Against Marcion, Book 4

1 Every opinion and every contrivance of the impious and sacrilegious Marcion we now challenge before his gospel itself, which he made his own by tampering with it. And to establish credit for it, he devised a sort of dowry for it: a work called Antitheses from its oppositions of contrary statements, forced into separating the law and the gospel, by which, dividing two gods, as different as one belonging to one instrument (or, as it is more usual to say, testament) and the other to the other, he might then champion the gospel too as one to be believed according to the Antitheses. But I would have cut these down in a separate engagement at close quarters, that is, objection by objection of the man from Pontus, were it not much more convenient to beat them back within and together with the gospel whose case they plead. And yet it is so easy to meet them by prescription that I actually accept them, count them valid, and say they are on our side, so that they may blush all the more at their author's blindness: they are now our Antitheses against Marcion. And so I confess that one order ran its course in the old arrangement under the Creator, and another in the new under Christ. I do not deny a difference in the records of speech, the precepts of virtue, and the disciplines of the law, provided that the whole difference applies to one and the same God, namely him by whom it is established that it was arranged, as it was also foretold. Long ago Isaiah proclaims that the law would go forth from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem: certainly another law and another word. “In short,” he says, “he will judge among the nations and will convict a very great people,” not of the one nation of the Jews, namely, but of the nations, who by the new law of the gospel and the new word of the apostles are judged and convicted in their own hearts of their former error as soon as they believe; and from then on they beat their swords into plows and their hunting spears (for zibinae are a kind of hunting spear) into sickles, that is, they turn minds once fierce and savage into upright dispositions that work to produce good fruit. And again: “Hear me, hear me, my people, and you kings, give ear to me; for a law will go forth from me, and my judgment for a light of the nations,” by which he had judged and decreed that the nations too were to be enlightened by the law and word of the gospel. This too will be the law in David, blameless because perfect, “converting the soul,” from idols to God, of course. This too will be the word of which the same Isaiah says: “For the Lord will make a cut-short word on the earth.” For the new testament is abridged, and freed from the ragged burdens of the law. But why say more, when renewal is foretold by the Creator through the same prophet more plainly and more clearly than light itself? “Do not remember the former things, and do not consider the things of old” (the old have passed away, new things are arising); “look, I make new things, which will now arise.” Likewise through Jeremiah: “Break up for yourselves new fallow ground, and do not sow among thorns; and be circumcised in the foreskin of your heart”; and elsewhere: “Look, the day will come, says the Lord, and I will accomplish for the house of Jacob and the house of Judah a new covenant, not according to the covenant which I arranged for their fathers in the day when I took hold of their hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt.” Thus he shows that the former covenant was temporary, in showing it changeable and in promising an eternal one for the future. For through Isaiah he says: “Hear me, and you will live, and I will arrange for you an eternal covenant,” adding, “the holy and sure things of David,” to show that this covenant would run its course in Christ, of the line of David by Mary's descent, whom he also foretold figuratively in the rod that would come forth from the root of Jesse. If, then, he said that other laws, other words, and new arrangements of covenants would come from the Creator, so that he appointed other, better offices even of the sacrifices themselves, and those among the nations, as Malachi says: “My will is not in you, says the Lord, and I will not accept your sacrifices from your hands, for from the rising of the sun to its setting my name has been glorified among the nations, and in every place a sacrifice is offered to my name, and a pure sacrifice,” namely simple prayer from a pure conscience; then every change that comes from renewal must enter into difference from the things of which it is made, and from difference into contrariety. For as nothing is changed that is not different, so nothing is different that is not contrary. Therefore the contrariety arising from difference will be assigned to the same one to whom the change arising from renewal belonged. He who arranged the change also instituted the difference; he who foretold the renewal also announced the contrariety beforehand. Why do you interpret a difference in things as a distinction of powers? Why do you twist against the Creator the antitheses of examples, which you can recognize in his own feelings and dispositions too? “I will strike,” he says, “and I will heal; I will kill,” he says, “and I will make alive,” creating evils and making peace; on which ground you are even accustomed to reproach him with the name of fickleness and inconstancy, forbidding what he commands and commanding what he forbids. Why then have you not listed contrasts in the natural works of the Creator, who is always contrary to himself? Could you not at least consider the world, which, unless I am mistaken, even among the people of Pontus is built out of the differences of substances rivaling one another? You ought first, then, to have defined one god of light and another of darkness, so that you could thus have asserted one god of the law and another of the gospel. But the matter has been prejudged from what is plain: he whose works and designs consist of antitheses has his mysteries consist in the same form.

1 You have this reply to the Antitheses, dispatched by us. I now pass on to the demonstration of the gospel, not the Jewish one, of course, but the Pontic one, adulterated in the meantime, laying down beforehand the order we are taking up. We lay down first that the gospel instrument has apostles as its authors, on whom this task of promulgating the gospel was laid by the Lord himself; and if also apostolic men, then not alone but with the apostles, since the preaching of disciples could be made suspect of seeking glory if the authority of the masters did not stand by it, or rather the authority of Christ, which made the apostles masters. In short, of the apostles, John and Matthew instill faith in us; of apostolic men, Luke and Mark renew it, beginning from the same rules as regards the one God the Creator and his Christ, born of a virgin, the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. Never mind if the arrangement of their narratives varied, provided there is agreement on the essential of the faith, on which there is no agreement with Marcion. Marcion, on the other hand, ascribes no author to his gospel, his own, that is; as if he might not have been allowed to forge a title too, he who thought it no crime to overturn the body of the work itself. And I could plant my foot here at once, contending that a work should not be acknowledged which does not lift up its head, which displays no constancy, which promises no credit through a full title and the due declaration of its author. But we prefer to engage on every point, and we do not conceal what can be understood from our own side. For of those commentators whom we have, Marcion seems to have chosen Luke to cut up. Now Luke was not an apostle but an apostolic man, not a master but a disciple, certainly less than a master, and certainly later by as much as he was the follower of a later apostle, Paul without doubt; so that even if Marcion had brought in his gospel under the name of Paul himself, the single instrument, without the support of those who went before, would not suffice for belief. For that gospel too would be required which Paul found, to which he gave his faith, with which he was soon eager that his own should agree; since it was for this reason that he went up to Jerusalem to know and consult the apostles, for fear that he might have run in vain, that is, that his belief and preaching of the gospel might not agree with theirs. Finally, when he had conferred with the authorities and agreed about the rule of faith, they joined right hands and from then on divided the duties of preaching, they to the Jews, Paul to the Jews and to the nations. If, then, Luke's very enlightener desired the authority of those who went before for his faith and preaching, how much more may I demand for Luke's gospel the authority that was necessary for his master's gospel?

1 It is another matter if, according to Marcion, the mystery of the Christian religion began with Luke's discipleship. But if it runs back earlier, it certainly had an authentic apparatus through which it reached Luke, with whose testimony standing by, Luke too could be admitted. But Marcion, having come upon Paul's letter to the Galatians, in which he rebukes even the apostles themselves for not walking with a straight foot according to the truth of the gospel, and at the same time accuses certain false apostles of perverting the gospel of Christ, strives to destroy the standing of those gospels which are published as their own and under the name of apostles, or of apostolic men too, in order, that is, to confer on his own the credit which he takes from them. Now even if Peter and John and James, who were reputed to be pillars, were rebuked, the reason is plain: they seemed to vary their company out of regard for persons. And yet, since Paul himself became all things to all men in order to win all, Peter too could have had this in view in acting somewhat otherwise than he taught. Likewise, if false apostles had also crept in, their character too is stated: they insisted on circumcision and Jewish pride. So they were censured by Paul not for their preaching but for their conduct, and he would equally have censured them if they had erred at all about God the Creator or his Christ. Each point, then, must be distinguished. If Marcion complains that the apostles are held suspect of collusion and pretense to the point of corrupting the gospel, he is now accusing Christ, by accusing those whom Christ chose. But if the apostles did hand on the gospel whole, and were rebuked only for inconsistency in their company, while the false apostles tampered with their truth, and our gospels were compiled from that source, what will that genuine instrument of the apostles be that did not suffer adulterers? What was it that enlightened Paul, and through him Luke? But if it was so utterly destroyed as to be blotted out by a sort of deluge, a flood of forgers, then Marcion does not have the true one either. Or if what Marcion alone has will be the true one, that is, the apostles', how does it agree with ours, which is ascribed not to the apostles but to Luke? Or if what Marcion uses is not to be assigned straightaway to Luke because it agrees with ours (ours being adulterated, as he says, in its title as well), but is the apostles', then ours too, which agrees with it, is equally the apostles', though adulterated in its title too.

1 The rope of contention, then, must be pulled, swaying with equal effort on either side. I say mine is true; Marcion says his. I affirm that Marcion's is adulterated; Marcion says mine is. Who will decide between us, except the reckoning of time, which assigns authority to what is found to be older and prejudges corruption against what is shown to be later? For in so far as falsehood is a corruption of the truth, to that extent the truth must precede the falsehood. The thing will come before what is done to it, and the material before its imitation. Otherwise, how absurd that, if we prove ours older and Marcion's later, ours should seem false before it had the truth as its material, and Marcion's be believed to have suffered imitation from ours before it was even published; and finally, that what is later should be thought the truer, after so many and such great works and records of the Christian religion had been published to the world, which certainly could not have been published without the truth of the gospel, that is, before the truth of the gospel. As regards, then, the gospel of Luke for the present, in so far as our common possession of it is disputed between us and Marcion as to its truth, what agrees with our text is so much older than Marcion's that Marcion himself once believed it, when in the first warmth of his faith he gave money to the catholic church, which was soon thrown back along with himself, after he had fallen away from our truth into his heresy. What now if the Marcionites deny that his first faith was with us, in the face of his own letter too? What if they do not acknowledge the letter either? Certainly they not only admit that the Antitheses are Marcion's, but hold them up. From these the proof is enough for me. For if the gospel which among us is ascribed to Luke (we shall see whether among Marcion too) is the very one that Marcion attacks through his Antitheses as interpolated by the protectors of Judaism, to merge it with the law and the prophets so that they might fashion Christ from them as well, he certainly could not have attacked anything but what he had found. No one censures beforehand things to come that he does not know will come. Correction does not come before the fault. A corrector indeed of the gospel, which had been overturned from the times of Tiberius to those of the Antonines, Marcion appeared, alone and first, awaited so long by Christ, who by now regretted having hastened to send out the apostles ahead without Marcion's protection! Except that heresy is the business of human rashness, not divine authority; it always corrects the gospels in this way, by corrupting them. For even if Marcion is a disciple, he is not above his master; if Marcion is an apostle, “whether it was I,” says Paul, “or they, so we preach”; if Marcion is a prophet, “the spirits of the prophets will be subject to the prophets, for they are not of confusion but of peace”; even if Marcion is an angel, he is to be called anathema sooner than an evangelist, since he preached a different gospel. So while he corrects, he confirms both: that ours is earlier, since he corrects what he found; and that that one is later which, by setting it up out of the correction of ours, he made his own and new.

1 In sum: if it is established that what is earlier is truer, that what is from the beginning is earlier, and that what is from the apostles is from the beginning, it will likewise be established that what has been held sacred among the churches of the apostles is what was handed down by the apostles. Let us see what milk the Corinthians drank from Paul; to what rule the Galatians were brought back for correction; what the Philippians, Thessalonians, and Ephesians read; what the Romans too, close at hand, give voice to, to whom both Peter and Paul left the gospel sealed with their own blood as well. We also have the churches nurtured by John. For even if Marcion rejects his Apocalypse, the succession of bishops, traced back to its origin, will rest on John as its founder. So too the pedigree of the other churches is recognized. I say, therefore, that among them, and not only among the apostolic churches but among all those that are joined with them in the fellowship of the sacrament, that gospel of Luke which we are at this moment defending has stood from the beginning of its publication; whereas Marcion's is not even known to most of them, and known to none without being condemned for that very reason. That one too, plainly, has churches, but its own, as late as they are adulterous; and if you look for their lineage, you will more easily find it apostate than apostolic, with Marcion as founder or someone from Marcion's swarm. Wasps make combs too; Marcionites make churches too. The same authority of the apostolic churches will also support the other gospels, which likewise we have through them and in agreement with them: I mean John's and Matthew's, though what Mark published may also be affirmed to be Peter's, whose interpreter Mark was. For people usually ascribe Luke's compilation to Paul as well; and it is proper that what disciples published should be regarded as their masters'. So Marcion must be pressed about these too: why, leaving them aside, he fastened on Luke instead, as if these too had not been in the churches from the beginning, just as Luke's was. Indeed, it is more credible that these were there from the beginning, as being earlier, since apostolic, as dedicated together with the churches themselves. Besides, what sort of thing would it be, if the apostles published nothing, that their disciples should rather have published, who could not even have come to be disciples without some teaching from their masters? So, since it is established that these too were in the churches, why did Marcion not touch these too, either to correct them if adulterated, or to acknowledge them if intact? For it would be fitting that those who were perverting the gospel should rather take care to pervert those whose authority they knew to be more widely received. That is why there were false apostles too: because they imitated the apostles by falsehood. So in so far as he would have corrected what needed correcting, had it been corrupted, to that extent he confirmed that what he did not think needed correcting was not corrupted. In short, he corrected what he judged corrupted; but not even this rightly, because it was not corrupted. For if the apostolic gospels have come down intact, and Luke's, as we have it, agrees so well with their rule that it remains with them in the churches, then it is established that Luke's too came down intact until the sacrilege of Marcion. Indeed, where Marcion laid hands on it, then it became different from and a rival to the apostolic gospels. I will therefore give his disciples some advice: either let them convert those gospels too, however late, to the form of their own, so that it may seem to agree with the apostolic ones (for they are reshaping it daily, as they are daily refuted by us); or let them blush for their master, who is exposed either way, since he now passes over the truth of the gospel knowingly and now overturns it shamelessly. These are more or less the short arguments we use when we are engaged on behalf of the faith of the gospel against heretics, maintaining both the order of time, which rules against the lateness of forgers, and the authority of the churches, which supports the tradition of the apostles; because the truth must precede the falsehood, and proceed from those by whom it was handed down.

1 But from here we take another step, challenging Marcion's gospel itself, as we professed, so as to prove in this way too that it has been adulterated. For certainly the whole of what he labored at, even in setting up the Antitheses in advance, is directed to this end: that, establishing a difference between the Old and the New Testament, he might likewise establish his Christ as separate from the Creator, as belonging to another god, as foreign to the law and the prophets. Certainly it was for this reason that he erased whatever was contrary to his opinion and agreed with the Creator, as having been woven in by the Creator's champions, and kept what suited his opinion. These we shall meet, these we shall embrace, if they turn out to be rather on our side, if they strike down Marcion's presumption; then it will be established that the other passages too were erased by the same fault of heretical blindness by which these were kept. Such will be the aim and plan of our little work, under the condition, of course, that has been agreed on both sides. Marcion lays down that there is one Christ who was revealed in the time of Tiberius by a god formerly unknown, for the salvation of all nations, and another who was appointed by God the Creator for the restoration of the Jewish state, and who is to come at some time. Between these he cuts a great and total difference, as great as between the just and the good, between the law and the gospel, between Judaism and Christianity. From this will come our prescription too, by which we fix it that the Christ of another god ought to have nothing in common with the Creator; and that on the other hand he must be declared the Creator's if he has administered his arrangements, fulfilled his prophecies, supported his laws, made present his promises, restored his mighty works, re-expressed his judgments, and represented his character and attributes. Remember this agreement and this prescription everywhere, I beg you, reader, and begin to discern whether it is Marcion's Christ or the Creator's.

1 In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius, he lays it down, Christ came down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee: from the Creator's heaven, of course, into which he had first come down from his own. Would it not have been proper order, then, that he should first be described as coming down from his own heaven into the Creator's? For why should I not criticize these things too, which do not fulfill the credibility of an orderly narrative, which always fails in a lie? Let what we have already dealt with elsewhere be said plainly once more: whether, coming down through the Creator's realm, and indeed against him, he could have been let in by him and passed on from there to the earth, which was equally his. But now I demand the rest of the order of his descent too, holding that he came down. Let it pass, if anywhere it is written that he “appeared.” To appear smacks of a sudden and unexpected sight, which strikes the eyes once upon what has appeared without delay; but to have come down is seen while it is happening, and brings the fact under the eyes. It also implies an order, and so compels us to ask in what form, with what equipage, with what speed or restraint, and even at what time of day or night he came down; besides, who saw him coming down, who reported it, who vouched for the fact, which would not easily be believed even from one who vouched for it. It is shameful, in short, that Romulus had Proculus to affirm his ascent into heaven, while the Christ of God did not find anyone to announce his descent from heaven, as if the one did not ascend by the same ladder of lies by which the other came down. And what had he to do with Galilee, if he was not the Creator's, for whom this region was destined as he entered on his preaching, as Isaiah says: “Drink this first, act quickly, land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, and you others who inhabit the seacoast and the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations: you people who sit in darkness, see a great light; you who inhabit the land, sitting in the shadow of death, a light has risen upon you”? And it is well that Marcion's god too is claimed as the enlightener of the nations; all the more should he, even if he came down from heaven, have come down to Pontus rather than to Galilee. But since both the place and the work of enlightening agree with the prophecy in Christ, we begin to recognize him already as the one prophesied, showing at his first entry that he had come not to dissolve the law and the prophets but rather to fulfill them. This Marcion erased as an addition. But in vain will he deny that Christ said what he at once in part did. For he meanwhile fulfilled the prophecy about the place. From heaven, at once, to the synagogue. As the saying goes, “Do what we came for.” Marcion, take this out of the gospel as well: “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” and, “It is not right to take the children's bread and give it to the dogs,” so that Christ may not seem to be Israel's. Deeds are enough for me in place of words. Take away the sayings of my Christ: the facts will speak. Look, he comes to the synagogue: surely to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Look, he offers the bread of his teaching to the Israelites first: surely as preferring them as sons. Look, he does not yet share it with others: surely as passing them by as dogs. But to whom would he rather have given it than to strangers to the Creator, if he had not himself been above all the Creator's? And yet how could one so sudden, so unknown, be admitted to the synagogue, one about whom no one was yet certain of his tribe, his people, his house, or finally his registration in Augustus's census, which the Roman archives keep as the most faithful witness to the Lord's birth? They certainly remembered that unless they knew him to be circumcised he was not to be admitted into the holy of holies. And even if the synagogue could be entered freely, it was not so for teaching, except by one well known, examined, and long approved for this very purpose, or recommended from elsewhere with this office. But all were astonished at his teaching. Of course, “for his word,” it says, “was with authority,” not because he taught against the law and the prophets. For the divine speech certainly showed both power and grace, building up rather than destroying the substance of the law and the prophets. Otherwise they would not have been astonished but horrified; they would not have wondered but at once have turned away from a destroyer of the law and the prophets, and above all from the preacher of another god, since he could not have taught against the law and the prophets, and on this account against the Creator, without first professing a different and rival divinity. Since, then, Scripture indicates nothing of the kind, except that the power and authority of his word alone were the object of wonder, it more readily shows that he taught in accordance with the Creator, because it did not deny it, than against the Creator, because it did not indicate it. And so he must either be recognized as belonging to the one according to whom he taught, or be judged a traitor if he taught according to the one against whom he had come. In the same place the spirit of a demon cries out: “What have we to do with you, Jesus? You have come to destroy us. I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” Here I shall not reopen the question whether this name too suited one who ought not even to be called Christ if he was not the Creator's (the names have been argued elsewhere already); but I now dispute how the demon knew that he was called by this name, when no foretelling about him had ever been sent out beforehand by a god unknown and up to that time mute, of whom he could not even attest him to be the Holy One, as being of a god unknown even to his own Creator. What had he yet brought forth of a new divinity, by which he could be understood as the Holy One of another god? Only that he had entered the synagogue, and had not even done anything by word against the Creator! Just as, then, he could in no way recognize as Jesus and the Holy One of God one whom he did not know, so he recognized one whom he knew. For he remembered both that the prophet had foretold the Holy One of God, and that the name Jesus was the name of the Lord in the son of Nun. These things he had also caught from the angel, according to our gospel: “Therefore that which will be born in you will be called holy, the Son of God,” and, “you shall call his name Jesus.” Besides, he certainly had some sense of the Lord's arrangement, demon though he was, rather than of a foreign one not yet well known. For he said first, “What have we to do with you, Jesus?” not as to a stranger, but to one to whom the spirits of the Creator belong. For he did not say, “What have you to do with us?” but, “What have we to do with you?”, lamenting himself and reproaching his lot, which he already saw, as he adds: “You have come to destroy us.” So he had recognized Jesus as the Son of the God who judges and avenges and, so to speak, is severe, not of that supremely good one who knows neither how to destroy nor how to punish. To what end have we set out this passage? To show that Jesus was recognized by the demon, and confirmed by himself, as none other than the Creator's. “But,” you say, “Jesus rebuked him.” Of course, as spiteful and impudent even in his confession, as flattering wickedly, as if this were the highest glory of Christ, that he had come for the destruction of demons and not rather for the salvation of men; he who wished his disciples to glory not in the subjection of spirits but in the whiteness of salvation. Or why did he rebuke him? If as having lied entirely, then he was not Jesus nor the Holy One of God at all. If as having lied in part, because he had thought him to be Jesus and the Holy One of God, but the Creator's, he rebuked him most unjustly for thinking what he knew should be thought, and for not supposing what he did not know should be supposed: another Jesus, the Holy One of another god. But if the rebuke has no more likely standing than the one we give it, then the demon told no lie, and was not rebuked for a lie; for he himself was Jesus, and the demon could not have recognized any other; and Jesus confirmed the one whom the demon had recognized, in not rebuking the demon for a lie.

1 The Creator's Christ was to be called a Nazarene according to prophecy. That is why the Jews call us by that very name, Nazarenes, because of him. For we are those of whom it is written, “The Nazirites were made whiter than snow,” we, that is, who were formerly livid with the stains of sin and blackened with the darkness of ignorance. And the title of Nazarene was to suit Christ from the hiding-place of his infancy, in which he went down to Nazareth to avoid Archelaus, the son of Herod. I have not left this out, because Marcion's Christ ought to have renounced all dealings even with the places familiar to the Creator's Christ, when he had so many towns of Judea not so made over to the Creator's Christ by the prophets. But he will be the Christ of the prophets wherever he is found in accordance with the prophets. And yet at Nazareth too he is not recorded to have preached anything new, while he is reported to have been thrown out for another reason, one proverb. Here, noticing that hands were laid on him for the first time, I must settle in advance the question of his bodily substance: that he cannot be believed a phantom who submitted to contact, and violent contact at that, being seized, taken hold of, and dragged to the very edge of the cliff. For even if he escaped through the midst of them, he had already experienced their force and was afterwards let go, the uproar dying down, as usually happens, or even being broken through; he did not slip away through a mist, which would not have been subject to any touch at all, if it had been one. For “nothing can touch or be touched except a body” is a sentence worthy even of worldly wisdom. In sum, he himself soon touched others, and by laying hands on them, hands that could certainly be felt, he conferred the benefits of healing, as real and as far from imaginary as the hands by which he conferred them. He is therefore Isaiah's Christ, the healer of diseases: “He,” it says, “takes away our weaknesses and carries our sicknesses.” And the Greeks commonly use “carry” for “take away.” The general promise is enough for me for now: whatever Jesus healed, he is mine. We shall come, however, to the particular kinds of healing. Freeing people from demons is also a healing of disease. And so the evil spirits went out, as though on the pattern of the former example, with a testimony, crying out, “You are the Son of God.” Of which God, let it be made clear here too. But they were likewise rebuked and ordered to be silent. For Christ likewise wished to be recognized as the Son of God by men, not by unclean spirits; that Christ, at least, to whom this was fitting, because he had sent ahead those through whom he could be recognized, and certainly worthier heralds. It belonged to him to reject the proclamation of an unclean spirit who had holy ones in abundance. But one who had never been announced, if he wished to be recognized (and he had come in vain if he did not), would not have scorned the testimony of a substance foreign to him, whatever it was, since he who had come down into another's domain had none of his own. And now, as the destroyer of the Creator, he would have wanted nothing more than to be recognized by the Creator's spirits and published abroad through their fear; except that Marcion denies that his god is feared, maintaining that the good one is not feared, but the judge, with whom lie the grounds of fear: anger, severity, judgments, vengeance, condemnation. But the demons certainly gave way through fear; therefore they were confessing the Son of a God to be feared, and would have had reason not to give way if he were not to be feared. And he, expelling them by command and rebuke, not by persuasion as a good one would, showed himself one to be feared. Or did he rebuke them because he was feared, not wishing to be feared? And how did he want them to go out, which they would not do except from fear? He fell, then, into a necessity by which he acted unlike his own nature, when as good he could have spared them once for all. He fell too into another mark of betrayal, in that he allowed himself to be feared by the demons as the Creator's Son, so that he expelled the demons not by his own power but by the Creator's authority. He goes out into a desert place. This too is a customary region of the Creator. It was fitting that the Word should be seen there too in a body, where he had once acted in a cloud as well. The setting of the place which had pleased the law suited the gospel too. So let the wilderness be glad: this Isaiah had promised. Detained by the crowds, he says, “I must announce the kingdom of God to other cities too.” Had he already shown his god anywhere? Not yet at all, I think. Was he speaking to people who knew of another god as well? I do not believe that either. So if neither had he made known another god, nor did they know any but the Creator, he was proclaiming the kingdom of the same God whom alone he knew to be known to those who heard him.

1 Out of so many kinds of work, why did he look to fishing in particular, to take from it Simon and the sons of Zebedee as apostles (for it cannot be seen as a simple deed from which an argument was to proceed), saying to Peter, who was frightened by the huge catch of fish, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men”? For by this saying he suggested to them the understanding of a fulfilled prophecy: that he was the one who had declared through Jeremiah, “Look, I will send many fishermen, and they will fish them,” namely men. Finally, leaving their boats, they followed him, understanding him to be the one who had begun to do what he had foretold. It is another matter if he chose to pick from the guild of boatmen because he was one day to have the shipmaster Marcion as an apostle. We laid down against the Antitheses that what he considers the difference between the law and the gospel does nothing for Marcion's purpose, since that difference too was arranged by the Creator, indeed foretold in the promise of a new law, a new word, and a new covenant. But since, in the case of the cleansing of the leper, he argues more pointedly before some “fellow-sufferer” and “fellow-object of hatred” of his, whoever he is, I have not been reluctant to meet him, and first of all to show the force of the figurative law, which, in the example of the leper who was not to be touched but rather removed from all dealings, forbade fellowship with a man stained with sins; with such people the apostle too forbids even taking food, for the stigma of sins is shared as if by contagion if anyone mixes with a sinner. And so the Lord, wishing the law to be understood more deeply, as signifying spiritual things through carnal ones, and on this account not destroying but rather building up the law which he wished to be recognized as more closely his own, touched the leper. Even if a man could have been defiled by him, God certainly would not be defiled, being incapable of pollution. So it will not be laid down against him that he ought to have kept the law and not touched the unclean, since the touch of the unclean would not defile him. I show that this fits my Christ better, by demonstrating that it does not fit yours. For if he touched the leper as a rival of the law, making nothing of the law's precept through contempt of defilement, how could he be defiled who had no body to be defiled? For a phantom could not be defiled. So one who could not be defiled, being a phantom, will be incapable of pollution not by divine power but by the emptiness of a phantom; nor can he be seen to have despised a defilement for which he had no material. So neither did he destroy the law, since he escaped defilement by the accident of being a phantom, not by a display of power. And if Elisha, the Creator's prophet, cleansed only one leper, Naaman the Syrian, out of so many Israelite lepers, this does not make for a difference in Christ either, as if he were in this way better because, a stranger, he cleanses an Israelite leper whom his own Lord had not been able to cleanse. The easier cleansing of the Syrian signifies the cleansing, through Christ their light, of the nations, which bristled with the seven stains of the capital sins: idolatry, blasphemy, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, false witness, fraud. That is why he washed seven times in the Jordan, as though once for each heading; at the same time to proclaim the expiation of the whole week, and because the force and fullness of a single washing was reserved for Christ alone, who was to make on earth a shortened washing, as he made a shortened word. For Marcion objects this too: that Elisha needed material, applied water, and that seven times, while Christ, using a word only, and that once, brought about the cure at once. As if I would not dare to claim the word itself too for the substance of the Creator: of everything he is the more powerful author who is the earlier. It is plainly incredible that the power of the Creator should have worked the cure of one disease by a word, when by a word it brought forth once for all the whole mass of the world! By what is the Creator's Christ better distinguished than by the power of the word? “But he is another Christ, because he acted otherwise than Elisha, because the master is more powerful than his servant.” What are you laying down, Marcion? That things are done by servants in the same way as by their masters themselves? Are you not afraid that it will turn to your disgrace, if you deny that Christ is the Creator's because he was more powerful than the Creator's servant, because he is recognized as greater than Elisha's smallness, if indeed he is greater? For the cure is equal, though the method differs. What more did your Christ accomplish than my Elisha? Indeed, what great thing did your Christ's word accomplish, when it accomplished what the Creator's river did? The rest agrees with this. As regards avoiding human glory, he forbade him to publish it; as regards safeguarding the law, he ordered the procedure to be carried out: “Go, show yourself to the priest, and offer the gift which Moses commanded.” For he was still safeguarding in their images the figurative proofs of the law, as being prophetic, which signified that a man once a sinner, cleansed soon after by the word of God, ought to offer a gift to God at the temple, namely prayer and thanksgiving in the church through Christ Jesus, the universal priest of the Father. So he added, “that it may be for a testimony to you,” no doubt one by which he testified that he was not dissolving the law but fulfilling it, by which he testified that he himself was the one who was announced as going to take up their diseases and illnesses. This interpretation of the testimony, so fitting and so due, Marcion, the flatterer of his own Christ, seeks to exclude under the pretext of gentleness and mildness. “For as good,” he says, “and moreover as knowing that everyone who was freed from leprosy would carry out the rites of the law, he therefore gave this command.” Then he came down in vain, as though to destroy the law, if he gives way to those who comply with the law. On the contrary, as one who knew their habit, he ought rather to have forestalled it to turn them away from it, if that was what he had come for. What then? Did he persevere in his goodness, that is, in permitting the law, or not? If he persevered as good, he will nowhere be a destroyer of the law, nor will he be held to belong to another god, since the destruction of the law ceases by which he is claimed for another god. If he did not persevere as good, destroying the law afterwards, then he gave them false testimony in the cure of the leper, for he abandoned goodness while destroying the law. He is bad, then, when he overturns the law, if he is good when he indulges it. But also, by indulging compliance with the law, he confirmed that the law was good, for no one allows compliance with what is evil. So he is bad on this count, if he indulged compliance with a bad law, and worse on that, if he came as destroyer of a good law. Likewise, if he commanded the gift to be offered because he knew that everyone freed from leprosy would do so, he could also have not commanded what he knew would happen of itself. Why did he not keep silent, so that the man might obey the law by his own choice alone? Then he could to some extent have seemed to show his forbearance. But he adds his authority too, enlarged by the weight of a testimony. A testimony to what, if not to the law asserted? Certainly it makes no difference how he confirmed the law, whether as good or as superfluous, whether as forbearing or as inconsistent, so long as I drive you from your position, Marcion. See, he commanded the law to be fulfilled. In whatever way he commanded it, in the same way he could also have pronounced beforehand that saying, “I have not come to dissolve the law but to fulfill it.” What business had you, then, to erase from the gospel what is sound? For you have confessed that out of goodness he did what you deny he said. It is established, then, that he said it, since he also did it, and that you rather have rooted the Lord's saying out of the gospel than that our people put it in.

1 The paralytic too is healed, and that in a gathering, with the people looking on. “For the people,” says Isaiah, “will see the majesty of the Lord and the glory of God.” What majesty and what glory? “Be strong, you slack hands and loosened knees” (this will be paralysis); “be strong, do not fear.” Not idly repeating “be strong,” nor pointlessly adding “do not fear,” since with the restoration of the limbs he was promising the return of strength as well (“Rise and take up your bed”), and at the same time vigor of mind not to fear those who were going to say, “Who will forgive sins but God alone?” So you have here the fulfilled prophecy both of the particular healing and of what followed the healing. Recognize Christ as the forgiver of sins too in the same prophet: “For,” he says, “he will forgive the sins of many, and he himself will take away our sins.” For at the very beginning too, in the person of the Lord himself: “Even if your sins are like rose-red, I will make them white as snow; even if like scarlet, I will make them white as wool”; showing in the rose-red the blood of the prophets, and in the scarlet, as brighter, the blood of the Lord. Micah too, of the pardon of sins: “Who is a God like you, taking away iniquities and passing over the injustices of the remnant of your inheritance? And he has not kept his anger as a testimony, because he delights in mercy. He will turn and have mercy on us; he will sink our sins, and he will sink our sins into the depth of the sea.” But even if nothing of the kind had been foretold of Christ, I would have examples of this kindness in the Creator, which promise me the Father's affection in the Son too. I see the Ninevites obtaining pardon for their crimes from the Creator, not to say from Christ even then, who from the beginning acted in the Father's name. I read too that the prophet Nathan said to David, when he acknowledged his sin against Uriah, “And the Lord has put away your sin, and you shall not die”; likewise that King Ahab, husband of Jezebel, guilty of idolatry and of the blood of Naboth, obtained pardon on the ground of repentance; and that Jonathan, the son of Saul, wiped out by a plea the guilt of breaking a fast. Why should I recount the people itself, so often restored by the forgiveness of sins, by that God, of course, who prefers mercy to sacrifice and the repentance of the sinner to his death? First, then, you must deny that the Creator ever forgave sins; next, you must show that he foretold nothing of the kind of his Christ; and so you will prove that this kindness of Christ, a new Christ, of course, is new, if you prove that it is neither equal to the Creator's nor foretold by the Creator. But whether forgiving sins can belong to one who is denied to retain them, whether it is his to acquit whose it is not also to condemn, and whether it is fitting for him to pardon against whom nothing has been committed, we have already engaged elsewhere, and prefer to recall rather than rehandle. About the Son of Man our prescription is twofold: that Christ could not lie so as to declare himself Son of Man if he was not truly so; and that no one is constituted son of man who is not born of a human being, whether father or mother. And so we must discuss of which human being he should be taken as son, father's or mother's. If he is from God the Father, then certainly not from a human father; if he is not from a human father, it remains that he is from a human mother; if from a human mother, it is now clear that he is from a virgin. For one to whom no human father is given will not have a husband assigned to his mother either; and one to whom no husband is assigned is a virgin. Otherwise two fathers will be held, God and a man, if the mother is not a virgin. For she will have a husband, so as not to be a virgin, and by having a husband she will make two fathers, God and man, for one who would be the son both of God and of a man. Such a birth, perhaps, the fables give to Castor or Hercules. If these points are distinguished thus, that is, if he is son of man from his mother, because not from a father, and from a virgin mother, because not from a human father, this will be Isaiah's Christ, whom he foretells a virgin will conceive. On what ground, then, you admit him as Son of Man, Marcion, I cannot see. If as son of a human father, you deny he is the Son of God; if also of God, you make Christ the Hercules of fable; if only of a human mother, you grant me mine; if neither of a human mother nor of a human father, then he is son of no human being, and he must have told a lie who said he was what he was not. One thing can relieve your straits: if you dare either to give your god, the father of Christ, the name of Man as well, as Valentinus did with his Aeon, or to deny that the virgin was human, which not even Valentinus did. What now if Christ is registered under the very title Son of Man in Daniel? Will that not suffice to prove him the prophetic Christ? For when he calls himself what was foretold of the Creator's Christ, he doubtless offers himself to be understood as the one of whom it was foretold. A sharing of names may perhaps be seen as simple chance (and yet we maintain that he ought not to have been called either Christ or Jesus, holding to the condition of difference); but a designation, such as “Son of Man,” in so far as it arises from a circumstance, is the harder to coincide, over and above a sharing of names, since it arises from a particular circumstance, especially when the cause by which it would come to be shared does not agree. And so, since a designation belongs properly to the one in whom it has its cause, if it is also claimed for another who shares the name, then the sharing of the name too becomes suspect in the one for whom a shared designation is claimed without cause; and it follows that the one is to be believed who is found more fitted for both name and designation, while the other is excluded who has no share in the designation, lacking its cause. And none will be more fitted for both than the one who first received both the name of Christ and the designation Son of Man, namely the Creator's Jesus. He it is who was seen by the king of Babylon in the furnace as the fourth with his martyrs, “like a son of man”; the same who was revealed to Daniel himself directly as a Son of Man, coming with the clouds of heaven as judge, as Scripture also shows. I have said that this could have been enough about the prophetic naming of the Son of Man. But Scripture gives me more, namely the Lord's own interpretation. For when the Jews, looking only at his humanity and not yet sure of his divinity, as being also Son of God, rightly objected that a man could not forgive sins, but God alone, why did he not answer them, according to their meaning, about a man, that he had authority to forgive sins, when by naming the Son of Man he would be naming a man? Why, unless he wished to strike them back with the very designation “Son of Man” from the book of Daniel, to show that a man too was the one who forgave sins: namely that one alone, the Son of Man in Daniel's prophecy, who received the authority to judge, and through it, of course, to forgive sins as well (for he who judges also acquits), so that, this stumbling-block being removed by the recollection of Scripture, they might more easily recognize him as the Son of Man himself from the very forgiveness of sins. Indeed, he nowhere professed himself Son of Man before this passage, the first in which he forgave sins, that is, the first in which he judged, by acquitting. Consider what sort of thing the opposing side argues against this, whatever it is. For it must tend to this madness: to maintain that he is Son of Man, so as not to make him a liar, and to deny that he was born of a human being, so as not to concede that he is the son of a virgin. But if divine authority, the nature of things, and common sense do not admit the heretical insanity, here too is an opportunity to interject, as briefly as possible, about the substance of his body against Marcion's phantoms. If he was born of a human being, as Son of Man, he is body from body. You would plainly more easily find a man born without a heart or a brain, like Marcion himself, than without a body, like Marcion's Christ. And so examine the heart, or the brain, of the man from Pontus.

1 He brings forward as an argument the tax collector chosen by the Lord, as though chosen by an adversary of the law, a stranger to the law and a profane outsider to Judaism. He forgot Peter, a man of the law, who was not only chosen but also received testimony for the recognition given him by the Father; he had nowhere read that Christ was foretold as the light and hope and expectation of the nations. On the contrary, Christ rather approved the Jews in saying that the physician is not needed by the healthy but by the sick. For if he wished the heathen and tax collectors whom he was choosing to be understood as the sick, he was confirming that the Jews were healthy, to whom he said a physician was not needed. If this is so, he did wrong to come down to destroy the law, as if to cure a bad illness, since those who lived under it were in good health and had no need of a physician. And what sort of thing is it that he put forward the comparison of a physician and did not carry it out? For as no one brings a physician to the healthy, so no one brings one to those who are so much strangers as man is to Marcion's god, man having his own author and protector, and from him rather Christ as physician. The comparison settles this in advance: that a physician is rather provided by the one to whom the sick belong. But where did John come from, too, into the midst? A sudden Christ, a sudden John! So are all things with Marcion which have their own full order with the Creator. But the rest about John elsewhere; for each point must be answered as it comes up. Now I shall maintain this: to show that John agrees with Christ and Christ with John, as the Creator's prophet agrees with the Creator's Christ, and so let the heretic blush, having frustrated John's course in vain. For if John had done nothing at all as, according to Isaiah, the one crying out in the wilderness and preparer of the Lord's ways by proclaiming and commending repentance; if he had not also dipped Christ himself among the rest, no one would have challenged Christ's disciples, who ate and drank, by the standard of John's disciples, who were constantly fasting and praying; because, if there had been any difference between Christ and John and the flock of each, there would be no demand for comparison, and the aim of the challenge would be empty. For no one would wonder, and no one would be troubled, if the rival preachings of different divinities did not agree with each other about disciplines either, when they did not first agree about the authorities behind those disciplines. So Christ was John's, and John Christ's, both belonging to the Creator, and both preachers and teachers from the law and the prophets. If Christ had rejected John's discipline as belonging to another god, and had defended his disciples as rightly walking otherwise, as initiated, that is, into another and contrary divinity, well and good; but as it is, humbly giving the reason that the sons of the bridegroom could not fast while the bridegroom was with them, and promising that they would fast afterwards, when the bridegroom had been taken away from them, he neither defended his disciples, but rather excused them, as not having been rebuked without reason, nor rejected John's discipline, but rather conceded it, appointing it to his own time; whereas he would otherwise have rejected it and defended its rivals, if what was already in existence had not been his own. I hold my Christ in the name of bridegroom too, of whom the psalm says: “He is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber; his going forth is from the height of heaven, and his return to its very height”; who also rejoices to the Father through Isaiah: “Let my soul exult in the Lord, for he has clothed me with the garment of salvation and the tunic of joy; like a bridegroom he has put a miter on me, like a bride in her ornaments.” For he reckons the church too as in himself, of whom the same Spirit says to him: “And you will put them all around you like a bride's ornament.” This bride Christ also summons to himself through Solomon from the calling of the nations, since you have read: “Come, bride, from Lebanon”; with an elegant mention of Mount Lebanon, of course, whose name among the Greeks means frankincense, for he was betrothing the church to himself out of idolatry. Deny now, Marcion, that you are utterly mad. See, you are attacking the law of your own god too. He does not join marriages, does not admit those already joined, dips no one but a celibate or a eunuch, and reserves baptism for death or divorce. Why then do you make his Christ a bridegroom? This is the name of the one who joined male and female, not of one who separated them. You have also erred in that saying of the Lord in which he seems to distinguish new things and old. You are puffed up with old wineskins and have lost your brain to new wine, and so have sewn onto the old, that is the earlier, gospel the patch of heretical novelty. In what, I should like to learn, does the Creator differ? When he commands through Jeremiah, “Break up new fallow ground for yourselves,” does he not turn them away from the old? When he declares through Isaiah, “The old things have passed away; look at the new things which I make,” does he not turn them to the new? We have long since established that this appointment of former things, promised rather by the Creator, is displayed by Christ, under the authority of one and the same God, to whom both the old and the new belong. For no one commits new wine to old wineskins who has no old wineskins, and no one puts a new patch on an old garment unless he also has an old garment. He does not do something, if it is not to be done, who has the means to do it, if it were to be done. So if he was aiming the comparison at this, to show that he was separating the newness of the gospel from the oldness of the law, he was showing that the one from which he was separating it was also his own. The separation of things belonging to others would not have been worth noting, since no one joins his own things to another's in order to be able to separate them from another's. Separation presupposes the joining from which it is made. So the things he was separating he was also showing to have been in one, as they would have remained if he had not separated them. And yet, if we grant this separation, it is by reformation, by enlargement, by progress; as the fruit is separated from the seed, though the fruit comes from the seed, so the gospel is separated from the law while it advances out of the law: other than it, but not foreign to it; different, but not contrary. Nor is Christ's manner of speech new. When he puts forward comparisons, when he refutes questions, it comes from the seventy-seventh psalm: “I will open my mouth,” he says, “in a parable,” that is, a comparison; “I will utter problems,” that is, I will set out questions. If he had wished to show himself a man of another nation, he would certainly have shown it by the peculiarity of his speech.

1 About the sabbath too I state this first: that this question could not have arisen if Christ had not been proclaiming the God of the sabbath. For there would have been no dispute about why he was destroying the sabbath, if it was his duty to destroy it. And it would have been his duty to destroy it if he belonged to another god, and no one would have wondered at his doing what suited him. They wondered, therefore, because it did not suit him to proclaim God the Creator and attack his sabbath. And, to settle each first point so as not to renew the same things everywhere against every argument of the adversary that leans on some new institution of Christ, this definition will now stand: that the newness of each institution was disputed because nothing had yet been published about the newness of a divinity, just as there was no dispute about that; and that it cannot be turned round from the very newness of any institution into a sufficient demonstration by Christ of another divinity, since it has been established that the newness itself, having been announced by the Creator, is not to be wondered at in Christ; and since another god certainly should have been explained first, and his discipline introduced afterwards, because God gives authority to discipline, not discipline to God; unless Marcion, plainly so perverse, learned his letters not through a master but his master through letters. For the rest, I direct the matter of the sabbath thus. If Christ overthrew the sabbath, he did so after the Creator's example, since at the siege of the city of Jericho, when the ark of the covenant was carried round the walls for seven days, on the sabbath too, the Creator by his command destroyed the sabbath through work, as those think who hold this of Christ too, not knowing that neither Christ nor the Creator destroyed the sabbath, as we will show shortly. And yet even then the sabbath was shaken through a Jesus, so that this too might be reported of Christ. Even if he pursued with hatred the most solemn day of the Jews, as a Christ not of the Jews, in professing hatred of the sabbath he also professed the Creator, as his Christ, following him who cried out by the mouth of Isaiah, “Your new moons and your sabbaths my soul hates.” But we also know in what sense these words too were said. Still, in this kind of case even an abrupt defense must be used against an abrupt challenge. Now I will argue about the very matter in which Christ's discipline seemed to destroy the sabbath. The disciples had been hungry that day; they had plucked ears of grain and rubbed them in their hands; by preparing food they had broken the holy rest. Christ excuses them and is charged with violating the sabbath; the Pharisees accuse. Marcion seizes on the issue of the controversy as though (to play a little with the truth of my Lord) it were a case of letter against intent: for the Creator's side is taken from the letter, and Christ’s justification from the intention, as in the example of David, who went into the temple on the sabbath and prepared food, boldly breaking the loaves of the presence. For he too remembered that this privilege had been granted to the sabbath from the beginning, when the day itself was first known: I mean exemption from fasting. For when the Creator forbade manna to be gathered for two days, he allowed it only on the day of preparation, so that the provision of food on the day before might free the rest of the following sabbath from fasting. It is well, then, that the Lord followed the same reason in destroying the sabbath, if they will have it so called; well, that he expressed the Creator's disposition too in honoring the sabbath by not fasting. In short, he would really have destroyed the sabbath, and the Creator himself, only if he had ordered his disciples to fast on the sabbath, against the letter and the intent of the Creator. But since he does not firmly defend his disciples but excuses them; since he sets human need against the charge as a plea; since he keeps the higher honor of the sabbath, that of not being made sad, rather than that of resting; since he puts David and his companions on a level with his own disciples in both fault and pardon; since he is pleased because the Creator allowed it; since by his example he too is so good: is he for that reason foreign to the Creator? Next the Pharisees watch whether he will heal on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him: certainly as a destroyer of the sabbath, not as the proclaimer of a new god. For perhaps I will press this one point everywhere: that another Christ was nowhere proclaimed. But the Pharisees were wholly mistaken about the law of the sabbath, not noticing that God imposes rest from work conditionally, under a certain kind of work. For when he says of the sabbath day, “Do not do any of your work on it,” by saying “your” he defined it as human work, which each one performs from his craft or business, not divine work. But the work of salvation and safety is not man's but properly God's; as again in the law: “Do not do any work on it,” he says, “except what must be done for every soul,” that is, in the cause of saving a soul, because God's work can be done through a man too for the salvation of a soul, yet by God. This Christ too was going to do as man, since he was also God. Wishing, then, to lead them into this sense of the law through the restoration of the withered hand, he asks: “Is it lawful on the sabbath to do good or not? to save a life or to destroy it?” so that, by permitting the work he was about to do for a soul, he might remind them which works the law of the sabbath forbade, namely human ones, and which it enjoined, namely divine ones, which would be done for every soul; being called Lord of the sabbath because he protected the sabbath as his own possession. Even if he had destroyed it, he would have done so rightly as its Lord, still more he who instituted it. But he did not destroy it at all as its Lord, so that from this it can now be seen that not even at the carrying round of the ark at Jericho was the sabbath destroyed by the Creator. For that too was God's work, which he himself had commanded and which he had arranged for the sake of the souls of his people, placed in the danger of war. And if somewhere he professed hatred of sabbaths, by saying “your sabbaths,” counting them as men's, not his own, which the people celebrated without the fear of God, full of sins, loving God with their lips and not their heart, he gave a different standing to his own sabbaths, that is, those kept according to his discipline; these he afterwards declares through the same prophet to be true, delightful, and not to be profaned. So Christ did not rescind the sabbath at all, whose law he kept, both above, in the case of the disciples, working for a soul (for he allowed the hungry the comfort of food), and now in healing the withered hand, pressing home everywhere by his deeds, “I have not come to dissolve the law but to fulfill it,” even though Marcion has stopped his mouth over this saying. For here too he fulfilled the law, while interpreting its condition, while throwing light on the difference of works, while doing what the law excepts from the rest of the sabbath, while by his good deed making more holy the sabbath day itself, holy from the beginning by the Father's blessing, a day on which, that is, he provided divine help; which an adversary would have provided on other days, so as not to adorn the Creator's sabbath and not to do the works appropriate to the Sabbath. If on that day the prophet Elisha too restored to life the dead son of the Shunammite woman, you see, Pharisee, and you, Marcion, that it was long ago the Creator's to do good on sabbaths, to save life and not destroy it, and that Christ brought in nothing new that is not from the pattern, the gentleness, the mercy, and the foretelling too of the Creator. For here also he makes present the prophecy of a particular healing: “Slack hands grow strong,” as also slack knees did in the paralytic.

1 Certainly he brings good news of peace and all good things to Zion and Jerusalem; certainly he goes up the mountain and spends the night there in prayer, and is surely heard by the Father. Unroll the prophets, then, and recognize the whole sequence. “Go up on a high mountain,” says Isaiah, “you who bring good news to Zion; lift up your voice with strength, you who bring good news to Jerusalem.” (With strength still: they were amazed at his teaching, for he was teaching as one having power.) And again: “Therefore my people will know my name on that day” (what name, if not Christ's?) “that I am he who speaks”; for he it was then who spoke in the prophets, the Word, the Son of the Creator. “I am here while there is time, upon the mountains, as one bringing the good news of peace, as one bringing good news of good things.” Likewise Nahum, of the Twelve: “Look at the swift feet on the mountain of one bringing good news of peace.” Of the voice of prayer to the Father by night, the psalm plainly says: “My God, I will cry by day, and you will not hear; and by night, and it will not be in vain for me.” And elsewhere the psalm, of the same place and voice: “With my voice I cried to the Lord, and he heard me from his holy mountain.” You have the representation of the name; you have the act of one bringing good news; you have the place, the mountain, and the time, night, and the sound of the voice, and the Father's hearing: you have the Christ of the prophets. But why did he choose twelve apostles, and not some other number? So that I could interpret my Christ from this too, as foretold not only by the words of the prophets but also by the evidence of events. For I find figures of this number with the Creator: the twelve springs of Elim; the twelve gems on the priestly robe of Aaron; and the twelve stones chosen by Joshua from the Jordan and laid up in the ark of the covenant. For just so many apostles were portended: like springs and rivers, to water the world of the nations, formerly dry and deserted of the knowledge of God (as also through Isaiah: “I will put rivers in a waterless land”); like gems, to give light to the sacred robe of the church, which Christ, the Father's high priest, put on; and like stones, solid in faith, which the true Jesus chose out of the washing of the Jordan and received into the sanctuary of his covenant. What of this kind, by way of defending the number, fits Marcion's Christ? Nothing can be seen as done simply by him which can be seen as not done simply by mine. The thing will belong to him with whom the preparation for the thing is found. He changes Peter's name too from Simon, because the Creator also re-formed the names of Abraham, Sarah, and Hoshea, calling the last Joshua and adding syllables to the others. But why Peter in particular? If for the strength of his faith, many materials, equally solid, could have lent a name from their own. Or is it because Christ is both rock and stone? For we read that he was set as a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense. I pass over the rest. So he chose to share a name especially with the dearest of his disciples from among his own figures, more appropriately, I think, than from figures not his own. A multitude comes together from Tyre and other regions, even from overseas. The psalm was looking to this: “And look, the foreigners and Tyre and the people of the Ethiopians, these were there. Mother Zion, a man will say, and a man was born in her” (for God was born man) “and he has built her” (by the Father's will); so that you may know that the Gentiles then came together to him who, being God, had been born man, to build the church by the Father's will from foreigners too. So also Isaiah: “Look, these come from far off, and these from the north and the sea, and others from the land of the Persians”; of whom again: “Lift up your eyes all around and see: they are all gathered together”; and of whom further on, seeing people unknown and strangers: “And you will say in your heart, Who has borne me these? Who has brought these up for me? And where were these for me?” Will this be the Christ not of the prophets? And who will be the Christ of the Marcionites? If perversity pleases, one who did not belong to the prophets.

1 I come now to his regular sayings, through which he introduces the distinctive character of his teaching; to Christ's edict, so to speak: “Blessed are the beggars” (for so the interpretation of the Greek word demands), “for theirs is the kingdom of God.” Already the very fact that he began with blessings belongs to the Creator, who consecrated all things, as he brought them forth, with no other word than a blessing: “My heart,” he says, “has uttered a most excellent word.” This will be the most excellent word, the word of blessing, which is recognized as inaugurating the new testament too, after the example of the old. What wonder, then, if he entered upon his work through a saying of this kind from the dispositions of the Creator, who always loves, comforts, protects, and vindicates beggars, the poor, the lowly, widows, and orphans, so that you may believe this seemingly private kindness of Christ to be a stream from the springs of the Savior? Truly I do not know where to turn among so great a multitude of such sayings, as in a forest, or a meadow, or an orchard. They must be gathered here and there as they come. The psalm cries out: “Do justice to the orphan and the beggar, and treat the lowly and poor justly; set free the poor, and rescue the beggar from the hand of the sinner.” Likewise the seventy-first psalm: “He will judge the beggars of the people in righteousness, and will save the sons of the poor”; and in what follows, of Christ: “All nations will serve him” (but David ruled over the one Jewish nation, so let no one think it spoken of David, because he too took in the lowly and those in distress), “because he has set free,” it says, “the beggar from the mighty; he will spare the beggar and the poor, and will save the souls of the poor; from usury and injustice he will redeem their souls, and their name will be honored in his sight.” Likewise: “Let the sinners be turned into the underworld, all the nations that forget God; for the beggar will not be forgotten forever; the endurance of the poor will not perish forever.” Likewise: “Who is like our God, who dwells on high and looks upon lowly things in heaven and on earth; who raises the beggar from the earth and lifts the poor from the dunghill, to make him sit with the princes of the people,” in his kingdom, of course? So too earlier, in the books of Kingdoms, Hannah, the mother of Samuel, giving glory to God in the Spirit: “Who raises the poor from the earth,” she says, “and lifts the beggar from the dunghill, to make him sit with the mighty of the people and on thrones of glory,” royal thrones, of course. And through Isaiah, how he inveighs against the oppressors of the needy! “But you, why have you burned my vineyard, and the goods stolen from the beggar is in your houses? Why do you injure my people and put the face of the beggars to shame?” And again: “Woe to those who write wickedness! For writing they write what is evil, avoiding the judgments of the beggars and plundering the rights of the poor of my people.” These judgments he demands for orphans and widows too, as for the needy, for their comfort: “Do justice to the orphan and treat the widow justly, and come, let us be reconciled, says the Lord.” He who has so great an affection for every condition of lowliness, his too will be the kingdom which Christ promises, since those to whom it is promised have long belonged to his affection. For even if you think that the Creator's promises were earthly and Christ's heavenly: it is well that no heaven of any other god has yet appeared, except his to whom the earth also belongs; it is well that the Creator promised lesser things first, so that I may more easily believe him about greater things too than one who never first built up belief in his generosity with lesser things. “Blessed are the hungry, for they will be filled.” I could have transferred this heading to the one above, since the hungry are none other than the poor and the beggars, if the Creator had not appointed this promise too particularly, as a groundwork for his gospel, of course; since through Isaiah he says of those whom he was to call from the end of the earth, the nations, of course: “Look, they will come swiftly, lightly” (swiftly, as hastening at the end of the times; lightly, as without the burdens of the former law); “they will not hunger or thirst.” Therefore they will be filled, which is certainly not promised except to the hungry and thirsty. And again: “Look,” he says, “those who serve me will be filled, but you will hunger; look, those who serve me will drink, but you will thirst.” We will see whether these opposites too are furnished beforehand for Christ. Meanwhile, the promise of fullness to the hungry belongs to the Creator. “Blessed are those who weep, for they will laugh.” Run through the saying of Isaiah: “Look, those who serve me will be delighted, but you will be put to shame; look, those who serve me will exult in joy, but you will cry out for sorrow of heart.” These opposites too we will recognize in Christ. Certainly delight and exultation in joy are promised to those in the opposite condition, the sad, the sorrowful, and the anxious. So too the hundred and twenty-fifth psalm says: “Those who sow in tears will reap in exultation.” Further, laughter comes to those who exult and receive joy, just as weeping to those who grieve and suffer. So the Creator, foretelling the occasions of laughter and weeping, was first to say that those who weep would laugh. So he who began with the comfort of the poor, the lowly, the hungry, and the weeping was eager at once to present himself as the one whom he had shown through Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor” (“Blessed are the beggars, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”); “he has sent me to heal the brokenhearted” (“Blessed are those who hunger, for they will be filled”); “to call the sick” (“Blessed are those who weep, for they will laugh”); “to give to those who mourn in Zion glory, and instead of ashes the oil of joy, and a garment of glory instead of a spirit of weariness.” If Christ, as soon as he was received, carried out these things, either he is the one who foretold that he would come for these things, or, if the one who foretold has not yet come (I would say it absurdly, but necessarily), perhaps he commissioned Marcion's Christ! “Blessed will you be when men hate you and reproach you and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man.” By this declaration he doubtless exhorts to endurance. What less does the Creator say through Isaiah? “Do not fear reproach from men, and do not be diminished by their scorn.” What reproach, what scorn? That which was to come on account of the Son of Man. Which Son of Man? The one who is according to the Creator. How can we prove it? From the hatred foretold against him too, as through Isaiah to the Jews, the authors of the hatred: “Because of you my name is blasphemed among the nations”; and elsewhere: “Hallow him who limits his own life, who is held in contempt by the nations, by servants and magistrates.” For if hatred was foretold against that Son of Man who is according to the Creator, and the gospel testifies that the name of Christians, certainly derived from Christ, will be hated on account of the Son of Man, that is, Christ, then it makes the cause of the hatred that Son of Man who was according to the Creator, against whom the hatred was foretold. And certainly, if he had not yet come, the hatred of the name, which is at work today, could not have come before the person who bears the name. For he is both hallowed among us, and he limits his own life, laying it down for us, and he is held in contempt by the nations. So the one who was born will be the Son of Man, on account of whom our name too is rejected.

1 “In the same way,” he says, “their fathers did to the prophets.” turncoat Christ, now destroyer, now champion of the prophets! He destroyed them as a rival, turning their disciples to himself; he championed them as a friend, rebuking their persecutors. Now, in so far as championing the prophets would not have suited Marcion's Christ, who had come to destroy them, to that extent rebuking the persecutors of the prophets suits the Creator's Christ, who was fulfilling them in everything; or because it belongs rather to the Creator to reproach sons with the sins of their fathers than to that god who does not even punish each person's own sins. “But,” you say, “he was not therefore protecting the prophets, if he wished to affirm the iniquity of the Jews, in that they had not acted dutifully even toward their own prophets.” On the contrary, there was no iniquity to reproach the Jews with here; they should rather have been praised and approved, if they had ill-treated those for whose destruction the supremely good god was moved after so long an age. But now, I suppose, he is no longer supremely good; he has now spent some time with the Creator, and is not wholly the god of Epicurus. For see, he turns to cursing, and shows himself to be one who knows how to be offended and to be angry. For he says “woe.” But we are faced with a question about the character of this word, as though it were not so much a curse as a warning. And what difference does it make to the case, since a warning too is not without the sting of a threat, especially when made more bitter by “woe”? And both warning and threat will belong to one who knows how to be angry. For no one will warn and no one will threaten, so that someone may not do something, except one who will punish it when done; and no one would punish except one who knows how to be angry. Others do acknowledge it as a word of cursing, but will have it that Christ pronounced “woe” not as properly his own sentence, but because “woe” comes from the Creator, and he wished to set the Creator's harshness against them, so as to commend his own forbearance above in the blessings. As if it did not suit the Creator, as showing both, to be both a good God and a judge; so that, having first shown kindness in the blessings, he should also add severity in the curses, furnishing the fullness of both disciplines, both for pursuing the blessing and for guarding against the curse. For so he had also said beforehand: “Look, I have set before you blessing and curse”; which even foreshadowed this arrangement of the gospel. Otherwise, what sort of being is he who, to insinuate his own goodness, set against it the Creator's harshness? Weak is the commendation propped up by the destruction of another. And in fact, by setting forth the Creator's harshness he confirmed that he is to be feared. If to be feared, then certainly to be obeyed rather than disregarded; and Marcion's Christ now begins to teach in the Creator's favor. Then, if the “woe” aimed at the rich is the Creator's, then it is not Christ who is offended at the rich but the Creator, and Christ ratifies the counts against the rich (I mean pride, vainglory, worldly pursuits, and neglect of God), by which they deserve woe from the Creator. But how would it not belong to the same one to reject the rich who above approved the beggars? No one fails to reject the opposite of what he has approved. So if the curse on the rich is to be assigned to the Creator, the blessing on the beggars will be maintained as his too, and the whole work of Christ now belongs to the Creator. If the blessing on the beggars is to be ascribed to Marcion's god, the curse on the rich will also be laid on him, and he will now be the Creator's equal, as much good as judge; and there will be no room left for the distinction by which there come to be two gods; and with the distinction removed, it will remain to proclaim one God, the Creator. So, if “woe” is a word of cursing or of some severer outcry, and is directed by Christ against the rich, I must prove that the Creator too despises the rich, as I proved that he is the advocate of beggars, so as to show Christ as the Creator's in this saying too. He did enrich Solomon, it is true; but because, given his choice, Solomon preferred to ask for what he knew was pleasing to God, wisdom and understanding, he also earned the riches, which he had not preferred. And yet it is not unfitting for God to grant riches, by which the rich too are helped with comfort (“for,” he says, “you have received your consolation,” from riches, that is, from their glory and worldly fruits), and by which many works of justice and love are carried out. But those vices that attend riches assign the “woe” to the rich in the gospel too, as in Moses' Deuteronomy: “Be careful,” he says, “that when you have eaten and are full, have built great houses, and have multiplied your flocks and herds, silver and gold, you do not become proud and forget the Lord your God.” So too he assails King Hezekiah through Isaiah, puffed up with his treasures and boasting of them rather than of God before those who had come from Persia: “Look, days are coming, and all that is in your house will be taken away, and what your fathers have stored up will be carried to Babylon.” So too through Jeremiah he declares: “Let not the rich man glory in his riches; but let him who glories,” that is, “glory in God.” So too through Isaiah he inveighs against the daughters of Zion, puffed up by their abundance of riches; and elsewhere, threatening the noble and proud: “The underworld has enlarged its soul and opened its mouth, and the renowned and great and rich will go down” (this will be Christ's “woe” on the rich); “and man will be humbled,” he who was exalted by riches, of course; “and the man will be dishonored,” he who was honored because of his wealth, of course. Of whom he says again: “Look, the Lord of powers will throw the glorious into confusion with might, and the lofty will be broken, and the high will fall by the sword.” Who more than the rich? Because they have received their consolation, namely glory and the loftiness of honors, from riches. Turning us from them, he says also in the forty-eighth psalm: “Do not fear when a man becomes rich, and when his glory abounds, for when he dies he will not take everything, nor will his glory go down with him”; likewise in the sixty-first: “Do not desire riches, even if they shine; do not set your heart on them.” Finally, that very word “woe” was long ago aimed through Amos at the rich who overflow with luxuries: “Woe,” he says, “to those who sleep on beds of ivory and are dissolute on their couches, who eat kids from the flocks of goats and suckling calves from the herds of cattle, clapping to the sound of instruments; they considered these things lasting and not as fleeting; who drink strained wine and anoint themselves with the finest ointments.” So even if I showed only that the Creator turns people away from riches, and not also that he condemns the rich beforehand, and that with the very word Christ uses, no one would doubt that the threat against the rich through Christ's “woe” was added by the same one by whom the turning away from those very things, riches, had gone before. For a threat is an addition to a dissuasion. He also pronounces woe on the full, because they will hunger, and on those who laugh now, because they will mourn. To these correspond the things set against the blessings above in the Creator: “Look, those who serve me will be filled, but you will hunger,” you who are full, of course; and, “Look, those who serve me will be delighted, but you will be put to shame,” you who laugh now and will weep, of course. For as in the psalm those who sow in tears will reap in gladness, so in the gospel those who sow in laughter, from gladness, will reap in tears. The Creator set these side by side long ago; Christ only renewed them, by separating, not by changing them. “Woe to you, when men speak well of you! In the same way their fathers did to the false prophets.” The Creator equally blames those who seek human blessing and praise, through Isaiah: “My people, those who call you blessed lead you astray and disturb the paths of your feet.” Elsewhere he forbids trust in man at all, as in the praise of man, as through Jeremiah: “Cursed is the man who has his hope in man.” For in the hundred and seventeenth psalm too he says: “It is better to trust in God than to trust in man, and better to hope in God than to hope in princes.” So the Creator renounced everything that is sought from man, let alone blessing. And to reproach the false prophets for being praised or blessed by their fathers belongs to him as much as to reproach the harassing and rejecting of the prophets. As the wrongs done to the prophets would have concerned only their own God, so the favors shown to the false prophets would have displeased only the God of the prophets.

1 “But I say to you who hear,” he says (showing that this was commanded long ago by the Creator: “Speak in the ears of those who hear”), “love your enemies, and bless those who hate you, and pray for those who slander you.” These things the Creator enclosed in a single declaration through Isaiah: “Say, You are our brothers, to those who hate you.” For if those who are enemies, and hate, and curse, and slander are to be called brothers, then surely he who commanded that they be counted brothers also commanded that those who hate be blessed and that prayer be made for slanderers. Christ plainly teaches a new patience, restraining even the retaliation for injury that the Creator permitted when he demanded an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; he, on the contrary, commands that the other cheek be offered as well, and that the cloak be given up besides the tunic. Plainly, unless Christ added these things as supplements in keeping with the Creator's discipline. And so this must be answered at once: is the discipline of patience preached in the Creator? If through Zechariah he commanded, “Let no one remember his brother's malice,” nor his neighbor's either, for again he says, “Let no one think over his neighbor's malice,” then much more did he enjoin patience under injury who enjoined forgetting it. And when he says, “Vengeance is mine, and I will avenge,” he likewise teaches patience that waits for vengeance. In so far, then, as it is incredible that the same one should seem to demand an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth in retaliation for injury who forbids not only retaliation but even revenge, and even the remembering and thinking over of an injury, to that extent it becomes clear to us how he meant “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”: not to permit a second injury by way of retaliation, which he had forbidden by prohibiting revenge, but to restrain the first by setting retaliation against it, so that each person, considering the license given to a second injury, would restrain himself from the first. For he knew that violence is more easily checked by the immediate prospect of retaliation than by the promise of vengeance. Both, however, had to be established, according to the nature and faith of men, so that one who believed God would wait for vengeance from God, and one who trusted less would fear the retaliations of the law. This intention of the law, which was hard to understand, Christ, the Lord of the sabbath and of the law and of all the Father's arrangements, both revealed and made effective, commanding the offering of the other cheek too, in order all the more to extinguish retaliation for injury, which the law too had wished to prevent through the retaliation clause, and which prophecy had plainly restrained, both forbidding the memory of injury and referring vengeance to God. So if Christ brought in anything, it was by a precept that assists and does not oppose; he did not destroy the Creator's disciplines. Indeed, if we consider the very reason for commanding patience, and one so full and perfect, it will not stand unless it belongs to the Creator, who promises vengeance, who presents himself as judge. Otherwise, if one who is not going to defend me lays on me so great a weight of patience, not only not to strike back but to offer the other cheek as well, not only not to curse back but even to bless, not only not to keep my tunic but to give up my cloak besides, he commands patience in vain, not showing me the reward of the precept, I mean the fruit of patience, which is vengeance; which he should have permitted me if he does not provide it himself, or, if he did not permit it to me, to provide himself, since it concerns discipline too that injury be avenged. For every iniquity is curbed by fear of vengeance; otherwise, let loose at will, it will rule, ready to gouge out both eyes and knock out every tooth in the security of impunity. But this is what belongs to the supremely and merely good god: to wrong patience, to throw open the door to violence, not to defend the upright, not to restrain the wicked. “Give to everyone who asks you”: to the needy, of course, or all the more to the needy, if also to one who has plenty. That no one, then, may need a giver, you have the Creator's pattern commanded in Deuteronomy: “There must be no one in need among you, so that the Lord your God may bless you with blessing,” you as the giver, that is, who have caused there to be no one in need. And there is more here: for he does not command giving to one who asks, but, “Let there be no one in need among you,” that is, take care of your own accord that there be none. All the more does he prejudge that one who asks is to be given to, in what follows too: “But if there is one in need among your brothers, you must not turn away your heart nor close your hand against your needy brother; you must open your hand to him; you must lend to him as much as he desires.” For a loan is usually not given except to one who asks. But of lending later. Now, if anyone wishes to argue that the Creator commanded giving to brothers, but Christ to all who ask, so that this is new and different: on the contrary, it will be one of the things through which the Creator's law will be repeated in Christ. For Christ commanded nothing else toward all than the Creator toward brothers. For even if kindness that works toward strangers is greater, it does not come before that which is owed first to neighbors. For who will be able to love strangers? But if the second step of kindness is toward strangers, the first toward neighbors, the second step will belong to the one to whom the first belongs, more readily than the second will belong to one to whom the first did not belong. So the Creator, according to the order of nature, taught kindness first toward neighbors, intending afterwards to extend it to strangers too; and according to the plan of his arrangement, first toward the Jews, afterwards to the whole human race as well. And so, as long as the sacrament was within Israel, he rightly commanded mercy toward brothers alone; but when he gave Christ the nations as his inheritance and the ends of the earth as his possession, and what was said through Hosea began to be fulfilled, “Not my people, my people; and she who had not obtained mercy, has obtained mercy,” the nation, namely, from then on Christ extended the law of the Father's kindness to all, excepting no one from compassion, as no one from the calling. So even if he taught something more, this too he received as the inheritance of the nations. “And as you wish men to do to you, so do you also to them.” In this precept its other half is surely understood: “And as you do not wish men to do to you, so do not you do to them.” If a new god, unknown before and not yet clearly made known, commanded this, one who had formed me by no previous instruction by which I might first know what I should wish or not wish for myself, and so do to others what I would wish for myself and not do what I would not wish for myself, then he left the meaning of the saying open and did not bind me to agreement between will and deed, to do to others what I wish for myself and not to do to others what I do not wish for myself. For he did not define what I should wish or not wish for myself and others, so that I might make my deed match the law of my will. And I can refuse to give another what I would wish another to give me: love, service, comfort, protection, and goods of that kind; and likewise do to another what I would not wish another to do to me: violence, injury, insult, fraud, and evils of that kind. In fact, the heathen, not yet instructed by God, act with this disagreement between will and deed. For even if good and evil are known by nature, they are not known by God's discipline, through the knowledge of which, and only then, the agreement of will and deed is practiced out of faith, as under the fear of God. So Marcion's god, just then revealed, if indeed revealed, could not put out so tight, obscure, and still blind a summary of this precept, one more easily interpreted by my own choice, when he had laid down no distinction for it beforehand. But my Creator long ago and everywhere commanded that the needy, the poor, orphans, and widows be protected, helped, and refreshed, as through Isaiah: “Break your bread for the beggars, and bring those without shelter into your house, and if you see the naked, cover him”; likewise through Ezekiel, of the righteous man: “He will give his bread to the hungry and cover the naked.” So he already then taught me well enough to do to others what I would wish done to me. Likewise, declaring, “Do not kill, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony,” he taught me not to do to others what I would not wish done to me. And so the precept in the gospel will be his who in the past both laid it down beforehand, distinguished it, and arranged it according to the judgment of his discipline, and now rightly bound it up in a summary; since the Lord, that is Christ, was foretold as one who would make a cut-short word on the earth.

1 Here now he speaks of lending at interest, when he interjects: “And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive back, what thanks is there to you?” Run through what follows in Ezekiel about the same righteous man: “He has not given his money,” he says, “at interest, and will not take what has overflowed,” that is, the surplus of the loan, which is usury. First, then, it was fitting to root out the fruit of lending, so that he might the more easily accustom man to the loss even of the loan itself, should it be lost, once he had learned to give up its fruit. For this, we say, was the work of the law, preparing the way for the gospel: it was gradually shaping the faith of some people at that time toward the full brilliance of Christian discipline by first precepts of a kindness still stammering. For above too he says: “And he will return the pledge to the debtor” — surely if he is unable to pay, for would any man write that a pledge must be returned to one who pays? — and much more plainly in Deuteronomy: “Do not sleep upon his pledge; you must return his cloak to him about sunset, and he will sleep in his cloak”; and more clearly still above: “You must cancel every debt that your neighbor owes you, and you must not demand it back from your brother, because the release of the Lord your God has been proclaimed.” Now when he commands a debt to be remitted, surely to one who will not pay — for it would be more if it were to one who would pay — when he forbids it to be demanded back, what else does he teach than this: that we should lend to one who will not repay, he who has imposed so great a loss on lending? 2 “And you will be sons of God.” Nothing could be more shameless, if he will make us sons to himself who has not allowed us to make sons for ourselves, by taking away marriage. How will he enroll his own under a name which he has already erased? I cannot be the son of a eunuch, especially since I have the same Father as all things have. For he is as truly the Father of all who is the Maker of the universe as he is a eunuch who is the maker of no substance. And even if the Creator had not joined male and female, and had not granted offspring to all living creatures as well, I was this to him before paradise, before the offense, before the exile, before the two were made one again: I was a son as soon as he brought me forth by his hands, as soon as he set me moving with his breath. He now calls me son again, giving birth no longer into soul but into spirit. “Because he,” it says, “is kind toward the ungrateful and the wicked.” Well done, Marcion! Quite cleverly you have taken the rains and the suns away from him, so that he would not seem to be the Creator. But who is this kind one, who until now was not even known? How is he kind, from whom no benefits of this kind of kindness had come beforehand, such as suns and rains; who had (not) lent to the human race without hope of return, as the Creator has, who, in return for so great a generosity of the elements, still bears with men who pay the debt of thanks to idols more readily than to him; who is truly kind in spiritual benefits too, for “the words of the Lord are sweeter than honey and the honeycomb”? He, then, reproached the ungrateful who deserved to find them grateful, he whose suns and rains you too, Marcion, have enjoyed ungratefully. But your god could not yet complain of the ungrateful, since he had not yet made anyone grateful. 3 Commanding mercy too, he says: “Be merciful, as your Father has had mercy on you.” This will mean: “Break your bread for the hungry, and bring into your house (the one) without a roof, and if you see the naked, cover him,” and: “Judge for the orphan and justify the widow.” I recognize the old teaching of him who prefers mercy to sacrifice. Or if another has now commanded mercy because he too is merciful, why was he not merciful to me through so long an age? 4 “Do not judge, that you may not be judged; do not condemn, that you may not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down and running over, they will give into your lap. With the same measure with which you have measured, it will be measured back to you.” As I think, these words speak of a repayment called forth according to deserts. From whom, then, is the repayment? If from men only, then he teaches a human discipline and a human reward, and we will obey men in everything; if from the Creator, as judge and assessor of deserts, then he is driving our obedience toward the one with whom he has placed the repayment to be sought or feared, according as each has judged or condemned or forgiven or measured; if from himself, then he too already judges, which Marcion denies. Let the Marcionites choose, then, whether falling away from their master's rule is not worth as much to them as having a Christ who teaches on behalf of either men or the Creator. But “the blind leads the blind into the pit.” Some correct Marcion. But “the disciple is not above his master.” Apelles, Marcion's corrector who had been his disciple, should have remembered this. Let the heretic take the beam out of his own eye too; then let him convict the straw, if he thinks there is one, in the Christian's eye. Just as a good tree does not bear bad fruit, because truth does not bear heresy, nor a bad tree good fruit, because heresy does not bear truth, so neither did Marcion bring out anything good from the bad treasure of Cerdo, nor Apelles from Marcion's. For we will apply these things, which Christ spoke allegorically of men, far more fittingly to these very people, not to two gods, as Marcion's stumbling would have it. 5 I think I am not rash in keeping to this line all this while, by which I determine that no other god at all has been revealed by Christ — at this point alone I marvel that Marcion's adulterating hands grew numb, unless it is that even robbers are afraid; no evil deed is (without) fear, because none is without its own guilty awareness —: so long, then, the Jews too knew no other god than the one besides whom they had until then known none, nor called any other Lord than the one whom alone they knew. If this is so, who will seem to have said: “Why do you call (me) ‘Lord, Lord’?” Was it he who had never been called this, since he had never yet been made known, or he who was always regarded as Lord, being known from the beginning, namely the God of the Jews? Likewise, who could have added: “And you do not do what I say”? Was it he who was only then trying to teach them, or he who from the beginning had sent them the words of the law and the prophets? He who could reproach them with disobedience even if he had never reproached them elsewhere? Moreover, he who before Christ had declared, “This people loves me with their lips, but their heart stands far from me,” was surely charging them with their old stubbornness. Otherwise, how absurd that a new god, a new Christ, the enlightener of a religion new only just now, should pronounce stubborn and disobedient those whom he could not have tested!

1 So then, in praising the centurion's faith, it is incredible that he should have declared that he had not found such faith even in Israel, if the faith of Israel was no concern of his. Nor could it have concerned him from then on: still raw as it was, how could it be tested or compared, not to say that it did not yet exist? (But why should he not have been allowed to use the example of another's faith? Because, if that were so, (he would have said) that such faith had never been in Israel. But in saying that He should have found such faith in Israel, He showed that He had come for this very purpose, to find it, as the God and Christ of Israel. He would not have reproached it unless he were one who demanded and pursued it; a rival would rather have preferred it to be found as it was, since he had come rather to weaken and destroy it, not to approve it. 2 He also raised the widow's dead son. This is no new proof. The Creator's prophets had done this too; how much more his Son? So far, moreover, had Christ up to that moment brought in no other god, that all who were there gave the glory to the Creator, saying: “A great prophet has arisen among us, and God has looked upon his people.” Which God? Surely the one whose people they were and from whom the prophets came. But if they were glorifying the Creator, and Christ, hearing and knowing it, did not correct them, even when, in so great a proof as a dead man raised, they were still praying to the Creator, then without doubt either he was carrying about no other god than the one whom he allowed to be honored in his own benefits and mighty works, or what sort of thing is it that he bore with them in their error so long, when he came precisely to heal their error? 3 But (John is offended) on hearing of Christ's mighty works, as though they were another's. I will first explain the reason for the offense, so as the more easily to hiss the heretic's offense off the stage. Now that the Lord of powers himself, the Word and Spirit of the Father, was working and preaching on earth, the portion of the Holy Spirit which, after the pattern of the prophetic measure, had worked in John to prepare the Lord's ways had necessarily to withdraw from John, being gathered back into the Lord as into its whole mass. So John, now an ordinary man and one of the crowd, was indeed offended, but as a man, not as one hoping for or perceiving another Christ, since he had no ground for hoping for one, as he was teaching or doing nothing new. No one will be in doubt about someone whom he knows does not exist and neither hopes for nor perceives; but John was certain that there was no God besides the Creator, if only as a Jew, (not to say) also as a prophet. Clearly, one will more easily be in doubt about someone whom he knows to exist, while not knowing whether this is he. With this fear John too said: “Are you the one who comes, or do we look for another?”, simply asking whether the one he was expecting had come. For he supposed, as everyone thought, from the likeness of the proofs, that a prophet might meanwhile have been sent, distinct from another, that is, a greater, who was expected to come, namely the Lord himself. And so this was John's offense: that he doubted whether the one they were expecting had come, whom he should have recognized from the works foretold. (Or) is it that the Lord announced to John that he was to be recognized through these same works? Since these are established as foretold of the Creator's Christ, as we have shown point by point, it would be quite perverse for him to announce that he was to be understood as a Christ not the Creator's through the very things by which he compelled men rather to recognize the Creator's Christ. Much more perverse, if a Christ who is not John's also bears witness to John, confirming that he is a prophet, and indeed more than that, an angel, even citing what was written about him: “Look, I send my angel before your face, who will prepare your way,” recalling the prophecy aptly in reference to the preceding question of the offended John, so that, by confirming that the forerunner John had already come, he might remove the scruple of that question: “Are you the one who comes, or do we look for another?” For since the forerunner had already performed his office and the Lord's way was prepared, he was to be understood as the one whom the forerunner had served. John was indeed greater than all born of women, but not therefore subject to him who was least in the kingdom of God, as if the kingdom, in which some lowly one will be greater than John, belonged to one god, and John, who is greater than all born of women, to another. For whether he speaks of any lowly person whatever or of himself in humility, because he was thought less than John, since everyone was running out into the wilderness to John rather than to Christ — “What did you go out into the wilderness to see?” — it comes to the same thing: it befits the Creator both that John is his, greater than those born of women, and that Christ, or whatever lowly one will be greater than John in the kingdom (of God), is likewise the Creator's, and is greater than so great a prophet because he was not offended at Christ, which at that time made John less. 4 We have spoken of the forgiveness of sins. But the case of that sinful woman will serve this point: that when she pressed the Lord's feet with kisses, flooded them with tears, wiped them with her hair, and anointed them with ointment, she was handling the reality of a solid body, not an empty phantom; and that the sinful woman's repentance, in accordance with the Creator, earned pardon, which he is accustomed to put before sacrifice. And if the spur of repentance had come from faith, then she, justified through repentance that came from faith, heard from him: “Your faith has saved you,” from him who had declared through Habakkuk: “The righteous will live by his faith.”

1 That wealthy women attached themselves to Christ and also ministered to him from their means, among them the wife of the king's steward, comes from prophecy. For he called these through Isaiah: “Rich women, rise up and hear my voice,” to show them first as disciples, then as workers and ministers: “Daughters, in hope hear (my) words; remember the day of the year with labor in hope”; for with labor they followed him, and in hope they ministered. 2 Likewise, regarding parables, let it suffice to have proved once that this kind of speech was promised by the Creator. But now that saying of his to the people too, “With the ear you will hear and not hear,” gave Christ reason to press home often: “He who has ears, let him hear,” not as though Christ, being a different god, granted a hearing which the Creator had taken away, but because exhortation followed the threat. For those who had ears were not hearing of their own accord; he was showing that the ears of the heart were needed, with which the Creator had said they would not hear; and therefore through Christ he adds: “Pay attention to how you listen,” that is, so that you do not hear with your ears yet fail to hear, hearing, that is, not with the heart but with the ear. If you fit a worthy sense to the saying, according to the mind of him who was rousing them to hear, then even by saying “Take heed how you hear” he was threatening those who would not hear. Surely the most gentle god does not threaten, since he neither judges nor is angry. This is proved also by the sense that follows: “To him who has, more will be given, but from him who has not, even what he thinks he has will be taken away.” What will be given? An increase of faith or of understanding, or salvation itself. What will be taken away? Surely what will be given. By whom will it be given, and taken away? If it is taken away by the Creator, it will also be given by him; if it is given by Marcion's god, it will also be taken away by him. Yet under whatever name he threatens the taking away, it will not belong to the god who does not know how to threaten, who knows nothing of anger. But I marvel that he should say a lamp is not usually hidden, he who had hidden himself through so long an age, a greater and more necessary light; that he should promise to bring everything out of secrecy into the open, he who keeps his god in shadow even until now, waiting, I suppose, for Marcion to be born. 3 We come to the argument most constantly used by all who dispute the Lord's birth. He himself, they say, testifies that he was not born, by saying: “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” So heretics always either snatch plain and simple words by conjecture to whatever sense they wish, or on the other hand dissolve words that are conditional and reasoned by treating them as simple, as in this place. We, on the contrary, say first that it could not have been announced to him that his mother and brothers were standing outside seeking to see him, if he had had no mother and no brothers; the one who announced it surely knew them, either known from before or learned then and there, while they were desiring to see him or while they themselves were sending the message. To this first proposition of ours the other side usually replies: (What if it was announced to him in order to test him? But Scripture does not say this; and just as it usually indicates when something was done by way of testing — “Look, a lawyer stood up, testing him,” and on the question of tribute: “And the Pharisees came to him, testing him” — so, where it makes no mention of testing, it does not admit an interpretation of testing. And yet, more than is needed, I demand the reasons for the test: for what purpose would they have tested him by naming his mother and brothers? If it was to learn whether he had been born or not, when was this ever in question, that they should settle it by that test? Who would doubt that one he saw to be a man had been born? One he had heard declare himself the Son of Man? One whom, seeing every human quality in him, he would hesitate to believe God or the Son of God, more readily thinking him a prophet, however great, but surely born? Even if he had had to be tested to probe his birth, any other proof would have suited the test better than a mention of those persons whom he could have lacked even though born. Tell me, does a mother outlive everyone who is born? Are brothers born after everyone who is born? May one not rather have fathers and sisters, or even no one? Besides, it is established that a census had then been taken in Judea under Augustus by Sentius Saturninus, in whose records they could have inquired into his family. So the theory of this testing does not stand at all; his mother and brothers truly were standing outside, and it remains to discern the sense of one who says, not simply, “Who is my mother or my brothers?” as though denying his family and birth, but out of the necessity of the case and on a reasoned condition. For when persons so close stood outside, while strangers inside were intent on his words, and moreover sought to call him away from his solemn work, he was rightly indignant; he did not so much deny them as disown them. And so, when he had first said, “Who is my mother and who are my brothers?”, and then added, “except those who hear my words and do them,” he transferred the names of blood to others, whom he judged closer on account of faith. But no one transfers anything except one who has what he transfers. If, then, he made mother and brothers of those who were not, how did he deny those who were? Rather, by this very thing he the more confessed that he had a mother and brothers, in that he refused to acknowledge them, on the condition of deserts, that is, not by denying his kin, teaching in his own person that whoever put father or mother or brothers before the word of God was not a worthy disciple. By adopting others he confirmed those whom he denied because of offense, putting the others in their place not as more real but as more worthy. In short, it would be nothing great if he put faith before a blood kinship that he did not have.

1 But who is this who commands the winds and the sea? (No doubt a new ruler and owner of the elements, now that the Creator has been subdued and shut out. Not so. Rather, these substances recognized their own maker, they who had been used to obeying even his servants. Look into Exodus, Marcion: see the rod of Moses commanding the Red Sea, vaster than all the lakes of Judea, so that, split to its depths and held fixed on either side in equal astonishment at the division, it let the people pass over dry-shod by a path through its very depths, and again, at the nod of the same rod, as nature returned, overwhelmed the Egyptian army as the waves came together; and the south winds too served that work. Read also that at its crossing the Jordan was a sword for dividing the family by lot, whose rush and downward course Joshua too had plainly taught to stand still while the prophets passed over. (What have you to say to this? If he is your Christ, he will not be more powerful than the Creator's servants. But I would have used only these examples if a prediction of this voyage on the sea had not also gone before Christ. For when he crosses the lake, a psalm is fulfilled: “The Lord,” it says, “upon many waters”; when he scatters the waves of the lake, Habakkuk is fulfilled: “Scattering waters on his way”; when the sea is dashed down at his threats, Nahum too is discharged: “Threatening the sea,” he says, “and drying it up,” surely along with the winds by which it was being stirred up. From which do you want my Christ to be vindicated? From the examples or from the prophets of the Creator? 2 Come now, you who think that a military and armed warrior is foretold, not figuratively or allegorically, one who would win a spiritual war against spiritual enemies with spiritual soldiery and spiritual weapons, spiritually: when you find in one man a multitude of demons calling itself a legion, surely a spiritual one, learn that Christ too is to be understood as the conqueror of spiritual enemies, spiritually armed and spiritually warlike, and that he is the very one who was to fight even with a legion of demons, so that the psalm may be seen to have spoken of this war too: “The Lord strong, the Lord mighty in battle.” For when he was to do battle with the last enemy, death, he triumphed through the trophy of the cross. But of which God did the legion testify that Jesus was the Son? Without doubt of the one whose torments and abyss they knew and feared. For they can hardly have been ignorant until then of what the power of a new and unknown god was working on earth, because it is not likely that the Creator was ignorant of it. For even if he had once been ignorant of another god above himself, yet he had surely found him out by now, acting beneath his own heaven. And what the master had found out would by now have become known to his whole household too, in the same world and within the same circuit of heaven in which the foreign divinity was moving about. To the extent, then, that the Creator and his substance would have known of it, had it existed, to that extent it did not exist, because the demons knew no other Christ than the Christ of their own God. For they would not have begged from another what they remembered they must beg from the Creator, namely to be spared the Creator's abyss. And in the end they obtained it. For what merit? Because they had lied, because they had made him the son of a cruel god? And what kind of god will he be who helped liars and put up with slanderers? But no: because they had not lied, because they had recognized him as the God of the abyss and as their own, He Himself confirmed through this that he was the one whom the demons recognized, Jesus, Son of the God who judges and avenges. 3 Here is something too of those petty traits and weaknesses of the Creator in Christ — for I too wish to ascribe ignorance to him; allow me this against the heretic —: he is touched by a woman who was flowing with blood, and he did not know by whom. “Who touched me?” he says. Even when the disciples make excuses, he persists in the language of ignorance: “Someone touched me,” and he affirms it from evidence: “For I perceived that power had gone out from me.” What does the heretic say? Did he know the person? Then why did he speak as though he did not know? Surely to call forth her confession, to test her fear. So too (the Creator) once asked, as though he did not know: “Adam, where are you?” You have both the Creator excused along with Christ and Christ made equal to the Creator. (But this too, they say, he did as an opponent of the law: because the law keeps a bleeding woman from touching, he was eager not only to allow her touch but even to grant her healing. god, beneficent not by nature but by rivalry! But if we find that the woman's faith merited this, since he said, “Your faith has saved you,” who are you to read rivalry with the law into this deed, which the Lord himself shows was done as a reward for faith? But you want to make this the woman's faith, that she had despised the law. And who could believe that a woman who was not yet aware of any (new) god, not yet initiated into any new law, would break through the law by which she was still bound? In short, by what faith did she break through it? Believing in what god? Despising the Creator for whom? Surely she touched him by faith in him. If by faith in the Creator, which knew no other god, how did she break through his law? For she broke through it, if she did, precisely as far as from faith in the Creator. But how will both fit together, that she both broke through it and broke through it by faith in the one on whose account she should not have broken through it? I will tell you. Her faith was first this: she trusted that her God prefers mercy to sacrifice itself, and she was sure that this God was at work in Christ. If with this faith she touched him, it was not as a holy man nor as a prophet, whom she would know could be defiled because of his human substance, but as God himself, who she had assumed could be polluted by no uncleanness. So she did not rashly interpret the law for herself as meaning that those things are defiled which are capable of defilement, not God, whom she trusted was in Christ. She also reflected that what the law regulates is the regular and customary flow of menstrual blood or of childbirth, which comes from the working of nature, not from a defect of health; but hers was overflowing from a defect of health, for which she knew that what was needed was not a limit of time but the help of divine mercy; and so she can be seen not to have broken through the law but to have drawn a distinction within it. This will be the faith that had also brought understanding: “Unless you believe,” he says, “you will not understand.” Approving this faith of the woman, who believed only in the Creator, Christ answered that he was the God of the faith which he approved. Nor will I pass over this: when his garment was touched, a garment surely put on a body and not on a phantom, a body too was being demonstrated; not as though we were going over this ground again, but because it bears on the present question. For if there was no reality of a body, a phantom, being an empty thing, surely could not be defiled. How then could one who cannot be defiled, because of the emptiness of his substance, have wanted it, as a rival of the law? He was lying, since he was not truly being polluted.

1 He sends the disciples out to preach the kingdom of God. Did he even here make known whose? He forbids them to carry anything on the journey for food or clothing. Who would have commanded this, except the one who both feeds the ravens and clothes the flowers of the field, who long before had commanded that the ox treading out the grain should have its mouth left free, so that it might be permitted to take fodder from its work, because the worker is worthy of his wage? Let Marcion delete these things, so long as their sense remains intact. But when he commands them to shake the dust off their feet against those by whom they had not been received, he orders this too to be done as a testimony. No one bears witness to what is not destined for judgment: one who orders inhospitality to be turned into testimony is threatening as a judge. 2 That no new god had been established by Christ was declared also by the common opinion of all, in which some asserted to Herod that Christ Jesus was John, others Elijah, others one of the old prophets. Whichever of these he had been, he surely would not have been raised for this purpose, to preach another god after his resurrection. 3 He feeds the people in the wilderness, after the ancient custom, of course. Or, if the majesty is not the same, then he is now less than the Creator, who sustained, not for one day but for forty years, not from lesser materials of bread and fish but from heavenly manna, not about five thousand but six hundred thousand men. But the majesty was so much (the same) that he willed the scantiness of the food not only to suffice but even to abound, after the ancient example. For so too, in the time of famine under Elijah, the small and last provisions of the widow of Zarephath had overflowed through the whole time of the famine by the prophet's blessing. You have the third book of Kingdoms. If you unroll the fourth as well, you will find this whole procedure of Christ in the case of that man of God who, when ten barley loaves were offered to him, ordered them to be distributed to the people; and when his servant, likewise comparing the multitude with the meagerness of the food, answered: “What then? Should I set this before a hundred men?”, he said: “Give, and they will eat, for thus says the Lord: They will eat and leave some over,” according to the word of the Lord. Christ, old even in what is new! 4 So Peter, who had seen these things and compared them with those of old, and had recognized them not only as deeds of the past but as already then prophesying the future, when the Lord asked who he seemed to them to be and he answered for all, “You are the Christ,” cannot have perceived him to be any Christ but the one he knew in the Scriptures, whom he was now recognizing in deeds. Christ himself confirms this too, bearing with it thus far, and indeed enjoining silence. For if Peter could not confess him as other than the Creator's Christ, and he commanded them to tell no one, surely what he did not want published was what Peter had perceived. No, you say: because Peter had not perceived rightly, he did not want a lie spread about. But he declared another reason for silence: that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and scribes and priests and be killed and rise again after the third day. Since these things too were foretold of the Creator's Christ, as we will fully show in their places, in this way too he shows himself to be the one of whom they were foretold. Certainly, even if they had not been foretold, the reason he gave for the silence he imposed was one which showed no error of Peter's: the necessity of undergoing his sufferings. 5 “Whoever wishes,” he says, “to save his soul will lose it, and whoever loses it for my sake will save it.” Certainly the Son of Man uttered this sentence. Look, then, you too, together with the king of Babylon, into his burning furnace, and you will find there one like a son of man — for he was not yet truly so, not yet born of a human being — already then establishing these outcomes. He saves the souls of the three brothers, who had agreed to lose them for God, but he destroyed those of the Chaldeans, which they had preferred to save by idolatry. What is this new teaching, whose proofs are old? And indeed predictions of martyrdoms too have run their course, both of those to come and of those who would receive a reward from God: “See,” says Isaiah, “how the righteous man perished, and no one takes it to heart; and righteous men are taken away, and no one considers it.” When does this happen more than in the persecution of His saints? This is certainly not a simple death, nor one common by the law of nature, but that distinguished death, the soldier's death for the faith, in which whoever loses his soul for God's sake keeps it; so that here too you may recognize a judge, who will repay the soul's evil gain with its loss and the soul's good loss with its salvation. And he shows me a jealous God, returning evil for evil: “Whoever is ashamed of me,” he says, “of him will I also be ashamed.” For the matter for shame fits none but my Christ, whose course is the more shameful in that it lies open even to the insults of heretics, who declaim with all the bitterness they can upon the whole foulness of his birth and upbringing and on the unworthiness of the flesh itself. But how will the other be liable to shame, when he is incapable of it? — he was not curdled in a womb, even though a virgin's, still a woman’s, and, even if not from seed, yet by the law of bodily substance, out of blood and fluid; he was not held to be flesh before he had form, nor called a mere animal thing after he took shape; he was not released after the torment of ten months, nor poured out onto the ground through the body's sewer, with the sudden shock of pains, along with the filth of so long a time; he did not greet the light at once with tears, from the first wound of his cord; he was not washed well, nor treated with salt and honey, nor initiated in swaddling clothes into what is already a burial wrapping, nor rolled thereafter through uncleanness from lap to lap, a nuisance at the breasts, long an infant, hardly a boy, late a man; no, he was set down from heaven, grown all at once, whole all at once, instantly Christ, spirit and power and God only. Moreover, (being) not real, since he was not seen, he was not to be blushed for on account of the curse of the cross either, whose reality he lacked, lacking a body. So he could not have said, “Whoever is ashamed of me.” Our Christ is the one who must have declared this, made a little lower than the angels by the Father, a worm and not a man, a reproach of men and the scorn of the people, to the extent that he willed, so that we might be healed by his bruise, so that our salvation might consist in his disgrace. And rightly he humbled himself for his own man, for his own image and likeness, not another's, so that, since man had (not) blushed to worship stone and wood, with the same boldness, unashamed of Christ, he might make satisfaction to God for the shamelessness of idolatry by the shamelessness of faith. Which of these things fits your Christ, Marcion, to make him deserve shame? Plainly you should be ashamed that you made him up yourself.

1 Now you should have blushed most of all at this: that you allow him to be seen, on the retreat of the mountain, with Moses and Elijah, whom he had come to destroy. This, no doubt, is what that voice from heaven meant to be understood: “This is my beloved Son; hear him,” that is, no longer Moses and Elijah. Then the voice alone would have been enough, without a display of Moses and Elijah. For by defining whom they should hear, he would have forbidden any others whatever to be heard. Or did he allow Isaiah and Jeremiah and the rest, whom he did not display, to be heard, if he forbade those whom he displayed? Now, even if their presence was necessary, surely they would not have been shown in conversation with him, which is a sign of intimacy, nor sharing his glory, which is a token of esteem and favor, but in some squalor, which is a proof of destruction; or rather in the Creator's darkness, which he had been sent to scatter, set far apart even from the glory of Christ, who was going to separate their very words and writings from his gospel. Is this how he shows them to be strangers, by keeping them with him? Is this how one should abandon those whom he joins to himself? Is this how he destroys those whom he builds up with his own rays? What would their own Christ have done? I suppose, by this perversity, he would have revealed them as Marcion's Christ should have done, or would (have shown) any others at all with him rather than his own prophets. But what is so proper to the Creator's Christ as to show his own heralds with him? To be seen with those to whom he had appeared in revelations? To speak with those who had spoken of him? To share his glory with those by whom he had been called the Lord of glory? With his chief servants, one of whom was once the shaper of the people and the other at some time its reshaper, one the initiator of the old testament and the other the finisher of the new? So Peter too, recognizing the fitting company of his Christ, suggests a plan for keeping him (in) their company: “It is good for us to be here” — good indeed, where Moses and Elijah are, of course — “and let us make three tabernacles here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” (But not knowing what he said. How not knowing? Was it by simple error, or on the principle by which we maintain, in the cause of the new prophecy, that ecstasy, that is, being out of one's mind, belongs to grace? For a man placed in the Spirit, especially when he beholds the glory of God or when God speaks through him, must of necessity lose his senses, being overshadowed, that is, by the divine power. Although there is a dispute on this between us and the psychics, meanwhile it is easy to prove that Peter was out of his mind. For how would he have recognized Moses and Elijah — for the people had no images or statues of them, nor likenesses, since the law forbade them — except because he had seen them in the Spirit? And so what he said, being placed in the Spirit and not in his senses, he could not know. But if he did not know in the sense of erring, because he thought the Christ belonged to them, then it is established that earlier too, when Christ asked whom they thought him to be, Peter said, “You are the Christ,” of the Creator's Christ; because, if he had then recognized him as another god's, he would not have erred here either. But if he erred here because he had erred earlier too, then you are certain that up to that day no new divinity had been revealed by Christ, that Peter had not erred up to then, since Christ up to then had revealed nothing of the kind, and that Christ must be considered the Creator’s and no one else’s all that time, whose whole pattern he expressed here too. He takes three of his disciples as witnesses of the vision and voice to come. This too is the Creator's way: “On three witnesses,” he says, “every word will stand.” He withdraws up a mountain. I recognize the pattern of the place. For the Creator too had initiated the ancient people at a mountain, with a vision and with his voice. It was fitting that the new testament should be sealed on that platform on which the old had been written, and under the same enveloping cloud, which no one will doubt was massed together from the Creator's air — unless he had brought down his own clouds too — since he too had forced his way through the Creator's sky. Or did he likewise use the Creator's cloud on loan? So neither now was the cloud mute, but there was the accustomed voice from heaven, and the Father's new testimony about the Son, to whom he says in the second psalm: “You are my Son; today I have begotten you,” and of whom also through Isaiah: “Who fears God? Let him hear the voice of his Son.” So, presenting him now — “This is my Son” — surely he implies: whom I promised. For if he once promised and afterward says, “This is he,” it belongs to one who once promised to use such words when pointing out the one promised, not to one to whom it could be answered: ‘Who are you yourself, to say, “This is my Son,” of whom you gave no more notice beforehand than you revealed yourself, what you were before?’ “Hear him,” then! Whom? (Who but the one whom) from the beginning he had declared must be heard, under the name of a prophet, since he was also to be thought a prophet by the people: “A prophet,” says Moses, “God will raise up for us from your sons” — according to fleshly descent, that is — “you must hear him as you hear me. And everyone who will not hear him, his soul will be cut off from his people.” So too Isaiah: “Who among you fears (God)? Let him hear the voice of his Son,” a voice which the Father himself was going to commend: “establishing,” he says, “the words of his Son,” namely by saying: “This is my beloved Son; hear him.” So even if the hearing was transferred from Moses and Elijah to Christ, it was not as from another god nor to another Christ, but from the Creator to his Christ, in keeping with the departure of the old testament and the succession of the new: “Not an envoy,” says Isaiah, “nor a messenger, but God himself will save them,” now himself preaching and fulfilling the law and the prophets. So the Father handed the new disciples over to the Son, after Moses and Elijah had first been shown with him in the privilege of glory and then dismissed, as though now discharged from both office and honor, so that this very point might be confirmed, for Marcion's sake: that Christ shares even his glory with Moses and Elijah. 2 The whole shape of this vision we have also in Habakkuk, where the Spirit speaks at times in the person of the apostles: “Lord, I have heard your report and was afraid” — at what, more than at that heavenly voice, “This is my beloved Son; hear him”? — “I considered your work (and) was out of my mind” — when more than when Peter, having seen his glory, did not know what he said? — “In the midst of two living creatures you will be known,” that is, Moses and Elijah, whom Zechariah too saw in the figure of two olive trees and two olive branches. For these are the ones of whom it was said to him: “The two sons of fatness stand by the Lord of the whole earth.” And again the same Habakkuk: “His power covered the heavens,” surely with that cloud, “and his splendor will be like light,” surely the light with which even his clothing shone. And if we recall the promise to Moses, it will be found fulfilled here. For Moses had longed for the sight of the Lord, saying: “If then I have found favor before you, show yourself to me, that I may see you knowingly,” longing for that sight in which the Lord would be acting as a man, as the prophet knew — for the face of God, he had already heard, no one will see and live —; and the Lord said: “This word too, which you have spoken, I will do for you.” And again Moses: “Show me your glory.” And the Lord likewise, of the future: “I will go before you in my glory,” and the rest. And at the end: “And then you will see my back parts,” not the loins or the calves, but the glory he had longed for, to be revealed in the latter times, in which he had promised that he would be visible to him face to face, saying also to Aaron: “And if there is a prophet among you, I will be known to him in a vision and will speak to him in a vision, not as to Moses; mouth to mouth will I speak to him, in form” — surely the form of the man he was going to bear — “not in a riddle.” For even if Marcion did not want him shown conversing with the Lord, but only standing there, yet even standing he stood mouth to mouth and face to face — “with him,” it says, “not apart from him” — in his very glory, not merely in his sight. From that glory he departed from Christ illumined no differently than he used to depart from the Creator, dazzling the eyes of the sons of Israel then, just as now those of blinded Marcion, who did not see that this argument too tells against him.

1 I take upon myself the part of Israel. Let Marcion's Christ stand there and cry out: “Unbelieving generation, how long must I be with you? How long must I bear with you?” At once he will have to hear from me: “Whoever you are, steward, first declare who you are, and from whom you come, and what right you have over us. Up to now everything about you is the Creator's. Plainly, if you come from him and act for him, we accept the rebuke. But if you come from another, I would like you to tell us: what have you ever entrusted to us of your own, which we should have believed, that you reproach us with unbelief, you who have never even revealed yourself to us? How long ago did you begin to deal with us, that you complain of the time? In what have you borne with us, that you charge us with your patience? You come just now, like Aesop's ass out of the well, and already you are braying.” Who would not have thrown back the injustice of the rebuke in this way, if he believed that it came from one who had as yet no right to complain? Except that he would not have sprung upon them either, had he not long before lodged among them in the law, in the prophets, in mighty works and benefits, and always found them unbelieving. 2 But look, Christ loves little children, teaching that those who always want to be greater should be like them, whereas the Creator set bears on boys, avenging the prophet Elisha for the insults he had suffered from them. A shameless enough antithesis, which pits such different things against each other, little children and boys, an age still innocent and an age already capable of judgment, which could insult, not to say blaspheme. As a just God, then, he did not spare even impious boys, requiring honor for greater age, and surely all the more from those younger; but as a good God he loves little children so much that in Egypt he did good to the midwives who protected the Hebrew births endangered by Pharaoh's edict. So this affection of Christ's too he shares with the Creator. Now then, how can Marcion's god, who opposes marriage, seem to be a lover of little children, whose whole cause is marriage? One who hates the seed must necessarily loathe the fruit as well. Indeed, he must be held more cruel than the king of Egypt. For Pharaoh did not allow infants to be reared; this god does not allow them even to be born, taking from them even their ten months of life in the womb. How much more credible that affection for little children should be credited to him who, by blessing marriage for the propagation of the human race, promised that the very fruit of marriage too would be blessed, a fruit which begins with infancy! 3 The Creator, at Elijah's request, brings down the plague of fire in the case of that false prophet. I recognize the judge's severity; on the other hand I recognize (the gentleness of Christ rebuking) the disciples who intended the same punishment for that little village of the Samaritans. Let the heretic too recognize that this gentleness of Christ was promised by the same most severe judge: “He will not strive,” he says, “nor (cry out, nor) will his voice be heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and smoking flax he will not quench.” Such a one would surely be much less likely to burn men up. For even then it was said to Elijah: “The Lord is not in the fire, but in the gentle breeze.” 4 But why does the most kindly Lord refuse the man who offers himself to him as so inseparable a companion? If it was because he had said proudly or hypocritically, “I will follow you wherever you go,” then by judging that either pride or hypocrisy must be refused he acted as a judge. And surely he condemned the man whom he refused, as one who would not attain salvation. For just as he calls to salvation the one he does not refuse, or even the one he calls of his own accord, so he condemns to perdition the one he refuses. And when he answers the one who pleaded his father's burial, “Let the dead bury their dead; but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God,” he plainly confirmed both laws of the Creator: that on the priesthood in Leviticus, which forbids priests to attend even the funerals of their parents — “The priest,” it says, “must not go in to any dead soul, and he must not be defiled for his father (or for his mother)” — and that on the vow in Numbers; for there too he commands the one who has vowed himself to God, among other things, not to go in to any dead soul, not even that of father or mother or brother. And I suppose he was destining for the vow and for the priesthood the man whom he had charged with preaching the kingdom of God. Or if this is not so, he must be pronounced impious indeed, commanding sons to disregard their parents' burial with no reason of the law coming between. And when he forbids that third man, who was preparing first to say farewell to his family, to look back, he follows the Creator's course: this too the Creator had not wanted done by those whom he had delivered from Sodom.

1 He appointed also seventy other apostles besides the twelve. For why twelve, after the number of the springs at Elim, if not also seventy, after the number of the palm trees there? The Antitheses were produced mostly by a difference of circumstances, not of powers. But one who paid no attention to the difference of circumstances easily supposed it to be a difference of powers. The Creator led the departure of the sons of Israel out of Egypt loaded even with those seized goods of gold and silver vessels and garments, besides the burdens of dough, whereas Christ directed his disciples not to carry even a staff on the journey. For the former were being sent forward into a wilderness, the latter were being sent into cities. Consider the difference of circumstances, and you will understand that it is one and the same power which arranged the expedition of its people according to want and plenty: cutting down the supplies of those who would have abundance through the cities, just as it had equipped those who would be in want through the wilderness. He forbade them even to carry shoes. For he was the very one under whom the people, even in the wilderness for so many years, had not worn out their shoes. “Salute no one,” he says, “on the way.” Christ, destroyer of the prophets, from whom he received even this! Elisha, when he sent his servant Gehazi on the way to raise the Shunammite woman's son from death, gave him, I think, this command: “Gird up your loins and take my staff in your hand and go: whomever you meet on the way, do not bless him,” that is, do not greet him, “and whoever blesses you, do not answer him,” that is, do not return his greeting. For what is a blessing on the roads but the mutual greeting of those who meet? So too the Lord's command, that in whatever house they entered they should say “peace” to it, comes from the same example. For Elisha commanded this too: when he came to the Shunammite woman, he should say to her: “Peace to your husband, peace to your son.” These rather will be our antitheses, which compare Christ with the Creator, not separate him. And who would more fittingly declare “The worker is worthy of his wage” than God the judge? For this very thing is judging: deeming a worker worthy of his wage. No repayment has ever been settled except by a judgment. Now here too the Creator's law is sealed, since he judges even working oxen to be workers worthy of their wage: “Do not bind the mouth,” he says, “of the ox that treads out the grain.” Who is so generous toward men as one who is so even toward cattle? And if Christ too declares workers worthy of their wage, he has vindicated that command of the Creator to carry off the gold and silver vessels of the Egyptians. For those who had worked on estates and cities for the Egyptians, surely workers worthy of their wage, were not incited to fraud but to the settling of their wage, which they could not otherwise exact from their masters. 2 He confirmed in this way too that the kingdom of God was neither new nor unheard of, when he commanded that it be announced as having drawn near. For what was once far off can be said to have drawn near. But if it had never existed before it drew near, it could not have been said to have drawn near, since it had never been far off. Everything new and unknown is sudden. Everything sudden, when it is announced, only then first takes on an appearance and only then first receives a time. Moreover, it could neither have been delayed in the past, so long as it was not announced, nor have drawn near from the time it began to be announced. He adds also that they should say to those who had not received them: “Know nevertheless that the kingdom of God has drawn near.” If he does not command this by way of threat as well, he commands it quite pointlessly. For what was it to them if the kingdom drew near, unless it draws near with judgment? — for the salvation, that is, of those who had received its announcement. So, since a threat is impossible without execution, you have in the one who threatens a God who executes, and a judge in both. So too he orders the dust to be shaken off against them, as a testimony that even their soil was renounced, much more any other fellowship. For if inhumanity and inhospitality were to receive no vengeance from him, for what purpose does he send a testimony ahead, which surely portends threats? Moreover, since the Creator too in Deuteronomy forbids the Ammonites and Moabites to be received into the assembly because they had inhumanly and inhospitably cheated the people setting out from Egypt of provisions, it will be clear that the ban on fellowship flowed into Christ from there, where it has its pattern. “Whoever despises you despises me.” This the Creator said to Moses too: “They have not despised you but me.” For Moses was as much an apostle as the apostles were prophets. The authority of both offices had to be made equal by one and the same Lord of apostles and prophets. 3 Now who will give power to tread upon snakes and scorpions? The Lord of all animals, or the god of not even one lizard? But it is well that the Creator promised this power even to little children through Isaiah: to put their hand into the hole of asps and into the den of young asps and not be harmed at all. And surely we know — without prejudice to the plain sense of Scripture, for even the beasts themselves will not be able to harm where there is faith — that scorpions and snakes figuratively signify the spiritual forces of wickedness, whose prince himself is represented by the Creator under the name of the serpent and the dragon and every most prominent beast; and that the Creator granted this power first to his own Christ, as Psalm 90 says to him: “You will walk upon the asp and the basilisk, and you will trample the lion and the dragon”; and as Isaiah too says: “In that day the Lord God will bring his holy sword, great and strong” — his Christ, that is — “upon that dragon, the great and twisting serpent, and will kill it in that day.” And when the same prophet says, “It will be called a clean way and a holy way, and nothing unclean will pass over it, nor will there be an unclean way there; but those who have been scattered will walk in it and will not go astray; and there will no longer be a lion there, nor will any of the evil beasts go up on it, nor will one be found there,” since he shows the way to be faith, by which we will reach God, he is already then promising to that same way, that is, to faith, this disabling and subjection of the beasts. In fact you will find that the times of the promise also agree, if you read what precedes: “Be strong, hands that hang down and knees that are loosened: then the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf will hear; then the lame man will leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute will be clear.” So when he had brought out the benefits of healing, then too he subjected scorpions and serpents to his saints: he, namely, who had first received this power from the Father, so that he might grant it to others also, and who displayed it in the order in which it had been foretold.

1 Who will be invoked as Lord of heaven, who has not first been shown to be its maker? For he says: “I thank you and confess you, Lord of heaven, because you have revealed to little ones the things that were hidden from the wise and prudent.” What things? And whose? Hidden by whom? Revealed by whom? By Marcion's god, hidden and revealed, when he had put forth nothing at all beforehand in which anything could have been hidden: no prophecies, no parables, no visions, no proofs of things or words or names overshadowed by allegories and figures or by the clouds of riddles? But he had hidden, they say, his very greatness, which he was just then revealing through Christ. That is unjust enough. For what wrong had the wise and prudent done, that God should be hidden from them, when their wisdom and prudence had not been enough to know him, since he himself had given them no way, through any proclamation of his works or any traces, by which the wise and prudent might be led to him? And even if they had offended in some way against a god unknown — suppose it — and now known, still they should not have found him jealous, since he is presented as unlike the Creator. So if he had neither put forth materials in which he could have concealed something, nor had guilty persons from whom to conceal it, nor should have concealed it even if he had had them, then neither will the revealer be he who was not the concealer — and so neither Lord of heaven nor Father of Christ — but rather that other one, to whom all these things apply. For he both concealed, having first put forth the instrument of prophetic obscurity, the understanding of which faith would earn — for “unless you believe, you will not understand” — and he had guilty persons, the wise and prudent, who did not seek God, though he could be understood from so many and such great works, or philosophized wrongly about him and supplied the heretics with their ideas; and lastly he is jealous. In fact long ago he proclaimed through Isaiah what Christ gives thanks for: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and I will hide the prudence of the prudent,” just as elsewhere too he indicates both that he has hidden (himself) and that he will reveal: “And I will give them hidden treasures; I will open to them invisible things,” and again: “Who else will scatter the signs of ventriloquists and divinations from the heart, turning the wise backward and making their thoughts foolish?” And if he also designated his Christ as the enlightener of the nations — “I have set you for a light of the nations” — whom we interpret under the name of little ones, since formerly they were little ones in understanding and infants in imprudence, and now are small also in the humility of faith, we will surely more easily believe that the same one who formerly hid, and who promised a revelation through Christ, has also revealed to little ones through Christ. Or if Marcion's god laid open the things that had formerly been hidden by the Creator, then he was already doing the Creator's business, expounding his affairs. But (it was for their destruction, you say,) to expose them. Then he should have exposed them to those from whom the Creator hid them, the wise and prudent. For if he was acting out of kindness, knowledge should have been granted to those to whom it had been denied, not to the little ones, from whom the Creator had withheld nothing. And yet up to now, I think, we are proving that what is found in Christ is the building up of the law and the prophets rather than their destruction. 2 He says that all things have been delivered to him by the Father. You may believe it if Christ is the Creator's, to whom all things belong, and because the Creator delivered to no lesser son all the things he founded through him, through his Word, that is. But if he is that other steward, what are the (all things) that were delivered to him by the Father? Are they the Creator's? Then what the Father delivered to the Son are good things, and the Creator is now good, since all his things are good; and that other is now not good, since he invaded another's goods to deliver them to his son, he who teaches us to keep our hands off what is another's. Surely he is the most beggarly of all, who had nothing with which to enrich even his son except from another's property. Or if nothing of the Creator's was delivered to him by the Father, how does he claim for himself the Creator's man? Or if only man was delivered to him, man is not all things. But Scripture declares that a delivering of (all things) was made to the Son. And even if you interpret (all things) of the races of men, that is, of all the nations, to deliver these too to the Son is the Creator's act: “I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession.” Or if he too had some (all things) of his own to deliver to his son together with the Creator's man, show me some single one of those (all things) as a pledge, as a sample, so that I may not refuse to believe, with as much reason, that all things belong to him of whom I see nothing, as I believe, with reason, that even the things I do not see belong to him to whom belong all the things I do see. 3 But “no one knows who the Father is except the Son, and who the Son is except the Father” “and anyone to whom the Son reveals him”; and so Christ preached an unknown god. For other heretics too prop themselves up on this, objecting that the Creator is known to all, to Israel by familiarity and to the nations by nature. And how is it that he himself testifies that he was known neither to Israel — “But Israel has not known me, and the people has not understood me” — nor to the nations? “For look,” he says, “of the nations there is no one.” That is why he counted them as a drop from a bucket, and Zion as a watchtower left in a vineyard. See then whether this is not a confirmation of the prophetic voice reproaching mankind's ignorance of God, which lasted right up to the Son. For this is why he added that the Father is known by the one to whom the Son reveals him: because he was the very one who was announced as set by the Father for a light of the nations, which were to be enlightened about God, surely, and a light of Israel too, surely through a fuller knowledge of God. So arguments that can apply to the Creator will not serve faith in another god, since only those that do not apply to the Creator could serve faith in another god. 4 If you look at what follows as well, “Blessed are the eyes which see what you see; for I tell you that the prophets did not see what you see,” this too comes down from the preceding sense: that no one had known God as he should, since not even the prophets had seen what was being seen under Christ. For if Christ were not mine, he would not have made mention of the prophets in this passage. For what wonder is it if they had not seen the things of a god unknown and revealed after so long an age, if they had not attained the display of things they had never foretold? But what would the happiness of those who then saw have been, except that those who could have seen the things of their own God, which they had even foretold, nevertheless had not seen them? For this will be the happiness of the former, that they saw what others had only foretold. In short, we will show, and have already shown, that what was seen in Christ had been foretold, yet hidden even from the prophets themselves, so that it might be hidden also from the wise and prudent of the world. 5 In the gospel of truth a lawyer approached the Lord and said: “What must I do to obtain eternal life?” In the heretic's gospel only “life” is set down, without mention of “eternal,” so that the lawyer may seem to have asked about the life promised in the law by the Creator, a long life, and the Lord therefore to have answered him according to the law, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength,” since he was asking about the life of the law. But the lawyer surely knew how the life of the law could be obtained, so that he would not have asked about it, since he himself taught its rules. But because the dead were already being raised by Christ, and, roused to the hope of eternal life by examples of a return to life, he was concerned that the higher hope might demand some further observance, therefore he asked how eternal life is to be attained. So the Lord, as one who was himself no other and was bringing in no other new commandment than the one that above all makes for all salvation and for both lives, sets before him the very head of the law, to love the Lord his God in every way. In fact, if the lawyer asked, and Christ answered, about the long life which is in the Creator's gift, not about the eternal life which is in the gift of Marcion's god, how will he obtain eternal life? Surely not in the same way as long life. For with the difference of rewards, a difference of works too must be believed. Then the Marcionites will not obtain eternal life by loving their god, as the lover of the Creator obtains long life. But how can it be that the one who promises eternal life is not to be loved all the more, if the one who promises long life is to be loved? So both lives will belong to the same God, since the discipline for gaining both lives is the same — what the Creator teaches, Christ too needs: that he be loved, in order to grant them. Here too that prescription intervenes, by which greater things should be more readily believed of the one with whom lesser things come first than of one for whom no lesser things have prepared any faith in the greater. Let it be their concern now whether our people added “eternal”: this is enough for me, that Christ, the one who invites to eternal and not to long life, when asked about long life, which he was abolishing, did not rather urge the man toward eternal life, which he was bringing in. What, I ask you, would the Creator's Christ have done, if one who was not the Creator's had built man up to love the Creator? I suppose he would have denied that the Creator is to be loved.

1 When in a certain place he had prayed to that higher Father — lifting quite shameless and reckless eyes to the Creator's heaven, from which he could have been crushed by such harsh and cruel hail and lightning, just as he could be nailed up by him (at) Jerusalem — one of his disciples approached him and said: “Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples,” (because, of course, he thought that another god had to be prayed to in another way. Whoever presumes this must first prove that another god was made known by Christ. For no one would have wanted to know how to pray before he had learned to whom he should pray. So if he had learned, prove it. If up to now you nowhere prove it, know that he asked for a form of prayer to the Creator, to whom John's disciples too were praying. But because John too had introduced some new order of prayer, this disciple not unreasonably presumed that the same should be asked of Christ, so that they too, by an institution of their own master, might pray not to another god but to God in another way. Accordingly, Christ would not have given the disciple a knowledge of prayer before a knowledge of God himself. So he too taught a prayer to the one whom the disciple had known up to then. In short, recognize which God the meaning of the prayer savors of. To whom should I say “Father”? To one who did not make me at all, from whom I do not draw my origin, or to him who begot me by making and fashioning me? From whom should I ask for the Holy Spirit? From one by whom not even the spirit of this world is granted, or from him by whom even angels are made spirits, and whose Spirit also in the beginning was borne upon the waters? Should I wish for the coming of the kingdom of one whom I have never heard called the king of glory, or of him in whose hand are even the hearts of kings? Who will give me daily bread? One who does not even grow millet for me, or he who even from heaven supplied his people daily with the bread of angels? Who will forgive me my sins? One who does not retain them because he does not judge, or he who, if he does not forgive, will retain them in order to judge? Who will not allow us to be led into temptation? One whom the tempter might have no reason to fear, or he who from the beginning condemned the tempter angel in advance? Whoever makes supplication in this order to another god and not to the Creator does not pray to him but defames him. Likewise, from whom should I ask, that I may receive? With whom should I seek, that I may find? At whose door should I knock, that it may be opened to me? Who has the means to give to one who asks, except him to whom all things belong, to whom I myself, who ask, belong? And what have I lost with that god, that I should seek it with him and find it? If wisdom and prudence, the Creator hid these; so it is with him that I will seek. If salvation and life, these too are with the Creator. Nothing will be sought, in order to be found, anywhere but where it lay hidden, in order to appear. So too I will knock nowhere else than where I was driven out from. In short, if receiving and finding and being admitted is the fruit of labor and perseverance for the one who has asked and sought and knocked, understand that these things are commanded and promised by the Creator. For that most good god, coming of his own accord to show kindness to a man not his own, would have imposed on him no labor and no perseverance. For he would no longer be most good if he did not give of his own accord to one who did (not) ask, and grant finding to one who did not seek, and open to one who did not knock. But the Creator could impose these things through Christ, so that, since man had offended his God by sinning, he might receive by the labor and perseverance of asking, find by that of seeking, and enter by that of knocking. 2 So too the parable set before this makes the one who asks for bread by night a friend, not a stranger, and has him knock at a friend's door, not an unknown man's. And a friend, even if he gives offense, is a man of the Creator's rather than of Marcion's god. So he knocks at the door of one on whom he had a claim, whose door he knew, whom he knew to have loaves, who was already lying in bed with the children whom he had willed to be born. Even the knocking late belongs to the Creator: the late hour is his whose is the world and the world's setting; but no one would have knocked late at the door of a new god, whose day was only just dawning. The door too is the Creator's, who formerly had shut it to the nations, the door that formerly was (not) knocked at. what a God! He rises and gives, even if no longer as to a friend, yet not as to a stranger. (But as to a nuisance, he says. But a newly arrived god could not so soon have found anyone a nuisance. 3 Recognize, then, as Father the one whom you even call so, the Creator. He is the one who knows what his children ask. For to those who asked for bread he gave manna from heaven, and to those who longed for meat he sent quails, not a serpent for a fish nor a scorpion for an egg. And it will belong to him who has both to refrain from giving evil instead of good. Marcion's god, on the other hand, having no scorpion, could not say that he would not give what he did not have; it is the one who has a scorpion too, and does not give it, who can say this. So too the Holy Spirit will be given by him with whom there is also a spirit that is not holy. 4 When he had cast out a mute demon, so as to fulfill Isaiah in that kind of healing too, and was said to cast out demons by Beelzebul, he said: “If I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your sons cast them out?” By these words what does he indicate, if not that he casts them out by the same power as their sons, namely by the power of the Creator? For if you think it should be taken thus: “If I by Beelzebul, your sons by whom?”, as though he were reproaching them for casting out by Beelzebul, the earlier sense will stand against you, that Satan cannot be divided against himself. So neither were they casting out by Beelzebul, but, as we have said, by the power of the Creator; and to make this understood he adds: “But if I cast out demons by the finger of God, has not the kingdom of God come near to you?” For in Pharaoh's presence those sorcerers who were brought in against Moses called the Creator's power the finger of God — “This is the finger of God” — because a finger signifies something small yet very strong. Showing this too, Christ, who recalls rather than obliterates ancient things, his own, of course, called the power of God the finger of God, to be understood as belonging to none other than him by whom it had been so named. So it was his kingdom too that had drawn near, whose power was called a finger. 5 Rightly, then, he attached to this the parable of that strong armed man whom another stronger than he overpowered, meaning the prince of demons, whom he had called Beelzebul and Satan above, overpowered by the finger of God, not the Creator subdued by another god. Besides, how would the Creator's kingdom still stand within its own bounds and laws and offices — the Creator whom, even with the world left intact, that stronger god of Marcion could in this way have seemed to overcome — if the Marcionites too did not die according to his law, crumbling into earth, and were not often taught even by a scorpion that the Creator has not been overcome? 6 A woman from the crowd cries out that blessed is the womb that carried him, and the breasts that nursed him; and the Lord says: “No, rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and do it.” Why not? Earlier too he had rejected his mother in the same way, as well as his brothers, while preferring those who hear and obey God: for his mother was not standing by him here either. So neither earlier had he denied that he was born, since, taking the point up again here, he likewise transferred the blessedness from the womb and breasts of his mother to the disciples; and he would not have transferred it from her if he had not had her.

1 I prefer to clear elsewhere the charges which the Marcionites bring against the Creator. For here it is enough if they are found in Christ too. See, he too is inconsistent, unstable, fickle, teaching one thing and doing another: he commands us to give to everyone who asks, and he himself does not give a sign to those who ask; for so long an age he hid his light from men, and yet he says a lamp is not to be hidden away, and insists that it must be set on a lampstand to give light to all; he forbids cursing in return, and much more surely cursing, and yet he heaps (woes) on the Pharisees and lawyers. Who (is) this Christ so like my God, if not his? 2 We have often established that he could in no way have been marked out as a destroyer of the law if he had proclaimed another god. That is why then too the Pharisee who had invited him to lunch was turning it over in his mind why one who went about with the God of the law had not first washed before reclining, according to the law. Jesus, however, even interpreted the law to him, saying that they cleaned the outside of the cup and the dish, but their inside was full of robbery and wickedness, to signify that the cleanness of vessels is to be understood before God as the cleanness of men; (and) since the Pharisee had been thinking to himself about a man, not about an unwashed cup, he says: “You wash the outside of the cup,” that is, the flesh, “but you have not cleansed your inside,” that is, the soul, adding: “Did not he who made the outside,” that is, the flesh, “make the inside also,” that is, the soul? By this saying he openly showed that the cleanness of the outer and the inner man belongs to the same God to whom both belong, who puts mercy before not only the washing of a man but even sacrifice. For he adds: “Give what you have as alms, and all things will be clean for you.” And even if another god could have commanded mercy, yet not before he was known. Moreover, it is clear here too that they were rebuked not about God but about the discipline of him who commanded them both the cleanness of vessels, figuratively, and works of mercy, plainly. 3 So too he reproves those who tithe their little herbs but pass over the calling and the love of God. The calling and love of what God, if not of him to whom they offered rue and mint as tithes according to the pattern of the law? For the whole reproach was this: that they cared for small things, surely toward the one to whom they did not give the greater obedience, who says: “You must love the Lord your God with all (your) heart and with all your soul and with all your strength, who called you out of Egypt.” Besides, the time would not have allowed Christ to demand so precocious, or rather so unripe, a love for a new and recent god, not to say one not yet made public. 4 When he also accuses those who seek the first places and the honor of greetings, he carries out the Creator's line, who calls such chiefs rulers of Sodom, who also forbids trusting in those set over us, and indeed pronounces the man most wretched who has hope in man. And if anyone aims at preeminence so as to glory in the services of others, the one who forbade such services by his ban on hoping and trusting in man also rebuked those who aim at preeminence. 5 He inveighs also against the lawyers themselves, because they burdened others with unbearable burdens which they themselves did not dare touch even with a finger; not censuring the burdens of the law as one who detested it. For how could he be its detester, who was just then accusing those who passed over the weightier things of the law — alms, and the calling and love of God — which are not even heavy, much less the tithes of rue and the cleaning of dishes? Besides, he would rather have thought them excusable if they could not carry what was unbearable. But what burdens does he censure? Those which they heaped up of their own, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men for their own advantage, joining house to house to take away what is their neighbor's, trampling the people, loving gifts, chasing rewards, plundering the judgments due to the poor, so that the widow might be their victim and the orphan their prey. Of these the same Isaiah says: “Woe to those who are strong in Israel,” and again: “Those who make demands on you rule over you.” Who more than the lawyers? If these displeased Christ too, they displeased him as his own. For he would not have attacked at all the teachers of a law not his own. 6 But why do they hear (woe) also because they built tombs for the prophets killed by their fathers, when they were rather worthy of praise, since by that work of piety they were testifying that they did not consent to their fathers' deeds — unless he was a jealous God, such as the Marcionites accuse, exacting the sins of the fathers from the sons to the fourth generation? 7 And what key did the lawyers have but the interpretation of the law? To its understanding they neither went in themselves, not believing, of course — for “unless you believe, you will not understand” — nor let others in, since they taught rather the precepts and doctrines of men. Then is the one who rebuked those who neither entered themselves nor let others enter to be held a detractor of the law or its supporter? If a detractor, those who shut off the law should have pleased him; if a supporter, then he is no longer a rival of the law. But, they say, he was bringing all this in to blacken the Creator as cruel, since those who sinned against him would have (woe). And who would not rather fear to provoke a cruel God by falling away from him? So much the more, then, was he teaching that the one he presented as to be feared must be won over. So it befitted the Creator's Christ.

1 Rightly, then, he dislikes the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, who love God with their lips, that is, and not with their heart. “Beware,” he says to his disciples, “of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy,” not the preaching of the Creator. The Son hates those who are stubborn toward the Father; he does not want his own to be such toward him — not toward another — toward whom hypocrisy had also been committed, the example of which the disciples were to beware of. So (when) he forbids the Pharisees' example, he was forbidding it to be committed against the one against whom the Pharisees were committing it. So, since he had censured their hypocrisy, which surely concealed the secrets of the heart and overshadowed the hidden things of unbelief with superficial observances, and which, having the key of knowledge, neither entered itself nor let others enter, he therefore adds: “But nothing is covered that will not be laid open, and nothing hidden that will not be made known,” so that no one should think he was aiming at a revelation and recognition of a god formerly unknown and hidden; for he adds also that what they muttered within themselves or discussed among themselves — saying of him, that is, “This man casts out demons only by Beelzebul” — would come out into the open and be on men's lips through the proclamation of the gospel. 2 Then, turning to the disciples, he says: “But I say to you, my friends: do not be terrified by those who can only kill you and after this have no further power over you” — but Isaiah will be on the side of these, foretelling: “See how the righteous man is taken away, and no one takes notice” — “but I will show you whom you should fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has power to cast into Gehenna” — meaning the Creator, surely —; “so I tell you: fear him.” And in this passage it would be enough for me to say: he whom Christ commands to be feared he forbids to be offended, and he whom he forbids to be offended he commands to be won over; and the one who gives these commands belongs to him on whose behalf he secures fear, freedom from offense, and favor. But I have more to take from what follows: “For I say to you: everyone who confesses me before men, I will confess him before God.” Now those who confess Christ before men will have to be killed, surely suffering nothing further from men after being killed. These, then, will be the ones whom he forewarned above not to fear being merely killed; he put first that death was not to be feared, so that he might add that confession must be endured. “And everyone who has denied me before men will be denied before God,” surely by the one who would have confessed him had he confessed. For if he will confess the confessor, he is the one who will also deny the denier. Moreover, if the confessor is the one who has nothing to fear after being killed, the denier will be the one who has something to fear even after death. So since what is to be feared after death, namely the punishment of Gehenna, belongs to the Creator, the denier too belongs to the Creator. And if the denier, then the confessor too, who after being killed will suffer nothing from man, but would clearly suffer from God if he denied. And so Christ is the Creator's, since he shows that those who deny him must fear the Creator's Gehenna. 3 So after deterring them from denial there follows a warning that blasphemy must be dreaded: “Whoever speaks against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him.” If forgiving and retaining sin already savor of God as judge, then the Holy Spirit that must not be blasphemed will (also) be his who will not forgive the blasphemy, just as above the one who must not be denied was his who will kill even into Gehenna. And if Christ turns blasphemy away from the Creator, I do not know how he came as his adversary. Or if by these words too he blackens the Creator's severity, as one who will not forgive blasphemy and will kill even into Gehenna, it remains that the Spirit of that other god may be blasphemed and Christ denied with impunity, and that it makes no difference whether he is worshiped or despised; and that, as there is no punishment for contempt, so no reward is to be hoped for worship. 4 He forbids those brought before the authorities to think out their answer for the interrogation. “For the Holy Spirit,” he says, “will teach you in that very hour what you should say.” If there is a proof of this kind from the Creator, the precept will belong to him whose example went before it. The prophet Balaam in Numbers, summoned by King Balak to curse Israel, with whom Balak was going to battle, was at once filled with the Spirit, and pronounced not the curse for which he had come but the blessing which the Spirit suggested to him in that very hour, having declared beforehand to the king's messengers, and soon to the king himself, that he would pronounce what God had put into his mouth. These are the new teachings of the new Christ, which the servants of the Creator initiated long ago. 5 Here, to be sure, is a contrasting example of Moses and of Christ. Moses, when brothers were quarreling, intervenes of his own accord and rebukes the wrongdoer: “Why do you strike your neighbor?”, and is rejected by him: “Who appointed you master or judge over us?” Christ, on the other hand, when asked by someone to settle (the) division of an inheritance between him and his brother, refused his help, and that in so honest a cause. So then my Moses is better than your Christ, striving for peace between brothers and confronting injury. But of course he is the Christ of the most good god, who is no judge: “Who,” he says, “appointed me judge over you?” Could he find no other form of excuse, so as not to use the words with which a wicked man and an impious brother had thrown off the champion of honesty and piety? In short, he approved a bad saying by using it, and a bad deed by declining to make peace between brothers. Or was he indignant that Moses had been driven off with this saying, and therefore, in a like case of brothers disputing, wanted to shame them by recalling the same saying? Clearly, let it be so. For he himself had then been in Moses, the one who had heard such words, namely the Spirit of the Creator. 6 I think we have already sufficiently established elsewhere that the glory of riches is condemned by our God, who pulls the mighty down from their throne and lifts the poor from the dunghill. From him, then, will come the parable of the rich man who flattered himself on the yield of his fields, to whom God says: “Fool, this night they will demand your soul back; and whose will be what you have prepared?” So, in the end, King (Hezekiah), having boasted before the Persians of his treasures and the storehouses of his delights, heard hard words through Isaiah

1 Who would forbid us to take thought for the soul about food and for the body about clothing, except the one who provided these things for man beforehand, and who, since he supplies them from then on, rightly forbids anxiety about them as a rival to his own generosity; who also made the substance of the soul itself worth more than food, and shaped the material of the body itself to be worth more than a tunic; whose ravens too neither sow nor reap nor store up in barns and yet are fed by him; whose lilies and grass too neither weave nor spin and yet are clothed by him; whose Solomon too was most glorious and yet not more finely arrayed than any little flower? Besides, nothing is so abrupt as that one should provide and another should command us to be carefree about his provision, and he a disparager of him at that. In short, whether he does not want thought given to such trifles as a disparager of the Creator — trifles about which neither ravens nor lilies labor, since they are supplied unasked, of course, because they are cheap — will appear a little later. Meanwhile, why does he accuse them of little faith, that is, of what faith? Of the faith which they could not yet show in perfection to a God only just (re)vealed, since they were only now learning him, or of the faith which they owed the Creator on this very account, to believe that he supplies these things to the human race unasked, and not to take thought about them? For when he also adds, “For the nations of the world seek these things,” that is, by not believing in God, the founder and provider of all things, he was rebuking as of little faith toward the same God those whom he did not want to be like the gentiles, whom he was marking as unbelieving toward him. Moreover, when he adds, “But the Father knows that you need these things,” I will first ask which Father Christ wants to be understood. If theirs, he points to the Creator and confirms him as good, since he knows what his children need; (if) his own, that other god, how does he know that food and clothing are necessary to man, when he supplied none of them? For if he had known, he would have supplied them. But if he knew what is necessary to man and still did not supply it, he failed to supply it either from malice or from weakness. And by declaring these things necessary to man, he surely confirmed them as good — for nothing evil is necessary — and he will no longer be a depreciator of the Creator's works and kindnesses, so that I have now settled what I put off above. Moreover, if another both provided and supplies what he knows is necessary to man, how does he himself promise these things? Or is he good at another's expense? “For seek,” he says, “the kingdom of God, and these things will be added to you,” surely by himself. But if by himself, what sort of god is he who will supply what belongs to another? If by the Creator, to whom they belong, who is he to promise another's things? If these things are to be added to the kingdom, to be restored in second place, the second place belongs to the one who also has the first; the food and clothing belong to the one to whom the kingdom also belongs. So the whole promise is the Creator's. 2 If the structure of parables and the matching of similitudes look to no one other than the one to whom they correspond in every respect, and we are servants — for we have God as Lord —, then we must gird our loins, that is, be free from the encumbrances of a trailing and entangled life, and likewise have lamps burning, that is, minds kindled by faith and shining with works of truth, and so wait for the Lord, that is, Christ. Returning from where? If from a wedding, he is the Creator's, whose weddings they are; if he is not the Creator's, not even Marcion himself would have gone to a wedding if invited, looking to his own god, the hater of weddings. So the parable fails in the person of the Lord if he were not one to whom weddings are fitting. 3 In the following parable too, he errs badly who assigns to the person of the Creator that thief whose hour, if the master of the house knew it, he would not let his house be broken into. For how can the Creator, Lord of the whole man, seem a thief? No one steals or breaks into what is his own; rather it is he who comes down upon what is another's and estranges man from his Lord. Moreover, since he shows us that the thief is the devil, whose hour, had man known it even in the beginning, he would never have been broken into by him, he therefore commands us to be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour we do not expect: not as though he himself were the thief, but as the judge, of course, of those who have not prepared themselves and have not guarded against the thief. So if he himself is the Son of Man, I hold him as judge, and in the judge I defend the Creator; but if in this place, under the name of the Son of Man, he shows the Creator's Christ so as to depict him as the thief whose coming we do not know, you have the rule laid down above that no one is a thief of his own property; and this too remains safe, that insofar as he presents the Creator as one to be feared, so far he is doing the Creator's business and belongs to him. So when Peter asked whether he was speaking the parable to them or to all, he presents, (that) is, for them and for all who would preside over the churches, an analogy about stewards: the one among them who has treated his fellow servants well in his lord's absence will, when the lord returns, be set over all his goods; but the one who has acted otherwise, when the lord returns on a day he did not expect, at an hour he did not know — that Son of Man, namely, the Creator's Christ, not a thief but a judge — will be cut off, and his portion will be put with the unbelievers. Accordingly, either here too he presents the Lord as judge, (as) he teaches there, or, if it is the most good god, he now affirms that he too is a judge, however little the heretic may like it. For they try to soften this sense when it is claimed for their god, as though it were a matter of peace and gentleness merely to cut off and to put a man's portion with the unbelievers, as if he had simply not been called, and were only returned to his own condition. As if this very thing were not done by judgment! What folly! What will be the outcome of those cut off? Is it not the loss of salvation? For they will be cut off from those who will attain salvation. And what is the state of the unbelievers? Is it not damnation? Or if those cut off and the unbelievers will suffer nothing, then equally, on the other side, those kept and the believers will gain nothing. But if those kept and the believers will gain salvation, those cut off and the unbelievers must on the other side lose it. This will be judgment, and whoever threatens it is the Creator's. 4 Whom else am I to understand as beating his servants with few or many blows, and requiring of them according to what he entrusted to them, than God who repays? Whom does he teach me to obey, if not one who rewards? 5 Your Christ proclaims: “I have come to cast fire on the earth,” he, the most good, lord of no Gehenna, who a little before had restrained his disciples from calling down fire on a most inhospitable village! When this other burned up Sodom and Gomorrah with a storm of fire; when it was sung (of him): “Fire will go before him and burn up his enemies”; when he threatened through Hosea, “I will send fire on the cities of Judah,” or through Isaiah, “Fire has blazed out from my indignation”: he must be lying, if he is not the one who sent forth his voice also from the burning bush. Consider what fire you insist is to be understood: even if it is a figure, by the very fact that he takes proofs for his meaning from my element, the one who uses what is mine is mine. The likeness of fire will belong to him to whom the reality of fire belongs. He himself will better interpret the nature of this fire when he adds: “Do you think I have come to send peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but separation.” “A sword,” indeed, is what is written, but Marcion emends it. As if separation too were not the work of a sword! So he who denied peace intends also a fire of overthrow. As the battle, so the burning; as the sword, so the flame; neither befits (your) lord. In short: “Father,” he says, “will be divided against son and son against father, and mother against daughter and daughter against mother, and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law and mother-in-law against daughter-in-law.” If the prophet's trumpet sounded this war among relatives in these very words, I fear that Micah was preaching for Marcion's Christ. 6 And therefore he pronounced them hypocrites, who could test the face of the sky and of the earth, but did not discern that time in which, of course, he should have been recognized, as he fulfilled everything that had been foretold of him and taught nothing different. Besides, who could have known the times of one who had nothing by which to prove them? He rightly reproaches them also for not judging what is right of themselves. Long ago he commanded this through Ezekiel: “Judge just and peaceable judgment”; through Jeremiah: “Do judgment and righteousness”; through Isaiah: “Judge for the orphan and justify the widow,” charging the vineyard of Sorek too that it had produced not judgment but an outcry. So he who had taught them to do it by precept was requiring them to do it of their own judgment as well. He who had sown the precept was also pressing for its overflow. And how absurd, that one should command us to judge justly who was destroying God the just judge! For they also discuss, by way of disparagement, the judge who sends a man into prison and does not bring him out until even the last farthing has been paid, as representing the Creator. To this I must respond with the same step. For as often as the Creator's severity is thrown up against us, so often does Christ belong to the one to whom he compels obedience through fear.

1 Again, how did he settle the question about the healing done on the sabbath? “Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ass or his ox from the manger and lead it to water?” So by acting according to the terms of the law he confirmed the law, not dissolved it, the law which commands that no work be done except what is to be done for every living soul — how much more a human one? 2 I demand everywhere that the parables fit. “The kingdom of God,” he says, “is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his garden.” Who is to be understood in the person of the man? Surely Christ, who, even if he is Marcion's, has been called the Son of Man; who received from the Father the seed of the kingdom, that is, the word of the gospel, and sowed it in the garden, surely in this world. Say now that it is in man; but since he said “in (his) garden,” and neither the world nor man is his but the Creator's, then he who sowed in his own ground is shown to be the Creator's. Or if, to escape this snare, they transfer the person of the man from Christ to the man who receives the seed of the kingdom and sows it in the garden of his heart, not even this material will fit anyone but the Creator. 3 As for the following analogy, I am really afraid that it may perhaps portend the kingdom of another god. For he compared it to leaven, not to unleavened bread, which is more familiar to the Creator. This is just the sort of conjecture that suits those who go begging for arguments. So I too will drive off vanity with vanity, saying that leavening too fits the Creator's kingdom, because after it comes the oven, or the furnace of Gehenna. For what sort of thing is it that the kingdom of the gentlest god should be one which even the heat of judgment follows with tearful harshness? 4 How often does he still show himself a judge, and in the judge the Creator! How often, surely, does he reject, and condemn by rejecting! As here too: “When the master of the house has risen” — to do what? what but what Isaiah said: “When he has risen to shatter the earth” — “and has shut the door” — surely to shut out the wicked, to whom, when they knock, he will answer, “I do not know where you are from,” and again, when they recount that they ate and drank in his presence and he taught in their streets: “Depart from me, all you workers of iniquity” — “there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” — where? outside, of course, where those shut out will be once the door is shut; so the punishment will come from the one by whom the shutting out into punishment is done — “when they see the righteous entering into the kingdom of God, but themselves held outside.” Held by whom? If by the Creator, who then will be inside receiving the righteous into the kingdom? The good god? Then what is the Creator doing there, holding outside in punishment those whom his adversary has shut out, when he would rather receive them himself, if anything, to spite his adversary? But that other too, when he is about to shut out the wicked, must either know that the Creator will hold them in punishment, or not know it. So either they will be held against his will, and he is less than the one who holds them, yielding to him unwillingly; or, if he wishes it to happen so, he himself has judged that it must be done so. And then he who is the author of the Creator's disgrace will be no better than the Creator. If there is no reason in believing that one punishes and another sets free, then both the judgment and the kingdom will belong to one; and since both belong to one, the one who judges is the Creator.

1 What sort of people does he command to be invited to lunch or dinner? The sort he had pointed out through Isaiah: “Break your bread for the hungry, and bring the beggars and those who have no roof into your house,” those, that is, who cannot repay this kindness. If Christ forbids seeking such repayment, promising it at the resurrection, the pattern is the Creator's, who is displeased with those who love gifts and chase rewards. 2 Weigh also which side the parable of the host fits better. “A certain man made a dinner and invited many.” Surely the preparing of the dinner figures the fullness of eternal life. I say first that strangers, bound by no tie of kinship, are not usually invited to dinner; certainly members of the household and relatives are invited more readily. So it is the Creator who invited, to whom the invited belonged, both through Adam, as men, and (through) the fathers, as Jews; not the one to whom they belonged neither by nature nor by privilege. Next, if the one who sends to the guests is the one who prepared the dinner, in this way too the dinner is the Creator's, who sent to remind the guests, already invited beforehand through the fathers, and to be reminded through the prophets; not one who sent no one to remind them and did nothing beforehand to invite them, but came down himself suddenly, inviting as soon as he became known, pressing people into the banquet as soon as he invited them, making the hour of dining and the invitation to dinner one and the same. The invited make excuses. If invited by another god, they did so rightly, because they were invited suddenly; if not rightly, then neither were they invited suddenly; but if they were not invited suddenly, then it was by the Creator, by whom they had been invited long ago, and whose invitation they had in fact declined back then, first saying to Aaron, “Make us gods to go before us,” and thereafter hearing with the ear and not hearing, namely the invitation of God, who says most pertinently to this parable through Jeremiah: “Hear my voice, and I will be your God and you will be my people, and you will walk in all my ways, whatever I command you” — see, the invitation of God — “and they did not hear,” he says, “and did not incline their ear” — see, the refusal of the people — “but they went off in the things that they desired in their evil heart”: “I have bought a field and I have purchased oxen and I have married a wife.” And he adds further: “And I sent to you all my servants the prophets” — this will be the Holy Spirit, who reminds the guests — “by day and before dawn, and my people did not hear and did not attend with their ears, and they hardened their neck.” When this was reported to the master of the house, he was then moved — good that he was moved, for Marcion denies that his god is moved; so in this too he is mine — and he orders a replacement to be gathered from the streets and lanes of the city. Let us see whether it is in the sense in which he says again through Jeremiah: “Have I become a wilderness to the house of Israel, or a land left untilled?” — that is: have I no one to choose, or nowhere to choose from? — “because my people said: We will not come to you.” So he sent to invite others still from the same city. Then, since there was room to spare, he commanded people to be gathered even from the roads and hedges, that is, us now, from the foreign nations, with that jealousy, namely, of which he speaks in Deuteronomy: “I will turn my face away from them and show what will be theirs at the last” — that is, that others will possess their place — “because it is a perverse generation, sons in whom there is no faith. They have made me jealous with what is no god and provoked me to anger with their idols; and I will make them jealous with what is no nation, with a foolish (nation) I will provoke them to anger” — with us, namely, whose hope the Jews groan over, which the Lord says they will not taste, Zion being left like a watchtower in a vineyard and a hut in a cucumber field, after it had refused even the last invitation, the one in Christ. What of this order, reviewed according to the Creator's arrangements and predictions, can apply to one who has neither an order nor an arrangement to fit the parable, who did his whole work at once? Or what will be his first invitation, and what the reminder in the second act? First some must make excuses, and afterward others must come together. But now he comes inviting both groups at the same time, from the city and from the hedges, against the mirror of the parable. Nor can he judge as disdainful those whom he never invited before, whom he is only now approaching. Or if he judges them as those who will despise the invitation in the future, then he also foretells as future their replacement by the gentiles. Clearly he is yet to come a second time; he is to come, however, I suppose, not to invite guests still, but by then to seat them at table. Meanwhile, you who interpret the invitation to this dinner as a heavenly banquet of spiritual fullness and delight, remember that the Creator's earthly promises of wine and oil and grain, and of the city itself, are likewise figures of spiritual things.

1 Who looks for the lost sheep and the lost coin? Is it not the one who lost it? And who lost it? Is it not the one who had it? And who had it? Is it not the one to whom it belonged? If, then, man is the property of no one but the Creator, the one who had him is the one to whom he belonged; the one who lost him is the one who had him; the one who sought him is the one who lost him; the one who found him is the one who sought him; the one who rejoiced is the one who found him. So the point of both parables is empty with regard to one to whom neither the sheep nor the coin, that is, man, belongs. For he did not lose, because he did not have; nor seek, because he did not lose; nor find, because he did not seek; nor rejoice, because he did not find. And so to rejoice over a sinner's repentance, that is, over the recovery of the lost, belongs to him who declared long ago that he prefers the repentance of a sinner to his death.

1 Which two masters he says cannot both be served, since one must necessarily be offended and the other defended, he himself declares, setting forth God and mammon. So whom he wants to be understood by mammon, if you have no interpreter, you can learn from him. For when he advises us to secure for ourselves, from worldly goods, the support of friendships, after the example of that servant who, removed from his stewardship, relieved his master's debtors by reducing their bonds as a help for himself, he says: “And I say to you, make friends for yourselves by the mammon of unrighteousness,” that is, by money, as that servant also did. For we all know money to be the author of unrighteousness and the ruler of the whole world. Seeing the greed of the Pharisees enslaved to it, he attached this sentence: “You cannot serve God and mammon.” In fact the money-loving Pharisees mocked him, because they understood, of course, that mammon was said of money; so let no one think that by mammon the Creator is to be understood, and that Christ called them back from the service of the Creator. What then? Rather learn from this that one God was shown by Christ. For he named two masters, God and mammon, the Creator and money: so, “You cannot serve God” — surely the one whom they seemed to serve — “and mammon,” to whom they were more devoted. But if he were presenting himself as another, he would have pointed out not two masters but three — for the Creator too is a master, since he is God, and surely more a master than mammon, and more to be observed by man, since he is more a master —; for what sort of thing is it that one who had called mammon a master and had joined it with the true master should have kept silent about the master himself, that is, God the Creator? Or by keeping silent about him did he concede that he must be served, since he denied only that both he himself and mammon could be served? So when he sets down one God — he who would have named the Creator too if he himself were another — he named as the Creator the one whom he set down without any other. And so that saying too will shine out, in what sense it was said: “(If) you have not been faithful in unrighteous mammon, who will entrust to you what is true?” — in unrighteous money, of course, not in the Creator, whom even Marcion makes just; and: “If you have not been found faithful in what is another's, who will give you what is mine?” For what is unrighteous should be foreign to the servants of God. But how was the Creator foreign to the Pharisees, being the proper God of the Jewish nation? If, then, these things do not apply to the Creator but to mammon, “who will entrust to you what is truer?” and “who will give you what is mine?” He cannot have spoken as though of another's gift, that of another god. For he would seem to have spoken so only if, by marking them as unfaithful toward the Creator and not toward mammon, he had by mentioning the Creator distinguished himself as another god, who would not entrust his truth to those unfaithful to the Creator; for a thing can seem to belong to another only when it is not set forth for the purpose of being separated from the matter at hand. 2 And if the Pharisees too, justifying themselves before men, placed their hope of reward in man, he rebuked them in the same sense as the prophet Jeremiah: “Wretched is the man who has hope in man.” If he adds too, “But God knows your hearts,” he was recalling the power of that God (who) had declared himself a lamp searching the reins and hearts. If he touches on pride — “What is exalted among men is abhorrent to God” — he sets Isaiah before our eyes: “For the day of the Lord of hosts is upon everyone insolent and proud, upon everyone lofty and exalted, and they will be brought low.” 3 I can now gather why Marcion's god was in hiding for so long an age. He was waiting, I suppose, until he had learned all these things from the Creator. So he learned up to John's time, and then came forward to announce the kingdom of God, saying: “The law and the prophets were until John; since then the kingdom of God is proclaimed.” As if we too did not recognize John as a kind of boundary set between the old and the new, at which Judaism would cease and from which Christianity would begin; yet not so that the stilling of the law and the prophets and the beginning of the gospel, in which is the kingdom of God, was brought about by another power. For if we have proved that the passing away of the old and the succession of the new were foretold by the Creator; if John too is shown to be the forerunner and preparer of the ways of the Lord, who would bring in the gospel and proclaim the kingdom of God; and if from the very fact that John came, the one who followed John as his forerunner will be the Christ; and if the old ceased and the new began with John standing between them, it will be no wonder that this comes from the Creator's arrangement, so that God’s kingdom may be established from anywhere at all more readily than from the setting of the law and the prophets in John and the rising of the kingdom of God from then on. Let heaven and earth pass away, then, sooner — as the law and the prophets did — than one tiny mark of the Lord’s words should fail: “For the word of our God,” says Isaiah, “abides forever.” For since in Isaiah even then Christ, that is, the Word and Spirit of the Creator, had foretold that John — “the voice of one crying in the wilderness: prepare the way of the Lord” — would come for this purpose, that the order of the law and prophets should cease from then on, by fulfillment, not by destruction, and the kingdom of God be proclaimed by Christ, he therefore added that the elements would pass away more easily than his words, confirming this too, that what he had said about John had not passed away.

1 (But Christ forbids divorce, saying: “Whoever puts away his wife and marries another commits adultery, (and) whoever marries a woman put away by her husband is likewise an adulterer” — so as to forbid divorce in this way too, he makes the marriage of a repudiated woman unlawful — whereas Moses permits repudiation in Deuteronomy: “If someone takes a wife and lives with her, and it happens that she does not find favor with him because something shameful has been found in her, he must write a bill of repudiation and put it in her hand and send her away from his house.” Do you see the difference between the law and the gospel, between Moses and Christ? Of course you do. For you have not accepted that other gospel too, of the same truth and the same Christ, in which, while forbidding divorce, he settled the particular question about it: “Moses, because of the hardness of your heart, commanded a bill of repudiation to be given; but from the beginning it was not so”; because, of course, he who had made male and female had said, “The two will be in one flesh; therefore what God has joined, let man (not) separate.” For by this answer he both protected the ordinance of Moses as his own and set right the institution of the Creator, as the Creator's Christ. But since you are to be refuted from what you have accepted, I will meet you as if my Christ were (yours): did not he too, while forbidding divorce, and yet bearing the likeness of him who joined male and female, excuse rather than destroy the ordinance of Moses? But see, let this Christ of yours be one who teaches contrary to Moses and the Creator, on these terms: that if I do not show him to be contrary, he is mine. For I say that he made the prohibition of divorce conditional here: if someone puts away his wife in order to marry another. “Whoever puts away his wife,” he says, “and marries another has committed adultery; and whoever marries a woman put away by her husband is likewise an adulterer”: a woman put away, of course, for the same reason for which it is not lawful to put her away, namely so that another wife may be taken; for whoever marries a woman unlawfully put away, as though she had not been put away, is an adulterer. For a marriage that has not been properly dissolved remains; and to marry while a marriage remains is adultery. So if he forbade putting away a wife conditionally, he did not forbid it absolutely; and what he did not forbid absolutely he permitted in other cases, where the reason for which he forbade it is absent; and so he teaches nothing contrary to Moses, whose precept he preserves in a certain case — I do not yet say confirms. Or if you deny altogether that divorce is permitted by Christ, how is it that you dissolve marriages, neither joining male and female yourself nor admitting those joined elsewhere to the sacrament of baptism and of the Eucharist unless they have sworn together against the fruit of marriage, as against the Creator himself? Surely, what will a husband do among you if his wife has committed adultery? Will he keep her? But you (know) that not even your apostle allows the members of Christ to be joined to a prostitute. So the justice of divorce has Christ too as its defender. Here at once Moses is confirmed by him, since Moses allows repudiation on the same ground as Christ does: “if something shameful has been found in the woman.” For in the gospel of Matthew too he says: “Whoever puts away his wife except for the cause of adultery makes her commit adultery.” And so he too is judged an adulterer who marries a woman put away by her husband. But except on the ground of adultery, not even the Creator separates what he himself, of course, has joined, since the same Moses elsewhere lays down that one who has made a marriage by violating a woman may never put away his wife. And if a marriage compelled by violence will stand, how much more one entered willingly by agreement? As by the authority of prophecy: “Do not send away the wife of your youth.” So you have Christ freely following everywhere in the footsteps of the Creator, both in permitting repudiation and in forbidding it; you have him also, whichever way you try to hide, as the guardian of marriage, which he wants neither to be broken apart, forbidding repudiation, nor to be kept with a stain on it, permitting divorce in that case. Blush, you who do not join those whom even your Christ has joined; blush also, you who separate them without the ground on which even your Christ was willing for them to be separated. 2 I must now show also from what the Lord drew this saying and at what he aimed it. For so it will be more fully established that he did not aim at destroying Moses by suddenly interposing a statement on repudiation, since it was not interposed suddenly, but has its root in the same mention of John. For John, rebuking Herod because, against the law, he had married the wife of his dead brother, who had a daughter by her — the law not permitting this, and indeed commanding it only when a brother has died childless, so that seed might be raised up for him by his own brother and from his own rib — had been cast into prison by the same Herod, and was afterwards killed. So, having mentioned John, the Lord, stirred surely by his death, hurled figures of unlawful marriages and of adultery at Herod, pronouncing an adulterer even one who marries a woman put away by her husband, so as to weigh down all the more the impiety of Herod, who had married a woman put away from her husband no less by repudiation than by death — and that when his brother had a daughter by her, and on that ground too unlawfully — at the prompting of lust, not of the law, and for that reason had also killed the prophet who upheld the law. 3 This discussion will help me also with the following argument, about the rich man in pain among the dead and the poor man at rest in Abraham’s embrace. For that too, as regards the surface of the Scripture, is introduced suddenly; but as regards the intent of its meaning, it too coheres with the mention of John mistreated and of Herod wrongly married, depicting the end of each, Herod's torments and John's refreshment, so that Herod might now hear: “They have Moses and the prophets there; let them hear them.” But Marcion forces it another way: he assigns both of the Creator's rewards, whether of torment or of refreshment, to the underworld, as laid up for those who have obeyed the law and the prophets, but he defines the embrace and haven of Christ and his god as heavenly. We will answer this too, since Scripture itself refutes his eyes, the Scripture which set Abraham’s embrace for the poor man apart from the underworld. For the underworld, I think, is one thing, and Abraham’s embrace another. For it says also that a great gulf lies between those regions and prevents passage either way. Nor would the rich man have lifted up his eyes, and that from afar, except toward higher places, and to the distance of the height, across that immense distance between height and depth. From this it is clear to every wise man who has ever heard of the Elysian fields that there is some determined place, called Abraham’s embrace, for receiving the souls of his children, even from the nations — his, that is, as the father of many nations — who are to be counted in Abraham's line by the same faith with which Abraham too believed God, under no yoke of the law and in no sign of circumcision. That region, then, Abraham’s embrace, I say, though not heavenly, yet higher than the underworld, provides refreshment meanwhile to the souls of the righteous, until the consummation of things completes the resurrection of all with the fullness of reward. Then will appear the heavenly promise — which Marcion claims for his (god), as though it had not been proclaimed by the Creator — to which Christ builds his ascent into heaven, according to Hosea, surely for his own, where there is also the everlasting place of which Isaiah says: “Who will announce to you the everlasting place?” Who but Christ, walking in righteousness, speaking the right way, hating unrighteousness and iniquity? And if an everlasting place is promised and an ascent into heaven is built by the Creator, who also promises that the seed of Abraham will be like the stars of heaven, surely because of the heavenly promise, why, with that promise kept intact, should it not be admissible that Abraham’s embrace is the name of some temporary receptacle of faithful souls, in which an image of the future is even now sketched and a certain bright foreview of both judgments is seen? It warns you heretics too, while you are in this life, that Moses and the prophets preach one God, the Creator, and His one Christ, and that both judgments, of punishment and of eternal salvation, rest with the one God, who kills and makes alive. No, he says, the admonition of our God from heaven commanded that not Moses and the prophets but Christ be heard: “Hear him.” Rightly. For by then the apostles had already heard Moses and the prophets enough, since they had followed Christ by believing Moses and the prophets. For Peter would not have been granted to say, “You are the Christ,” before he had heard and believed Moses and the prophets, by whom alone Christ had until then been announced. This faith of theirs, then, had earned confirmation even by a heavenly voice, commanding that he be heard whom they had recognized as preaching peace, preaching good things, announcing the everlasting place, building for them his ascent into heaven. But in the underworld it was said of those — “They have Moses and the prophets there; let them hear them” — who did not believe at all, or did not quite believe, that after death punishments had been announced by Moses and the prophets for the pride of riches and the glory of luxuries, and decreed by that God who puts down the mighty from their thrones and raises the needy from the dunghills. So since the difference between the two pronouncements befits the Creator, it is not a distinction between deities that must be established, but a distinction between the matters themselves.

1 Turning to the disciples in the same place, (he pronounces woe) on the author of stumbling blocks: it would have been better for him if he had not been born, or if he had been thrown into the deep with a millstone tied round his neck, than that he should cause one of those little ones, surely his disciples, to stumble. Consider what punishment he threatens. For no other will avenge the stumbling of his disciples. Recognize, then, both a judge, and one who speaks about care for his own with the same affection as the Creator long ago: “Whoever touches you is as one who touches the pupil of my eye.” The same sense belongs to the same one. He commands a sinning brother to be rebuked; whoever does not do this has surely sinned, either wishing out of hatred that his brother should persist in sin, or sparing him out of partiality. You have Leviticus: “Do not hate your brother in your heart; you must correct your neighbor” — and surely your brother — “and you must not incur sin because of him.” And no wonder he teaches this, who forbids you to disregard even your brother's cattle, if you find them straying on the road, rather than lead them back to your brother, much less to neglect bringing back your brother himself to himself. He also commands you to forgive a brother who sins against you, even seven times. Too little, plainly. For there is more with the Creator, who set no limit, declaring without end: “Do not remember your brother's malice,” and commands you to grant forgiveness not only to one who asks it but even to one who does not. For he wants you not merely to pardon the offense but to forget it. 2 How much interpretation the law of the lepers requires, regarding the kinds of that disease and the inspection by the high priest, is for us to know; for Marcion, it is to set against it the fussiness of the law, so as here too to affirm that Christ is its rival, anticipating the solemn rites of the law even in the healing of the ten lepers, whom he cleansed on the way, merely commanding them to go and show themselves to the priests, now without touch and without a word, by silent power and his will alone. As if, once Christ had been announced as the healer of sicknesses and diseases and proved by the results, there were any need to reconsider the manner of the cures, or to summon the Creator in Christ to account under the law, if he himself accomplished something otherwise than he laid down in the law; since surely the Lord works in one way by himself or through the Son, and in another (through) the prophets his servants, especially in proofs of might and power, which, as clearer and stronger, being his own, may rightly differ from those done by deputies. But things of this kind have already been said elsewhere, in the previous book. Now, even though he had said earlier that there were many lepers in Israel in the days of the prophet Elisha and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian, the number surely will not make for a difference of gods, to the destruction of the Creator, who healed one, and the preference of him who cleansed ten. For who will doubt that more could have been healed by him who had healed one than ten by the other, who had never before healed even one? But by this very saying he strikes at the distrust or the pride of Israel: that though there were many lepers there and a prophet was not lacking, even when a proof had been given, no one ran to God working in the prophet. So, since he himself was the authentic high priest of God the Father, he inspected them according to the hidden meaning of the law, which signifies that Christ is the true examiner and remover of human stains. But he also commanded what was plain in the law: “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” Why, if he was going to cleanse them first? Or was it as a mocker of the law, so that, having healed them on the way, he might show that the law, along with the priests themselves, is nothing? Well, let him see to it, to whom Christ seems so given to fancies. No, worthier interpretations and ones more in keeping with faith should be given: they were healed because, having been commanded to go to the priests according to the law, they had obeyed. For it is not credible that observers of the law earned healing from a destroyer of the law. But why did he give no such command to the earlier leper? Because neither did Elisha to Naaman the Syrian; and yet not for that reason was Elisha not the Creator's. I have answered enough; but the one who believes understands something deeper as well. Learn, then, the reasons too. The event took place in the regions of Samaria, and one of the lepers was also from there. Now Samaria had revolted from Israel, holding to that schism of the nine tribes, torn away through the prophet Ahijah, which Jeroboam had settled at Samaria. And besides, the Samaritans were always pleased with themselves over the mountains and wells of the fathers, as in John's gospel that Samaritan woman, talking with the Lord at the well: “Are you greater?” and so on; and again: “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you say that one must worship at Jerusalem.” So he who had also said through Isaiah, “Woe to those who trust in the mountain of Samaria,” now Himself willing to restore it, deliberately commands them to show themselves to the priests — who surely were nowhere but where the temple was — subjecting the Samaritan to the Jew, since salvation is from the Jews, whether for Israelites or Samaritans, for the whole promise was to the tribe of Judah — so that they might know that at Jerusalem were the priests and the temple and the mother of religion and the fountain, not a well, of salvation. And so, when he saw that they had acknowledged that the law was to be fulfilled at Jerusalem, he healed them, since they were now to be justified by faith without the order of the law. That is why, marveling at that one Samaritan out of the ten, who was set free and mindful of divine grace, he does not command him to offer a gift according to the law, because he had already offered enough by giving glory to God, the Lord wishing this too to interpret the law. And yet to what God did the Samaritan give thanks, when not even an Israelite had until then learned of another god? To what other than the one to whom all those formerly healed by Christ gave thanks? And so he heard, “Your faith has saved you,” because he had understood that he should make the true offering to almighty God, namely thanksgiving, at his true temple and before his true high priest, Christ. 3 But neither can the Pharisees seem to have asked the Lord when the kingdom of another god would come, so long as no other god had been made known by Christ, nor can he seem to have answered about the kingdom of any other than the one about whose kingdom he was asked. “The kingdom of God,” he says, “does not come with observation, nor do they say, ‘See, here! See, there!’; for look, the kingdom of God is within you.” Who will not interpret “is within you” thus: that is, in your hand, in your power, if you hear and do God's commandment? And if the kingdom of God lies in the commandment, then set Moses against it, after the manner of our own antitheses, and the sense is one. “The commandment,” he says, “is not high nor far from you. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up into heaven and bring it down to us, and having heard it we will do it?’ Nor is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross over and fetch it for us, and having heard it we will do it?’ The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart and in your hands, to do it.” This will be: “Not here nor there; for look, the kingdom of God is within you.” And so that heretical boldness does not argue that the Lord answered them not about the Creator's kingdom, about which he was asked, but about his own, what follows stands in the way. For by saying that the Son of Man must first suffer many things and be rejected before his coming, in which the kingdom too will be revealed in substance, he showed that the kingdom about which he had answered was his own, since it awaited his sufferings and rejection. And since he was to be rejected and afterwards acknowledged and taken up and exalted, he took even the word “rejected” from the place where, in the riddle of the stone, both his manifestations were sung in David, the first to be refused, the second to be honored: “The stone,” he says, “which the builders rejected, this has become the head of the corner; this was done by the Lord.” For it would be empty to believe that God prophesied about the dishonor or glory of some piece of flint, and did not portend him in the figure of a stone too, whom he had portended also in the figure of a rock and of a mountain. 4 But if he is speaking of his own coming, why does a mild and gentle god compare it to the dark and dreadful days of Noah and Lot? Why does he warn us to remember Lot's wife, who did not despise the Creator's command with impunity, if he will not come with judgment to avenge his own commands? Even if he does avenge like the Creator, if he judges, he should not have formed me by the proofs of the one he is destroying, so that it does not seem to be the Creator who forms me. But if here too he is not speaking of his own coming but of that of the Jews' Christ, let us wait still for him to preach something about his own, believing meanwhile that he is the Creator's Christ, since he preaches him in every place.

1 For, when he commands perseverance and urgency in prayer, he sets forth the parable of the judge who was compelled to hear the widow by the urgency and perseverance of her appeals. So he shows that it is God the judge who must be prayed to, not himself, if he himself is not the judge. But he (also) added that God would avenge his elect. If, then, the one who is judge will also be the avenger, he has proved the Creator to be the better god, since he showed him to be the avenger of his elect who cry to him day and night. And yet, when he brings in the Creator's temple and describes two men praying with different minds, the Pharisee in pride, the publican in humility, and says that the one went down rejected and the other justified, surely, by teaching with what discipline one must pray, he established here too that the one to be prayed to is he from whom they would receive this discipline of prayer, whether it rejects pride or justifies humility. I find with Christ no temple, no worshipers, no judgment of another god, but only of the Creator: him he commands us to worship in humility, as the one who lifts up the humble, not in pride, as the one who destroys the proud. What other does he show me to be worshiped? With what discipline? With what hope? None, I think. For the prayer he taught, too, we have proved fits the Creator. It is another matter if, being the most good god and good unasked, he does not even want to be worshiped. 2 “But who is good but one, God?” he says. Not as though he had shown one of two gods to be the good one, but that (one) God alone is good, who is thus alone good because he alone is God. And surely he is good who rains on the just and the unjust and makes his sun rise on the good and the evil, sustaining and feeding and helping even the Marcionites. In short, when he was asked by a certain man, “Good teacher, what must I do to obtain eternal life?”, he asked whether he knew, that is, did, the Creator's commandments, so as to testify that eternal life is gained by the Creator's commandments; and when the man affirmed that he had kept all the chief ones from his youth, he said: “One thing you lack: sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” Come now, Marcion, and all you heretics, his fellow wretches and fellow haters, what will you dare to say? Did Christ cancel the earlier commandments — not to kill, not to commit adultery, not to steal, not to bear false witness, to love father and mother — or did he both keep them and add what was lacking — although this commandment too, of generosity to the needy, is spread everywhere through the law and the prophets — so that that most glorious keeper of the commandments might be exposed as one who would hold his money much dearer? Let this saying of the gospel, then, stand safe here too: “I have not come to destroy the law and the prophets, but rather to fulfill them.” At the same time he freed the other points from doubt, by making it plain that the name of God and of (the good one), and eternal life, and treasure in heaven, and he himself, all belong to one God, whose commandments he both kept and increased by supplementing them. He is to be recognized in this place also according to Micah, who says: “Has a man told you what is good? Or what does the Lord require of you but to do judgment, to love mercy, and to be ready to follow the Lord your God?” For Christ is the man telling what is good: the knowledge of the law — “You know the commandments,” he says; to do judgment — “Sell what you have,” he says; to love mercy — “And give to the needy,” he says; to be ready to go with the Lord — “And come,” he says, “follow me.” 3 The Jewish nation was from the beginning so distinctly arranged by tribes and peoples and families and houses that no one could easily be unknown as to his descent, not least because of the recent censuses of Augustus, which were then perhaps still on record. But Marcion's Jesus — even (if) there was no doubt of the birth of one who appeared to be a man — surely, not having been born, could have had no public record of his family, but was to be counted as one of those who were regarded, in whatever way, as unknown. When, then, the blind man heard that he was passing by, why did he cry out, “Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me,” if not because he was not without reason regarded as David’s son, (that) is, of David's family, through his mother and brothers, who had once been announced to him, surely by people who knew them? (But those who went ahead rebuked the blind man, to make him be quiet. Rightly, since he was shouting, not because he was lying about the son of David. Or show that those who rebuked him knew that Jesus was not the son of David, so that they may be believed to have imposed silence on the blind man for that reason. But even if you showed it, you would more easily presume that they were ignorant than that the Lord could have allowed a false proclamation about himself. But the Lord is patient. Yet he does not confirm error. What is more, as the one who exposes the Creator, would he not first have cleared away this blindness of that man, so that he would no longer think Jesus the son of David? But in fact, so that you should not defame his patience nor fasten on him any motive for dissembling, he most plainly confirmed the blind man's proclamation, both by the very reward of healing and by the testimony to his faith: “Your faith,” he says, “has saved you.” What do you want the blind man to have believed? That Jesus had come down from another god to expose the Creator, to destroy the law and the prophets? That he was not the one who was destined to come from the root of Jesse and from the fruit of David's loins, the one who would reward the blind as well? But the blind were not yet, I think, of Marcion's kind, so that this was the faith of that blind man, by which he believed in the words, “Jesus, son of David.” He who both knew himself to be this and wished to be known as this by all, granted to the man's faith, which already had better eyes and possessed the true light, outward sight as well, so that we too might learn the rule of faith and at the same time its reward: whoever wishes to see, let him believe that Jesus is the son of David through the virgin's descent; whoever does not so believe will not hear from him, “Your faith has saved you,” and so will remain blind, falling into the antithesis, which itself falls (into) an antithesis. For so the blind is accustomed to lead the blind. For if, (because) the blind had once offended David at the recovery of Zion by resisting his entry — as a figure of the people who were likewise blind and would one day refuse to admit Christ the son of David — therefore Christ, on the contrary, came to the aid of a blind man, to show by this that he was not the son of David, being by a difference of disposition good to the blind whom David had ordered to be struck down, then why did he say he had granted it to faith, and to a wrong faith at that? But in fact this too (the son of David) (gives) an antithesis to be beaten back with his own weapon. For because the blind had offended David, and now a man of the same flesh had presented himself as a suppliant to the son of David, therefore the son of David, as though appeased by his making amends, restored his sight with a testimony to his faith, by which he had believed this very thing, that the son of David must be entreated by him. And yet it was, I think, the audacity of those men, not their infirmity, that had offended David.

1 The house of Zacchaeus too obtains salvation. By what merit? Had he too believed that Christ had come from Marcion's (god)? But the voice of that blind man was still in everyone's ears — “Have mercy on me, Jesus, son of David” — and “All the people gave praise to God,” not Marcion's God, but David's. Indeed, Zacchaeus, even though a foreigner, yet perhaps breathed upon by some knowledge of the Scriptures from his dealings with the Jews — though it is more if he did so without even knowing Isaiah — had fulfilled his commands: “Break your bread,” he says, “for the hungry, and bring those who have no roof into your house” — this he was doing at that very moment, feeding the Lord whom he had received into his house — “and if you see the naked, cover him”; this he was promising at that very moment, offering half his substance for all works of mercy, loosing the bonds of oppressive contracts, letting the harassed go free, and tearing up every unjust bond, by saying: “And if I have taken anything from anyone by false accusation, I restore it fourfold.” So the Lord says: “Today salvation has come to this house.” He testified that what the Creator's prophet had commanded brings salvation. And when he says, “For the Son of Man has come to save what was lost,” I no longer argue that he came to save what was lost of the one to whom it had belonged and from whom what he came to save had been lost, but I move on to the next step of another question. There is no doubt that it concerns man. Since man consists of two substances, body and soul, we must ask in which kind of substance he seems to have been lost. If in the body, then the body had been lost, not the soul. What had been lost the Son of Man saves: so the flesh too has salvation. If he had been lost in the soul, the soul's perdition is destined for salvation, and the flesh, which was not lost, is safe. If the whole man had been lost in both substances, the whole man must necessarily be saved, and the opinion of the heretics who deny the salvation of the flesh is struck down. And now the Creator's Christ is confirmed too, who, in keeping with the Creator, promised the salvation of the whole man. 2 The parable too of the servants who are judged according to their account of their lord's money put out at interest shows (your) god to be a judge even on the side of severity, not only loading with more but also taking away what someone seems to have had. Or if this too depicts the Creator, (austere, taking what he did not lay down and reaping what he did not sow,) here too it is he who instructs me, whose money he teaches me to put out at interest.

1 Christ knew where John's baptism came from. Then why did he ask as though he did not know? He knew that the Pharisees would not answer him. Then why did he ask to no purpose? Or was it to judge them out of their own mouth, or heart? Refer these things, then, to the Creator's defense and to the comparison with Christ, and consider now what would have followed if the Pharisees had given any answer to the question. Suppose they had answered that John's baptism was human: they would at once have been crushed with stones. Some Marcion would have risen up against Marcion to say: “most good god, god unlike the Creator's examples! Knowing that men would go headlong, he himself set them on the edge of the precipice.” For that is how they argue about the Creator in the law of the tree. But John's baptism was from heaven. “And why,” says Christ, “did you not believe him?” So he who had wanted John to be believed, since he was going to rebuke them for not believing, belonged to him whose sacrament John was administering. Certainly, when they would not report what they thought, and he in turn set against them, “Neither do I tell you by what power I do these things,” he returned evil for evil. 2 “Give Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.” What will be God's, like Caesar's denarius? His image and likeness, of course. So he commands man to be given to the Creator, in whose image and likeness and name and material man has been stamped. Let Marcion's god look for coinage of his own; Christ commands man's denarius to be given to his own Caesar, not to a stranger; unless he must do so because he has no denarius of his own. 3 It is a just and fitting rule in every question that the sense of the answer should bear on the point of the question. To answer one thing to one who asks another is the mark of a madman; all the more let what does not befit even a man be far from Christ. The Sadducees, who deny the resurrection, having a question about it, had set before the Lord a case from the law: a woman who, when seven brothers had died one after another, had married them according to the legal precept — whose wife was she to be counted in the resurrection? This was the matter of the question, this the substance of the inquiry; to this Christ must have answered. He feared no one, so as to seem either to have dodged questions or to have used them as an occasion to hint at what he did not otherwise teach openly. He answered, then, that the sons of this age marry — you see how pertinently to the case: because the question was about the age to come, in which he was going to lay down that no one marries, he first established that here there is marrying, where there is also dying — but those whom God has deemed worthy of the possession of that age and of the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, because they will no longer die, since they are like the angels of God, having been made sons of the resurrection. Since, then, the sense of the answer must be directed to nothing other than the point of the question, if the point of the question is settled by this sense of the answer, the Lord's answer means nothing other than what settles the question: you have the times of marriage permitted and denied, arising not from a question about marriage itself but from the question of the resurrection; you have also the confirmation of the resurrection itself and all that the Sadducees were asking about, since they were not inquiring about another god nor asking about the proper right of marriage. But if you make Christ answer about things he was not asked, you deny that he could answer what he was asked, as though he were caught, of course, by the wisdom of the Sadducees. 4 Now, more than is needed and after the rule has been laid down, I will go over the matter against their connected arguments. For having got hold of the text of Scripture, “But those whom God has deemed worthy of that age,” they run through it in reading so as to join “of that age” to “God,” in order to make another god, the god of that age; whereas it should be read, “But those whom God has deemed worthy,” so that, with a pause made here after “God,” “of that age” belongs to what follows, that is: “whom God has deemed worthy of the possession of that age and of the resurrection.” For the question was not about God but about the state of that age, whose wife she would be after the resurrection in that age. So too they twist the answer about marriage itself, so that “the sons of this age marry and are given in marriage” is said of the men of the Creator, who permits marriage, whereas those whom the god of that age — the other one, of course — has deemed worthy of the resurrection do not marry even here, because they are not sons of this age. But, when he was asked about the marriages of that age and not of this, he denied those about which he was asked. And so those who had taken in the very force of the words and of the delivery and of the pauses understood nothing but what bore on the matter of the question; and so the scribes said: “Teacher, you have spoken well.” For he had confirmed the resurrection by setting forth its form against the opinion of the Sadducees. In short, he did not refuse the testimony of those who had taken him to have answered in this way. 5 But if the scribes thought Christ was the son of David, while David himself calls him Lord, what has this to do with a Christ who is not David's? Was he beating down the error of the scribes? (No.) Rather he was securing honor for David's Christ, whom he confirmed as Lord rather than as son of David — which would not suit a destroyer of the Creator. But on our side how fitting the interpretation is! For he who had once been invoked by that blind man as (son of David), and had then kept silent on the point, since no scribes were present, now of his own accord deliberately brought it forward in their presence, to show that he, whom the blind man had proclaimed, according to the scribes' teaching, only as David's son, was also his Lord; rewarding the blind man's faith, by which he had believed him to be the son of David, and striking at the tradition of the scribes, by which they did not know him to be David's Lord as well. Whatever tended to the glory of the Creator's Christ, no one but the Creator's Christ would so defend.

1 It was established long ago, concerning the ownership of the names, that they belong to Him who first both announced his Christ to men and renamed Hoshea “Jesus” (Joshua). So the shamelessness will be established of the one who says that many will come in his name — a name that is not his, if he is not the Christ and Jesus of the Creator, to whom the ownership of the names belongs. Further, he forbids them to be received, when he himself is their equal, as one who likewise came in another's name. If not, it was for him to forewarn his disciples against the lie about the name, since through the ownership of the name he possessed its truth. In short, those men will come saying, “I am the Christ”: you will receive them, you who received one just like them; for this one too did not come in his own name. What then? When the lord of the names himself comes, the Christ and Jesus of the Creator, will you reject him? And how unfair, how unjust, how unworthy of the most good god, that you should not receive the one who comes in his own name, when you have received another in his name! 2 Let us see also what signs he assigns to the times: wars, I think, and kingdom against kingdom and nation against nation, and pestilence and famines and earthquakes and terrors and portents from heaven, all of which befit a severe and dreadful god. When he adds too that these things must happen, what does he show himself to be, the destroyer or the approver of the Creator? He confirms that the Creator's arrangements must be fulfilled, which, as the most good, he would rather have abolished than established, grim and dreadful as they are, if they had not been his own. But before these things he foretells to them persecutions and sufferings to come, for martyrdom, surely, and for salvation. Hear it foretold in Zechariah: “The Lord almighty,” he says, “will protect them, and they will devour them, and will stone them with sling stones, and will drink their blood like wine, and will fill the bowls as of the altar; and the Lord will save them in that day like sheep, his people, because holy stones are rolled.” And so that you do not think these things are foretold of the sufferings which awaited them at the hands of foreigners in so many wars, look at their kinds. No one, in foretelling wars to be fought with regular arms, lists stoning, which belongs rather to popular gatherings and unarmed riots; no one measures such rivers of blood in war by the capacity of bowls, or makes them equal to the bloodying of one altar; no one calls sheep those who fall in war armed and themselves fighting with the same ferocity, but those who are slaughtered in their own proper character and patience, surrendering themselves rather than defending themselves. In fact he says, “Because holy stones are rolled,” not because soldiers fight. For stones are also foundations, on which we are built, having been built up, according to Paul, on the foundations of the apostles, who, as holy stones, are rolled, set in the way for all to stumble against. So here too he forbids them to think out beforehand what they should answer before tribunals, he who suggested to Balaam what he had not thought of, indeed the opposite of what he had thought of, and promised a mouth to Moses when he pleaded slowness of tongue. And the very wisdom which no one will resist he showed through Isaiah: “This one will say, I am God's; and (this one) will cry, In the name of Jacob; and another will be inscribed in the name of Israel.” For what is wiser and more unanswerable than a simple and open confession in the name of a martyr, prevailing with God, which is the meaning of “Israel”? No wonder that he forbade thinking things out beforehand, who himself received from the Father the supply of timely speech: “The Lord gives me the tongue of instruction when I should speak a word,” unless Marcion brings in a Christ not subject to the Father. 3 That persecutions from one's nearest, and blasphemy of the name out of hatred, were foretold, I need not show again. “But by endurance,” he says, “you will save yourselves”; of which, of course, the psalm speaks: “The endurance of the righteous will not perish forever,” since elsewhere too: “Precious is the death of the righteous,” through endurance, no doubt; and Zechariah too: “But there will be a crown for those who have endured.” But do not dare to argue that the apostles were harassed by the Jews as heralds of another god; remember that the prophets too, who suffered the same things from the Jews, were nevertheless apostles of no other god than the Creator. 4 But having next pointed out the time of the destruction, when Jerusalem would begin to be surrounded by armies, he recounts the signs of the very end: portents of sun and moon and stars, and on earth the distress of nations bewildered as by the roar of the surging sea, in expectation of the evils hanging over the world. That the very powers of the heavens are to be shaken, hear Joel: “And I will give portents in heaven, and on earth blood and fire and vapor of smoke; the sun will be turned into darkness and the moon into blood, before the great and glorious day of the Lord comes.” You have Habakkuk too: “The earth will be torn by rivers; the peoples will see you and be in labor; scattering the waters in your course; the abyss gave its voice; the height of its fear was lifted up; the sun and moon stood in their order; your flashes will go into light, your shield like lightning into brightness; in your threat you will diminish the earth, and in your indignation you will bring down the nations.” The Lord's pronouncements and the prophets' agree, I think, about the shakings of the world and of the earth, of the elements and of the nations. After this, what does the Lord say? “And then they will see the Son of Man coming from the heavens with great power. And when these things come to pass, you will stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption will be drawing near,” namely at the time of the kingdom, of which the parable itself will be added: “So you too, when you see all these things come to pass, know that the kingdom of God has drawn near.” This will be the great and glorious day of the Lord, of the Son of Man coming from the heavens, according to Daniel: “Look, one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven,” and so on, “and royal power was given to him” — which in the parable he had gone away to request, leaving his money with his servants to be put out at interest — “and all the nations” — which the Father had promised him in the psalm: “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance” — “and all glory serving him, and his power everlasting, which will not be taken away, and his kingdom, which will not be corrupted,” because in it they will neither die nor marry, but will be like angels. Of the same coming of the Son of Man and its fruit, in Habakkuk: “You went out for the salvation of your people, to save your anointed ones,” those, namely, who will stand up and lift up their heads, redeemed in the time of the kingdom. So, since the things that belong to the promises agree in the same way as those that belong to the shakings, by the harmony of the prophetic and the Lord's pronouncements, you will be able to insert no distinction here, so as to refer the shakings to the Creator, as a god of cruelty — things which the most good god should not even permit, much less look forward to — and to credit the promises to the most good god, which the Creator, not knowing him, would not have prophesied. Or if the Creator prophesied them as his own, not differing from the promises of (your) Christ, he will be equal in generosity to the most good god, and no more will seem to be promised by your Christ than by my Son of Man. You will find the very course of the gospel Scripture, from the disciples' question to the parable of the fig tree, so bound up in its connected sense with the Son of Man on both sides that it joins to him both the sad and the glad, both the shakings and the promises, and you cannot separate either part from him. For since the coming of one Son of Man is set between two outcomes, the shakings and the promises, both the troubles of the nations and the longings of the saints must belong to one Son of Man, because he is placed in the middle so as to (be) common to both outcomes, bringing the one to a close by his coming, namely the troubles of the nations, and beginning the other, namely the longings of the saints; so that, if you grant that the coming of the Son of Man is my Christ's, and so attribute to him the impending evils which precede his coming, you are compelled also to ascribe to him the good things which arise from his coming; but if you prefer your Christ and attribute to him the good things that follow his coming, you are compelled also to attribute to him the evils which precede his coming. For the evils are as bound up with the coming of the Son of Man by preceding it as the good things are by following it. Ask yourself, then, which of the two Christs you will set in the person of the one Son of Man, to whom both arrangements are referred; either you have made the Creator most good, or your god harsh, by nature. In sum, consider the example of the parable itself: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees: when they have put forth fruit, men understand that summer has drawn near; so you too, when you see these things come to pass, know that the kingdom of God is near.” For if the fruiting of the trees gives a sign of summer by preceding it, so too the conflicts of the world give advance notice of the kingdom by preceding it. Now every sign belongs to the one to whom the thing it signifies belongs, and on every thing a sign is set by the one to whom the thing belongs. So if the conflicts are signs of the kingdom, as the fruiting is of summer, then the kingdom too is the Creator's, to whom the conflicts that are signs of the kingdom are ascribed. The most good god had said beforehand that these things must happen, so dreadful and so dire, things surely foretold by the prophets and the law: so far was he from destroying the law and the prophets, since he confirms that what they had foretold must be fulfilled. 5 He further insists that heaven and earth will not pass away until all things are accomplished. What things are these? If those (foretold) by the Creator, the elements will rightly bear it that their own Lord's order be carried out; if those of the most good god, I doubt whether heaven and earth would bear the fulfillment of what a rival has decreed. If the Creator puts up with this, he is not a jealous God. Come now, let heaven and earth pass away — for so their Lord has determined — so long as his word abides forever — for so Isaiah too declared —; let the disciples too be warned that their hearts must never be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and worldly cares, and that day come upon them suddenly like a snare, as upon those who, surely, have forgotten God out of fullness and preoccupation with the world — this will be Moses' warning —: so the one who will deliver from the snare of that day is the one who long ago gave this warning. 6 There were other places too in Jerusalem for teaching, and places outside Jerusalem to withdraw to. But by day he taught in the temple, as one who had foretold through Hosea: “In my temple they found me, and there it was discussed with them”; but at night he withdrew to the Mount of Olives; for so Zechariah had pointed out: “And his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives.” There were also hours suited to hearing: they had to gather at dawn, because when he had said through Isaiah, “The Lord gives me the tongue of discipline,” he added, “He has set my ear in the morning to hear.” If this is dissolving the prophecies, what will fulfilling them be?

1 Likewise he knew also when He was to suffer, since the law had prefigured his suffering. For out of so many feasts of the Jews he chose the day of the Passover. For with this in view Moses had declared the sacred sign: “It is the Lord's Passover.” Therefore he also showed his desire: “With desire I have desired to eat the Passover with you before I suffer.” destroyer of the law, who had desired even to keep the Passover! No doubt the Jewish mutton had delighted him. Or was he the one who, being about to be led like a sheep to the slaughter, and like a sheep before its shearer so not to open his mouth, desired to fulfill the figure of his saving blood? He could have been betrayed by any stranger too, were it not that, as I would have to say, even in this the psalm was fulfilled: “He who eats bread with me has lifted up his heel against me.” He could also have been betrayed without a price. For what need of a betrayer was there for one who, offending the people openly, could no more have been betrayed than seized by force? But this would have suited another Christ, not one who was fulfilling prophecies. For it is written: “Because they sold the righteous.” For both the amount of the price and its outcome — when Judas repented and it was called back and given for the purchase of the potter's field, as is contained in Matthew's gospel — Jeremiah foretold: “And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him who was valued” — or honored — “and gave them for the potter's field.” So, having declared that with desire he had desired to eat the Passover as his own — for it would be unworthy of God to desire anything belonging to another — he made the bread which he had taken and distributed to the disciples his body, by saying, “This is my body,” that is, the figure of my body. But there would not have been a figure unless there were a body of truth. An empty thing, which is what a phantom is, could not take on a figure. Or if he made up the bread into a body for himself because he lacked the reality of a body, then he should have handed over bread for us. It would have suited Marcion's emptiness for bread to be crucified. But why does he call bread his body, and not rather a melon, which Marcion had in place of a heart, not understanding that this was an ancient figure of the body of Christ, who says through Jeremiah: “They devised a plan against me, saying: Come, let us put wood into his bread,” that is, the cross into his body? So the one who sheds light on ancient things declared plainly enough what he had then meant the bread to signify, by calling his body bread. So too, in mentioning the cup, establishing the testament sealed with his blood, he confirmed the substance of his body. For there can be blood of no body but one of flesh. For even if some quality of body that is not fleshly is set against us, it will surely not have blood unless it is fleshly. So the proof of the body will stand on the testimony of the flesh, and the proof of the flesh on the testimony of the blood. And that you may recognize the ancient figure of blood too in wine, Isaiah will be at hand: “Who is this,” he says, “who comes from Edom, the redness of his garments from Bozrah, so splendid in His robe, with violence and strength? Why are your garments red, and your clothing as from the floor of the winepress, full and trodden?” For the prophetic Spirit, as if already contemplating the Lord coming to his passion, clothed, that is, in flesh so as to suffer in it, depicts the bloody condition of the flesh in the redness of the garments, trodden and pressed out by the force of the passion as in the floor of the winepress, since from there too men come down as though bloodied by the redness of the wine. Much more plainly Genesis, in the blessing of Judah, from whose tribe Christ's descent according to the flesh was to come, already then sketched Christ in Judah: “He will wash,” it says, “his robe in wine, and his garment in the blood of the grape,” showing the flesh by the robe and garment, and the blood by the wine. So now too he consecrated his blood in wine, who then figured wine as blood.

1 “Woe,” he says, “to him through whom the Son of Man is betrayed.” So it is now established that “woe” must be understood as an outcry of imprecation and threat, and attributed to one who is angry and offended, unless Judas was to carry off so great a crime with impunity. But if with impunity, the “woe” is empty; if not with impunity, then surely he was to be punished by the one against whom he committed the crime of betrayal. Moreover, if he knowingly allowed a man whom he himself had taken into his company to rush into so great a crime, then stop raking up against the Creator, in the case of Adam, charges which are turned back on your god too: either that he did not know, since he did not in foresight stand in the way of the one about to sin; or that he could not stand in the way, if he did (not) fail to know; or that he did not want to, if he both knew and could, and so must be judged malicious, since he allowed his own man to perish through sin. I advise you, then, to recognize the Creator in this one too, rather than make the most good god equal to him, against your own opinion. For by destining Peter, who had spoken somewhat presumptuously, to denial, he shows you a jealous God. He had to be betrayed with a kiss too, as the Christ of prophecy, namely as the Son of him who was loved by the people with their lips. 2 Brought into the council, he is asked whether he is the Christ. About what Christ would the Jews have asked, if not their own? Why then did he not, even then, reveal another to them? So that he could suffer, you say; that is, so that that most good one might plunge people who were still ignorant into crime. And yet even if he had told them, he would have suffered. “For if I tell you,” he says, “you will not believe.” Moreover, not believing, they would have persisted in putting him to death. And why would he not have been all the more likely to suffer, if he had revealed (himself) as belonging to another god, and therefore as the Creator's adversary? So it was not in order to suffer that even then he refrained from showing himself to be another, but because they were eager to wring a confession from his mouth, and yet would not believe him even if he confessed, those who should have recognized him from the works that fulfilled the Scriptures. So it was fitting that one to whom recognition was owed without asking should conceal himself. And yet, still reaching out a hand to them, he says: “From now on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God.” For he was suggesting that he was the Son of Man from Daniel's prophecy and the one seated at the right hand of God from David's psalm. So, enlightened by this saying and by comparison with Scripture as to whom he wished to be understood as, they say: “So you are the Son of God?” Of what God, if not the one whom alone they knew? Of what God, if not the one whom they remembered saying to his Son in the psalm, “Sit at my right hand”? (But he answered, “You say so,” as if to mean, “Not I.”) On the contrary, he confirmed that he was what they had said, while they were questioning him again. But how will you prove that they too spoke interrogatively and not affirmatively — “So you are the Son of God” — in the sense that, because he had indirectly shown through the Scriptures that he was to be understood as the Son of God, they took it thus: “So you are the Son of God, which you will not say openly”? And so he too answered “You say so” affirmatively; and so much was this his meaning that they persisted in what his words implied.

1 For having brought him to Pilate they began to charge him with calling himself Christ the King, no doubt (the Son of God who would sit at God's right hand). Otherwise they would have pressed him with some other charge, uncertain whether he had called himself Son of God, (un)less he had said “You say so” in such a way as to mean that he was what they said. To Pilate too, when he asked, “Are you the Christ?”, he (answered) likewise, “You say so,” for fear that He might seem, out of fear of authority, to have answered more fully. 2 So the Lord was set up in judgment — “And he has set his people in judgment; the Lord himself comes into judgment with the elders and rulers of the people,” according to Isaiah — and from then on he fulfilled everything written about his passion: “The nations raged together, and the peoples plotted vain things; the kings of the earth stood up and the rulers gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ.” The nations were the Romans who were with Pilate; the peoples, the tribes of Israel; (the kings) are seen in Herod, (the rulers) in the chief priests. For when he was sent by Pilate to Herod as a gift, he kept faith with the words of Hosea, who had prophesied of Christ: “And they will lead him bound as a present to the king.” Herod was indeed delighted at seeing Jesus, and heard no word from him. For “like a lamb before its shearer so he did not open his mouth,” because the Lord had given him the tongue of discipline to know when He should speak a word — that tongue, namely, which he said in the psalm cleaves to his throat, and which he then proved by not speaking. 3 And Barabbas, most guilty in his life, is granted as though he were good, while Christ, most righteous, is demanded for death as a murderer. And two criminals too are crucified on either side of him, so that he might be counted among the wicked. His clothing, divided by the soldiers partly (and partly) given over to the lot, Marcion has plainly removed, with an eye to the prophecy of the psalm: “They divided my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing.” Then remove the cross itself too. For the same psalm is not silent about it: “They pierced my hands and feet.” The whole outcome is read in it: “Dogs surrounded me, the synagogue of evildoers besieged me. All who looked at me mocked me with sneering noses; they spoke with their lips and shook their heads: He hoped in God; let him deliver him.” What use now is it to remove the testimony of the garments? Keep the gains from your falsification: the whole psalm is the garments of Christ. 4 But see, the elements too are shaken. For their Lord was suffering. Otherwise, if it had been their adversary who was harmed, the sky would have blossomed with lights, the sun would have exulted the more in its rays, the day would have stood still the longer, gladly watching Marcion's Christ hanging on the cross. These arguments would have suited my case even if these things had not been foretold: “I will clothe the heaven with darkness,” says Isaiah; this will be the day of which Amos too says: “And it will be on that day, says the Lord, the sun will set at noon” — you have the sixth hour indicated too — “and it will grow dark over the earth.” The veil of the temple too was torn, by the bursting out of the angel abandoning the daughter of Zion like a watchtower in a vineyard and a hut in a cucumber field. how he persisted in expressing himself even in Psalm 30! He cries out to the Father: “Into Your hands I entrust My spirit,” so that even while dying he might fulfill the prophets with his last cry. With this word he breathed out his spirit. Who did? Did the spirit breathe out itself, or the flesh the spirit? But the spirit could not breathe itself out. What breathes out is one thing, what is breathed out another. If the spirit is breathed out, it must be breathed out by another. But if he had been spirit alone, he would rather have been said to have departed than to have breathed out. Who, then, breathes out the spirit but the flesh, which both breathes while it has the spirit and so breathes it out when it loses it? In short, if it was not flesh but a phantom of flesh, and a phantom was spirit, and the spirit breathed itself out and by breathing out departed, then without doubt the phantom departed when the spirit, which was the phantom, departed, and the phantom was nowhere to be seen along with the spirit. Did nothing, then, remain on the wood, nothing hang there even after the breathing out? Was nothing asked of Pilate, nothing taken down from the cross, nothing wrapped in the linen, nothing laid in the new tomb? But it was not nothing. What then was it? If a phantom, then the spirit was still in it. If the spirit had departed, then it had taken the phantom away with it. It remains for heretical shamelessness to say that the phantom of a phantom remained there; but of course Joseph knew it was a body that he handled with all piety, that Joseph who had not consented with the Jews in their crime, a blessed man, who did not walk in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of the pestilent.

1 The one who buried the Lord had to be foretold too, and even then deservedly blessed, if prophecy did not pass over even the service of those women who came together at the tomb before dawn with the spices they had prepared. For of this he speaks through Hosea: “And they will seek my face; before dawn they will watch for me, saying: Let us go and return to the Lord, for he has torn and he will heal us; he has struck and he will have mercy on us; he will heal us after two days; on the third day we will rise again.” For who would not believe that these words were turning over in the minds of those women, between the grief of their present bereavement, by which they seemed to themselves to have been struck by the Lord, and the hope of his resurrection, by which they thought they would be restored? But since the body was not found, his burial had been taken away from the midst, according to Isaiah. And two angels also appeared there. God's word, which stands on two witnesses, used generally to employ about that many attendants. The women too returning from the tomb and from that vision of angels Isaiah foresaw: “Women,” he says, “coming from the vision, come,” namely to announce the Lord's resurrection. 2 And it is well that the disciples' unbelief persisted, so that our defense might stand firm to the end: that Christ Jesus revealed himself to the disciples as no other than the Christ of the prophets. For when two of them were on a journey and the Lord had joined them, without its being apparent that it was he, and even feigning ignorance of what had happened, they said: “But we thought that he was the redeemer of Israel,” surely meaning their own Christ, that is, the Creator's. So far had he been from revealing himself to them as another. Otherwise they would not have thought him the Creator's; and when he was thought to be the Creator's, he would not have tolerated this opinion of himself if he were not the one he was thought to be. Or he himself will be the author of error and a betrayer of the truth, contrary to the title of the most good god. But neither after the resurrection did he show himself to them as other than the one they had told him they thought he was. He plainly inveighed against them: “foolish and slow of heart in not believing all that he spoke to you.” What had he spoken? That he belonged to another god? Prove it, and I surrender. Or the same things the angels said to the women: “Remember what he said to you in Galilee, saying that the Son of Man must be betrayed and crucified and rise on the third day”? And why “must,” unless because it had been so written by God the Creator? So he rebuked them as men offended at the passion alone and doubtful about the resurrection announced to them by the women, and because of this they had not believed that he was the one they had thought him to be. So, wishing them to believe what they had thought, he confirmed that he was the one they had thought him to be, namely the Creator's Christ, the redeemer of Israel. 3 And as for the reality of his body, what could be clearer? When they hesitated whether he might be a phantom, or rather believed him to be a phantom, he says: “Why are you troubled, and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; for a spirit does not have bones, as you see that I have.” And Marcion was unwilling to erase from his gospel certain things that tell against him — deliberately, I suppose — so that, from what he could have erased and did not, it might either be denied that he erased what he did erase, or be said that he had good reason to erase it; and he spares only those passages which he subverts no less by misinterpreting than he would by deleting. So he wants it to have been said thus: “A spirit does not have bones, as you see me having,” as though “as you see me having” referred to the spirit, that is, not having bones, like a spirit. And what is the reason for this contortion, when he could simply have said: “Because a spirit does not have bones, as you see me not having”? And why does he offer to their inspection his hands and feet, which are members made of bones, if he did not have bones? Why does he add, “And know that it is I,” whom, of course, they had known before as having a body? Or if he was a phantom through and through, why did he rebuke them for believing him a phantom? But in fact, when they still did not believe, he asked for food, so as to show that he had teeth too. 4 We have fulfilled our undertaking, I think. We have exhibited Jesus Christ, in his teachings, sayings, affections, thoughts, mighty works, sufferings, and even his resurrection, as the Christ of the prophets and none other than the Creator's, since also, in sending the apostles to preach to all nations, he commanded them in fulfillment of the psalm: that their sound should go out into all the earth and their words to the ends of the earth. I pity you, Marcion: you have labored in vain. For the Christ Jesus in your gospel is mine.