Against Marcion 4.7–4.10

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius, he lays it down, Christ came down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee: from the Creator's heaven, of course, into which he had first come down from his own. Would it not have been proper order, then, that he should first be described as coming down from his own heaven into the Creator's? For why should I not criticize these things too, which do not fulfill the credibility of an orderly narrative, which always fails in a lie? Let what we have already dealt with elsewhere be said plainly once more: whether, coming down through the Creator's realm, and indeed against him, he could have been let in by him and passed on from there to the earth, which was equally his. But now I demand the rest of the order of his descent too, holding that he came down. Let it pass, if anywhere it is written that he “appeared.” To appear smacks of a sudden and unexpected sight, which strikes the eyes once upon what has appeared without delay; but to have come down is seen while it is happening, and brings the fact under the eyes. It also implies an order, and so compels us to ask in what form, with what equipage, with what speed or restraint, and even at what time of day or night he came down; besides, who saw him coming down, who reported it, who vouched for the fact, which would not easily be believed even from one who vouched for it. It is shameful, in short, that Romulus had Proculus to affirm his ascent into heaven, while the Christ of God did not find anyone to announce his descent from heaven … as if the one did not ascend by the same ladder of lies by which the other came down. And what had he to do with Galilee, if he was not the Creator's, for whom this region was destined as he entered on his preaching, as Isaiah says: “Drink this first, act quickly, land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, and you others who inhabit the seacoast and the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations: you people who sit in darkness, see a great light; you who inhabit the land, sitting in the shadow of death, a light has risen upon you”? And it is well that Marcion's god too is claimed as the enlightener of the nations; all the more should he, even if he came down from heaven, have come down to Pontus rather than to Galilee. But since both the place and the work of enlightening agree with the prophecy in Christ, we begin to recognize him already as the one prophesied, showing at his first entry that he had come not to dissolve the law and the prophets but rather to fulfill them. This Marcion erased as an addition. But in vain will he deny that Christ said what he at once in part did. For he meanwhile fulfilled the prophecy about the place. From heaven, at once, to the synagogue. As the saying goes, “Do what we came for.” Marcion, take this out of the gospel as well: “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” and, “It is not right to take the children's bread and give it to the dogs,” so that Christ may not seem to be Israel's. Deeds are enough for me in place of words. Take away the sayings of my Christ: the facts will speak. Look, he comes to the synagogue: surely to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Look, he offers the bread of his teaching to the Israelites first: surely as preferring them as sons. Look, he does not yet share it with others: surely as passing them by as dogs. But to whom would he rather have given it than to strangers to the Creator, if he had not himself been above all the Creator's? And yet how could one so sudden, so unknown, be admitted to the synagogue, one about whom no one was yet certain of his tribe, his people, his house, or finally his registration in Augustus's census, which the Roman archives keep as the most faithful witness to the Lord's birth? They certainly remembered that unless they knew him to be circumcised he was not to be admitted into the holy of holies. And even if the synagogue could be entered freely, it was not so for teaching, except by one well known, examined, and long approved for this very purpose, or recommended from elsewhere with this office. But all were astonished at his teaching. Of course, “for his word,” it says, “was with authority,” not because he taught against the law and the prophets. For the divine speech certainly showed both power and grace, building up rather than destroying the substance of the law and the prophets. Otherwise they would not have been astonished but horrified; they would not have wondered but at once have turned away from a destroyer of the law and the prophets, and above all from the preacher of another god, since he could not have taught against the law and the prophets, and on this account against the Creator, without first professing a different and rival divinity. Since, then, Scripture indicates nothing of the kind, except that the power and authority of his word alone were the object of wonder, it more readily shows that he taught in accordance with the Creator, because it did not deny it, than against the Creator, because it did not indicate it. And so he must either be recognized as belonging to the one according to whom he taught, or be judged a traitor if he taught according to the one against whom he had come. In the same place the spirit of a demon cries out: “What have we to do with you, Jesus? You have come to destroy us. I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” Here I shall not reopen the question whether this name too suited one who ought not even to be called Christ if he was not the Creator's (the names have been argued elsewhere already); but I now dispute how the demon knew that he was called by this name, when no foretelling about him had ever been sent out beforehand by a god unknown and up to that time mute, of whom he could not even attest him to be the Holy One, as being of a god unknown even to his own Creator. What had he yet brought forth of a new divinity, by which he could be understood as the Holy One of another god? Only that he had entered the synagogue, and had not even done anything by word against the Creator! Just as, then, he could in no way recognize as Jesus and the Holy One of God one whom he did not know, so he recognized one whom he knew. For he remembered both that the prophet had foretold the Holy One of God, and that the name Jesus was the name of the Lord in the son of Nun. These things he had also caught from the angel, according to our gospel: “Therefore that which will be born in you will be called holy, the Son of God,” and, “you shall call his name Jesus.” Besides, he certainly had some sense of the Lord's arrangement, demon though he was, rather than of a foreign one not yet well known. For he said first, “What have we to do with you, Jesus?” not as to a stranger, but to one to whom the spirits of the Creator belong. For he did not say, “What have you to do with us?” but, “What have we to do with you?”, lamenting himself and reproaching his lot, which he already saw, as he adds: “You have come to destroy us.” So he had recognized Jesus as the Son of the God who judges and avenges and, so to speak, is severe, not of that supremely good one who knows neither how to destroy nor how to punish. To what end have we set out this passage? To show that Jesus was recognized by the demon, and confirmed by himself, as none other than the Creator's. “But,” you say, “Jesus rebuked him.” Of course, as spiteful and impudent even in his confession, as flattering wickedly, as if this were the highest glory of Christ, that he had come for the destruction of demons and not rather for the salvation of men; he who wished his disciples to glory not in the subjection of spirits but in the whiteness of salvation. Or why did he rebuke him? If as having lied entirely, then he was not Jesus nor the Holy One of God at all. If as having lied in part, because he had thought him to be Jesus and the Holy One of God, but the Creator's, he rebuked him most unjustly for thinking what he knew should be thought, and for not supposing what he did not know should be supposed: another Jesus, the Holy One of another god. But if the rebuke has no more likely standing than the one we give it, then the demon told no lie, and was not rebuked for a lie; for he himself was Jesus, and the demon could not have recognized any other; and Jesus confirmed the one whom the demon had recognized, in not rebuking the demon for a lie.

The Creator's Christ was to be called a Nazarene according to prophecy. That is why the Jews call us by that very name, Nazarenes, because of him. For we are those of whom it is written, “The Nazirites were made whiter than snow,” we, that is, who were formerly livid with the stains of sin and blackened with the darkness of ignorance. And the title of Nazarene was to suit Christ from the hiding-place of his infancy, in which he went down to Nazareth to avoid Archelaus, the son of Herod. I have not left this out, because Marcion's Christ ought to have renounced all dealings even with the places familiar to the Creator's Christ, when he had so many towns of Judea not so made over to the Creator's Christ by the prophets. But he will be the Christ of the prophets wherever he is found in accordance with the prophets. And yet at Nazareth too he is not recorded to have preached anything new, while he is reported to have been thrown out for another reason, one proverb. Here, noticing that hands were laid on him for the first time, I must settle in advance the question of his bodily substance: that he cannot be believed a phantom who submitted to contact, and violent contact at that, being seized, taken hold of, and dragged to the very edge of the cliff. For even if he escaped through the midst of them, he had already experienced their force and was afterwards let go, the uproar dying down, as usually happens, or even being broken through; he did not slip away through a mist, which would not have been subject to any touch at all, if it had been one. For “nothing can touch or be touched except a body” is a sentence worthy even of worldly wisdom. In sum, he himself soon touched others, and by laying hands on them, hands that could certainly be felt, he conferred the benefits of healing, as real and as far from imaginary as the hands by which he conferred them. He is therefore Isaiah's Christ, the healer of diseases: “He,” it says, “takes away our weaknesses and carries our sicknesses.” And the Greeks commonly use “carry” for “take away.” The general promise is enough for me for now: whatever Jesus healed, he is mine. We shall come, however, to the particular kinds of healing. Freeing people from demons is also a healing of disease. And so the evil spirits went out, as though on the pattern of the former example, with a testimony, crying out, “You are the Son of God.” Of which God, let it be made clear here too. But they were likewise rebuked and ordered to be silent. For Christ likewise wished to be recognized as the Son of God by men, not by unclean spirits; that Christ, at least, to whom this was fitting, because he had sent ahead those through whom he could be recognized, and certainly worthier heralds. It belonged to him to reject the proclamation of an unclean spirit who had holy ones in abundance. But one who had never been announced, if he wished to be recognized (and he had come in vain if he did not), would not have scorned the testimony of a substance foreign to him, whatever it was, since he who had come down into another's domain had none of his own. And now, as the destroyer of the Creator, he would have wanted nothing more than to be recognized by the Creator's spirits and published abroad through their fear; except that Marcion denies that his god is feared, maintaining that the good one is not feared, but the judge, with whom lie the grounds of fear: anger, severity, judgments, vengeance, condemnation. But the demons certainly gave way through fear; therefore they were confessing the Son of a God to be feared, and would have had reason not to give way if he were not to be feared. And he, expelling them by command and rebuke, not by persuasion as a good one would, showed himself one to be feared. Or did he rebuke them because he was feared, not wishing to be feared? And how did he want them to go out, which they would not do except from fear? He fell, then, into a necessity by which he acted unlike his own nature, when as good he could have spared them once for all. He fell too into another mark of betrayal, in that he allowed himself to be feared by the demons as the Creator's Son, so that he expelled the demons not by his own power but by the Creator's authority. He goes out into a desert place. This too is a customary region of the Creator. It was fitting that the Word should be seen there too in a body, where he had once acted in a cloud as well. The setting of the place which had pleased the law suited the gospel too. So let the wilderness be glad: this Isaiah had promised. Detained by the crowds, he says, “I must announce the kingdom of God to other cities too.” Had he already shown his god anywhere? Not yet at all, I think. Was he speaking to people who knew of another god as well? I do not believe that either. So if neither had he made known another god, nor did they know any but the Creator, he was proclaiming the kingdom of the same God whom alone he knew to be known to those who heard him.

Out of so many kinds of work, why did he look to fishing in particular, to take from it Simon and the sons of Zebedee as apostles (for it cannot be seen as a simple deed from which an argument was to proceed), saying to Peter, who was frightened by the huge catch of fish, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men”? For by this saying he suggested to them the understanding of a fulfilled prophecy: that he was the one who had declared through Jeremiah, “Behold, I will send many fishermen, and they will fish them,” namely men. Finally, leaving their boats, they followed him, understanding him to be the one who had begun to do what he had foretold. It is another matter if he chose to pick from the guild of boatmen because he was one day to have the shipmaster Marcion as an apostle. We laid down against the Antitheses that what he considers the difference between the law and the gospel does nothing for Marcion's purpose, since that difference too was arranged by the Creator, indeed foretold in the promise of a new law, a new word, and a new covenant. But since, in the case of the cleansing of the leper, he argues more pointedly before some “fellow-sufferer” and “fellow-object of hatred” of his, whoever he is, I have not been reluctant to meet him, and first of all to show the force of the figurative law, which, in the example of the leper who was not to be touched but rather removed from all dealings, forbade fellowship with a man stained with sins; with such people the apostle too forbids even taking food, for the stigma of sins is shared as if by contagion if anyone mixes with a sinner. And so the Lord, wishing the law to be understood more deeply, as signifying spiritual things through carnal ones, and on this account not destroying but rather building up the law which he wished to be recognized as more closely his own, touched the leper. Even if a man could have been defiled by him, God certainly would not be defiled, being incapable of pollution. So it will not be laid down against him that he ought to have kept the law and not touched the unclean, since the touch of the unclean would not defile him. I show that this fits my Christ better, by demonstrating that it does not fit yours. For if he touched the leper as a rival of the law, making nothing of the law's precept through contempt of defilement, how could he be defiled who had no body to be defiled? For a phantom could not be defiled. So one who could not be defiled, being a phantom, will be incapable of pollution not by divine power but by the emptiness of a phantom; nor can he be seen to have despised a defilement for which he had no material. So neither did he destroy the law, since he escaped defilement by the accident of being a phantom, not by a display of power. And if Elisha, the Creator's prophet, cleansed only one leper, Naaman the Syrian, out of so many Israelite lepers, this does not make for a difference in Christ either, as if he were in this way better because, a stranger, he cleanses an Israelite leper whom his own Lord had not been able to cleanse. The easier cleansing of the Syrian signifies the cleansing, through Christ their light, of the nations, which bristled with the seven stains of the capital sins: idolatry, blasphemy, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, false witness, fraud. That is why he washed seven times in the Jordan, as though once for each heading; at the same time to proclaim the expiation of the whole week, and because the force and fullness of a single washing was reserved for Christ alone, who was to make on earth a shortened washing, as he made a shortened word. For Marcion objects this too: that Elisha needed material, applied water, and that seven times, while Christ, using a word only, and that once, brought about the cure at once. As if I would not dare to claim the word itself too for the substance of the Creator: of everything he is the more powerful author who is the earlier. It is plainly incredible that the power of the Creator should have worked the cure of one disease by a word, when by a word it brought forth once for all the whole mass of the world! By what is the Creator's Christ better distinguished than by the power of the word? “But he is another Christ, because he acted otherwise than Elisha, because the master is more powerful than his servant.” What are you laying down, Marcion? That things are done by servants in the same way as by their masters themselves? Are you not afraid that it will turn to your disgrace, if you deny that Christ is the Creator's because he was more powerful than the Creator's servant, because he is recognized as greater than Elisha's smallness, if indeed he is greater? For the cure is equal, though the method differs. What more did your Christ accomplish than my Elisha? Indeed, what great thing did your Christ's word accomplish, when it accomplished what the Creator's river did? The rest agrees with this. As regards avoiding human glory, he forbade him to publish it; as regards safeguarding the law, he ordered the procedure to be carried out: “Go, show yourself to the priest, and offer the gift which Moses commanded.” For he was still safeguarding in their images the figurative proofs of the law, as being prophetic, which signified that a man once a sinner, cleansed soon after by the word of God, ought to offer a gift to God at the temple, namely prayer and thanksgiving in the church through Christ Jesus, the universal priest of the Father. So he added, “that it may be for a testimony to you,” no doubt one by which he testified that he was not dissolving the law but fulfilling it, by which he testified that he himself was the one who was announced as going to take up their diseases and illnesses. This interpretation of the testimony, so fitting and so due, Marcion, the flatterer of his own Christ, seeks to exclude under the pretext of gentleness and mildness. “For as good,” he says, “and moreover as knowing that everyone who was freed from leprosy would carry out the rites of the law, he therefore gave this command.” Then he came down in vain, as though to destroy the law, if he gives way to those who comply with the law. On the contrary, as one who knew their habit, he ought rather to have forestalled it to turn them away from it, if that was what he had come for. What then? Did he persevere in his goodness, that is, in permitting the law, or not? If he persevered as good, he will nowhere be a destroyer of the law, nor will he be held to belong to another god, since the destruction of the law ceases by which he is claimed for another god. If he did not persevere as good, destroying the law afterwards, then he gave them false testimony in the cure of the leper, for he abandoned goodness while destroying the law. He is bad, then, when he overturns the law, if he is good when he indulges it. But also, by indulging compliance with the law, he confirmed that the law was good, for no one allows compliance with what is evil. So he is bad on this count, if he indulged compliance with a bad law, and worse on that, if he came as destroyer of a good law. Likewise, if he commanded the gift to be offered because he knew that everyone freed from leprosy would do so, he could also have not commanded what he knew would happen of itself. Why did he not keep silent, so that the man might obey the law by his own choice alone? Then he could to some extent have seemed to show his forbearance. But he adds his authority too, enlarged by the weight of a testimony. A testimony to what, if not to the law asserted? Certainly it makes no difference how he confirmed the law, whether as good or as superfluous, whether as forbearing or as inconsistent, so long as I drive you from your position, Marcion. See, he commanded the law to be fulfilled. In whatever way he commanded it, in the same way he could also have pronounced beforehand that saying, “I have not come to dissolve the law but to fulfill it.” What business had you, then, to erase from the gospel what is sound? For you have confessed that out of goodness he did what you deny he said. It is established, then, that he said it, since he also did it, and that you rather have rooted the Lord's saying out of the gospel than that our people put it in.

The paralytic too is healed, and that in a gathering, with the people looking on. “For the people,” says Isaiah, “will see the majesty of the Lord and the glory of God.” What majesty and what glory? “Be strong, you slack hands and loosened knees” (this will be paralysis); “be strong, do not fear.” Not idly repeating “be strong,” nor pointlessly adding “do not fear,” since with the restoration of the limbs he was promising the return of strength as well (“Rise and take up your bed”), and at the same time vigor of mind not to fear those who were going to say, “Who will forgive sins but God alone?” So you have here the fulfilled prophecy both of the particular healing and of what followed the healing. Recognize Christ as the forgiver of sins too in the same prophet: “For,” he says, “he will forgive the sins of many, and he himself will take away our sins.” For at the very beginning too, in the person of the Lord himself: “Even if your sins are like rose-red, I will make them white as snow; even if like scarlet, I will make them white as wool”; showing in the rose-red the blood of the prophets, and in the scarlet, as brighter, the blood of the Lord. Micah too, of the pardon of sins: “Who is a God like you, taking away iniquities and passing over the injustices of the remnant of your inheritance? And he has not kept his anger as a testimony, because he delights in mercy. He will turn and have mercy on us; he will sink our sins, and he will sink our sins into the depth of the sea.” But even if nothing of the kind had been foretold of Christ, I would have examples of this kindness in the Creator, which promise me the Father's affection in the Son too. I see the Ninevites obtaining pardon for their crimes from the Creator, not to say from Christ even then, who from the beginning acted in the Father's name. I read too that the prophet Nathan said to David, when he acknowledged his sin against Uriah, “And the Lord has put away your sin, and you shall not die”; likewise that King Ahab, husband of Jezebel, guilty of idolatry and of the blood of Naboth, obtained pardon on the ground of repentance; and that Jonathan, the son of Saul, wiped out by entreaty the guilt of breaking a fast. Why should I recount the people itself, so often restored by the forgiveness of sins, by that God, of course, who prefers mercy to sacrifice and the repentance of the sinner to his death? First, then, you must deny that the Creator ever forgave sins; next, you must show that he foretold nothing of the kind of his Christ; and so you will prove that this kindness of Christ, a new Christ, of course, is new, if you prove that it is neither equal to the Creator's nor foretold by the Creator. But whether forgiving sins can belong to one who is denied to retain them, whether it is his to acquit whose it is not also to condemn, and whether it is fitting for him to pardon against whom nothing has been committed, we have already engaged elsewhere, and prefer to recall rather than rehandle. About the Son of Man our prescription is twofold: that Christ could not lie so as to declare himself Son of Man if he was not truly so; and that no one is constituted son of man who is not born of a human being, whether father or mother. And so we must discuss of which human being he should be taken as son, father's or mother's. If he is from God the Father, then certainly not from a human father; if he is not from a human father, it remains that he is from a human mother; if from a human mother, it is now clear that he is from a virgin. For one to whom no human father is given will not have a husband assigned to his mother either; and one to whom no husband is assigned is a virgin. Otherwise two fathers will be held, God and a man, if the mother is not a virgin. For she will have a husband, so as not to be a virgin, and by having a husband she will make two fathers, God and man, for one who would be the son both of God and of a man. Such a birth, perhaps, the fables give to Castor or Hercules. If these points are distinguished thus, that is, if he is son of man from his mother, because not from a father, and from a virgin mother, because not from a human father, this will be Isaiah's Christ, whom he foretells a virgin will conceive. On what ground, then, you admit him as Son of Man, Marcion, I cannot see. If as son of a human father, you deny he is the Son of God; if also of God, you make Christ the Hercules of fable; if only of a human mother, you grant me mine; if neither of a human mother nor of a human father, then he is son of no human being, and he must have told a lie who said he was what he was not. One thing can relieve your straits: if you dare either to give your god, the father of Christ, the name of Man as well, as Valentinus did with his Aeon, or to deny that the virgin was human, which not even Valentinus did. What now if Christ is registered under the very title Son of Man in Daniel? Will that not suffice to prove him the prophetic Christ? For when he calls himself what was foretold of the Creator's Christ, he doubtless offers himself to be understood as the one of whom it was foretold. A sharing of names may perhaps be seen as simple chance (and yet we maintain that he ought not to have been called either Christ or Jesus, holding to the condition of difference); but a designation, such as “Son of Man,” in so far as it arises from a circumstance, is the harder to coincide, over and above a sharing of names, since it arises from a particular circumstance, especially when the cause by which it would come to be shared does not agree. And so, since a designation belongs properly to the one in whom it has its cause, if it is also claimed for another who shares the name, then the sharing of the name too becomes suspect in the one for whom a shared designation is claimed without cause; and it follows that the one is to be believed who is found more fitted for both name and designation, while the other is excluded who has no share in the designation, lacking its cause. And none will be more fitted for both than the one who first received both the name of Christ and the designation Son of Man, namely the Creator's Jesus. He it is who was seen by the king of Babylon in the furnace as the fourth with his martyrs, “like a son of man”; the same who was revealed to Daniel himself directly as a Son of Man, coming with the clouds of heaven as judge, as Scripture also shows. I have said that this could have been enough about the prophetic naming of the Son of Man. But Scripture gives me more, namely the Lord's own interpretation. For when the Jews, looking only at his humanity and not yet sure of his divinity, as being also Son of God, rightly objected that a man could not forgive sins, but God alone, why did he not answer them, according to their meaning, about a man, that he had authority to forgive sins, when by naming the Son of Man he would be naming a man? Why, unless he wished to strike them back with the very designation “Son of Man” from the book of Daniel, to show that a man too was the one who forgave sins: namely that one alone, the Son of Man in Daniel's prophecy, who received the authority to judge, and through it, of course, to forgive sins as well (for he who judges also acquits), so that, this stumbling-block being removed by the recollection of Scripture, they might more easily recognize him as the Son of Man himself from the very forgiveness of sins. Indeed, he nowhere professed himself Son of Man before this passage, the first in which he forgave sins, that is, the first in which he judged, by acquitting. Consider what sort of thing the opposing side argues against this, whatever it is. For it must tend to this madness: to maintain that he is Son of Man, so as not to make him a liar, and to deny that he was born of a human being, so as not to concede that he is the son of a virgin. But if divine authority, the nature of things, and common sense do not admit the heretical insanity, here too is an opportunity to interject, as briefly as possible, about the substance of his body against Marcion's phantoms. If he was born of a human being, as Son of Man, he is body from body. You would plainly more easily find a man born without a heart or a brain, like Marcion himself, than without a body, like Marcion's Christ. And so examine the heart, or the brain, of the man from Pontus.