Against Marcion 5.9

Meanwhile the Marcionite will produce nothing of this kind, even to declare to whom the Christ not yet revealed rather belongs: as mine is to be awaited, who was foretold from the beginning, his is not to be, precisely because he was not foretold from the beginning. So we believe better in a Christ to come than the heretic does in any. We must first consider how certain people then denied the resurrection of the dead. Surely in the same way as now; since it is always the resurrection of the flesh that is denied. The soul, in fact, many of the wise, claiming it to be divine, promise will be kept safe, and the common people themselves honour the dead on the assumption by which they are confident that their souls remain. But bodies, it is plain, are destroyed either at once by fire or by wild beasts, or, even when most carefully buried, still by time. So if the apostle beats back those who deny the resurrection, he is surely defending against them what they denied, namely the resurrection of the flesh. There you have the answer in brief. The rest is now more than is needed. For the very phrase “the resurrection of the dead” requires us to uphold the proper meanings of the words “dead” and “resurrection.” Nothing is dead except what has lost the soul by whose power it lived. It is the body that loses the soul and by losing it becomes dead; so the word “dead” suits the body. Further, if the resurrection is of the dead, and the dead is nothing other than the body, the resurrection will be of the body. So too the word “resurrection” claims no other thing than what has fallen. For a thing can be said to “rise” which has not fallen at all, which has always lain before. But to “rise again” belongs only to what has fallen; for it is said to rise again by rising a second time, because it fell. For the syllable “re” always denotes repetition. So we say that the body falls to the earth through death, as the fact itself bears witness from God's law. For it was said to the body, “You are earth, and to earth you shall go.” So what is from earth will go to earth; that falls which will go to earth; that rises again which falls. “Since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection.” Here Christ's body too is shown to me in the word “man,” which consists of a body, as we have often taught. And if we are all made alive in Christ just as we are put to death in Adam, then since in Adam we are put to death in the body, so we must also be made alive in Christ in the body. Otherwise the comparison does not hold, if the making alive in Christ does not meet the putting to death in Adam in the same substance. But he has inserted something more about Christ, which is not to be passed over, for the sake of the present dispute. For the resurrection of the flesh will be all the more proved, the more I show that Christ belongs to that God with whom the resurrection of the flesh is believed. When he says, “For he must reign until he puts his enemies under his feet,” even from this he already proclaims an avenging God, and so the very one who promised this to Christ: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet. The Lord will send forth the rod of your power from Zion, and you will rule in the midst of your enemies.” But I must show that those scriptures belong to my case which the Jews too try to take away from us. They say, in fact, that this psalm was sung of Hezekiah, because he sat at the right hand of the temple and God turned back and destroyed his enemies; and that therefore the rest too, “Before the morning star I begot you from the womb,” fits Hezekiah and Hezekiah's birth. We produce the Gospels (of whose trustworthiness we ought surely by now, in so great a work, to have convinced them to some extent), which declare that the Lord was born by night, so that this is “before the morning star”: both from the star, understood by the Magi, and from the testimony of the angel who announced by night to the shepherds that Christ had at that very moment been born, and from the place of the birth, for one comes to an inn for the night. Perhaps it was also done with a mystical meaning, that Christ was born by night, since he was to be the light of truth in the darkness of ignorance. And God would not have said “I begot you” except to a true son. For although he says of the whole people, “I have begotten sons,” he does not add “from the womb.” And why did he add “from the womb” (so pointlessly, as though anyone doubted that a man was born from the womb) unless because he wanted it to be understood more pointedly of Christ: “I begot you from the womb,” that is, from the womb alone, without the seed of a man, assigning to the flesh what is from the womb, and to the Spirit what is from himself? To this is added: “You are a priest for ever.” But Hezekiah was not a priest, nor for ever, even if he had been one. “According to the order of Melchizedek,” he says. What has Hezekiah to do with Melchizedek, priest of the Most High, and uncircumcised at that, who blessed the circumcised Abraham after receiving the offering of tithes? But the order of Melchizedek will fit Christ, since Christ, the proper and lawful high priest of God, the pontiff of the priesthood of the uncircumcised, then appointed among the nations, by whom he was rather to be received, will, when he comes at the last, deign to acknowledge the circumcision and the race of Abraham with acceptance and blessing. There is also another psalm that begins thus: “O God, give your judgment to the king,” that is, to Christ who is to reign, “and your righteousness to the king's son,” that is, to Christ's people; for his sons are those who are born again in him. But this psalm too is said to be sung of Solomon. Yet will not the things that fit Christ alone be able to teach that the rest too belongs not to Solomon but to Christ? “He will come down,” it says, “like rain upon a fleece, and like drops falling on the earth,” describing his gentle and imperceptible descent from heaven into flesh. But Solomon, even if he came down from somewhere, did not come down like rain, because not from heaven. But I will set out only the simpler points. “He will rule from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth”: this was given to Christ alone, whereas Solomon ruled over one small Judaea. “All kings will worship him”: whom will all worship, if not Christ? “And all nations will serve him”: whom will all serve, if not Christ? “May his name be for ever”: whose name is eternal, if not Christ's? “His name will endure before the sun”: for before the sun is the Word of God, that is, Christ. “And all the nations will be blessed in him”: in Solomon no nation is blessed, but in Christ every nation is. What now, if this psalm even shows him to be God? “And they will call him blessed; for blessed is the Lord God of Israel, who alone does wonders. Blessed is the name of his glory, and the whole earth will be filled with his glory.” Solomon, on the contrary, I dare say, lost even the glory he had in God, being drawn by a woman all the way into idolatry. And so, since in the middle of the psalm this too is set, “His enemies will lick the dust,” that is, when put under his feet, it will bear on the point for which I brought in this psalm and defended it for my case: to confirm that the one who, according to the Creator's arrangement, will obtain both the glory of the kingdom and the subjection of his enemies is to be believed to be none other than the Creator's Christ.