Against Marcion, Book 3

1 Following the footprints of my earlier work, which I am persevering in restoring after it was lost, the order of argument now turns to Christ, though this is more than is needed after the defense of the one Godhead has been completed. For it has been sufficiently settled in advance that Christ is to be understood as belonging to no other god than the Creator, once it has been determined that no god other than the Creator is to be believed; whom Christ so preached, and after him the apostles proclaimed a Christ belonging to no other than the God whom Christ preached, that is, the Creator, that no mention of another god, and so of another Christ, was ever raised before the scandal of Marcion. This is most easily proved by a review of the apostolic and the heretical churches: the perversion of the rule must be declared to lie there, clearly, where it is found to come later. I wove this into my first book as well. But now too this engagement, which will examine Christ separately, will certainly be of use to this end: that while we prove Christ to be the Creator's, Marcion's god is in this way also shut out. It befits the truth to use all its strength, not as though it were struggling (for it wins in any case by the short ways of prescription) but as eager to meet its adversary everywhere, an adversary so frenzied that he has more readily presumed that a Christ has come who was never announced than that one has come who was always foretold.

1 From here, then, I take my first step: whether he should have come so suddenly. First, as being himself the Son of his God; for the proper order was that the Father should acknowledge the Son before the Son the Father, and that the Father should bear witness about the Son before the Son about the Father. Next, as one sent, apart from the name of Son. For the backing of the sender should likewise have gone before, as testimony for the one sent, since no one who comes on another's authority vindicates that authority for himself by his own assertion; rather he waits to be vindicated by it, the recommendation of the one who grants the authority going before him. Otherwise neither will he be recognized as a son whom a father has never named, nor believed to be sent whom a commissioner has never designated. The father would have named him, and the commissioner designated him, if there had been such. Everything that departs from the rule of things will be held suspect, a rule which does not allow the principal degrees to be recognized afterwards: the father after the son, the commissioner after the commissioned, God after Christ. Nothing that is prior in its origin comes later in recognition, because it does not come later in arrangement either. A sudden son, a suddenly sent one, a sudden Christ! But I would think nothing from God is sudden, because nothing from God is not arranged. And if arranged, why not also foretold, so that it could be proved both to be arranged, from the foretelling, and to be divine, from the arrangement? And surely so great a work, one being prepared for human salvation, should not have been sudden, at least in so far as it was to profit by means of faith. For in so far as it had to be believed in order to profit, to that extent it required preparation so that it could be believed, built up on the foundations of arrangement and foretelling, so that faith, shaped by this order, might rightly be both laid upon man by God and offered to God by man, owing belief out of recognition: because it could believe, having learned from the foretelling what to believe.

1 “There was no need,” you say, “for an order of that kind, because he was going to prove at once, by the facts themselves, through the evidence of mighty works, that he was Son and Sent and the Christ of God.” But I will deny that this kind of evidence alone was adequate to testify for him, since he himself later stripped it of its authority. For when he declared that many would come and do signs and perform great mighty works, to the point of turning aside even the elect, and yet were not on that account to be received, he showed that faith based on signs and mighty works is rash, since they come very easily even to false Christs. Or what sort of thing is it that he wished to be proved, understood, and received from the very source (from mighty works, I mean) from which he did not wish the others to be, though they too were to come just as suddenly and were announced by no authority? If, because he came before them and was first to set his seal on the evidence of mighty works, he therefore seized faith for himself, like a place in the baths, and snatched it away from all who came after, take care that he himself is not caught in the position of those who come later, found to be later than the Creator, who was already known before, who likewise performed mighty works before, and who likewise warned that others were not to be believed, namely those coming after him. So if having come first and having first made pronouncements about those to come after is what secures faith, he too will have been condemned in advance by the one after whom he was recognized, and the authority of laying down this rule about later comers will belong to the Creator alone, who, being later than no one, could not have come after anyone. Now then, since I am going to prove that the Creator both in times past performed through his servants the very same mighty works which you claim for your Christ as the only ground of faith, and appointed them to be performed through his own Christ, I can on this ground too rightly lay down in advance that your Christ should all the more not have been believed on the ground of mighty works alone, in that people could have interpreted him as belonging to no other than the Creator, since the works corresponded to the Creator's mighty works, both those performed through his servants and those promised for his Christ. And yet, even if other evidences were found in your Christ, new ones naturally, we would more readily believe that the new ones too belonged to the one to whom the old ones also belong than to one to whom only new ones belong, which lack the proof of trust that belongs to victorious antiquity. So on this ground too he should have come foretold, with foretellings of his own building up faith in him as well as mighty works; above all since he was to come against the Creator's Christ, who was fortified with both signs and prophecies of his own, so that as rival of that Christ he might shine out in every kind of difference. But how could his Christ be foretold by a god who was never foretold? This, then, is what you demand: that neither your god nor your Christ be believed, since both the god should not have been unknown and the Christ should have been recognized through the god.

1 He disdained, I suppose, to imitate the order of our God, as one who displeased him and was above all to be refuted. A new god, he chose to come in a new way: a son before the father's acknowledgement, and one sent before the commissioner's authority, so as to introduce a most monstrous faith as well, by which one would believe that Christ had come before one knew that he existed. It also falls to me to take up this question: why did he not come after Christ? For when I consider his god, so patient for so long an age with a most harsh Creator, who meanwhile was announcing his own Christ to mankind, I say that for whatever reason he did this, deferring both his revelation and his intervention, for that same reason he should have shown patience with the Creator in his Christ too, who was going to carry out his arrangements, so that when every operation of the rival god and the rival Christ had been completed and fulfilled, he might then bring in his own arrangements over them. But if he repented of so great patience, in that he did not persevere to the end of the Creator's affairs, he tolerated in vain the foretelling of that god's Christ, whose appearing he did not tolerate. Either he broke into the course of another's time without reason, or without reason he did not break into it for so long. What held him back, or what disturbed him? In fact he offended both ways: revealed so late after the Creator, and so hastily before his Christ. He should have exposed the one long ago, the other not yet: he should not have endured the one raging so long, nor disturbed the other while still at rest. Toward both he falls short of the title of the “good God,” and shows himself changeable and uncertain: lukewarm toward the Creator, hot against Christ, and futile in both directions. For he no more restrained the Creator than he blocked Christ. The Creator remains just what he is; and Christ will come just as he is written. Why did he come after the Creator, whom he could not correct? Why was he revealed before that god's Christ, whom he could not call back? Or if he corrected the Creator, being revealed after him so that what needed correcting should come first, then he should equally have waited for his Christ in order to correct him too, and so be his later corrector as well as the Creator's. It is another matter if he too is to come again after him, so that in his first coming he advanced against the Creator, destroying his law and prophets, and in his second advances against Christ, refuting his kingdom. Then, therefore, he will complete his order; then, perhaps, he should be believed. Or if his business is already finished now, then he will come in vain, since he will have nothing to accomplish.

1 Let these be my opening skirmishes, as it were from the first line and still at a distance. But from here on, since I am going to fight at close quarters and with certainty, I see that certain lines must still be drawn in advance along which the fight will be fought, namely the Scriptures of the Creator. For since I am going to prove from them that Christ was the Creator's, as having been later fulfilled in his Christ, I must also set out the form, and so to speak the nature, of these Scriptures themselves, so that they are not drawn into controversy just when they are brought to bear on the issues, and dull the reader's attention by mixing their own defense with the defense of the issues. I therefore put forward two features of prophetic speech which our adversaries must from now on acknowledge. The first is that future things are sometimes stated as already past. For it befits the Godhead to regard whatever it has decreed as accomplished, because with it there is no distinction of time, since eternity itself directs a uniform state of time in it; and it is more natural to prophetic divination to show what it foresees, while it foresees it, as already seen and so already completed, that is, as in every way certain to come, as through Isaiah: “I gave my back to the scourges, and my cheeks to the palms of the hand, and I did not turn my face away from spitting.” For whether Christ was already then speaking of himself, as we hold, or the prophet of himself, as the Jews hold, what had not yet been done was nonetheless voiced as already past. The other feature will be that many things are foretold figuratively, through riddles, allegories, and parables, to be understood otherwise than as written. For we read that the mountains will drip sweetness, yet not so that you should expect grape syrup from the rocks or boiled-down wine from the cliffs; and we hear of a land flowing with milk and honey, yet not so that you should believe you will ever make cakes and Samian delicacies out of clods of earth. For God did not straightaway promise to be a water-finder and a farmer when he said, “I will put rivers in a thirsty region, and box and cedar in the wilderness”; just as, foretelling the conversion of the nations, “The beasts of the field will bless me, the sirens and the daughters of the sparrows,” he certainly does not mean to bring back happy omens from swallows' chicks and little foxes and those monstrous, fabled songstresses. And why should I say more of this kind? Since even the heretics' apostle interprets the law itself, which allows the ox that treads the grain a free mouth, as said not of oxen but of us; and asserts that the rock which accompanied them to supply drink was Christ; teaching the Galatians likewise that the two accounts of Abraham's sons ran as allegory, and suggesting to the Ephesians that what was declared at the beginning of man, who would leave father and mother and the two would become one flesh, he recognizes as referring to Christ and the church.

1 If these two peculiarities of Jewish literature are sufficiently established for the present, remember, reader, that it has been settled that, when we bring forward anything of this kind, the question is not reopened about the form of Scripture but concerns the state of the case. Since, then, heretical madness presumed that a Christ had come who had never been announced, it followed that it should contend that the Christ who had always been foretold had not yet come; and so it was forced to join with the error of the Jews and build its argument from it, as though the Jews, themselves certain that the one who came was a stranger, not only rejected him as a foreigner but even killed him as an adversary, whereas they would doubtless have recognized him and attended him with every duty of religion if he had been theirs. No doubt a law, not of Rhodes but of Pontus, had provided for that ship-owner that the Jews could not err about their own Christ; when, even if nothing of the kind were found foretold against them, the human condition alone, liable to deception, would surely have persuaded him that the Jews could err, being men, and that no prejudgment should be taken from the opinion of those who may credibly have erred. Moreover, since it was also foretold that they would not recognize Christ and therefore would even put him to death, then he will be the very one who was both unrecognized and put to death by them, against whom they were marked out beforehand to commit such things. If you demand proof of this, I will not open those Scriptures which, declaring that Christ could be put to death, also affirm that he could go unrecognized (for unless he were unrecognized, he could suffer nothing); but, keeping those for the question of the sufferings, it will suffice at present to bring forward those foretellings which meanwhile prove that Christ could go unrecognized, and that briefly, since they show that all power of understanding was taken away from the people by the Creator. “I will take away,” he says, “the wisdom of their wise, and the prudence of their prudent I will hide”; and: “With the ear you will hear and not hear, and with the eyes you will see and not see; for the heart of this people has grown fat, and with their ears they have heard heavily, and their eyes they have shut, so that they do not hear with their ears, see with their eyes, understand with their heart, and turn, so that I would heal them.” They had deserved this dulling of their saving senses, loving God with their lips but in heart standing far off from him. So if Christ was being announced by the Creator, who establishes the thunder and creates the wind and announces his Christ to mankind according to the prophet Joel; if all the hope of the Jews, not to say also of the Gentiles, was directed toward the revelation of Christ, then without doubt it was being shown that they would not recognize or understand what was being announced, that is Christ, the powers of recognition and understanding, wisdom and prudence, having been taken away; that their chief wise men, that is the scribes, and their prudent men, that is the Pharisees, would err about him; and likewise that the people would hear with their ears and not hear, Christ teaching, of course, and see with their eyes and not see, Christ doing signs, of course; according to what is said elsewhere as well: “And who is blind but my servants? And who is deaf but those who rule over them?” And also when he reproaches them through the same Isaiah: “Sons I have begotten and raised up, but they have rejected me; the ox knew its owner and the ass its master's manger, but Israel has not known me and the people has not understood me.” We indeed are certain that Christ always spoke in the prophets (the Spirit of the Creator, as the prophet testifies: “The person of our spirit, Christ the Lord”), who from the beginning, as the Father's deputy, was both heard and seen in the name of God; and we know that such were his words, even then reproaching Israel for what they were foretold to commit against him: “You have forsaken the Lord and provoked the Holy One of Israel to anger.” But if you prefer to refer the whole charge of Jewish ignorance of old not to Christ but rather to God himself, unwilling to grant that even in the past the Word and Spirit, that is, the Creator's Christ, was despised and not recognized by them, even so you are refuted. For since you do not deny that his Christ is the Son and Spirit and substance of the Creator, you must concede that those who did not recognize the Father could not recognize the Son either, by the condition of the same substance; for if its fullness was not understood, much more so the portion, as sharer in the fullness. With these matters thus examined, it is now clear how the Jews both rejected Christ and killed him: not understanding him as a foreign Christ, but not recognizing him as their own. For they could not have understood a foreign one about whom nothing had ever been announced, whereas they could have understood one who had always been foretold. For that alone admits of being understood or not understood which, having the substance of a foretelling, will have the material for either recognition or error; what lacks that material does not allow any outcome of wisdom. And so it was not as the Christ of another god that they turned from him and persecuted him, but only as a man whom they thought a deceiver in his signs and a rival in his teachings; so that they brought the man himself to judgment as their own, that is a Jew, but a subverter and destroyer of Judaism, and punished him by their own law, which they would not have used in judging a stranger. So far are they from seeming to have understood Christ as a stranger, that they did not even judge his humanity as that of a stranger.

1 Now let the heretic learn, along with the Jew himself (it will be more than enough), the reason for the Jew's errors too, from whom he borrowed his leadership in this argument and, the blind led by the blind, has fallen into the same pit. We say that the prophets, by showing two conditions of Christ, marked out beforehand the same number of comings. The one in humility, the first of course, when he was to be led like a sheep to the slaughter, and like a lamb voiceless before the shearer, so not opening his mouth; not even beautiful in appearance. “For we have announced concerning him,” it says, “as a little child, as a root in a thirsty land; and he has no form or glory; and we saw him, and he had no form or beauty, but his form was without honor, falling short of the sons of men; a man under the stroke, and knowing how to bear weakness”; as one set by the Father as a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense; made by him a little lower than the angels; declaring himself a worm and not a man, a reproach of men and the scorn of the people. These marks of lowliness befit the first coming, as those of sublimity befit the second, when he will no longer be a stone of stumbling or a rock of offense, but the chief cornerstone, taken up after rejection and raised to complete the temple, that is, the church; and indeed that stone in Daniel cut from the mountain, which will shatter and grind the image of the kingdoms of the world. Of this coming the same prophet says: “And look, one coming as a son of man with the clouds of heaven came as far as the Ancient of Days. He stood in his sight, and those who stood by brought him near. And there was given to him royal power, and all the nations of the earth according to their kinds, and all glory serving him. And his power is forever, which will not be taken away, and his kingdom, which will not be corrupted.” Then, clearly, he will have a form full of honor and a beauty unfailing beyond the sons of men: “For you are in the bloom of beauty,” it says, “beyond the sons of men; grace is poured out on your lips; therefore God has blessed you forever. Gird your sword upon your thigh, mighty in your bloom and your beauty”; when also the Father, after he made him a little lower than the angels, will crown him with glory and honor and put all things under his feet. Then too those who pierced him will know him, and will beat their breasts, tribe by tribe, because in the past they did not recognize him in the lowliness of the human condition: “He is a man too,” says Jeremiah, “and who will know him?” For also: “His generation,” says Isaiah, “who will declare?” So too in Zechariah, in the person of Jesus, and indeed in the very mystery of the name, the true high priest of the Father, Christ Jesus, is sketched in a twofold condition for the two comings. First he is clothed in filthy garments, that is, in the indignity of passible and mortal flesh, when the devil also opposed him (the instigator, that is, of Judas the betrayer, not to mention his tempter after his baptism too); then he is stripped of his former filth and adorned with a full-length robe, a miter, and a clean turban, that is, with the glory and honor of the second coming. For if I also interpret the two goats that were offered at the fast, do they not also figure both stages of Christ? They were equal and alike, because of the Lord's one appearance, since he will not come in another form, as one who is to be recognized by those by whom he was wounded. But one of them, surrounded with scarlet, cursed, spat upon, torn, and pierced, was cast out by the people outside the city to perdition, marked with the plain signs of the Lord's passion; while the other, offered for sins and given to the priests of the temple for food, set its seal on the proofs of the second appearing, in which, when all sins have been expiated, the priests of the spiritual temple, that is, of the church, would enjoy as it were a public distribution of meat from the Lord's grace, while the rest go fasting from salvation. Since, then, the first coming was foretold as both much obscured by figures and cast down by every indignity, and the second as both manifest and worthy of God, therefore, fixing their eyes on the one alone which they could easily both understand and believe, that is, the second, they were not undeservedly deceived about the more obscure, certainly the less worthy, that is, the first. And so to this day they deny that their Christ has come, because he did not come in sublimity, not knowing that he was to come in humility as well.

1 Let the heretic now stop borrowing poison from the Jew, the asp, as they say, from the viper; let him now vomit up the venom of his own invention, claiming that Christ was a phantom. Except that in this opinion too he will have other forerunners, premature and in a way abortive Marcionites, whom the apostle John declared antichrists, denying that Christ had come in the flesh; not, however, in order to establish the right of another god (for on that point too they would have been branded), but because they had presumed it incredible that God should have flesh. All the more did the antichrist Marcion seize that presumption for himself, being better suited, naturally, to reject the bodily substance of Christ, since he had brought in a god who was neither the author of flesh nor its raiser, supremely good, no doubt, in this too, and utterly unlike the lies and deceits of the Creator. And so his Christ, so as not to lie or deceive and in this way perhaps be counted the Creator's, was not what he seemed and lied about what he was: flesh and not flesh, man and not man; and likewise, I suppose, God and not God. For why should he not have carried a phantom of God as well? Or am I to believe him about his inner substance, when he has been a cheat about his outer one? How will he be held truthful in what is hidden, when he has been found so deceitful in what is open? And how, by mixing in himself the truth of the spirit with the deceit of the flesh, did he make that fellowship of light, that is truth, with darkness, that is deceit, which the apostle denies? Now then, when the flesh of Christ is detected as a lie, it follows that everything done through the flesh of Christ was done by a lie: his meetings, his touching, his living with others, even his mighty works. For if by touching someone he freed him from an affliction, or was touched by someone, what was done bodily cannot be believed to have been truly done without the reality of the body itself. Nothing solid could be accomplished by what is empty, nothing full by what is void: a supposed condition, a supposed action; an imaginary worker, imaginary works. So neither will the sufferings of his Christ deserve belief. For he suffered nothing who did not truly suffer, and a phantom could not truly suffer. The whole work of God, then, is overturned. The whole weight and fruit of the Christian name, the death of Christ, is denied, which the apostle so emphatically commends, as real of course, making it the highest foundation of the gospel, of our salvation, and of his own preaching: “For I delivered to you,” he says, “first of all, that Christ died for our sins, and that he was buried, and that he rose on the third day.” Further, if his flesh is denied, how is his death asserted, which is the passion proper to flesh, as it returns through death into the earth from which it was taken, according to the law of its author? And once death is denied by denying the flesh, there will be no certainty about the resurrection either. For he did not rise, for the same reason that he did not die, namely not having the substance of flesh, to which resurrection belongs as death does. And so, once the resurrection of Christ is weakened, ours too is overturned. For it will not hold, the resurrection for whose sake Christ came, if Christ's does not hold. For just as those who said there is no resurrection of the dead are refuted by the apostle from the resurrection of Christ, so, if the resurrection of Christ does not stand, the resurrection of the dead is also taken away. And so our faith too is empty, and empty the preaching of the apostles. And they are even found to be false witnesses of God, because they testified that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise. And we are still in our sins, and those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished; due to rise again, certainly, but perhaps as a phantom, like Christ.

1 On this question, you who think the Creator's angels should be set against us, as though they too acted in a phantom, of course a supposed flesh, in the presence of Abraham and Lot, and yet truly met with them, ate, and carried out what they had been commanded: first, you will not be admitted to examples from the God whom you are destroying. For the better and more perfect the god you bring in, the less do that God's examples fit him, since unless he is wholly different he will not be better and more perfect at all. Next, know that it is not conceded to you either that the flesh in the angels was supposed; it was of true and solid human substance. For if it was not hard for him to display true senses and actions in a supposed flesh, it was much easier for him to give a true substance of flesh to true senses and actions, as its own author and craftsman. Your god, since he produced no flesh at all, might perhaps fittingly have brought in a phantom of that whose reality he had not been able to make; but my God, who took flesh from the clay and re-formed it into its present quality, not yet from married seed and yet flesh, could equally have built up flesh for the angels too out of any material whatever, he who built even the world out of nothing into so many and such great bodies, and that by a word. And surely, if your god promises men at some time the true substance of angels (“For they will be,” he says, “like angels”), why should my God not have fitted the true substance of men to angels, taken from wherever it was taken? For you will not answer me either where that angelic substance is taken from in your system. It is enough for me to define what befits God: namely the reality of the thing he presented to three witnessing senses, sight, touch, and hearing. It is harder for God to lie than to produce the reality of flesh from wherever he will, even though it was not born. Besides, to other heretics, who lay it down that that flesh in the angels would have had to be born of flesh if it had truly been human, we reply with a sure reason why it was both truly human and unborn. Truly human, because of the truthfulness of God, who is a stranger to lying and deceit, and because they could not be handled in human fashion by men except in human substance. Unborn, because Christ alone was to be born into flesh from flesh, in order to re-form our birth by his own birth, and so also to dissolve our death by his own death, rising again in the flesh in which he was born so that he could also die. And that is why he himself too appeared then with the angels at Abraham's tent in the reality of flesh, but flesh not yet born, because not yet to die, but already learning to live among men. All the more, then, the angels, not appointed to die for us, did not need to have taken on their brief furlough of flesh by being born, since they were not going to lay it down by dying. But wherever it was taken from, and however it was finally laid aside, they did not pretend it. If the Creator makes his angels spirits and his attendants a flaming fire, as truly spirits as fire, he likewise truly made them flesh; so that we may now recall, and announce to the heretics, that it belongs to him who once formed angels into men to promise that he will at some time re-form men into angels.

1 So, since you are not admitted to share in the Creator's examples, as belonging to another and having reasons of their own, I should like you yourself to set out your god's plan in exhibiting his Christ not in the reality of flesh. If he despised it as earthly and, as you people say, stuffed with dung, why did he not likewise scorn its likeness? For no image of a thing that deserves disdain deserves honor: the likeness follows the status. “But how could he live among men except through an image of human substance?” Why not rather through its reality, then, so as truly to live among them, if he had to live among them? How much more worthily would necessity have been served by good faith than by a trick! You make your god wretched enough by this very fact, that he could not exhibit his Christ except in the likeness of an unworthy thing, and one belonging to another at that. To some extent it will be fitting to use unworthy things if they are our own, just as it will not be fitting to use things belonging to another, even if worthy. Why then did he not come in some other, worthier substance, and above all his own, so as not to seem to have needed a thing both unworthy and foreign? If my Creator met with man through a bush and fire as well, and afterwards through a cloud and a pillar, and made use of the bodies of the elements in representations of himself, these examples of divine power show well enough that God did not need to provide either false or even true flesh. But if we look at the truth of the matter, no substance is worthy for God to put on. Whatever he puts on, he himself makes worthy, yet without a lie. And so what sort of thing is it that he should have thought the reality of flesh a disgrace rather than its falsehood? Yet he honored it by feigning it. How great flesh must be, when a phantom of it was necessary to a superior god!

1 Marcion took up all these conjuring tricks of a supposed bodiliness in Christ with this purpose: that his birth too should not be established from the evidence of human substance, and so Christ be claimed for the Creator, as one announced as capable of birth and therefore made of flesh. Very foolish here too, the man from Pontus: as if flesh in God were not more easily believed unborn than false, especially when the Creator's angels, who lived in true flesh and yet unborn, lay the groundwork for that belief. For that Philumene, too, rather persuaded Apelles and the other deserters from Marcion that Christ did carry flesh about in reality, yet flesh of no birth, as having borrowed it from the elements. But if Marcion feared that belief in flesh would also bring in belief in birth, then without doubt one who was seen to be a man was certainly believed to have been born. For a certain woman had cried out, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts you sucked”; and how were his mother and brothers said to be standing outside? Certainly, when he proclaimed himself the Son of Man, he was professing that he was born. We will see about these passages in their proper time. For now, though I have put all these off to the examination of the gospel, still, as I laid down above: if one who was seen to be a man was bound in any case to be believed born, he thought in vain that belief in his birth could be overthrown by the device of imaginary flesh. For what did it profit that both flesh and birth were not real, when they were held to be real? Or if you say, “Let human opinion see to that,” you already honor your god with the title of deceit, if he knew himself to be other than he had made men think. Then you could equally have fitted him with a supposed birth, so as not to run into this question as well. For little women sometimes think themselves pregnant, swollen either by the tribute of blood or by some illness. And surely he should have played the phantom's stage-part through to the end, so that one who had acted the role of the substance itself should not leave out in his dance the origin of the flesh. Plainly you rejected the lie of a birth, for you put forward flesh itself as real. A real birth, no doubt, is the most shameful thing even for God! Come then, declaim against those most holy and venerable works of nature, inveigh against all that you are; destroy the origin of flesh and soul; call the womb a sewer, the workshop for producing so great a living being, that is, man; pursue the uncleanness and the shameful torments of childbirth, and the filthy, anxious, ridiculous outcome of the delivery itself. Yet when you have destroyed all these, to confirm that they are unworthy of God, birth will not be more unworthy than death, nor infancy than the cross, nor nature than punishment, nor flesh than condemnation. If Christ truly suffered these things, to be born was less; if he suffered them by a lie, as a phantom, he could also be born by a lie. These are the chief arguments of Marcion by which he makes Christ another's; I think we have shown well enough that they do not stand at all, while we teach that the reality of the condition in which God exhibited his Christ befits him far more than a lie. If it was reality, it was flesh; if it was flesh, he was born. For the things this heresy attacks are confirmed when the things by which it attacks are destroyed. So if he is to be held fleshly because born, and born because fleshly, because he was not a phantom, then he is to be recognized as the one whom the Creator's prophets announced as coming in the flesh and by birth, as being the Creator's Christ.

1 Challenge me now, as you usually do, over this comparison of Christ with Isaiah, contending that it fits in no respect. “For first,” you say, “Isaiah's Christ will have to be called Emmanuel, and then to take the power of Damascus and the goods seized from Samaria against the king of the Assyrians. But this one who came was neither brought forth under a name of that kind nor engaged in any warfare.” But I will remind you to consider also what belongs with each of the two statements. For the interpretation of Emmanuel is added as well, “God with us,” so that you should look not only at the sound of the name but also at its sense. For the sound, Hebrew, that is “Emmanuel,” belongs to its own nation; but its sense, that is “God with us,” is common to all through translation. Ask, then, whether this phrase, “God with us,” which is “Emmanuel,” has been in use of Christ since Christ appeared. And I think you will not deny it, since you yourself say “God with us,” that is, Emmanuel. Or if you are so foolish that, because with you he is called “God with us” and not “Emmanuel,” you therefore refuse to admit the coming of him whose proper title is to be called Emmanuel, as if this were not also “God with us,” you will find that among the Hebrews the Christians, and indeed the Marcionites, name Emmanuel when they mean to say “God with us”; just as every nation, in whatever sounds it says “God with us,” will be pronouncing Emmanuel, fulfilling the sound in the sense. But if Emmanuel is “God with us,” and “God with us” is Christ, who is even in us (“for as many of you as were dipped into Christ have put on Christ”), then Christ is as properly in the meaning of the name, “God with us,” as in the sound of the name, “Emmanuel.” And so it is established that he who was foretold as Emmanuel has already come, because what Emmanuel signifies has come, that is, “God with us.”

1 You are likewise led by the sound of names when you take “the power of Damascus,” “the goods seized from Samaria,” and “the king of the Assyrians” as if they portended that the Creator's Christ would be a warrior, not noticing what Scripture puts first: “For before the child knows how to call father and mother, he will take the power of Damascus and the goods seized from Samaria against the king of the Assyrians.” You should first look at the indication of age, whether it can present Christ as yet a man, let alone a general. No doubt the infant was to summon men to arms with his wailing and give the signal for battle not with a trumpet but with a rattle, and mark out the enemy not from horse or chariot or wall but from the neck or back of his nurse or carrier, and so subdue Damascus and Samaria instead of the breast! It is another matter if among you people of Pontus the infants of a barbarous nation burst into battle, first oiled, I suppose, in the sun, then armed with swaddling clothes and paid in butter, who know how to throw a lance before they know how to lick. Indeed, if nature nowhere allows this, to serve as a soldier before becoming a man, to take the power of Damascus before knowing the words for father and mother, it follows that the statement must be seen as figurative. “But nature does not allow a virgin to give birth either,” he says, “and yet the prophet is believed.” And rightly; for he laid the groundwork for belief in an incredible thing by giving the reason, that it was to be a sign: “Therefore,” he says, “the Lord will give you a sign: look, a virgin will conceive in the womb and bear a son.” But a sign from God would not have been a sign unless it were some wondrous novelty. Finally, the Jews, whenever they dare to lie in order to throw us down, as though Scripture says not that a virgin but that a young woman will conceive and bear, are refuted by this: that an everyday thing, the pregnancy and childbirth of a young woman, can have no appearance of a sign. The virgin mother, then, appointed for a sign, will rightly be believed; but the warrior infant not equally, for the ground of a sign does not operate here. Rather, after the sign attached to the new birth, the next stage of the infant is then declared in another place, as one who is to eat honey and butter (and this is surely not for a sign, for it belongs to infancy too), and also to take the power of Damascus and the goods seized from Samaria against the king of the Assyrians. Keep to the measure of his age and look for the sense of the prophecy; indeed, give back to the gospel of truth what you took from it as a later arrival, and the prophecy is understood as clearly as it is reported fulfilled. For let those magi of the East stand firm, honoring the newborn infancy of Christ with gold and incense, and the infant has taken the power of Damascus without battle and weapons. For besides what is known to everyone, that the power of the East, that is its strength and resources, used to abound in gold and spices, it is certainly the Creator's way to make gold the power of other nations too, as through Zechariah: “And Judah will take a stand at Jerusalem and will gather all the strength of the peoples all around, gold and silver.” And of that gift of gold David too says: “And there will be given to him of the gold of Arabia”; and again: “The kings of the Arabs and of Sheba will offer him gifts.” For the East generally held magi to be kings, and Damascus was formerly considered part of Arabia, before it was transferred to Syrophoenicia when the Syrias were divided; whose power Christ then took by taking its tokens, namely gold and spices. And the goods seized from Samaria were the magi themselves, who, when they had recognized him, honored him with gifts, and on bended knee worshiped him as God and king, under the witness of the star that pointed the way and led them, became captives taken from Samaria, that is of idolatry, by believing, of course, in Christ. For he marked idolatry by the name of Samaria, as disgraced for the idolatry by which it had then fallen away from God under King Jeroboam. Nor is this new for the Creator, to use a figurative transfer of names on the ground of comparable crimes. For he calls the rulers of the Jews rulers of Sodom, and the people itself the people of Gomorrah; and likewise elsewhere, “Your father,” he says, “was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite,” on account of like impiety, though he had once called them his own sons: “Sons I have begotten and raised up.” So too Egypt is sometimes understood by him as the whole world, under the charge of superstition and curse. So too Babylon, in our John as well, is a figure of the city of Rome, as likewise great, proud in its empire, and warring down the saints of God. It is by this usage, then, that he titled the magi too with the name of Samaritans, stripped of what they had held in common with the Samaritans, as we said, idolatry. And by “against the king of the Assyrians” understand “against Herod,” whom the magi indeed opposed at that time by not reporting to him about Christ, whom he was seeking to seize.

1 This interpretation of ours will be helped when, supposing Christ a warrior elsewhere too because of the names of certain weapons and words of that kind, you are refuted by comparison with the sense of the rest as well. “Gird your sword,” says David, “upon your thigh.” But what do you read of Christ just before? “You are in the bloom of beauty beyond the sons of men; grace is poured out on your lips.” It makes me laugh, if the one he was girding with a sword for war he was flattering about the bloom of his beauty and the grace of his lips. So too, adding, “and stretch out, and prosper, and reign,” he went on: “because of truth and gentleness and justice.” For who will work these things with a sword, and not rather their opposites, deceit, harshness, and injustice, the proper business of battles? Let us see, then, whether that sword is not a different one, since its action is different. For the apostle John too in the Apocalypse describes a sword coming out of the mouth of God, two-edged and very sharp, which must be understood as the divine Word: two-edged by the two testaments of the law and the gospel, sharp with wisdom, hostile to the devil, arming us against the spiritual enemies of wickedness and of all lust, cutting us off even from those dearest to us for the name of God. But if you will not acknowledge John, you have our common teacher Paul, girding our loins with truth and the breastplate of righteousness, and shoeing us with the preparation of the gospel of peace, not of war, bidding us take up the shield of faith, with which we can quench all the fiery darts of the devil, and the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, “which is,” he says, “the word of God.” This is the sword which the Lord himself came to send on the earth, not peace. If he is your Christ, then he too is a warrior. If he is not a warrior, brandishing an allegorical sword, then the Creator's Christ too in the psalm could, without anything warlike, figuratively wear the sword of the Word, and to him the bloom just mentioned and grace of lips fit; the sword with which he was already then being strapped to His thigh in David, and which he was at some time to send on the earth. For this is what it says: “and stretch out, and prosper, and reign”: stretching out the Word into all the earth for the calling of all the nations; to prosper by the success of the faith by which he was received; and reigning from then on, in that he conquered death by the resurrection. “And your right hand,” it says, “will lead you wonderfully”: the power, that is, of spiritual grace, by which the knowledge of Christ is brought out. “Your arrows are sharp”: the precepts flying everywhere, and threats, and exposures of the heart, pricking and piercing every conscience. “Peoples will fall under you”: in worship, of course. Such is the Creator's Christ, mighty in war and bearing arms; so too now he receives spoils, not of Samaria only but of all the nations. Recognize figurative spoils too, when you have learned that his arms are allegorical. And so, since the Lord speaks figuratively in this way and the apostle writes so, we are not rash in using such interpretations, examples of which even our adversaries admit; and so the Christ who came will be Isaiah's precisely in so far as he was not a warrior, since he is not foretold as such by Isaiah.

1 So much, then, for the question of the flesh, and through it of the birth, and meanwhile of the one name Emmanuel. But as to the other names, and above all “Christ,” what will the opposing side reply? If with you the name of Christ is as common as that of God, so that it is fitting for the son of either god to be called Christ, just as either father is called God, a sure reason will stand against this argument. For the name “God,” as belonging by nature to divinity, can be shared with all to whom divinity is ascribed, even idols, as the apostle says: “For there are those who are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth.” But the name “Christ,” coming to him not from nature but from an arrangement, becomes the proper possession of him by whom the arrangement is found to have been made, and is not open to be shared with another god, least of all a rival who has his own arrangement, to which he will owe names of his own too. For what sort of thing is it that people who have devised different arrangements of two gods allow a partnership of names amid the discord of their arrangements, when no proof of two rival gods would be more at hand than if, in their arrangements, a difference of names were found as well? For no state of difference is marked except by distinct designations. When these are lacking, then if ever the Greek catachresis, the misuse of another's term, comes to the rescue. But with God, I think, nothing ought to be lacking, nor his arrangement to be furnished from another's. Who is this god, who claims names for his son too from the Creator, names not merely belonging to another but old and commonplace, which even so would not suit a new and unknown god? How, finally, does he teach that a new patch is not sewn onto an old garment, nor new wine entrusted to old wineskins, when he himself is sewn onto and put into old names? How does he cut the gospel off from the law, when he is clothed in the whole law, namely in the name of Christ? Who prevented him from being called something else, since he preached something else and came from somewhere else, when for this very reason he did not take on the reality of a body, for fear that He might be believed to be the Creator's Christ? It was futile for him to refuse to seem to be the one whose name he chose to bear, since even if he had truly had a body, he would all the more not have seemed the Creator's Christ if he had not been so called. But as it is, he rejects the substance whose name he took, though he would even prove the substance from the name. For if “Christ” means “anointed,” and to be anointed is certainly something that happens to a body, one who had no body could not be anointed at all; and one who could not be anointed at all could in no way be called Christ. It is another matter if he affected a phantom of the name too. “But how,” he says, “could he creep into the faith of the Jews except through a name customary and familiar among them?” You describe an inconstant or crafty god: to advance anything by deceiving is a plan either of distrust or of malice. The false prophets acted far more freely and simply, coming in the name of their own god against the Creator. But I do not find that this plan worked either, since they more readily believed him to be either their own Christ, or rather some deceiver, than the Christ of another god, as the gospel will prove.

1 Now, if he snatched up the name of Christ as a petty thief snatches a gift-basket, why did he also wish to be called Jesus, a name not so much looked for among the Jews? For if we, having by God's grace attained an understanding of his mysteries, recognize that this name too was destined for Christ, it does not follow that the matter will be known to the Jews as well, from whom wisdom has been taken away. Indeed, to this day they hope for a Christ, not a Jesus, and they interpret Elijah as the Christ rather than Jesus. Why then did he also come in that name in which the Christ was not presumed to come? He could have come in that name alone which alone was presumed. But when he mixed the two, the expected and the unexpected, both his plans are defeated. For if he was called Christ in order to creep in for the time being as though he were the Creator's, the name Jesus is against it, because Jesus was not expected in the Creator's Christ; or if he was called Jesus to be taken for another's, the name Christ does not allow it, because a Christ belonging to anyone but the Creator was not expected. Which of these can stand, I do not know. But both will stand in the Creator's Christ, in whom the name Jesus is also found. “How?” you say. Learn this too with your partners in error, the Jews. When Hoshea son of Nun was appointed successor to Moses, he is certainly changed from his former name and begins to be called Jesus. “Certainly,” you say. This we say was first a figure of what was to come. For since Jesus Christ was to lead the second people (which we are, born in the deserts of the world) into the land of promise flowing with milk and honey, that is, into the possession of eternal life, than which nothing is sweeter; and since this was to come about not through Moses, that is, not through the discipline of the law, but through Jesus, that is, through the grace of the gospel, when we had been circumcised with a knife of stone, that is, with the precepts of Christ (for the rock is Christ): therefore that man who was being prepared as an image of this mystery was also consecrated with the figure of the Lord's name, being named Jesus. Christ himself testified even then that this name was his own when he was speaking to Moses. For who was speaking, if not the Spirit of the Creator, who is Christ? When, then, he said to the people in his command: “Look, I send my angel before your face, to guard you on the way and bring you into the land which I have prepared for you; attend to him and hear him, and do not disobey him; for he will not hide from you, since my name is upon him,” he called him an angel because of the greatness of the mighty works he was to perform, and because of the office of a prophet, announcing the divine will; but he called him Jesus because of the mystery of his own future name. For he confirmed as his own the name which he himself had given him, since he had commanded that from then on he be called not Angel nor Hoshea but Jesus. So if both names fit the Creator's Christ, then both are unfitting for a Christ not the Creator's, as is the rest of his course. In short, from here on a sure and just prescription must be set between us, necessary to both sides, by which it is determined that the Christ of another god ought to have nothing at all in common with the Creator's Christ. For you must maintain the difference just as we must oppose it, since neither will you be able to prove that another god's Christ has come unless you show him to be far different from the Creator's Christ, nor will we be able to claim him for the Creator unless we show him to be such as the Creator appointed. As for the names, we have now closed the matter: I claim Christ for myself, I defend Jesus as mine.

1 Let us compare the rest of his course with the Scriptures. Isaiah is at hand again: “We announced,” he says, “before him: like a little child, like a root in a thirsty land; and he has no form or glory; and we saw him, and he had no form or beauty, but his form was without honor, falling short of all men”; just as, above, the Father's voice to the Son: “As many will be astonished at you, so your form will be without glory from men.” Whatever that little body was, what bearing and appearance did it have? If without glory, if lowly, if without honor, he will be my Christ; for such was he announced to be in bearing and appearance. For even if in David he is in the bloom of beauty beyond the sons of men, it is in that allegorical state of spiritual grace, when He wears the sword of the Word, which is truly his form and beauty and glory. But in his bodily bearing, in the same prophet he is even a worm and not a man, a reproach of men and the scorn of the people. Nor were such things announced of his inner quality. For if the fullness of the Spirit rested in him, I recognize the rod from the root of Jesse: its flower will be my Christ, on whom, according to Isaiah, rested the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and strength, the spirit of knowledge and piety, the spirit of the fear of God. For the totality of spiritual endowments fitted no man except Christ, who is likened to a flower because of the grace of the Spirit, and regarded as coming from Jesse’s line through Mary, and so to be counted from it. But I press the point at issue: if you grant him a bent toward all humility, patience, and calm, then by these too he will be Isaiah's Christ: “a man under the stroke, and knowing how to bear weakness,” who “was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and like a lamb before the shearer did not open his mouth,” who “neither strove nor cried out, nor was his voice heard outside,” who “did not break the bruised reed,” that is, the shaken faith of the Jews, who “did not quench the burning flax,” that is, the momentary ardor of the nations; he cannot be other than the one who was foretold. His action too must be recognized by the rule of the Scriptures, distinguished, if I am not mistaken, by a twofold work: preaching and power. But I shall arrange both headings so that, since I have decided to sift Marcion's own gospel as well, the particular kinds of teachings and signs are put off to that point, as if to the matter in hand; here, however, let us complete in general the course we began, showing for the present that Christ is announced as a preacher through Isaiah: “For who among you,” he says, “fears God, let him hear the voice of his Son”; and likewise as a healer: “For he himself took away our weaknesses and carried our sicknesses.”

1 It is over his death, I suppose, that you plainly try to introduce a difference, denying that the suffering of the cross was foretold of the Creator's Christ, and arguing besides that it is not to be believed that the Creator exposed his Son to that kind of death which he himself had cursed: “Cursed,” he says, “is everyone who hangs on a tree.” But I rightly put off the meaning of this curse and treat only the foretelling of the cross, which is now the main question, since in other cases too the proof of the facts comes before the explanation. I shall first teach from the figures. And indeed this mystery, above all, had to be figured in prophecy: the more incredible it was, the more it would be a stumbling-block if it were foretold nakedly; and the more magnificent it was, the more it needed to be veiled, so that the difficulty of understanding might seek the grace of God. So first of all Isaac, when he was given up by his father as a sacrifice and himself carried the wood, was even then signifying Christ's death, who was surrendered by the Father as a victim and bore the wood of his own passion. Joseph too was to figure Christ, if only in this (not to delay my course), that he suffered persecution from his brothers because of God's favor, as Christ did from the Jews, his brothers according to the flesh. When he is blessed by his father in these words too: “His beauty is that of a bull; his horns are the horns of a unicorn; with them he will toss the nations all together to the very end of the earth,” it was certainly not a one-horned rhinoceros or a two-horned minotaur that was meant, but Christ was signified in him: a bull because of his twofold dealing, fierce to some as judge, gentle to others as savior; whose horns would be the extremities of the cross. For in a ship's yard too, which is part of a cross, the ends are called horns, and the upright post in the middle is the unicorn. By this power of the cross, in short, and horned in this way, he both now tosses all nations through faith, lifting them from earth to heaven, and will then toss them through judgment, casting them down from heaven to earth. He will also be the bull elsewhere in the same Scripture, when Jacob spiritually invokes a curse on Simeon and Levi, that is, on the scribes and Pharisees (for their lineage is derived from them): “Simeon and Levi have accomplished iniquity out of their own choice,” that is, the choice by which they persecuted Christ; “let my soul not come into their council, and let my heart not rest in their assembly, because in their anger they killed men,” that is, the prophets, “and in their desire they hamstrung a bull,” that is, Christ, whom, after the murder of the prophets, they fastened to the cross and raged against his sinews with nails. Otherwise it would be pointless, after murders, to reproach them with the butchery of some ox. Next, Moses: why did he pray sitting down with hands outstretched only at the time when Joshua was fighting against Amalek, when in so alarming a situation he should rather have commended his prayer with bent knees, hands beating his breast, and face rolling on the ground? Unless it was that there, where the name of the Lord was fighting (the Lord who was one day to fight against the devil), the form of the cross too was necessary, by which Jesus would bring back the victory. Why again did the same Moses, after forbidding the likeness of anything whatever, set up a bronze serpent placed on a pole, in the posture of one hanging, as a saving sight? Was he not here too aiming at the power of the Lord's cross, by which the serpent, the devil, was exposed, and for everyone bitten by the spiritual snakes who yet looked upon it and believed in it, healing from the bites of sins, and thereafter salvation, was proclaimed?

1 Come now, if you have read in David, “The Lord has reigned from the tree,” I wait to see what you understand by it; unless perhaps you think some carpenter king of the Jews is meant, and not Christ, who, having overcome death by his passion on the tree, has reigned from then on. For if death reigned from Adam until Christ, why should Christ not be said to have reigned from the tree, since by dying on the tree of the cross he shut out the reign of death? So too Isaiah: “For a child is born to us” (what is new in that, if he does not speak of the Son of God?) “and is given to us, whose government is upon his shoulder.” What king at all displays the emblem of his power on his shoulder, and not either a diadem on his head, or a scepter in his hand, or some mark of his own dress? But Christ Jesus alone, the new King of the new ages, of a new glory, has lifted up his power and his majesty on his shoulder, namely the cross, so that, according to the earlier prophecy, the Lord might reign from then on from the tree. This tree Jeremiah too suggests to you, foretelling what the Jews would say: “Come, let us cast wood into his bread,” that is, into his body. For so the Lord revealed in your gospel too, calling the bread his body, so that from this you may understand that he gave the figure of his body to the bread, whose body the prophet long before figured as bread, the Lord himself being later to interpret this mystery. If you still ask for the foretelling of the Lord's cross, the twenty-first psalm can now satisfy you, containing the whole passion of Christ, who even then sang of his glory: “They dug my hands and my feet,” which are the particular atrocities of the cross. And again, when he implores the Father's help: “Save me,” he says, “from the mouth of the lion,” namely of death, “and my lowliness from the horns of the unicorn,” that is, from the ends of the cross, as we showed above. Neither David himself suffered this cross, nor any king of the Jews; so do not think the passion of any other is prophesied but his who alone was so notably crucified by the people. Now even if heretical hardness rejects and laughs at all these interpretations, I will concede to it that no cross of Christ is signified by the Creator, since not even from this will it prove that the one who was crucified is another; unless perhaps it shows that this death of his was foretold by its own god, so that a difference of passions, and through that of persons too, may be established from a difference of foretellings. Besides, since not even its Christ was foretold, let alone his cross, the prophecy of his death alone is enough to point to my Christ. For since the manner of death was not stated, it could have come about through a cross too, and would then have to be assigned to another only if it had been foretold of another. Unless he will not have even the death of my Christ prophesied; all the more should he blush, if he announces that his own Christ died, whom he denies was born, but denies that mine is mortal, whom he confesses capable of birth. But I want to show the death and burial and resurrection of my Christ with one saying of Isaiah: “His burial has been taken away from the midst.” For neither would he have been buried unless he had died, nor would his burial have been taken away from the midst except through resurrection. Finally he added: “Therefore he will himself inherit many and will divide the goods seized from many, because his soul was handed over to death.” For with the reason for this favor shown, namely for the wrong of the death that was to be healed, it is likewise shown that he would obtain these things after death, namely through resurrection.

1 It is enough so far to have run through the course of Christ for the present on these points. Proved to be such as he was announced, he ought not to be held to be other than the one who was announced as such; so that now, from this agreement between his history and the Creator's Scriptures, belief ought also to be restored to those things, on the prejudgment of the greater part, which are either brought into doubt or denied by the opposing view. We now build further on this the equally matching things from the Creator's Scriptures which were foretold as to come after Christ. For this arrangement too would not be found fulfilled if he had not come, after whom it was to take place. Look at all the nations emerging from then on out of the whirlpool of human error to God the Creator, to God the Christ; and deny, if you dare, that it was prophesied. But at once the Father's promise in the psalms will meet you: “You are my Son, today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance and the ends of the earth as your possession.” You cannot claim that David is his son rather than Christ, or that the ends of the earth were promised to David, who reigned within the one nation of the Jews, rather than to Christ, who has now taken the whole world by the faith of his gospel. So too through Isaiah: “Look, I have given you as a covenant of the race, as a light of the nations, to open the eyes of the blind,” namely of those who wander, “to release the bound from their chains,” that is, to free them from their sins, “and from the prison cell,” that is, of death, “those who sit in darkness,” namely of ignorance. If these things come about through Christ, they will have been prophesied of none other than the one through whom they come about. Likewise elsewhere: “Look, I have set him as a witness to the nations, a ruler and commander to the nations; nations which do not know you will call upon you, and peoples will flee to you.” Nor will you interpret this of David, because he said first: “And I will make with you an everlasting covenant, the holy and sure things of David.” On the contrary, from this you should rather understand Christ, traced to David by descent according to the flesh, because of the lineage of the virgin Mary. For it is about this promise that an oath is sworn to David in the psalm: “Of the fruit of your womb I will set upon your throne.” What womb is this? David's own? Certainly not, for David was not going to give birth. Nor his wife's either; for he would not have said, “of the fruit of your womb,” but rather “of the fruit of your wife's womb.” But by speaking of his own womb, it remains that he pointed to someone of his line, of whose womb the fruit would be the flesh of Christ, which blossomed from Mary's womb. And that is why he named only the fruit of the womb, as properly of the womb, as though of the womb alone and not also of a husband; and he referred the womb itself to David, the head of the line and father of the family. For since he could not assign the virgin's womb to a husband, he assigned it to the forefather. So the new covenant which is found today in Christ will be the one which the Creator was then promising, calling “the holy and sure things of David” what belonged to Christ, since Christ is from David. For the prophet Nathan too, in the second book of Kingdoms, makes a promise to David for his seed, “which will be,” he says, “from his own womb.” If you explain this simply of Solomon, you will make me laugh: David will seem to have given birth to Solomon! Is not Christ signified here too, the seed of David from that womb which would be from David, that is, Mary's? For Christ was the one who would rather build the house of God, namely a holy humanity, a better temple, in which the Spirit of God would dwell; and Christ rather than Solomon, the son of David, was to be the Son of God. Finally, the throne forever and the kingdom forever fit Christ rather than Solomon, a king for a time. And from Christ the mercy of God did not depart, while upon Solomon even the anger of God came, after his luxury and idolatry, for Satan raised up against him an Edomite enemy. Since, then, none of these things fits Solomon but Christ, the rationale of our interpretations will be sure, the very outcome of events proving that they were foretold of Christ. And so in him will be the holy and sure things of David; him God set as a witness to the nations, not David; as ruler and commander of the nations, not David, who ruled over Israel alone. It is Christ whom the nations that did not know him call upon today, and to Christ the peoples flee today, whom they formerly did not know. What you see happening cannot be called future.

1 So too you cannot sustain that objection of yours to distinguish two Christs, as though the Jewish Christ were appointed by the Creator only to gather back the people from the dispersion, while yours was bestowed by the supremely good god to set free the whole human race; since, after all, the Christians of the Creator are found to be earlier than Marcion's, all peoples having been called into his kingdom from the time when God reigned from the tree, when there was as yet no Cerdo, let alone Marcion. But refuted about the calling of the nations, you now seek to turn it into proselytes who pass over from the nations to the Creator; whereas the proselytes, being of a different and distinct status, are named separately by the prophet (“Look,” says Isaiah, “proselytes will come to you through me,” showing that the proselytes too would come to God through Christ), and the nations, which is what we are, likewise have their own designation, as hoping in Christ: “And in his name,” he says, “the nations will hope.” But the proselytes, whom you substitute in the prophecy of the nations, do not usually hope in the name of Christ but in the ordinance of Moses, from whom their instruction comes. The choosing of the nations, on the other hand, arose from the last days. Isaiah says in these very words: “And it will be in the last days that the mountain of the Lord will be manifest,” namely the majesty of God, “and the house of God on the tops of the mountains,” namely Christ, the universal temple of God in which God is worshiped, established over all the heights of virtues and powers; “and all nations will come to it, and many will go and say: Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of the God of Jacob, and he will announce to us his way and we will walk in it; for from Zion will go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” This will be the way of the new law, the gospel, and of the new word, in Christ, no longer in Moses. “And he will judge among the nations,” namely concerning their error, “and will refute a great people,” first of all the Jews themselves and the proselytes, “and they will beat their swords into plows and their spears into sickles,” that is, they will turn the dispositions of harmful minds and hostile tongues, and of all malice and blasphemy, into pursuits of moderation and peace; “and nation will not take up sword against nation,” the sword of discord, that is, “and they will no longer learn to make war,” that is, to carry out enmities; so that here too you may learn that Christ was promised not as mighty in war but as bringing peace. Either deny that these things were prophesied, when they are seen before your eyes, or that they are fulfilled, when they are read; or if you deny neither, they will have been fulfilled in him of whom they were prophesied. For look further at the very entry and course of the calling into the nations, from the last days, as they approach God the Creator; not into proselytes, whose choosing belongs rather to the first days. For it was the apostles who brought in this faith.

1 You have the work of the apostles foretold too: “How timely are the feet of those who bring good news of peace, who bring good news of good things,” not of war or of evil. The psalm answers: “Their sound has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the earth,” as they carried about the law that went forth from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, so that what is written might come to pass: “And those who were far from my righteousness have drawn near to my righteousness and truth.” When the apostles prepared themselves for this task, did they renounce the elders, the rulers, and the priests of the Jews, or not? “Yes indeed,” he says, “as preachers of another god.” On the contrary, of that very same God whose Scripture they were at that time fulfilling: “Depart, depart,” cries Isaiah, “go out from there and touch nothing unclean” (namely, blasphemy against Christ); “go out from the midst of her” (the synagogue, of course); “be separated, you who carry the vessels of the Lord.” For already, according to what is written above, the Lord had revealed his holy arm, that is, Christ, by his power, before the nations, so that all nations and the ends of the earth might see the salvation that was from God. So too, departing from Judaism itself, when they exchanged the bonds and burdens of the law for the freedom of the gospel, they were carrying out the psalm: “Let us burst their bonds and cast their yoke from us”; certainly after “the nations raged and the peoples meditated vain things; the kings of the earth stood up and the rulers gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ.” What then did the apostles suffer? “Every iniquity of persecution,” you say, “at the hands of the Creator's men, of course, as adversaries of the one they preached.” And why does the Creator, if he was the adversary of Christ, not only foretell that his apostles would suffer this, but also reproach it? For he would neither foretell the course of another god, of whom, as you people will have it, he was ignorant, nor reproach what he had himself brought about: “See how the righteous man perishes, and no one takes it to heart, and righteous men are taken away, and no one notices; for the righteous man has been taken away from the face of injustice.” Who, if not Christ? “Come,” they say, “let us take away the righteous man, because he is useless to us.” So, stating beforehand and adding afterwards that Christ likewise suffered, he prophesied that his righteous ones would suffer the same, the apostles as well as all the faithful after them; sealed, namely, with that mark of which Ezekiel speaks: “The Lord says to me: Pass through the midst of the gate, in the midst of Jerusalem, and put the sign Tau on the foreheads of the men.” For this very letter, the Greek Tau, our T, is the form of the cross, which he foretold would be on our foreheads in the true and catholic Jerusalem, in which the twenty-first psalm, speaking in the person of Christ himself to the Father, sings that Christ's brothers, the sons of God, would give glory to God: “I will declare your name to my brothers; in the midst of the church I will sing a hymn to you” (for what was to be done today in his name and Spirit he rightly foretold as to be done by himself); and a little further on: “From you is my praise in the great church”; and in the sixty-seventh: “In the churches bless the Lord God”; so that the prophecy of Micah might likewise agree: “My will is not in you, says the Lord, and I will not accept your sacrifices; for from the rising of the sun to its setting my name is glorified among the nations, and in every place a sacrifice is offered to my name, a pure sacrifice,” namely giving glory, blessing, praise, and hymns. Since all these things are found in your church too, the sealing of foreheads, the sacraments of the churches, and the purity of the sacrifices, you ought now to burst out and say that the Spirit of the Creator prophesied of your Christ.

1 Now, since along with the Jews you deny that their Christ has come, consider also their own end, which they were foretold to suffer after Christ because of the impiety with which they both despised and killed him. For first, from the day when, according to Isaiah, man threw away his abominations of gold and silver, which they made to worship vain and harmful things, that is, from the time when the human race, the truth having been made clear through Christ, threw away its idols, see whether what follows has not been fulfilled. For “the Lord of Hosts took away from Judea and from Jerusalem,” among other things, “both the prophet and the wise master builder,” namely the Holy Spirit, who builds the church, that is, the temple and house and city of God. For from then on the grace of God ceased among them, and “the clouds were commanded not to rain showers on the vineyard of Sorek,” that is, the heavenly benefits were commanded not to come to the house of Israel. For it had produced thorns, with which it had crowned the Lord, and not righteousness but an outcry, by which it had forced him onto the cross. And so, the dews of spiritual gifts being withdrawn, “the law and the prophets were until John.” Then, when through their persistent fury the name of the Lord was blasphemed through them, as it is written, “Because of you my name is blasphemed among the nations” (for the slander began with them), and when they had not understood the intervening time from Tiberius to Vespasian as given for repentance, “their land was made desolate, their cities burned with fire, strangers devour their country before their eyes; the daughter of Zion is left like a watchtower in a vineyard or a hut in a cucumber field,” ever since, that is, “Israel did not know the Lord and the people did not understand him,” but “forsook him and provoked the Holy One of Israel to anger.” So too the conditional threat of the sword, “If you are unwilling and do not hear me, the sword will devour you,” will prove that it was Christ, by not hearing whom they perished; who also in the fifty-eighth psalm asks the Father to scatter them, “Scatter them in your power”; who again, through Isaiah, concluding his speech about their burning, says, “Because of me these things have happened to you; you will lie down in anguish.” Quite pointless, if they suffered these things not because of him who had declared they would suffer because of him, but because of the Christ of another god. And yet, I say, you people claim that the Christ of another god was driven to the cross by the Creator's virtues and powers, as by rivals. But see, he is shown to be avenged by the Creator: “And the worst were given for his burial,” namely those who had asserted that it had been stolen, “and the rich for his death,” namely those who had bought the betrayal from Judas and from the soldiers false testimony that the body had been stolen. So either these things did not happen to the Jews because of him (but you are refuted by the agreement of the sense of the Scriptures with the outcome of events and the order of the times), or, if they happened to them because of him, the Creator could only avenge his own Christ, since he would rather have rewarded the Jews if they had killed his adversary. Certainly, if the Creator's Christ has not yet come, because of whom they are foretold to suffer these things, then they will suffer them when he comes. And where then will be the daughter of Zion to be left forsaken, when today there is none? Where the cities to be burned, which are already in ruins? Where the scattering of the nation, which is already in exile? Give back to Judea the state in which the Creator's Christ may find it, and then contend that another has come. And again, what sort of thing is it that the Creator let into his heaven one whom he was going to kill on his earth, the more honorable and glorious region of his kingdom having been violated, his very court and citadel trampled? Or was this rather what he aimed at? Plainly a jealous God. Yet he won. Blush, you who believe in a defeated god! What will you hope for from one who could not protect himself? For either he was overwhelmed through weakness by the Creator's powers and men, or through malice, to fasten so great a crime on them by his forbearance.

1 “Rather,” you say, “what I hope for from him is something that itself serves as evidence of the difference: the kingdom of God, an eternal and heavenly possession. But your Christ promises the Jews their former state through the restoration of their land, and after life has run its course, refreshment in Abraham’s embrace among the dead below.” most good God, if when appeased he gives back what he had taken away when angry! your god, who both strikes and heals, creates evils and makes peace! a god merciful even as far as the underworld! But of Abraham’s embrace in its own time. As for the restoration of Judea, which the Jews themselves hope for just as it is described, led on by the names of places and regions, how an allegorical interpretation applies spiritually to Christ and the church, its condition and its fruit, would take long to pursue, and has been set out in another work, which we entitle On the Hope of the Faithful; and at present it is idle for this reason too, that the question is not about an earthly but about a heavenly promise. For we do confess that a kingdom is promised to us on earth, but before heaven, and in another state: namely after the resurrection, for a thousand years, in the city of divine workmanship, Jerusalem, brought down from heaven, which the apostle too designates as “our mother above”; and when he declares that our politeuma, that is, our citizenship, is in heaven, he certainly assigns it to some heavenly city. This city Ezekiel knew, the apostle John saw, and the word of the New Prophecy, which belongs to our faith, bears witness to it, so that it even foretold that an image of the city would be seen as a sign before its manifestation. This was in fact fulfilled very recently during the eastern expedition. For it is established, even by heathen witnesses, that in Judea for forty days a city hung from the sky in the early morning hours, the whole appearance of its walls fading as the day advanced, and at other times, close at hand, there was none. This city, we say, has been provided by God for receiving the saints at their resurrection and refreshing them with an abundance of all goods, spiritual ones of course, in compensation for those which we have either despised or lost in the world; since it is both just and worthy of God that his servants should rejoice there too, where they were also afflicted for his name. This is the plan of the kingdom beneath heaven. After its thousand years, within which period the resurrection of the saints is completed, as they rise sooner or later according to their merits, then, when the destruction of the world and the conflagration of judgment have taken place, we shall be changed in an instant into angelic substance, namely by that putting on of incorruption over us, and be transferred into the heavenly kingdom. This kingdom is now being discussed as though it were not foretold by the Creator, and so proved a Christ of another god, by whom it was first and alone revealed. Learn now, then, both that it was foretold by the Creator and that, even without foretelling, it is to be believed of the Creator. What do you think? When the seed of Abraham, after the first promise in which it is promised to be like the multitude of the sand, is also destined to be like the stars, are these not tokens of both an earthly and a heavenly arrangement? When Isaac, blessing his son Jacob, says, “May God give you of the dew of heaven and of the fatness of the earth,” are these not examples of both kinds of bounty? Indeed, the very structure of that blessing must be noted here too. For with Jacob, who is a figure of the later and preferred people, that is, of us, the first promise is of heavenly dew, the second of earthly fatness. For we are first invited to heavenly things when we are torn away from the world, and so are found afterwards to obtain earthly things as well. And your gospel too has: “Seek first the kingdom of God, and these things will be added to you.” But to Esau he puts the earthly blessing first and adds the heavenly, saying, “Your dwelling will be of the fatness of the earth, and of the dew of heaven.” For the arrangement of the Jews, in Esau, the elder by birth but later in affection of the sons, first steeped in earthly goods through the law, is afterwards led to heavenly things by believing through the gospel. And when Jacob dreams of a ladder fixed on the earth up to heaven, and angels, some ascending and some descending, and the Lord leaning upon it from above, would we be rash, perhaps, to interpret this ladder as showing that the way to heaven, by which some arrive and from which others fall, has been established by the Lord’s judgment? And why, when he woke up and was first struck with awe at the place, does he turn to interpreting the dream? For when he had said, “How terrible is this place!” he says, “This is nothing else but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” For he had seen Christ the Lord, who is the temple of God and also the gate through whom heaven is entered. And certainly he would not have named a gate of heaven if heaven is not entered with the Creator. But there is a gate that receives and leads on, and a way already paved by Christ, of whom Amos says, “who builds his ascent into heaven,” certainly not for himself alone, but also for his own, who will be with him. “For you will surround yourself with them,” he says, “like the ornament of a bride.” So the Spirit marvels at those who by that ascent are making for the heavenly kingdoms, saying, “They fly like kites, they fly like clouds, and like young doves to me,” that is, simply, as doves. “For we shall be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord,” according to the apostle (the Son of Man, namely, coming in the clouds, according to Daniel), “and so we shall always be with the Lord,” both on earth and in heaven, the Lord who, because of those ungrateful for both promises, calls even the elements themselves to witness: “Hear, heaven, and give ear, earth.” And for my part, even if Scripture had not so often stretched out to me the hand of heavenly hope, I would have a sufficient prejudgment in favor of this promise too, in that I already hold earthly grace; I would expect something from heaven as well from the God of heaven as of earth. So I would believe that the Christ who promises higher things belongs to him who had promised lower ones; who had made proofs of the greater from the lesser; who had reserved for Christ alone the proclamation of this perhaps unheard-of kingdom, so that earthly glory was announced through his servants, but the heavenly through the Lord himself. But you argue from this too for another Christ, because he announces a new kingdom. First you must bring forward some example of his bounty, so that I may not rightly doubt the trustworthiness of so great a promise, which I hope for (for I have learned it); or rather, before all else, you must prove that he whom you proclaim as promising heavenly things has some heaven. As it is, you invite me to dinner and do not show me the house; you allege a kingdom and do not point out the palace. Does your Christ promise a heavenly kingdom without having a heaven, just as he presented himself as a man without having flesh? phantom through and through! great conjuring trick, even of the promise!