Against Marcion 4.12

About the sabbath too I state this first: that this question could not have arisen if Christ had not been proclaiming the God of the sabbath. For there would have been no dispute about why he was destroying the sabbath, if it was his duty to destroy it. And it would have been his duty to destroy it if he belonged to another god, and no one would have wondered at his doing what suited him. They wondered, therefore, because it did not suit him to proclaim God the Creator and attack his sabbath. And, to settle each first point so as not to renew the same things everywhere against every argument of the adversary that leans on some new institution of Christ, this definition will now stand: that the newness of each institution was disputed because nothing had yet been published about the newness of a divinity, just as there was no dispute about … ; and that it cannot be turned round from the very newness of any institution into a sufficient demonstration by Christ of another divinity, since it has been established that the newness itself, having been announced by the Creator, is not to be wondered at in Christ; and since another god ought certainly to have been set forth first, and his discipline introduced afterwards, because God gives authority to discipline, not discipline to God; unless Marcion, plainly so perverse, learned his letters not through a master but his master through letters. For the rest, I direct the matter of the sabbath thus. If Christ overthrew the sabbath, he did so after the Creator's example, since at the siege of the city of Jericho, when the ark of the covenant was carried round the walls for seven days, on the sabbath too, the Creator by his command destroyed the sabbath through work, as those think who hold this of Christ too, not knowing that neither Christ nor the Creator destroyed the sabbath, as we shall show shortly. And yet even then the sabbath was shaken through a Jesus, so that this too might be reported of Christ. Even if he pursued with hatred the most solemn day of the Jews, as a Christ not of the Jews, in professing hatred of the sabbath he also professed the Creator, as his Christ, following him who cried out by the mouth of Isaiah, “Your new moons and your sabbaths my soul hates.” But we also know in what sense these words too were said. Still, in this kind of case even an abrupt defense must be used against an abrupt challenge. Now I will argue about the very matter in which Christ's discipline seemed to destroy the sabbath. The disciples had been hungry that day; they had plucked ears of grain and rubbed them in their hands; by preparing food they had broken the holy rest. Christ excuses them and is charged with violating the sabbath; the Pharisees accuse. Marcion seizes on the issue of the controversy as though (to play a little with the truth of my Lord) it were a case of letter against intent: for the Creator's side is taken from the letter, and Christ's pretext from the intent, as though … from the example of David, who went into the temple on the sabbath and prepared food, boldly breaking the loaves of the presence. For he too remembered that this privilege had been granted to the sabbath from the beginning, when the day itself was first known: I mean exemption from fasting. For when the Creator forbade manna to be gathered for two days, he allowed it only on the day of preparation, so that the provision of food on the day before might free the rest of the following sabbath from fasting. It is well, then, that the Lord followed the same reason in destroying the sabbath, if they will have it so called; well, that he expressed the Creator's disposition too in honoring the sabbath by not fasting. In short, he would really have destroyed the sabbath, and the Creator himself, only if he had ordered his disciples to fast on the sabbath, against the letter and the intent of the Creator. But since he does not firmly defend his disciples but excuses them; since he sets human need against the charge as a plea; since he keeps the higher honor of the sabbath, that of not being made sad, rather than that of resting; since he puts David and his companions on a level with his own disciples in both fault and pardon; since he is pleased because the Creator allowed it; since by his example he too is so good: is he for that reason foreign to the Creator? Next the Pharisees watch whether he will heal on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him: certainly as a destroyer of the sabbath, not as the proclaimer of a new god. For perhaps I shall press this one point everywhere: that another Christ was nowhere proclaimed. But the Pharisees were wholly mistaken about the law of the sabbath, not noticing that God imposes rest from work conditionally, under a certain kind of work. For when he says of the sabbath day, “You shall not do any of your work on it,” by saying “your” he defined it as human work, which each one performs from his craft or business, not divine work. But the work of salvation and safety is not man's but properly God's; as again in the law: “You shall not do any work on it,” he says, “except what shall be done for every soul,” that is, in the cause of saving a soul, because God's work can be done through a man too for the salvation of a soul, yet by God. This Christ too was going to do as man, inasmuch as he was also God. Wishing, then, to lead them into this sense of the law through the restoration of the withered hand, he asks: “Is it lawful on the sabbath to do good or not? to save a life or to destroy it?” so that, by permitting the work he was about to do for a soul, he might remind them which works the law of the sabbath forbade, namely human ones, and which it enjoined, namely divine ones, which would be done for every soul; being called Lord of the sabbath because he protected the sabbath as his own possession. Even if he had destroyed it, he would have done so rightly as its Lord, still more he who instituted it. But he did not destroy it at all as its Lord, so that from this it can now be seen that not even at the carrying round of the ark at Jericho was the sabbath destroyed by the Creator. For that too was God's work, which he himself had commanded and which he had arranged for the sake of the souls of his people, placed in the danger of war. And if somewhere he professed hatred of sabbaths, by saying “your sabbaths,” counting them as men's, not his own, which the people celebrated without the fear of God, full of sins, loving God with their lips and not their heart, he gave a different standing to his own sabbaths, that is, those kept according to his discipline; these he afterwards declares through the same prophet to be true, delightful, and not to be profaned. So Christ did not rescind the sabbath at all, whose law he kept, both above, in the case of the disciples, working for a soul (for he allowed the hungry the comfort of food), and now in healing the withered hand, pressing home everywhere by his deeds, “I have not come to dissolve the law but to fulfill it,” even though Marcion has stopped his mouth over this saying. For here too he fulfilled the law, while interpreting its condition, while throwing light on the difference of works, while doing what the law excepts from the rest of the sabbath, while by his good deed making more holy the sabbath day itself, holy from the beginning by the Father's blessing, a day on which, that is, he provided divine help; which an adversary would have provided on other days, so as not to adorn the Creator's sabbath and not to render to the sabbath the works due to it. If on that day the prophet Elisha too restored to life the dead son of the Shunammite woman, you see, Pharisee, and you, Marcion, that it was long ago the Creator's to do good on sabbaths, to save life and not destroy it, and that Christ brought in nothing new that is not from the pattern, the gentleness, the mercy, and the foretelling too of the Creator. For here also he makes present the prophecy of a particular healing: “Slack hands grow strong,” as also slack knees did in the paralytic.