Against Marcion 4.11

He brings forward as an argument the tax collector chosen by the Lord, as though chosen by an adversary of the law, a stranger to the law and a profane outsider to Judaism. He forgot Peter, a man of the law, who was not only chosen but also received testimony for the recognition given him by the Father; he had nowhere read that Christ was foretold as the light and hope and expectation of the nations. On the contrary, Christ rather approved the Jews in saying that the physician is not needed by the healthy but by the sick. For if he wished the heathen and tax collectors whom he was choosing to be understood as the sick, he was confirming that the Jews were healthy, to whom he said a physician was not needed. If this is so, he did wrong to come down to destroy the law, as if to cure a bad illness, since those who lived under it were in good health and had no need of a physician. And what sort of thing is it that he put forward the comparison of a physician and did not carry it out? For as no one brings a physician to the healthy, so no one brings one to those who are so much strangers as man is to Marcion's god, man having his own author and protector, and from him rather Christ as physician. The comparison settles this in advance: that a physician is rather provided by the one to whom the sick belong. But where did John come from, too, into the midst? A sudden Christ, a sudden John! So are all things with Marcion which have their own full order with the Creator. But the rest about John elsewhere; for each point must be answered as it comes up. Now I shall maintain this: to show that John agrees with Christ and Christ with John, as the Creator's prophet agrees with the Creator's Christ, and so let the heretic blush, having frustrated John's course in vain. For if John had done nothing at all as, according to Isaiah, the one crying out in the wilderness and preparer of the Lord's ways by proclaiming and commending repentance; if he had not also dipped Christ himself among the rest, no one would have challenged Christ's disciples, who ate and drank, by the standard of John's disciples, who were constantly fasting and praying; because, if there had been any difference between Christ and John and the flock of each, there would be no demand for comparison, and the aim of the challenge would be empty. For no one would wonder, and no one would be troubled, if the rival preachings of different divinities did not agree with each other about disciplines either, when they did not first agree about the authorities behind those disciplines. So Christ was John's, and John Christ's, both belonging to the Creator, and both preachers and teachers from the law and the prophets. If Christ had rejected John's discipline as belonging to another god, and had defended his disciples as rightly walking otherwise, as initiated, that is, into another and contrary divinity, well and good; but as it is, humbly giving the reason that the sons of the bridegroom could not fast while the bridegroom was with them, and promising that they would fast afterwards, when the bridegroom had been taken away from them, he neither defended his disciples, but rather excused them, as not having been rebuked without reason, nor rejected John's discipline, but rather conceded it, appointing it to his own time; whereas he would otherwise have rejected it and defended its rivals, if what was already in existence had not been his own. I hold my Christ in the name of bridegroom too, of whom the psalm says: “He is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber; his going forth is from the height of heaven, and his return to its very height”; who also rejoices to the Father through Isaiah: “Let my soul exult in the Lord, for he has clothed me with the garment of salvation and the tunic of joy; like a bridegroom he has put a miter on me, like a bride …” For he reckons the church too as in himself, of whom the same Spirit says to him: “And you will put them all around you like a bride's ornament.” This bride Christ also summons to himself through Solomon from the calling of the nations, since you have read: “Come, bride, from Lebanon”; with an elegant mention of Mount Lebanon, of course, whose name among the Greeks means frankincense, for he was betrothing the church to himself out of idolatry. Deny now, Marcion, that you are utterly mad. See, you are attacking the law of your own god too. He does not join marriages, does not admit those already joined, dips no one but a celibate or a eunuch, and reserves baptism for death or divorce. Why then do you make his Christ a bridegroom? This is the name of the one who joined male and female, not of one who separated them. You have also erred in that saying of the Lord in which he seems to distinguish new things and old. You are puffed up with old wineskins and have lost your brain to new wine, and so have sewn onto the old, that is the earlier, gospel the patch of heretical novelty. In what, I should like to learn, does the Creator differ? When he commands through Jeremiah, “Break up new fallow ground for yourselves,” does he not turn them away from the old? When he declares through Isaiah, “The old things have passed away; behold the new things which I make,” does he not turn them to the new? We have long since established that this appointment of former things, promised rather by the Creator, is displayed by Christ, under the authority of one and the same God, to whom both the old and the new belong. For no one commits new wine to old wineskins who has no old wineskins, and no one puts a new patch on an old garment unless he also has an old garment. He does not do something, if it is not to be done, who has the means to do it, if it were to be done. So if he was aiming the comparison at this, to show that he was separating the newness of the gospel from the oldness of the law, he was showing that the one from which he was separating it was also his own. The separation of things belonging to others would not have been worth noting, since no one joins his own things to another's in order to be able to separate them from another's. Separation presupposes the joining from which it is made. So the things he was separating he was also showing to have been in one, as they would have remained if he had not separated them. And yet, if we grant this separation, it is by reformation, by enlargement, by progress; as the fruit is separated from the seed, though the fruit comes from the seed, so the gospel is separated from the law while it advances out of the law: other than it, but not foreign to it; different, but not contrary. Nor is Christ's manner of speech new. When he puts forward comparisons, when he refutes questions, it comes from the seventy-seventh psalm: “I will open my mouth,” he says, “in a parable,” that is, a comparison; “I will utter problems,” that is, I will set out questions. If he had wished to show himself a man of another nation, he would certainly have shown it by the peculiarity of his speech.