Against Marcion 4.23

I take upon myself the part of Israel. Let Marcion's Christ stand there and cry out: “O unbelieving generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I bear with you?” At once he will have to hear from me: “Whoever you are, O steward, first declare who you are, and from whom you come, and what right you have over us. Up to now everything about you is the Creator's. Plainly, if you come from him and act for him, we accept the rebuke. But if you come from another, I would like you to tell us: what have you ever entrusted to us of your own, which we ought to have believed, that you reproach us with unbelief, you who have never even revealed yourself to us? How long ago did you begin to deal with us, that you complain of the time? In what have you borne with us, that you charge us with your patience? You come just now, like Aesop's ass out of the well, and already you are braying.” Who would not have thrown back the injustice of the rebuke in this way, if he believed that it came from one who had as yet no right to complain? Except that he would not have sprung upon them either, had he not long before lodged among them in the law, in the prophets, in mighty works and benefits, and always found them unbelieving.

But look, Christ loves little children, teaching that those who always want to be greater ought to be like them, whereas the Creator set bears on boys, avenging the prophet Elisha for the insults he had suffered from them. A shameless enough antithesis, which pits such different things against each other, little children and boys, an age still innocent and an age already capable of judgment, which could insult, not to say blaspheme. As a just God, then, he did not spare even impious boys, requiring honor for greater age, and surely all the more from those younger; but as a good God he loves little children so much that in Egypt he did good to the midwives who protected the Hebrew births endangered by Pharaoh's edict. So this affection of Christ's too he shares with the Creator. Now then, how can Marcion's god, who opposes marriage, seem to be a lover of little children, whose whole cause is marriage? One who hates the seed must necessarily loathe the fruit as well. Indeed, he must be held more cruel than the king of Egypt. For Pharaoh did not allow infants to be reared; this god does not allow them even to be born, taking from them even their ten months of life in the womb. How much more credible that affection for little children should be credited to him who, by blessing marriage for the propagation of the human race, promised that the very fruit of marriage too would be blessed, a fruit which begins with infancy!

The Creator, at Elijah's request, brings down the plague of fire in the case of that false prophet. I recognize the judge's severity; on the other hand I recognize (the gentleness of Christ rebuking) the disciples who intended the same punishment for that little village of the Samaritans. Let the heretic too recognize that this gentleness of Christ was promised by the same most severe judge: “He will not strive,” he says, “nor (cry out, nor) will his voice be heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and smoking flax he will not quench.” Such a one would surely be much less likely to burn men up. For even then it was said to Elijah: “The Lord is not in the fire, but in the gentle breeze.”

But why does the most kindly Lord refuse the man who offers himself to him as so inseparable a companion? If it was because he had said proudly or hypocritically, “I will follow you wherever you go,” then by judging that either pride or hypocrisy must be refused he acted as a judge. And surely he condemned the man whom he refused, as one who would not attain salvation. For just as he calls to salvation the one he does not refuse, or even the one he calls of his own accord, so he condemns to perdition the one he refuses. And when he answers the one who pleaded his father's burial, “Let the dead bury their dead; but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God,” he plainly confirmed both laws of the Creator: that on the priesthood in Leviticus, which forbids priests to attend even the funerals of their parents — “The priest,” it says, “shall not go in to any dead soul, and he shall not be defiled for his father (or for his mother)” — and that on the vow in Numbers; for there too he commands the one who has vowed himself to God, among other things, not to go in to any dead soul, not even that of father or mother or brother. And I suppose he was destining for the vow and for the priesthood the man whom he had charged with preaching the kingdom of God. Or if this is not so, he must be pronounced impious indeed, commanding sons to disregard their parents' burial with no reason of the law coming between. And when he forbids that third man, who was preparing first to say farewell to his family, to look back, he follows the Creator's course: this too the Creator had not wanted done by those whom he had delivered from Sodom.