Against Marcion 5.3–5.5

Then he writes that he went up to Jerusalem after fourteen years to seek the backing of Peter and the other apostles, in order to confer with them about the rule of his gospel, lest he had run or should run in vain for so many years, that is, if he were preaching in any way short of their pattern. So much did he desire to be approved and confirmed by those whom, if anyone, you want to be understood as closer akin to Judaism. And when he says that not even Titus was circumcised, he begins to show that only the question of circumcision had been stirred up, out of a continuing defense of the law, by those whom he therefore calls false brothers brought in secretly. They were going on to establish nothing other than the continuance of the law, out of a faith in the Creator that was no doubt intact, and so were perverting the gospel, not by tampering with Scripture so as to fashion a Christ of the Creator, but by retaining the old rule of life so as not to exclude the Creator's law. “Because of false brothers brought in secretly,” he says, “who had slipped in to spy out our freedom which we have in Christ, to bring us into slavery, we did not yield in submission even for an hour.” Let us attend both to the sense itself and to its reason, and the corruption of the text will appear. When he first says, “But not even Titus, who was with me, though he was a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised,” and then adds, “because of false brothers brought in secretly,” and the rest, he begins to give the reason for the opposite action, showing why he did what he would not have done if that on account of which he did it had not happened. Tell me, then: if those false brothers had not slipped in to spy out their freedom, would they have yielded in submission? I think not. So they yielded because there were people for whose sake one had to yield. For this suited a faith still raw and still in suspense about keeping the law, when the apostle himself too was anxious lest he had run or should run in vain. So the false brothers who were spying out Christian freedom had to be thwarted, lest they carry it off into the slavery of Judaism before Paul knew that he had not run in vain, before his predecessors gave him their right hands, before he took up the office of preaching to the nations with their consent. So of necessity he yielded for a time; and in this way his reason is consistent for circumcising Timothy and for bringing shaven men into the temple, which are recorded in the Acts. So true are these things that they agree with the apostle's own profession that he became a Jew to the Jews to win the Jews, and one living under the law for the sake of those who lived under the law; and so also for the sake of those men who had been brought in; and finally that he became all things to all people to win all. If these things too require to be understood from this passage, this too no one will doubt: that Paul was a preacher of that God and Christ whose law, though he was excluding it, he had nevertheless meanwhile admitted for the times; a law that he would have had to clear away at once if he had brought forward a new god. It is well, then, that Peter and James and John gave Paul their right hands and made an agreement on the division of duties, that Paul should go to the nations and they to the circumcision, “only that they should remember the poor”: this too according to the law of the Creator, who cherishes the poor and needy, as was proved in the examination of your gospel. So it is clear that the question concerned the law alone, since it is shown what of the law it was fitting to keep. But he rebukes Peter for not walking with a straight foot toward the truth of the gospel. He rebukes him indeed, yet for nothing else than inconsistency in his way of eating, which he varied according to the kind of people present, fearing those who were of the circumcision; not for any difference of deity. On that point he would have withstood others to their face too, he who did not spare Peter himself for the lesser matter of wavering conduct, if he had believed in the way the Marcionites want. For the rest, let the apostle go on, denying that a man is justified by works of the law, but by faith: faith, however, in that God to whom the law also belongs. For he would not have labored to distinguish faith from the law if a difference of deity itself, had there been one, had already distinguished them unaided. Rightly he did not rebuild what he had destroyed. And the law was to be destroyed from the time the voice of John cried in the wilderness, “Prepare the ways of the Lord,” so that the valleys and hills and mountains should be filled and brought low, and the crooked and rough made straight and level: that is, the difficulties of the law turned into the ease of the gospel. He had remembered, too, that the time of the psalm had come: “Let us burst their bonds from us and cast their yoke from us,” since “the nations raged and the peoples devised vain things; the kings of the earth stood up and the rulers gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ”; so that a man should now be justified by the freedom of faith, not by the slavery of the law, because “the righteous lives by faith.” And if the prophet Habakkuk declared this, you have the apostle confirming the prophets, as Christ did too. So the faith by which the righteous will live will belong to the same God as the law by which the worker is not justified. Likewise, if in the law there is a curse and in faith a blessing, you have both set forth with the Creator: “Behold,” he says, “I have set before you a curse and a blessing.” You cannot claim a difference of gods on this ground (a difference which, though it is one of things, is not therefore one of authors) when both are set forth by one author. And why Christ became a curse for us, since the apostle himself teaches it, is clear, and how much it makes for us, that is, for faith in the Creator. For it will not seem that, because the Creator pronounced, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree,” Christ therefore belongs to another god and was for that reason already cursed by the Creator in the law. Or how could the Creator have cursed in advance one he did not know? And why is it not more fitting for the Creator to have given his own Son up to his own curse than for that god of yours to have subjected him to a curse, and that for a man who was a stranger to him? In short, if this seems cruel in the Creator toward his Son, it is equally so in your god; but if it is reasonable in yours, it is equally so in mine, and more so in mine. For it will more easily be believed that he provided a blessing for man through the curse of Christ who once set both a curse and a blessing before man, than he who, by your account, never professed either. “We receive the spiritual blessing through faith,” he says: the faith, that is, by which the righteous lives according to the Creator. This, then, is what I say: that faith belongs to that God to whom faith, the pattern of grace, belongs. And when he adds, “For you are all sons of faith,” it is shown what the heretic's industry erased above, namely the mention of Abraham, in which the apostle affirms that we are sons of Abraham through faith; and in keeping with that mention he here too called us sons of faith. Otherwise, how are we sons of faith? And of whose faith, if not Abraham's? For if Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness, and from that he deserved to be named father of many nations, and we, by believing God more …, are likewise justified as Abraham was, and likewise obtain life, as the righteous lives by faith, so it comes about that above he declared us sons of Abraham, as the father of faith, and here sons of faith, through which Abraham had been promised as father of the nations. The very fact that he called faith away from circumcision: was he not seeking to make them sons of Abraham, who had believed while his flesh was still uncircumcised? In short, faith in one god cannot be admitted to the pattern of the other god, so as to reckon believers as righteous, to make the righteous live by faith, to call the nations sons of faith. All this belongs to the one with whom it was already known before.

Under the same mention of Abraham, so long as he is refuted by the sense itself. “I speak still,” he says, “in human terms: when we were little children we were placed under the elements of the world, to be slaves to them.” But this is not said in human terms; it is not an illustration but the truth. For what little child (in understanding, of course, as the nations are) is not subject to the elements of the world, which he looks up to as God? What he did say then in human terms was this: “Yet no one sets aside or adds to a man's testament.” For by the example of a human testament that stands firm he was defending the divine one: “The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He did not say ‘to seeds,’ as of many, but ‘to your seed,’ as of one, which is Christ.” Let Marcion's sponge blush! Except that I am going over, more than I need, what he has taken away, when it is more effective to refute him from what he has kept. “But when the fullness of time came, God sent his Son”: surely he who is also God of the very times of which the world consists; who also ordained the signs of the times, suns and moons and constellations and stars; who, in short, both arranged and foretold the revelation of his Son at the end of the times: “In the last days the mountain of the Lord will be manifest,” and, “In the last days I will pour out of my Spirit on all flesh,” according to Joel. It belonged to him to wait for the time to be fulfilled whose also was the end of time, as well as its beginning. But that idle god, who has no work and no prophecy and so no time of any kind, what did he ever do to bring it about that the time was fulfilled, or to wait for it until it should be fulfilled? If nothing, it is quite empty that he should have waited for the Creator's times, serving the Creator. And for what purpose did he send his Son? “To redeem those who were under the law”: that is, to make the crooked into a straight way and the rough into smooth ways, according to Isaiah, so that the old things should pass away and new ones arise (“a new law from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem”); “and that we might receive the adoption of sons,” we the nations, of course, who were not sons. For he himself will be the light of the nations, and in his name the nations will hope. So, that it might be certain that we are sons of God, “he sent his Spirit into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba, Father.’” For “in the last days,” he says, “I will pour out of my Spirit on all flesh.” Whose is this grace, if not his whose is also the promise of grace? Who is Father, if not he who is also Maker? So after these riches there was to be no turning back “to the weak and beggarly elements.” Now among the Romans, too, the first letters of the alphabet are commonly called “elements.” So he did not want to turn them away from the God of the elements of the world by disparaging those elements. (Although, when he said above, “If then you serve those who by nature are not gods,” he rebukes the error of physical, that is natural, superstition, which holds the elements to be God, yet not even so does he censure the God of the elements.) But he himself declares which elements he wants to be understood, namely the first letters of the law: “You observe days and months and times and years”; and sabbaths, I suppose, and the preparation meals and fasts and great days. For these too, like circumcision, were to cease by the Creator's decrees, who says through Isaiah: “Your new moons and sabbaths and great day I will not endure; your fasting and holidays and ceremonies my soul hates”; and through Amos: “I have hated, I have rejected your ceremonies, and I will not smell the savour in your solemn assemblies”; and again through Hosea: “I will turn away all her mirth and her ceremonies and her sabbaths and her new moons and all her solemn assemblies.” “Has he erased what he himself had established?” you say. Yes, he rather than another; or if another, then that other helped the Creator's sentence, taking away what the Creator too had condemned. But the question here is not why the Creator broke his own laws. It is enough that we have proved that he would break them, so that it is confirmed that the apostle laid down nothing against the Creator, since the very removal of the law comes from the Creator. But as thieves often drop some of their loot, which gives them away, so, I believe, Marcion left behind the last mention of Abraham, though none needed removing more, even if he partly altered it. For Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and the other by the free woman; but the one by the slave woman was born according to the flesh, and the one by the free woman through promise. These things are allegorical (that is, they foreshadow something else); for these are the two testaments (or two “showings,” as we find it translated): one from Mount Sinai into the synagogue of the Jews, according to the law, bearing children for slavery; the other bearing children above every principality and power and dominion and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come, into which we have been promised, the holy church, which is our mother. And so he adds, “Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman but of the free.” He has certainly made plain that the nobility of Christianity has the sacred sign of allegory in Abraham's son born of the free woman, just as the legal slavery of Judaism has it in the son of the slave woman; and so that both dispensations belong to that God with whom we find the outline of both. The very saying, “For the freedom with which Christ has set us free,” does it not make him the liberator who was the master? For not even Galba set free other people's slaves; he would more readily have released free men. Freedom, then, will be granted by the one with whom was the slavery of the law. And rightly it was not fitting for those who had been set free to be bound again by the yoke of slavery, that is, of the law, now that the psalm had been fulfilled: “Let us burst their bonds and cast their yoke from us,” after the rulers had gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ. So from those released from slavery he persisted in erasing the very mark of slavery, circumcision, on the authority, of course, of the prophetic preaching, remembering what was said through Jeremiah, “And circumcise the foreskins of your heart,” since Moses too says, “You shall circumcise your hardness of heart,” that is, not the flesh. In short, if he was excluding circumcision because he came from another god, why does he also deny that uncircumcision has any value in Christ, as he does circumcision? For he ought to have preferred the rival of what he was attacking, if he came from a god who was the rival of circumcision. But because both circumcision and uncircumcision were assigned to one God, both were void in Christ, because faith was preferred to them: that faith of which it had been written, “And in his name the nations will believe”; that faith which, by saying that it is made complete through love, he shows in this way too to be the Creator's. For whether he means the love that is toward God, this too is the Creator's: “You shall love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength”; or the love toward one's neighbour, “Your neighbour as yourself” is also the Creator's. “But he who troubles you will bear judgment.” From which god? From the best god? But he does not judge. From the Creator? But neither will he condemn one who upholds circumcision. If there will be no other judge than the Creator, then he will not condemn the defenders of the law except because he himself determined that it should cease. What now, if he even confirms it in the part in which he ought? “For the whole law,” he says, “has been fulfilled in you: You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” Or if he wants “has been fulfilled” to be understood as meaning that it is no longer to be fulfilled, does he then not want me to love my neighbour as myself, so that this too has ceased with the law? But this precept will have to be kept for ever. So the Creator's law has been approved even by its adversary, and has gained from him not loss but gain, its sum reduced to a single precept. But this too suits no one better than its author. And so when he says, “Bear one another's burdens, and so you will fulfil the law of Christ,” if this cannot be done unless one loves his neighbour as himself, it is plain that “You shall love your neighbour as yourself,” through which “Bear one another's burdens” is understood, is the law of Christ, which is the Creator's; and so Christ is the Creator's, since the Creator's law is Christ's. “Do not be deceived; God is not mocked.” And yet Marcion's god can be mocked, since he knows neither how to be angry nor how to avenge. “For whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.” So it is a God of recompense and judgment who threatens. “And let us not grow weary in doing good,” and, “While we have time, let us work what is good.” Deny that the Creator commanded doing good, and then let a different teaching belong to a different deity. Further, if he preaches recompense, the harvest both of corruption and of life will come from the same one. “And in due time we shall reap,” since Ecclesiastes too says, “There is a time for everything.” “But to me too” (a servant of the Creator) “the world has been crucified” (yet not the God of the world) “and I to the world” (yet not to the God of the world). For he spoke of the world with regard to its manner of life, by renouncing which we are crucified to each other and die to each other. [He calls them persecutors of Christ.] And when he adds that he bears the marks of Christ in his body (bodily marks, of course, of fetters), he has confessed that Christ's flesh was not imaginary but real and solid, since he shows its bodily marks.

The groundwork laid in the preceding letter led me not to discuss its heading, being sure that it could be discussed elsewhere as well, since it is common to all the letters and the same in each. That he prescribes for those to whom he writes not “health” but “grace and peace”: I do not ask what he, the destroyer of Judaism, has to do with a custom still Jewish (for even today the Jews greet one another in the name of peace, and formerly in the Scriptures they so saluted); but I understand that by his office he was upholding the Creator's preaching: “How ripe are the feet of those who bring good news of good things, who bring good news of peace.” For the good news of good things, that is, of God's grace, is proclaimed as peace, which he knew was to be preferred. When he announces these as “from God our Father and the Lord Jesus,” he uses common names that also suit our faith; and I do not think it can be discerned which God the Father and which Lord Jesus is proclaimed except from the attendant circumstances, as to which of the two they fit better. First, then, I lay down that God the Father is to be recognized as none other than the Creator and Founder both of man and of the universe; next, that the name of Lord is also added to the Father because of his power, which the Son too receives through the Father; then, that grace and peace belong not only to him by whom they were foretold but also to him who had been offended. For there is no grace except for an offence, and no peace except after war. And both the people, by transgressing the rule of life, and the whole human race, by ignoring nature, had both sinned and rebelled against the Creator. But Marcion's god could not be offended, both because he was unknown and because he does not know how to be angry. What grace, then, from one who was not offended? What peace from one who was not rebelled against? He says that the cross of Christ is foolishness to those who are perishing, but the power and wisdom of God to those who will attain salvation; and to show where this came from, he adds: “For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the understanding of the prudent I will bring to nothing.’” If these are the Creator's words and bear on the cross being counted foolishness, then both the cross and, through the cross, Christ will belong to the Creator, by whom what concerns the cross was foretold. Or if the Creator, as a rival, took away wisdom so that the cross of Christ, his adversary, should be counted foolishness, how could the Creator have declared anything about the cross of a Christ not his own, whom he did not know when he prophesied? And again, why is it that with the best god, of lavish mercy, some carry off salvation, believing the cross to be the power and wisdom of God, and others perdition, who count the cross of Christ foolishness? If this does not belong to him, it belongs to the Creator to have punished some offence of both the people and the human race by the loss of wisdom and prudence. What follows will confirm this, when he says, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” and when here too he adds why: “Since in the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe.” But first I will discuss “the world.” Since the most subtle heretics here above all take “the world” to mean the lord of the world, we understand it of the man who is in the world, from the simple form of human speech in which we usually put the container for what it contains: “The circus shouted,” “The forum spoke,” and “The basilica murmured,” meaning those who were doing business in those places. So because man, not the God of the world, did not in wisdom know God, in which he ought to have known him (the Jew in the wisdom of the Scriptures, and every nation in the wisdom of his works), therefore the same God, who was not recognized in his wisdom, resolved to strike back at the wisdom of men with foolishness, by saving all who believe in the foolish preaching of the cross. “Since the Jews desire signs”: they who ought already to have been certain about God; “and the Greeks seek wisdom”: they who, of course, set up their own wisdom, not God's. But if a new god were being preached, what wrong had the Jews done in desiring signs by which to believe, or the Greeks in pursuing wisdom which they would rather believe? So the very recompense on Jews and Greeks confirms a jealous God and judge, who by a retribution both jealous and judicial made foolish the wisdom of the world. And if the reasons belong to him whose Scriptures are applied, then the apostle, in speaking of the Creator, teaches that the Creator, who had not been understood, is to be understood. Also, in preaching Christ as a stumbling block to the Jews, he seals the prophecy of the Creator about him, who says through Isaiah, “Behold, I have set in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence.” And “the rock was Christ” even Marcion keeps. And what is “the foolishness of God that is wiser than men,” if not the cross and death of God? What is “the weakness of God that is stronger than men,” if not the birth and flesh of God? But if Christ was neither born of a virgin nor built up of flesh, and so suffered neither the cross nor death in truth, there was nothing foolish or weak in him; nor then did God choose “the foolish things of the world to confound the wise,” nor “the weak things of the world to confound the strong,” nor the dishonourable and least and despised things, “things that are not,” that is, that do not truly exist, “to confound the things that are,” that is, that truly exist. For nothing arranged by God is truly small and ignoble and despicable, but only what man arranges. Yet with the Creator the old things can indeed be reckoned as foolishness and weakness and dishonour and pettiness and contempt. What more foolish, what weaker, than God's demand for bloody sacrifices and reeking burnt offerings? What weaker than the purification of vessels and beds? What more dishonourable than the further disfigurement of flesh that already blushes? What so low as the imposing of retaliation? What so contemptible as the exclusion of foods? The whole Old Testament, as far as I know, every heretic ridicules. “For God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise” (Marcion's god does nothing of the kind, since he does not strive to refute opposites by opposites) “so that no flesh should boast,” in order that, as it is written, “Let him who boasts boast in God.” In what God? Surely in the one who gave this command; unless the Creator commanded us to boast in Marcion's god.