Against Marcion 4.34

(But Christ forbids divorce, saying: “Whoever puts away his wife and marries another commits adultery, (and) whoever marries a woman put away by her husband is likewise an adulterer” — so as to forbid divorce in this way too, he makes the marriage of a repudiated woman unlawful — whereas Moses permits repudiation in Deuteronomy: “If someone takes a wife and lives with her, and it happens that she does not find favor with him because something shameful has been found in her, he shall write a bill of repudiation and put it in her hand and send her away from his house.” Do you see the difference between the law and the gospel, between Moses and Christ? Of course you do. For you have not accepted that other gospel too, of the same truth and the same Christ, in which, while forbidding divorce, he settled the particular question about it: “Moses, because of the hardness of your heart, commanded a bill of repudiation to be given; but from the beginning it was not so”; because, of course, he who had made male and female had said, “The two shall be in one flesh; therefore what God has joined, let man (not) separate.” For by this answer he both protected the ordinance of Moses as his own and set right the institution of the Creator, as the Creator's Christ. But since you are to be refuted from what you have accepted, I will meet you as if my Christ were (yours): did not he too, while forbidding divorce, and yet bearing the likeness of him who joined male and female, excuse rather than destroy the ordinance of Moses? But see, let this Christ of yours be one who teaches contrary to Moses and the Creator, on these terms: that if I do not show him to be contrary, he is mine. For I say that he made the prohibition of divorce conditional here: if someone puts away his wife in order to marry another. “Whoever puts away his wife,” he says, “and marries another has committed adultery; and whoever marries a woman put away by her husband is likewise an adulterer”: a woman put away, of course, for the same reason for which it is not lawful to put her away, namely so that another wife may be taken; for whoever marries a woman unlawfully put away, as though she had not been put away, is an adulterer. For a marriage that has not been properly dissolved remains; and to marry while a marriage remains is adultery. So if he forbade putting away a wife conditionally, he did not forbid it absolutely; and what he did not forbid absolutely he permitted in other cases, where the reason for which he forbade it is absent; and so he teaches nothing contrary to Moses, whose precept he preserves in a certain case — I do not yet say confirms. Or if you deny altogether that divorce is permitted by Christ, how is it that you dissolve marriages, neither joining male and female yourself nor admitting those joined elsewhere to the sacrament of baptism and of the Eucharist unless they have sworn together against the fruit of marriage, as against the Creator himself? Surely, what will a husband do among you if his wife has committed adultery? Will he keep her? But you (know) that not even your apostle allows the members of Christ to be joined to a prostitute. So the justice of divorce has Christ too as its defender. Here at once Moses is confirmed by him, since Moses allows repudiation on the same ground as Christ does: “if something shameful has been found in the woman.” For in the gospel of Matthew too he says: “Whoever puts away his wife except for the cause of adultery makes her commit adultery.” And so he too is judged an adulterer who marries a woman put away by her husband. But except on the ground of adultery, not even the Creator separates what he himself, of course, has joined, since the same Moses elsewhere lays down that one who has made a marriage by violating a woman may never put away his wife. And if a marriage compelled by violence will stand, how much more one entered willingly by agreement? As by the authority of prophecy: “You shall not put away the wife of your youth.” So you have Christ freely following everywhere in the footsteps of the Creator, both in permitting repudiation and in forbidding it; you have him also, whichever way you try to hide, as the guardian of marriage, which he wants neither to be broken apart, forbidding repudiation, nor to be kept with a stain on it, permitting divorce in that case. Blush, you who do not join those whom even your Christ has joined; blush also, you who separate them without the ground on which even your Christ was willing for them to be separated.

I must now show also from what the Lord drew this saying and at what he aimed it. For so it will be more fully established that he did not aim at destroying Moses by suddenly interposing a statement on repudiation, since it was not interposed suddenly, but has its root in the same mention of John. For John, rebuking Herod because, against the law, he had married the wife of his dead brother, who had a daughter by her — the law not permitting this, and indeed commanding it only when a brother has died childless, so that seed might be raised up for him by his own brother and from his own rib — had been cast into prison by the same Herod, and was afterwards killed. So, having mentioned John, the Lord, stirred surely by his death, hurled figures of unlawful marriages and of adultery at Herod, pronouncing an adulterer even one who marries a woman put away by her husband, so as to weigh down all the more the impiety of Herod, who had married a woman put away from her husband no less by repudiation than by death — and that when his brother had a daughter by her, and on that ground too unlawfully — at the prompting of lust, not of the law, and for that reason had also killed the prophet who upheld the law.

This discussion will help me also with the following argument, about the rich man in pain among the dead and the poor man at rest in Abraham's bosom. For that too, as regards the surface of the Scripture, is introduced suddenly; but as regards the intent of its meaning, it too coheres with the mention of John mistreated and of Herod wrongly married, depicting the end of each, Herod's torments and John's refreshment, so that Herod might now hear: “They have Moses and the prophets there; let them hear them.” But Marcion forces it another way: he assigns both of the Creator's rewards, whether of torment or of refreshment, to the underworld, as laid up for those who have obeyed the law and the prophets, but he defines the bosom and harbor of Christ and his god as heavenly. We will answer this too, since Scripture itself refutes his eyes, the Scripture which set Abraham's bosom for the poor man apart from the underworld. For the underworld, I think, is one thing, and Abraham's bosom another. For it says also that a great gulf lies between those regions and prevents passage either way. Nor would the rich man have lifted up his eyes, and that from afar, except toward higher places, and to the distance of the height, across that immense distance between height and depth. From this it is clear to every wise man who has ever heard of the Elysian fields that there is some determined place, called Abraham's bosom, for receiving the souls of his children, even from the nations — his, that is, as the father of many nations — who are to be counted in Abraham's line by the same faith with which Abraham too believed God, under no yoke of the law and in no sign of circumcision. That region, then, Abraham's bosom, I say, though not heavenly, yet higher than the underworld, provides refreshment meanwhile to the souls of the righteous, until the consummation of things completes the resurrection of all with the fullness of reward. Then will appear the heavenly promise — which Marcion claims for his (god), as though it had not been proclaimed by the Creator — to which Christ builds his ascent into heaven, according to Hosea, surely for his own, where there is also the everlasting place of which Isaiah says: “Who will announce to you the everlasting place?” Who but Christ, walking in righteousness, speaking the right way, hating unrighteousness and iniquity? And if an everlasting place is promised and an ascent into heaven is built by the Creator, who also promises that the seed of Abraham will be like the stars of heaven, surely because of the heavenly promise, why, with that promise kept intact, should it not be admissible that Abraham's bosom is the name of some temporary receptacle of faithful souls, in which an image of the future is even now sketched and a certain bright foreview of both judgments is seen? It warns you heretics too, while you are in this life, … Moses and the prophets, who preach one God the Creator and preach his one Christ, and that both judgments, of punishment and of eternal salvation, rest with the one God, who kills and makes alive. No, he says, the admonition of our God from heaven commanded that not Moses and the prophets but Christ be heard: “Hear him.” Rightly. For by then the apostles had already heard Moses and the prophets enough, since they had followed Christ by believing Moses and the prophets. For Peter would not have been granted to say, “You are the Christ,” before he had heard and believed Moses and the prophets, by whom alone Christ had until then been announced. This faith of theirs, then, had earned confirmation even by a heavenly voice, commanding that he be heard whom they had recognized as preaching peace, preaching good things, announcing the everlasting place, building for them his ascent into heaven. But in the underworld it was said of those — “They have Moses and the prophets there; let them hear them” — who did not believe at all, or did not quite believe, that after death punishments had been announced by Moses and the prophets for the pride of riches and the glory of luxuries, and decreed by that God who puts down the mighty from their thrones and raises the needy from the dunghills. So since the difference between the two pronouncements befits the Creator, it is not a distinction between deities that must be established, but a distinction between the matters themselves.