Against Marcion 4.21

He sends the disciples out to preach the kingdom of God. Did he even here make known whose? He forbids them to carry anything on the journey for food or clothing. Who would have commanded this, except the one who both feeds the ravens and clothes the flowers of the field, who long before had commanded that the ox treading out the grain should have its mouth left free, so that it might be permitted to take fodder from its work, because the worker is worthy of his wage? Let Marcion delete these things, so long as their sense remains intact. But when he commands them to shake the dust off their feet against those by whom they had not been received, he orders this too to be done as a testimony. No one bears witness to what is not destined for judgment: one who orders inhospitality to be turned into testimony is threatening as a judge.

That no new god had been established by Christ was declared also by the common opinion of all, in which some asserted to Herod that Christ Jesus was John, others Elijah, others one of the old prophets. Whichever of these he had been, he surely would not have been raised for this purpose, to preach another god after his resurrection.

He feeds the people in the wilderness, after the ancient custom, of course. Or, if the majesty is not the same, then he is now less than the Creator, who sustained, not for one day but for forty years, not from lesser materials of bread and fish but from heavenly manna, not about five thousand but six hundred thousand men. But the majesty was so much (the same) that he willed the scantiness of the food not only to suffice but even to abound, after the ancient example. For so too, in the time of famine under Elijah, the small and last provisions of the widow of Zarephath had overflowed through the whole time of the famine by the prophet's blessing. You have the third book of Kingdoms. If you unroll the fourth as well, you will find this whole procedure of Christ in the case of that man of God who, when ten barley loaves were offered to him, ordered them to be distributed to the people; and when his servant, likewise comparing the multitude with the meagerness of the food, answered: “What then? Shall I set this before a hundred men?”, he said: “Give, and they will eat, for thus says the Lord: They will eat and leave some over,” according to the word of the Lord. O Christ, old even in what is new!

So Peter, who had seen these things and compared them with those of old, and had recognized them not only as deeds of the past but as already then prophesying the future, when the Lord asked who he seemed to them to be and he answered for all, “You are the Christ,” cannot have perceived him to be any Christ but the one he knew in the Scriptures, whom he was now recognizing in deeds. Christ himself confirms this too, bearing with it thus far, and indeed enjoining silence. For if Peter could not confess him as other than the Creator's Christ, and he commanded them to tell no one, surely what he did not want published was what Peter had perceived. No, you say: because Peter had not perceived rightly, he did not want a lie spread about. But he declared another reason for silence: that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and scribes and priests and be killed and rise again after the third day. Since these things too were foretold of the Creator's Christ, as we shall fully show in their places, in this way too he shows himself to be the one of whom they were foretold. Certainly, even if they had not been foretold, the reason he gave for the silence he imposed was one which showed no error of Peter's: the necessity of undergoing his sufferings.

“Whoever wishes,” he says, “to save his soul will lose it, and whoever loses it for my sake will save it.” Certainly the Son of Man uttered this sentence. Look, then, you too, together with the king of Babylon, into his burning furnace, and you will find there one like a son of man — for he was not yet truly so, not yet born of a human being — already then establishing these outcomes. He saves the souls of the three brothers, who had agreed to lose them for God, but he destroyed those of the Chaldeans, which they had preferred to save by idolatry. What is this new teaching, whose proofs are old? And indeed predictions of martyrdoms too have run their course, both of those to come and of those who would receive a reward from God: “See,” says Isaiah, “how the righteous man perished, and no one takes it to heart; and righteous men are taken away, and no one considers it.” When does this happen more than in persecution? … of his saints, surely not a simple death, nor one common by the law of nature, but that distinguished death, the soldier's death for the faith, in which whoever loses his soul for God's sake keeps it; so that here too you may recognize a judge, who will repay the soul's evil gain with its loss and the soul's good loss with its salvation. And he shows me a jealous God, returning evil for evil: “Whoever is ashamed of me,” he says, “of him will I also be ashamed.” … since the matter for shame fits none but my Christ, whose course is the more shameful in that it lies open even to the insults of heretics, who declaim with all the bitterness they can upon the whole foulness of his birth and upbringing and on the unworthiness of the flesh itself. But how will the other be liable to shame, when he is incapable of it? — he was not curdled in a womb, even though a virgin's, still a woman's, … and, even if not from seed, yet by the law of bodily substance, out of blood and fluid; he was not held to be flesh before he had form, nor called a mere animal thing after he took shape; he was not released after the torment of ten months, nor poured out onto the ground through the body's sewer, with the sudden shock of pains, along with the filth of so long a time; he did not greet the light at once with tears, from the first wound of his cord; he was not washed well, nor treated with salt and honey, nor initiated in swaddling clothes into what is already a burial wrapping, nor rolled thereafter through uncleanness from lap to lap, a nuisance at the breasts, long an infant, hardly a boy, late a man; no, he was set down from heaven, grown all at once, whole all at once, instantly Christ, spirit and power and God only. Moreover, (being) not real, since he was not seen, he was not to be blushed for on account of the curse of the cross either, whose reality he lacked, lacking a body. So he could not have said, “Whoever is ashamed of me.” Our Christ is the one who must have declared this, made a little lower than the angels by the Father, a worm and not a man, a reproach of men and the scorn of the people, to the extent that he willed, so that we might be healed by his bruise, so that our salvation might consist in his disgrace. And rightly he humbled himself for his own man, for his own image and likeness, not another's, so that, since man had (not) blushed to worship stone and wood, with the same boldness, unashamed of Christ, he might make satisfaction to God for the shamelessness of idolatry by the shamelessness of faith. Which of these things fits your Christ, Marcion, to make him deserve shame? Plainly you ought to be ashamed that you made him up yourself.