been ordered and its holders sent off to their work, thought that he must be added on the spur of the moment rather than by foresight: by necessity, so to speak, not by will. Therefore, shipmaster from Pontus, if you have never taken smuggled or unlawful goods aboard your boats, if you have never made off with or adulterated a cargo, then, being more cautious and more faithful in the things of God, tell us, please, under what bill of lading you took on the apostle Paul, who stamped him with the mark of his title, who handed him over to you, who put him aboard, so that you may confidently unload him; lest he be proved to belong to the One who produced all the documents of his apostleship. He himself, he says, professed himself an apostle, and that “not from men nor through a man, but through Jesus Christ.” Certainly anyone can profess himself; but his profession is completed by another's authority. One writes, another signs; one seals, another enters it in the record. No one is both his own claimant and his own witness. Besides, you have certainly read that many will come who say, “I am the Christ.” If there is one who falsely claims to be Christ, how much more one who proclaims himself an apostle of Christ? So far I am playing the part of a disciple and an inquirer, so as from here on both to blunt your faith, since you have nothing to prove it from, and to put your impudence to the blush, since you lay claim to him yet do not accept the means by which you could lay claim to him. Let Christ belong to another, and let the apostle now belong to another too, so long as they are proved only from the Creator's documents. For Genesis too promised me Paul long ago. Among those figures and prophetic blessings that Jacob spoke over his sons, when he turned to Benjamin he said: “Benjamin is a ravening wolf; in the morning he will still devour, and at evening he will give food.” For he foresaw that Paul would arise from the tribe of Benjamin, a ravening wolf devouring in the morning, that is, in the first part of his life laying waste the Lord's flocks as a persecutor of the churches, and then at evening giving food, that is, as his life was already declining, feeding Christ's sheep as teacher of the nations. So too Saul's harsh pursuit of David at first, and afterwards his repentance and amends when he received good for evil, foreshadowed nothing other than Paul in Saul, according to his tribe, and Jesus in David, according to the virgin's descent. If these mysteries of figures displease you, at any rate the Acts of the Apostles have handed down to me this course of Paul's, which you too must not deny. From there I show that the apostle, once a persecutor, was “not from men nor through a man”; from there I am led to believe him myself; from there I drive you from defending him, and I do not fear your saying, “So you deny the apostle Paul?” I do not blaspheme the one I am protecting. I deny him in order to compel you to prove him; I deny him in order to prove that he is mine. Either, if you look to our faith, accept what makes it; or, if you appeal to yours, produce what lays its foundation. Either prove that what you believe is so, or, if you do not prove it, how do you believe it? Or what sort of believer are you, set against the one by whom alone what you believe is proved to be? Take the apostle now from my side, as you took Christ: as much my apostle as my Christ. Here too we shall fight along the same lines and challenge you on the same ground of prescription: namely, that an apostle who is denied to be the Creator's, indeed who is put forward against the Creator, must teach nothing, know nothing, will nothing according to the Creator, and above all must proclaim another god with as much constancy as he broke away from the Creator's law. For it is not likely that, in turning people away from Judaism, he would not equally show into faith in which god he was turning them, since no one could pass over from the Creator without knowing to whom he was to pass. For either Christ had already revealed another god, and then the apostle's testimony would follow as well, if only so that he should not be thought an apostle of a god other than the one Christ had revealed, and because one who had already been revealed by Christ could not be kept hidden by the apostle; or Christ had revealed nothing of the kind about God, and then it was all the more the apostle's duty to reveal him, since he could no longer be revealed by anyone else, and he would without doubt not be believed in if he were not revealed even by the apostle. We have laid this down beforehand so that we may declare from here on that we shall prove, just as we proved it of Christ, that no other god was carried about by the apostle; and this from Paul's own letters, which the form of the heretic's gospel must already have led us to judge in advance to be likewise mutilated, even in their number.

We too acknowledge that the letter that teaches the Galatians is the principal one against Judaism. For we embrace that entire removal of the old law, as itself coming from the Creator's arrangement, as we have often discussed already in this series with regard to the renewal foretold by the prophets of our God. Now if the Creator promised that the old things would cease, since new things were to arise, and Christ marked the time of that departure (“the law and the prophets until John”), setting in John the boundary between the two orders, of the old things ending from then on and of the new beginning, then necessarily the apostle too, in Christ revealed after John, weakens the old and confirms the new, and so is concerned for faith in no other god than the Creator, with whom it was foretold that the old things would pass away. So both the dismantling of the law and the building up of the gospel make for my case in this letter too, bearing as they do on that presumption of the Galatians by which they presumed that Christ, as being the Creator's, was to be believed with the Creator's law kept intact, since it still seemed incredible that the law should be laid aside by its own author. Further, if they had heard of an entirely other god from the apostle, they would certainly have known of themselves that they must withdraw from the law of that god whom they had left to follow another. For who would wait any longer to learn that one who had received a new god ought to follow a new rule of life? No: because the same Deity was preached in the gospel that had always been known in the law, but not the same rule of life, this was the whole point at issue: whether the Creator's law ought to be excluded by the gospel in the Creator's Christ. Take away this issue, and there is no question. And if there were no question, since everyone would recognize of his own accord that he must depart from the Creator's order through faith in the other god, the apostle would have had no occasion to teach so insistently what faith itself would have dictated unasked. So the whole aim of this letter teaches nothing else than the departure of the law as coming from the Creator's arrangement, as we shall show further. If, likewise, he makes no mention of any new god (and he would have done so nowhere more than on this subject, so as to set out the reason for dismissing the law by this single and most sufficient definition, a new deity), it is plain in what sense he writes: “I am amazed that you are so quickly being transferred from him who called you into grace to another gospel”: another in conduct, not in religion; in rule of life, not in deity; since the gospel of Christ was to call them away from the law to grace, not from the Creator to another god. For no one had moved them away from the Creator, so that they might seem to be transferred to another gospel in that sense, as though in being transferred to the Creator. For when he adds that there is no other gospel at all, he confirms that the one he defends is the Creator's. For the Creator too promises a gospel, saying through Isaiah, “Go up onto a high mountain, you who bring good news to Zion; lift up your voice in your strength, you who bring good news to Jerusalem”; and again, in the person of the apostles, “How timely are the feet of those who bring good news of peace, who bring good news of good things”: to the nations too, of course, since he also says, “In his name the nations will hope,” that is, in Christ's, to whom he says, “I have set you as a light of the nations.” Now if there is also a gospel of the new god, which you hold the apostle was then defending, then there are two gospels belonging to two gods, and the apostle will have lied in saying that there is no other at all, since there is another; when he could have defended his own gospel by demonstrating it rather than by declaring it the only one. But perhaps, to escape from this, you will say: “And that is why he added, ‘Even if an angel from heaven should preach a gospel otherwise, let him be anathema,’ because he knew that the Creator too would preach a gospel.” Again you entangle yourself. For this is what binds you: to confirm two gospels is not the part of one who has already denied that there is another. Yet his meaning is clear, since he put his own person first: “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel otherwise.” It is said by way of example. Besides, if he himself would not preach otherwise, neither would an angel. So he named an angel for this reason, that men should be believed all the less when not even an angel, or even an apostle, was to be believed; not in order to refer the angel to the Creator's gospel. Then, running through the course of his conversion from persecutor to apostle, he confirms the scripture of the Acts, in which the very subject of this letter is also recognized: that certain people intervened who said that one must be circumcised and that the law of Moses must be kept; and that the apostles, then consulted on this question, announced by the authority of the Spirit that burdens were not to be laid on men which the fathers themselves had not been able to bear. And if in this too the Acts of the Apostles agree with Paul, it is now plain why you reject them: because they preach no other god than the Creator and no Christ other than the Creator's; since the fulfilment of the promise of the Holy Spirit too is proved from no other document than the Acts. It is surely not likely that they should agree with the apostle in part, when they show his career in accordance with his own testimony, and disagree in part, when they proclaim the deity of the Creator in Christ, as though Paul had not followed the preaching of the apostles, when it was from them that he received the pattern for unteaching the law.