Against Marcion, Book 5

Nothing is without an origin except God alone. And just as origin comes first in the state of all things, so it must also come first in the examination of them, so that one may be clear about their state; for you cannot discern what a thing is like unless you are sure that it is, once you have learned where it comes from. And so, brought by the order of this little work to this subject, I ask Marcion also for the origin of the apostle Paul: I, a new sort of disciple and the hearer of no one else, who for the present believe nothing except that nothing is to be believed rashly, and that whatever is believed without knowledge of its origin is believed rashly; and who with every right bring this inquiry to careful scrutiny, since a man is affirmed to me as an apostle whom I do not find in the roll of the apostles in the Gospel. Then, hearing that he was chosen afterwards by the Lord, when the Lord was already at rest in heaven, I judge it a kind of lack of foresight if Christ did not know beforehand that he needed him, but, when the office of the apostolate had already been ordered and its holders sent off to their work, thought that he must be added on the spur of the moment rather than by foresight: by necessity, so to speak, not by will. Therefore, shipmaster from Pontus, if you have never taken smuggled or unlawful goods aboard your boats, if you have never made off with or adulterated a cargo, then, being more cautious and more faithful in the things of God, tell us, please, under what bill of lading you took on the apostle Paul, who stamped him with the mark of his title, who handed him over to you, who put him aboard, so that you may confidently unload him; for fear that he may be proved to belong to the One who produced all the documents of his apostleship. He himself, he says, professed himself an apostle, and that “not from men nor through a man, but through Jesus Christ.” Certainly anyone can profess himself; but his profession is completed by another's authority. One writes, another signs; one seals, another enters it in the record. No one is both his own claimant and his own witness. Besides, you have certainly read that many will come who say, “I am the Christ.” If there is one who falsely claims to be Christ, how much more one who proclaims himself an apostle of Christ? So far I am playing the part of a disciple and an inquirer, so as from here on both to blunt your faith, since you have nothing to prove it from, and to put your impudence to the blush, since you lay claim to him yet do not accept the means by which you could lay claim to him. Let Christ belong to another, and let the apostle now belong to another too, so long as they are proved only from the Creator's documents. For Genesis too promised me Paul long ago. Among those figures and prophetic blessings that Jacob spoke over his sons, when he turned to Benjamin he said: “Benjamin is a ravening wolf; in the morning he will still devour, and at evening he will give food.” For he foresaw that Paul would arise from the tribe of Benjamin, a ravening wolf devouring in the morning, that is, in the first part of his life laying waste the Lord's flocks as a persecutor of the churches, and then at evening giving food, that is, as his life was already declining, feeding Christ's sheep as teacher of the nations. So too Saul's harsh pursuit of David at first, and afterwards his repentance and amends when he received good for evil, foreshadowed nothing other than Paul in Saul, according to his tribe, and Jesus in David, according to the virgin's descent. If these mysteries of figures displease you, at any rate the Acts of the Apostles have handed down to me this course of Paul's, which you too must not deny. From there I show that the apostle, once a persecutor, was “not from men nor through a man”; from there I am led to believe him myself; from there I drive you from defending him, and I do not fear your saying, “So you deny the apostle Paul?” I do not blaspheme the one I am protecting. I deny him in order to compel you to prove him; I deny him in order to prove that he is mine. Either, if you look to our faith, accept what makes it; or, if you appeal to yours, produce what lays its foundation. Either prove that what you believe is so, or, if you do not prove it, how do you believe it? Or what sort of believer are you, set against the one by whom alone what you believe is proved to be? Take the apostle now from my side, as you took Christ: as much my apostle as my Christ. Here too we shall fight along the same lines and challenge you on the same ground of prescription: namely, that an apostle who is denied to be the Creator's, indeed who is put forward against the Creator, must teach nothing, know nothing, will nothing according to the Creator, and above all must proclaim another god with as much constancy as he broke away from the Creator's law. For it is not likely that, in turning people away from Judaism, he would not equally show into faith in which god he was turning them, since no one could pass over from the Creator without knowing to whom he was to pass. For either Christ had already revealed another god, and then the apostle's testimony would follow as well, if only so that he should not be thought an apostle of a god other than the one Christ had revealed, and because one who had already been revealed by Christ could not be kept hidden by the apostle; or Christ had revealed nothing of the kind about God, and then it was all the more the apostle's duty to reveal him, since he could no longer be revealed by anyone else, and he would without doubt not be believed in if he were not revealed even by the apostle. We have laid this down beforehand so that we may declare from here on that we shall prove, just as we proved it of Christ, that no other god was carried about by the apostle; and this from Paul's own letters, which the form of the heretic's gospel must already have led us to judge in advance to be likewise mutilated, even in their number. (Galatians 1:1; Luke 21:8)

We too acknowledge that the letter that teaches the Galatians is the principal one against Judaism. For we embrace that entire removal of the old law, as itself coming from the Creator's arrangement, as we have often discussed already in this series with regard to the renewal foretold by the prophets of our God. Now if the Creator promised that the old things would cease, since new things were to arise, and Christ marked the time of that departure (“the law and the prophets until John”), setting in John the boundary between the two orders, of the old things ending from then on and of the new beginning, then necessarily the apostle too, in Christ revealed after John, weakens the old and confirms the new, and so is concerned for faith in no other god than the Creator, with whom it was foretold that the old things would pass away. So both the dismantling of the law and the building up of the gospel make for my case in this letter too, bearing as they do on that presumption of the Galatians by which they presumed that Christ, as being the Creator's, was to be believed with the Creator's law kept intact, since it still seemed incredible that the law should be laid aside by its own author. Further, if they had heard of an entirely other god from the apostle, they would certainly have known of themselves that they must withdraw from the law of that god whom they had left to follow another. For who would wait any longer to learn that one who had received a new god ought to follow a new rule of life? No: because the same Deity was preached in the gospel that had always been known in the law, but not the same rule of life, this was the whole point at issue: whether the Creator's law ought to be excluded by the gospel in the Creator's Christ. Take away this issue, and there is no question. And if there were no question, since everyone would recognize of his own accord that he must depart from the Creator's order through faith in the other god, the apostle would have had no occasion to teach so insistently what faith itself would have dictated unasked. So the whole aim of this letter teaches nothing else than the departure of the law as coming from the Creator's arrangement, as we shall show further. If, likewise, he makes no mention of any new god (and he would have done so nowhere more than on this subject, so as to set out the reason for dismissing the law by this single and most sufficient definition, a new deity), it is plain in what sense he writes: “I am amazed that you are so quickly being transferred from Him who called you into grace to another gospel”: another in conduct, not in religion; in rule of life, not in deity; since the gospel of Christ was to call them away from the law to grace, not from the Creator to another god. For no one had moved them away from the Creator, so that they might seem to be transferred to another gospel in that sense, as though in being transferred to the Creator. For when he adds that there is no other gospel at all, he confirms that the one he defends is the Creator's. For the Creator too promises a gospel, saying through Isaiah, “Go up onto a high mountain, you who bring good news to Zion; lift up your voice in your strength, you who bring good news to Jerusalem”; and again, in the person of the apostles, “How timely are the feet of those who bring good news of peace, who bring good news of good things”: to the nations too, of course, since He also says, “In His name the nations will hope,” that is, in Christ's, to whom He says, “I have set you as a light of the nations.” Now if there is also a gospel of the new god, which you hold the apostle was then defending, then there are two gospels belonging to two gods, and the apostle will have lied in saying that there is no other at all, since there is another; when he could have defended his own gospel by demonstrating it rather than by declaring it the only one. But perhaps, to escape from this, you will say: “And that is why he added, ‘Even if an angel from heaven should preach a gospel otherwise, let him be anathema,’ because he knew that the Creator too would preach a gospel.” Again you entangle yourself. For this is what binds you: to confirm two gospels is not the part of one who has already denied that there is another. Yet his meaning is clear, since he put his own person first: “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel otherwise.” It is said by way of example. Besides, if he himself would not preach otherwise, neither would an angel. So he named an angel for this reason, that men should be believed all the less when not even an angel, or even an apostle, was to be believed; not in order to refer the angel to the Creator's gospel. Then, running through the course of his conversion from persecutor to apostle, he confirms the scripture of the Acts, in which the very subject of this letter is also recognized: that certain people intervened who said that one must be circumcised and that the law of Moses must be kept; and that the apostles, then consulted on this question, announced by the authority of the Spirit that burdens were not to be laid on men which the fathers themselves had not been able to bear. And if in this too the Acts of the Apostles agree with Paul, it is now plain why you reject them: because they preach no other god than the Creator and no Christ other than the Creator's; since the fulfillment of the promise of the Holy Spirit too is proved from no other document than the Acts. It is surely not likely that they should agree with the apostle in part, when they show his career in accordance with his own testimony, and disagree in part, when they proclaim the deity of the Creator in Christ, as though Paul had not followed the preaching of the apostles, when it was from them that he received the pattern for unteaching the law. (Luke 16:16; Galatians 1:6-7; Galatians 1:7; Isaiah 52:7; Isaiah 42:6; Galatians 1:8)

Then he writes that he went up to Jerusalem after fourteen years to seek the backing of Peter and the other apostles, in order to confer with them about the rule of his gospel, for fear that he had run or would run in vain for so many years, that is, if he were preaching in any way short of their pattern. So much did he desire to be approved and confirmed by those whom, if anyone, you want to be understood as closer akin to Judaism. And when he says that not even Titus was circumcised, he begins to show that only the question of circumcision had been stirred up, out of a continuing defense of the law, by those whom he therefore calls false brothers brought in secretly. They were going on to establish nothing other than the continuance of the law, out of a faith in the Creator that was no doubt intact, and so were perverting the gospel, not by tampering with Scripture so as to fashion a Christ of the Creator, but by retaining the old rule of life so as not to exclude the Creator's law. “Because of false brothers brought in secretly,” he says, “who had slipped in to spy out our freedom which we have in Christ, to bring us into slavery, we did not yield in submission even for an hour.” Let us attend both to the sense itself and to its reason, and the corruption of the text will appear. When he first says, “But not even Titus, who was with me, though he was a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised,” and then adds, “because of false brothers brought in secretly,” and the rest, he begins to give the reason for the opposite action, showing why he did what he would not have done if that on account of which he did it had not happened. Tell me, then: if those false brothers had not slipped in to spy out their freedom, would they have yielded in submission? I think not. So they yielded because there were people for whose sake one had to yield. For this suited a faith still raw and still in suspense about keeping the law, when the apostle himself too was anxious that he had run or would run in vain. So the false brothers who were spying out Christian freedom had to be thwarted, so that they did not carry it off into the slavery of Judaism before Paul knew that he had not run in vain, before his predecessors gave him their right hands, before he took up the office of preaching to the nations with their consent. So of necessity he yielded for a time; and in this way his reason is consistent for circumcising Timothy and for bringing shaven men into the temple, which are recorded in the Acts. So true are these things that they agree with the apostle's own profession that he became a Jew to the Jews to win the Jews, and one living under the law for the sake of those who lived under the law; and so also for the sake of those men who had been brought in; and finally that he became all things to all people to win all. If these things too require to be understood from this passage, this too no one will doubt: that Paul was a preacher of that God and Christ whose law, though he was excluding it, he had nevertheless meanwhile admitted for the times; a law that he would have had to clear away at once if he had brought forward a new god. It is well, then, that Peter and James and John gave Paul their right hands and made an agreement on the division of duties, that Paul should go to the nations and they to the circumcision, “only that they should remember the poor”: this too according to the law of the Creator, who cherishes the poor and needy, as was proved in the examination of your gospel. So it is clear that the question concerned the law alone, since it is shown what of the law it was fitting to keep. But he rebukes Peter for not walking with a straight foot toward the truth of the gospel. He rebukes him indeed, yet for nothing else than inconsistency in his way of eating, which he varied according to the kind of people present, fearing those who were of the circumcision; not for any difference of deity. On that point he would have withstood others to their face too, he who did not spare Peter himself for the lesser matter of wavering conduct, if he had believed in the way the Marcionites want. For the rest, let the apostle go on, denying that a man is justified by works of the law, but by faith: faith, however, in that God to whom the law also belongs. For he would not have labored to distinguish faith from the law if a difference of deity itself, had there been one, had already distinguished them unaided. Rightly he did not rebuild what he had destroyed. And the law was to be destroyed from the time the voice of John cried in the wilderness, “Prepare the ways of the Lord,” so that the valleys and hills and mountains should be filled and brought low, and the crooked and rough made straight and level: (Galatians 2:1-2; Galatians 2:3; Galatians 2:4; Galatians 2:4-5; Galatians 2:3-4; Galatians 2:2; Acts 16:3; Acts 21:23-26; Galatians 2:9; Galatians 2:10; Galatians 2:12; Galatians 2:16; Luke 3:4-5) that is, the difficulties of the law turned into the ease of the gospel. He had remembered, too, that the time of the psalm had come: “Let us burst their bonds from us and cast their yoke from us,” since “the nations raged and the peoples devised vain things; the kings of the earth stood up and the rulers gathered together against the Lord and against His Christ”; so that a man should now be justified by the freedom of faith, not by the slavery of the law, because “the righteous lives by faith.” And if the prophet Habakkuk declared this, you have the apostle confirming the prophets, as Christ did too. So the faith by which the righteous will live will belong to the same God as the law by which the worker is not justified. Likewise, if in the law there is a curse and in faith a blessing, you have both set forth with the Creator: “Look,” he says, “I have set before you a curse and a blessing.” You cannot claim a difference of gods on this ground (a difference which, though it is one of things, is not therefore one of authors) when both are set forth by one author. And why Christ became a curse for us, since the apostle himself teaches it, is clear, and how much it makes for us, that is, for faith in the Creator. For it will not seem that, because the Creator pronounced, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree,” Christ therefore belongs to another god and was for that reason already cursed by the Creator in the law. Or how could the Creator have cursed in advance one He did not know? And why is it not more fitting for the Creator to have given His own Son up to His own curse than for that god of yours to have subjected Him to a curse, and that for a man who was a stranger to him? In short, if this seems cruel in the Creator toward His Son, it is equally so in your god; but if it is reasonable in yours, it is equally so in mine, and more so in mine. For it will more easily be believed that he provided a blessing for man through the curse of Christ who once set both a curse and a blessing before man, than he who, by your account, never professed either. “We receive the spiritual blessing through faith,” he says: the faith, that is, by which the righteous lives according to the Creator. This, then, is what I say: that faith belongs to that God to whom faith, the pattern of grace, belongs. And when he adds, “For you are all sons of faith,” it is shown what the heretic's industry erased above, namely the mention of Abraham, in which the apostle affirms that we are sons of Abraham through faith; and in keeping with that mention he here too called us sons of faith. Otherwise, how are we sons of faith? And of whose faith, if not Abraham's? For if Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness, and from that he deserved to be named father of many nations, and we, who are even more like Abraham in believing God, are likewise justified as Abraham was, and likewise obtain life, as the righteous lives by faith, so it comes about that above he declared us sons of Abraham, as the father of faith, and here sons of faith, through which Abraham had been promised as father of the nations. The very fact that he called faith away from circumcision: was he not seeking to make them sons of Abraham, who had believed while his flesh was still uncircumcised? In short, faith in one god cannot be admitted to the pattern of the other god, so as to reckon believers as righteous, to make the righteous live by faith, to call the nations sons of faith. All this belongs to the one with whom it was already known before. (Habakkuk 2:4; Deuteronomy 11:26; Galatians 3:13; Galatians 3:26; Galatians 3:6)

Under the same mention of Abraham, so long as he is refuted by the sense itself. “I speak still,” he says, “in human terms: when we were little children we were placed under the elements of the world, to be slaves to them.” But this is not said in human terms; it is not an illustration but the truth. For what little child (in understanding, of course, as the nations are) is not subject to the elements of the world, which he looks up to as God? What he did say then in human terms was this: “Yet no one sets aside or adds to a man's testament.” For by the example of a human testament that stands firm he was defending the divine one: “The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He did not say ‘to seeds,’ as of many, but ‘to your seed,’ as of one, which is Christ.” Let Marcion's sponge blush! Except that I am going over, more than I need, what he has taken away, when it is more effective to refute him from what he has kept. “But when the fullness of time came, God sent His Son”: surely he who is also God of the very times of which the world consists; who also ordained the signs of the times, suns and moons and constellations and stars; who, in short, both arranged and foretold the revelation of His Son at the end of the times: “In the last days the mountain of the Lord will be manifest,” and, “In the last days I will pour out of my Spirit on all flesh,” according to Joel. It belonged to Him to wait for the time to be fulfilled whose also was the end of time, as well as its beginning. But that idle god, who has no work and no prophecy and so no time of any kind, what did he ever do to bring it about that the time was fulfilled, or to wait for it until it should be fulfilled? If nothing, it is quite empty that he should have waited for the Creator's times, serving the Creator. And for what purpose did He send His Son? “To redeem those who were under the law”: that is, to make the crooked into a straight way and the rough into smooth ways, according to Isaiah, so that the old things should pass away and new ones arise (“a new law from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem”); “and that we might receive the adoption of sons,” we the nations, of course, who were not sons. For He himself will be the light of the nations, and in His name the nations will hope. So, that it might be certain that we are sons of God, (Galatians 3:16; Galatians 4:4; Galatians 4:5; Isaiah 40:4; Isaiah 2:3; Isaiah 42:4; Galatians 4:6) “he sent his Spirit into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba, Father.’” For “in the last days,” he says, “I will pour out of my Spirit on all flesh.” Whose is this grace, if not his whose is also the promise of grace? Who is Father, if not He who is also Maker? So after these riches there was to be no turning back “to the weak and beggarly elements.” Now among the Romans, too, the first letters of the alphabet are commonly called “elements.” So he did not want to turn them away from the God of the elements of the world by disparaging those elements. (Although, when he said above, “If then you serve those who by nature are not gods,” he rebukes the error of physical, that is natural, superstition, which holds the elements to be God, yet not even so does he censure the God of the elements.) But he himself declares which elements he wants to be understood, namely the first letters of the law: “You observe days and months and times and years”; and sabbaths, I suppose, and the preparation meals and fasts and great days. For these too, like circumcision, were to cease by the Creator's decrees, who says through Isaiah: “Your new moons and sabbaths and great day I will not endure; your fasting and holidays and ceremonies my soul hates”; and through Amos: “I have hated, I have rejected your ceremonies, and I will not smell the savor in your solemn assemblies”; and again through Hosea: “I will turn away all her mirth and her ceremonies and her sabbaths and her new moons and all her solemn assemblies.” “Has he erased what He himself had established?” you say. Yes, He rather than another; or if another, then that other helped the Creator's sentence, taking away what the Creator too had condemned. But the question here is not why the Creator broke His own laws. It is enough that we have proved that He would break them, so that it is confirmed that the apostle laid down nothing against the Creator, since the very removal of the law comes from the Creator. But as thieves often drop some of their loot, which gives them away, so, I believe, Marcion left behind the last mention of Abraham, though none needed removing more, even if he partly altered it. For Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and the other by the free woman; but the one by the slave woman was born according to the flesh, and the one by the free woman through promise. These things are allegorical (that is, they foreshadow something else); for these are the two testaments (or two “showings,” as we find it translated): one from Mount Sinai into the synagogue of the Jews, according to the law, bearing children for slavery; the other bearing children above every principality and power and dominion and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come, into which we have been promised, the holy church, which is our mother. And so he adds, “Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman but of the free.” He has certainly made plain that the nobility of Christianity has the sacred sign of allegory in Abraham's son born of the free woman, just as the legal slavery of Judaism has it in the son of the slave woman; and so that both dispensations belong to that God with whom we find the outline of both. The very saying, “For the freedom with which Christ has set us free,” does it not make him the liberator who was the master? For not even Galba set free other people's slaves; he would more readily have released free men. Freedom, then, will be granted by the one with whom was the slavery of the law. And rightly it was not fitting for those who had been set free to be bound again by the yoke of slavery, that is, of the law, now that the psalm had been fulfilled: “Let us burst their bonds and cast their yoke from us,” after the rulers had gathered together against the Lord and against His Christ. So from those released from slavery he persisted in erasing the very mark of slavery, circumcision, on the authority, of course, of the prophetic preaching, remembering what was said through Jeremiah, “And circumcise the foreskins of your heart,” since Moses too says, “You shall circumcise your hardness of heart,” that is, not the flesh. In short, if he was excluding circumcision because he came from another god, (Galatians 4:9; Galatians 4:8; Galatians 4:10; Isaiah 1:13-14; Amos 5:21; Hosea 2:11; Galatians 5:1; Jeremiah 4:4; Deuteronomy 10:16; Galatians 5:6) why does he also deny that uncircumcision has any value in Christ, as he does circumcision? For he ought to have preferred the rival of what he was attacking, if he came from a god who was the rival of circumcision. But because both circumcision and uncircumcision were assigned to one God, both were void in Christ, because faith was preferred to them: that faith of which it had been written, “And in His name the nations will believe”; that faith which, by saying that it is made complete through love, he shows in this way too to be the Creator's. For whether he means the love that is toward God, this too is the Creator's: “You shall love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength”; or the love toward one's neighbor, “Your neighbor as yourself” is also the Creator's. “But he who troubles you will bear judgment.” From which god? From the best god? But he does not judge. From the Creator? But neither will He condemn one who upholds circumcision. If there will be no other judge than the Creator, then He will not condemn the defenders of the law except because he himself determined that it should cease. What now, if he even confirms it in the part in which he ought? “For the whole law,” he says, “has been fulfilled in you: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Or if he wants “has been fulfilled” to be understood as meaning that it is no longer to be fulfilled, does he then not want me to love my neighbor as myself, so that this too has ceased with the law? But this precept will have to be kept forever. So the Creator's law has been approved even by its adversary, and has gained from him not loss but gain, its sum reduced to a single precept. But this too suits no one better than its author. And so when he says, “Bear one another's burdens, and so you will fulfill the law of Christ,” if this cannot be done unless one loves his neighbor as himself, it is plain that “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” through which “Bear one another's burdens” is understood, is the law of Christ, which is the Creator's; and so Christ is the Creator's, since the Creator's law is Christ's. “Do not be deceived; God is not mocked.” And yet Marcion's god can be mocked, since he knows neither how to be angry nor how to avenge. “For whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.” So it is a God who repays and judges who threatens. “And let us not grow weary in doing good,” and, “While we have time, let us work what is good.” Deny that the Creator commanded doing good, and then let a different teaching belong to a different deity. Further, if He teaches that people will be repaid, the harvest both of corruption and of life will come from the same one. “And in due time we shall reap,” since Ecclesiastes too says, “There is a time for everything.” “But to me too” (a servant of the Creator) “the world has been crucified” (yet not the God of the world) “and I to the world” (yet not to the God of the world). For he spoke of the world with regard to its manner of life, by renouncing which we are crucified to each other and die to each other. [He calls them persecutors of Christ.] And when he adds that he bears the marks of Christ in his body (bodily marks, of course, of fetters), he has confessed that Christ's flesh was not imaginary but real and solid, since he shows its bodily marks. (Isaiah 42:4; Galatians 5:6; Deuteronomy 6:5; Leviticus 19:18; Galatians 5:10; Galatians 5:14; Galatians 6:2; Galatians 6:7; Galatians 6:9; Galatians 6:10; Ecclesiastes 3:17; Galatians 6:14)

The groundwork laid in the preceding letter led me not to discuss its heading, being sure that it could be discussed elsewhere as well, since it is common to all the letters and the same in each. That he prescribes for those to whom he writes not “health” but “grace and peace”: I do not ask what he, the destroyer of Judaism, has to do with a custom still Jewish (for even today the Jews greet one another in the name of peace, and formerly in the Scriptures they so saluted); but I understand that by his office he was upholding the Creator's preaching: “How ripe are the feet of those who bring good news of good things, who bring good news of peace.” For the good news of good things, that is, of God's grace, is proclaimed as peace, which he knew was to be preferred. When he announces these as “from God our Father and the Lord Jesus,” he uses common names that also suit our faith; and I do not think it can be discerned which God the Father and which Lord Jesus is proclaimed except from the attendant circumstances, as to which of the two they fit better. First, then, I lay down that God the Father is to be recognized as none other than the Creator and Founder both of man and of the universe; next, that the name of Lord is also added to the Father because of His power, which the Son too receives through the Father; then, that grace and peace belong not only to him by whom they were foretold but also to him who had been offended. For there is no grace except for an offense, and no peace except after war. And both the people, by transgressing the rule of life, and the whole human race, by ignoring nature, had both sinned and rebelled against the Creator. But Marcion's god could not be offended, both because he was unknown and because he does not know how to be angry. What grace, then, from one who was not offended? What peace from one who was not rebelled against? He says that the cross of Christ is foolishness to those who are perishing, but the power and wisdom of God to those who will attain salvation; and to show where this came from, he adds: “For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the understanding of the prudent I will bring to nothing.'” If these are the Creator's words and bear on the cross being counted foolishness, then both the cross and, through the cross, Christ will belong to the Creator, by whom what concerns the cross was foretold. Or if the Creator, as a rival, took away wisdom so that the cross of Christ, his adversary, should be counted foolishness, how could the Creator have declared anything about the cross of a Christ not His own, whom He did not know when He prophesied? And again, why is it that with the best god, of lavish mercy, some carry off salvation, believing the cross to be the power and wisdom of God, and others perdition, who count the cross of Christ foolishness? If this does not belong to him, it belongs to the Creator to have punished some offense of both the people and the human race by the loss of wisdom and prudence. What follows will confirm this, when he says, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” and when here too he adds why: “Since in the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe.” But first I will discuss “the world.” Since the most subtle heretics here above all take “the world” to mean the lord of the world, we understand it of the man who is in the world, from the simple form of human speech in which we usually put the container for what it contains: “The circus shouted,” “The forum spoke,” and “The basilica murmured,” meaning those who were doing business in those places. So because man, not the God of the world, did not in wisdom know God, in which he ought to have known him (the Jew in the wisdom of the Scriptures, and every nation in the wisdom of his works), therefore the same God, who was not recognized in His wisdom, resolved to strike back at the wisdom of men with foolishness, by saving all who believe in the foolish preaching of the cross. “Since the Jews desire signs”: they who ought already to have been certain about God; “and the Greeks seek wisdom”: they who, of course, set up their own wisdom, not God's. But if a new god were being preached, what wrong had the Jews done in desiring signs by which to believe, or the Greeks in pursuing wisdom which they would rather believe? So the repayment made to Jews and Greeks confirms a jealous God and judge, who by a retribution both jealous and judicial made foolish the wisdom of the world. And if the reasons belong to him whose Scriptures are applied, then the apostle, in speaking of the Creator, teaches that the Creator, who had not been understood, is to be understood. Also, in preaching Christ as a stumbling block to the Jews, he seals the prophecy of the Creator about Him, who says through Isaiah, “Look, I have set in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense.” And “the rock was Christ” even Marcion keeps. And what is “the foolishness of God that is wiser than men,” if not the cross and death of God? What is “the weakness of God that is stronger than men,” if not the birth and flesh of God? But if Christ was neither born of a virgin nor built up of flesh, and so suffered neither the cross nor death in truth, there was nothing foolish or weak in him; nor then did God choose “the foolish things of the world to confound the wise,” nor “the weak things of the world to confound the strong,” nor the dishonourable and least and despised things, “things that are not,” that is, that do not truly exist, “to confound the things that are,” that is, that truly exist. For nothing arranged by God is truly small and ignoble and despicable, but only what man arranges. Yet with the Creator the old things can indeed be regarded as foolishness and weakness and dishonour and pettiness and contempt. What more foolish, what weaker, than God's demand for bloody sacrifices and reeking burnt offerings? What weaker than the purification of vessels and beds? What more dishonourable than the further disfigurement of flesh that already blushes? What so low as the imposing of retaliation? What so contemptible as the exclusion of foods? The whole Old Testament, as far as I know, every heretic ridicules. “For God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise” (Marcion's god does nothing of the kind, since he does not strive to refute opposites by opposites) “so that no flesh should boast,” in order that, as it is written, “Let him who boasts boast in God.” In what God? Surely in the one who gave this command; unless the Creator commanded us to boast in Marcion's god. (1 Corinthians 1:3; Isaiah 52:7; 1 Corinthians 1:18; 1 Corinthians 1:20; 1 Corinthians 1:21; 1 Corinthians 1:22; 1 Corinthians 1:23; Isaiah 8:14; Isaiah 28:16; 1 Corinthians 1:25; 1 Corinthians 1:27; Leviticus 13:2-6)

So by all these things he shows of which God it is that he speaks the wisdom among the perfect: of him, namely, who took away the wisdom of the wise and brought to nothing the understanding of the prudent, who made foolish the wisdom of the world, choosing its foolish things and appointing them for salvation. This wisdom, he says, was hidden: it lay in things foolish and small and dishonourable, and it lay concealed also under figures, allegories, and riddles, to be revealed afterwards in Christ, who was set as a light of the nations by the Creator, who promised through the voice of Isaiah that He would open up treasures unseen and hidden. For that the god who did nothing at all in which he might be thought to have hidden something should have hidden anything is quite incredible. If he himself existed, he could not stay hidden, much less any mysteries of his. But the Creator is as well known Himself as His mysteries are, which ran their course openly in Israel, yet were overshadowed as to their meanings, and in them the wisdom of God lay hidden: to be told among the perfect in its own time, but set forth in God's purpose before the ages. And whose are the ages, if not the Creator's? For if the ages are built of times, and times are put together from days and months and years, and days and months and years are marked by the Creator's suns and moons and stars, set by him for this purpose (“and they shall be,” he says, “for signs of months and years”), it is plain that the ages too are the Creator's, and that whatever is said to have been purposed before the ages belongs to no other than Him whose the ages are. Or let Marcion prove that the ages belong to his god; let him also show the world itself in which ages may be counted, the vessel, so to speak, of the times, and some signs or instruments of them. If he shows nothing, I return to say this too: why did he purpose our glory before the Creator's ages? It might seem that he had purposed it before the ages if he had revealed it at the beginning of the age. But since he does so when almost the whole of the Creator's ages has already run out, he purposed it before the ages to no purpose, and not rather within the ages, since he was going to reveal it almost after the ages. For it does not belong to one who was slow in revealing to have been in a hurry in purposing. But both suit the Creator: (1 Corinthians 2:6-7; Isaiah 42:6; 1 Corinthians 2:7) to have purposed before the ages and to have revealed at the end of the ages, because what He both purposed and revealed He prepared in the intervening span of the ages in figures and riddles and allegories. But since he adds about our glory that none of the rulers of this age knew it, and that if they had known it they would never have crucified the Lord of glory, the heretic argues that the rulers of this age crucified the Lord of glory, that is, the Christ of the other god, so as to lay this too at the door of the Creator. Now, since we have shown above in what ways our glory is to be ascribed to the Creator, it must be taken as settled that the glory which was hidden with the Creator was rightly unknown also to all the Creator's virtues and powers, since not even servants may know their masters' plans, much less those apostate angels and the prince of transgression himself, the devil, whom I would contend were, because of their guilt, all the more strangers to any knowledge of the Creator's arrangements. But it no longer suits me either to take the rulers of this age as the Creator's virtues and powers, because the apostle ascribes ignorance to them. For even the devil, according to our Gospel too, recognized Jesus in the temptation; and according to the common document the evil spirit knew that he was the Holy One of God and was called Jesus and had come to destroy them. Also the parable of that strong armed man, whom another, stronger man overpowered and whose goods he seized: if in Marcion's reading it is taken of the Creator, then the Creator could no longer have been ignorant of the Lord of glory while He was being overpowered by him, nor could He have fixed on a cross the one against whom he had no strength. And it remains (credible enough on my view) that the Creator's virtues and powers, knowing the Lord of glory, their own Christ, crucified him, with that despair and overflowing malice with which even the most wicked slaves do not hesitate to kill their masters; for it is written in my Gospel that Satan entered into Judas. But according to Marcion, the apostle in this place does not allow ignorance of the Lord of glory to be ascribed to the Creator's powers, since he does not want them understood as the rulers of this age. And if he does not seem to have spoken of spiritual rulers, then he spoke of worldly ones: of the ruling people (not among the nations, of course), of its own rulers, of King Herod, and also of Pilate, and, above him, of the greater power of this age, the Roman authority that presided over them. So, when the arguments of the other side are torn down, our interpretations are built up. But you still want our glory to belong to your god and to have been hidden with him. Then why does both the god and the apostle still lean on the same document? What has he to do everywhere with the sayings of the prophets? “For who has known the mind of the Lord, and who has been His counselor?” That is Isaiah's. What has he to do, too, with the examples of our God? For when he affirms that he is a wise master builder, we find this meant by the Creator through Isaiah of one who would lay out the divine rule of life: “For I will take away from Judaea,” he says, among other things, “the wise master builder.” And was it not Paul himself who was then marked out, destined to be taken away from Judaea, that is, from Judaism, for the building of Christianity, to lay the one foundation, which is Christ? For of this too the Creator says through the same prophet: “Look, I am laying in the foundations of Zion a precious stone, held in honor, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.” Unless God was professing Himself a builder of an earthly work, so as not to be pointing to His Christ, who was to be the foundation of those who believe in Him. On this foundation, according as each builds on it doctrine worthy or unworthy, if his work is to be tested by fire, if his reward is to be paid out through fire, it is the Creator's doing, because through fire our superstructure is judged, the superstructure, of course, on his own foundation, that is, on His own Christ. “Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” If man (thing and work and image and likeness, flesh from the earth and soul from the breath) is the Creator's, then, if we are not the Creator's temple, Marcion's god dwells wholly in what belongs to another. “If anyone corrupts the temple of God, he will be corrupted,” by the God of the temple, of course. In threatening an avenger he has threatened the Creator. “Be fools, that you may be wise.” Why? “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.” With which God? Even if the earlier arguments have settled nothing for us in favor of this sense, it is well that he confirms it here too: “For it is written, ‘He catches the wise in their wickedness,' and again, ‘The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.'” For on the whole we shall have laid it down that he could not have used any saying of that God whom he ought to be destroying, if he were not teaching in his service. “So,” he says, “let no one boast in man”: and this too is according to the Creator's rule of life: “Wretched is the man who puts his hope in man,” and, “It is better to trust in God than to trust in men”; and so too with boasting. (1 Corinthians 2:8; Matthew 4:1-11; Luke 4:34; Luke 22:3; Isaiah 40:13; 1 Corinthians 3:10; 1 Corinthians 3:11; Isaiah 28:16; 1 Corinthians 3:16; 1 Corinthians 3:17; 1 Corinthians 3:18; 1 Corinthians 3:19; 1 Corinthians 3:21; Jeremiah 17:5)

“And He himself will bring to light the hidden things of darkness”: through Christ, of course, since He promised Christ as a light of the nations and declared himself a lamp searching the reins and hearts. From Him too will come praise to each one, from whom also comes the opposite of praise, as from a judge. “Surely,” you say, “here at least he means by ‘the world’ the God of the world, when he says, ‘We have become a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men’; because if he had meant by ‘the world’ the men of the world, he would not have named men afterwards as well.” No: so that you should not argue in this way, the foresight of the Holy Spirit showed how he had said, “We have become a spectacle to the world”: namely, to the angels who minister to the world and to the men to whom they minister. No doubt a man of such constancy (not to say the Holy Spirit), writing especially to the children whom he had begotten in the gospel, was afraid to name the God of the world freely, when he could not have seemed to preach against him unless he did so openly! I do not argue that the man who had his father's wife displeased him on the basis of the Creator's law (the apostle may have been following the rule of a common and public religion); but when he condemns him to be handed over to Satan, he is the herald of a God who condemns. No matter how he said it, “for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord,” since he has passed judgment both on the destruction of the flesh and on the salvation of the spirit; and in ordering the evil to be removed from their midst, he has recalled a sentence very frequent with the Creator. “Purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, as you are unleavened.” So the unleavened loaves were figures of us with the Creator. “So too Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed.” Why is Christ the Passover, unless the Passover is a figure of Christ by the likeness of the blood of the saving lamb and of Christ? Why has he clothed us and Christ with images of the Creator's festivals, if they were not ours? And in turning us away from sexual immorality he makes plain the resurrection of the flesh. “The body,” he says, “is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body,” as the temple for God and God for the temple. Will the temple, then, perish for God, and God for the temple? But you see: “He who raised the Lord will also raise us.” He raised him in the body too, because the body is for the Lord and the Lord for the body. And it is well that he piles it up: “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” What will the heretic say? That the members of Christ, which are no longer our own, will not rise? “For we have been bought at a great price.” At no price at all, surely, if Christ was a phantom and had no substance of body to pay out for our bodies. So Christ had something with which to redeem us; and if He redeemed these bodies at a great price, bodies into which sexual immorality must not be admitted, as being now members of Christ, not our own, He will surely keep safe for himself what He bought at a great price. How, then, shall we now glorify, how shall we bear God in a body that is to perish? (1 Corinthians 4:5; Isaiah 42:6; 1 Corinthians 4:9; Leviticus 18:8; 1 Corinthians 5:1; 1 Corinthians 5:5; 1 Corinthians 5:13; 1 Corinthians 5:7; 1 Corinthians 6:13; 1 Corinthians 6:14; 1 Corinthians 6:15; 1 Corinthians 6:20; 1 Corinthians 7:7-8; 1 Corinthians 7:27) Next he takes up marriage, which Marcion, more rigorous than the apostle, forbids. For the apostle, though he prefers the good of continence, still permits marriage both to be contracted and to be used, and urges that it be kept rather than dissolved. Clearly Christ forbids divorce, while Moses permits it. Marcion, who takes away all sexual union from the faithful (let his catechumens see to themselves), and orders divorce before marriage: whose sentence is he following, Moses' or Christ's? And yet the apostle, when He commands that a wife should not depart from her husband, or, if she departs, should remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband, both permitted divorce, since He did not forbid it altogether, and confirmed marriage, since he first forbade it to be dissolved and, if it happened to be dissolved, wanted it restored. But what reasons does he give for continence? “Because the time is short.” I had thought it was because there was another god in Christ! And yet from him from whom comes the shortening of the time will also come what befits the shortening of the time. No one provides for another's time. You make your god a petty one, Marcion, if the Creator's time hems him in in any respect. Certainly, in prescribing that one must marry only in the Lord, so that no believer should contract marriage with a heathen, he upholds the Creator's law, which everywhere forbids marriages with foreigners. “But even if there are those who are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth”: it is plain how he said this, not as though they truly were gods, but because there are those who are called gods, though they are not. For he began with idols, being about to discuss things sacrificed to idols: “We know that an idol is nothing.” But even Marcion does not deny that the Creator is God. So the apostle cannot seem to have placed the Creator too among those who are called gods and yet are not, since, even if they had been, still for us there would be one God, the Father, “from whom are all things.” From whom are all things for us, if not from Him to whom all things belong? And what are they? You have them in what came before: “All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or things present or things to come.” So He makes the Creator the God of all things, from whom come the world and life and death, which cannot belong to another god. From Him, then, among all things, comes Christ too. In teaching that each one ought to live by his own labor, he had given examples first of soldiers, shepherds, and farmers; but they lacked divine authority. So he sets against the ungrateful the law of the Creator, which he was destroying (for he had no such law of his own god): “You shall not muzzle the ox that treads out the grain,” he says, and adds: “Is it for oxen that the Lord cares? Yes, he is kind even to oxen for the sake of men? For it was written for our sake,” he says. So he proved that the law is allegorical with reference to us, and that it pleads for those who live by the gospel; and for that reason that the preachers of the gospel belong to no other than Him to whom the law belongs, which provided for them, since he says, “For it was written for our sake.” But he did not want to use the right the law gave, because he preferred to labor without pay. This he referred to his own glory, which he said no one would make void, not to the destruction of the law, which he proved another would use. But look: blind Marcion stumbles on the rock from which our fathers drank in the wilderness. For if that rock was Christ (the Creator's Christ, of course, whose people they were too), to what purpose does he interpret it as a figure of a foreign mystery? Was it not to teach this very thing, that the old things were figures pointing to Christ, who was to be recognized from them? For when he is about to run through the rest of the people's history, he says first: “Now these things were made examples for us.” Tell me: were examples made by the Creator for the men of another god, and an unknown one at that? Or does one god borrow examples from another, and from a rival at that? He frightens me about the very God from whom he is transferring my faith! Will his adversary make me better for him? Now, if I commit the same sins as the people did, am I to suffer the same things or not? If not the same, he sets before me to no purpose fears of what I shall not suffer. But from whom shall I suffer? If from the Creator, what sort of things is it his part to inflict? And how will it be that the jealous God punishes the sinner of His rival rather than, on the contrary, cherishing him? If from that god, well, he does not know how to punish. So this whole argument of the apostle has no ground at all unless it is in keeping with the Creator's rule of life. Finally, in his conclusion he answers his preface: “Now these things happened to them as they did, and were written to admonish us, upon whom the ends of the ages have come.” What a Creator, already foreknowing and admonishing Christians who belong to another! I pass over, if anywhere, things like those already dealt with; some I also dispatch briefly. A great argument for another god, the permission of all kinds of food against the law! As if we ourselves did not also confess that the burdens of the law have been set aside, but by the one who imposed them, who promised a renewal; and so he who took away foods has also given back what He granted from the beginning. But if there had been some other god, the destroyer of our God, he would have forbidden his own people nothing more than to live on the provisions of his adversary. (1 Corinthians 7:10-11; 1 Corinthians 7:29; 1 Corinthians 7:39; 1 Corinthians 8:5; 1 Corinthians 8:4; 1 Corinthians 8:6; 1 Corinthians 3:21-22; 1 Corinthians 3:23; 1 Corinthians 9:13; 1 Corinthians 9:7; 1 Corinthians 11:10; 1 Corinthians 9:15; 1 Corinthians 10:4; 1 Corinthians 10:6; 1 Corinthians 10:7-10; 1 Corinthians 10:11; 1 Corinthians 10:25-27)

“The head of the man is Christ.” Which Christ? Is He not the man's author? For he used “head” to mean authority, and authority will belong to no one but the author. Of what man, then, is He the head? Surely of the one of whom he goes on to say: “For a man ought not to have his head veiled, since he is the image of God.” So if he is the image of the Creator (for the Creator, looking upon Christ, His Word, who was to become man, said, “Let us make man in our image and likeness”), how can I have another head, and not Him whose image I am? For since I am the image of the Creator, there is no room in me for another head. And why should a woman have authority over her head? If it is because she was made from the man and for the man, according to the Creator's ordinance, then in this way too the apostle cared for the rule of life of that God from whose ordinance he explains the reasons for the rule. He adds also: “because of the angels.” Which angels, that is, whose? If the Creator's apostate angels, rightly, so that the face which caused them to stumble should bear some mark in a humble dress and a darkening of its beauty; but if because of the angels of the other god, what does he fear, when not even the Marcionites themselves desire women? We have often shown already that heresies are placed by the apostle among evils as an evil, and that those are to be understood as approved who flee heresies as an evil. Likewise we have already proved in the Gospel, from the sacrament of the bread and the cup, the reality of the Lord's body and blood against Marcion's phantom; and that every mention of judgment belongs to the Creator, as God the judge, has been treated in almost the whole work. Now about spiritual gifts. I say that these too were promised to Christ by the Creator, under that prescription, most just I think, by which the bestowal of a thing is to be believed to belong to no one other than Him whose promise of it has been proved. Isaiah declared: “A rod will come forth from the root of Jesse, and a flower will rise up from the rod, and the Spirit of God will rest upon him.” Then he lists its kinds: “the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and godliness; the spirit of the fear of God will fill Him.” For in the figure of the flower he shows Christ, who was to arise from the rod that came from the root of Jesse, that is, from the virgin of the family of David, the son of Jesse; in which Christ the whole substance of the Spirit was to rest, not as though it would come to Him afterwards, since he was always the Spirit of God, even before the flesh (so that you should not argue from this that the prophecy belongs to a Christ who, as a mere man, of David's descent alone, would later obtain the spirit of his God); but because from the time he had flowered in the flesh taken from the stock of David, every working of spiritual grace was to rest in Him and to cease and come to an end, as far as the Jews were concerned. As the fact itself bears witness, nothing of the Creator's Spirit has breathed among them from then on, now that there has been taken away from Judaea the wise and prudent master builder and counselor and prophet, so that this is the meaning of “the law and the prophets until John.” Hear now how he declared that the gifts would also come from Christ after he was received into heaven: “He ascended on high,” that is, into heaven; “He led captivity captive,” that is, death or human slavery; “He gave gifts to the sons of men,” that is, bounties, which we call charisms. Elegantly he says “to the sons of men,” not indiscriminately “to men,” showing us the sons of men, that is, of men in the true sense, the apostles. For, he says, “in the gospel I have begotten you,” and, “my children, with whom I am again in labor.” Now too that promise of the Spirit made through Joel has been fulfilled: “In the last times I will pour out of my Spirit on all flesh, and their sons and daughters will prophesy; and on my menservants and maidservants I will pour out of my Spirit.” And surely, if the Creator promised the grace of the Spirit for the last days, and Christ, the dispenser of spiritual gifts, appeared in the last days, as the apostle says, “But when the time was fulfilled, God sent His Son,” and again, “For the time is now short,” it is plain from the prediction of the last times too that this grace of the Spirit belongs to the Christ of the one who foretold it. Compare, finally, the kinds listed by the apostle and by Isaiah. “To one,” he says, “is given through the Spirit the word of wisdom”: at once Isaiah too set down the spirit of wisdom. “To another the word of knowledge”: this will be the word of understanding and counsel. “To another faith in the same Spirit”: this will be the spirit of godliness and of the fear of God. “To another the gift of healings, to another of mighty works”: this will be the spirit of might. “To another prophecy, to another the discerning of spirits, to another kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues”: this will be the spirit of knowledge. See how the apostle agrees with the prophet both in making the distribution of the one Spirit and in explaining its particular forms. I can say this: the very fact that he likened the unity of the various gifts to the frame of our body with its many and different members shows that the same one is Lord both of the human body and of the Holy Spirit; he who did not want the gifts to have rank against one another in the body of the Spirit, just as he did not set the members in rank against one another in the human body; he who also taught the apostle that love is to be put before all the gifts, by the chief commandment, which Christ too approved: “You shall love the Lord with all your heart and all your strength and all your soul, and your neighbor as yourself.” And if he recalls that it was written in the law that the Creator would speak in other tongues and with other lips, and by this recollection confirms the gift of tongues, here too he cannot seem to have confirmed another's gift by the Creator's prophecy. Likewise, in prescribing silence to women in the church, so that they should not speak merely for the sake of learning (for he has already shown that they too have the right to prophesy, since he puts a veil on the woman even when she prophesies), he takes from the law the authority for subjecting the woman, a law which, to say it once for all, he ought not to have known except to destroy it. But to leave spiritual gifts now, the facts themselves will have to prove which of us claims them rashly for his own God, and whether they can be set against our side, even if the Creator promised them to His own Christ, not yet revealed, as destined for the Jews alone, to have their workings in their own time, in His own Christ, and among His own people. Let Marcion then produce gifts of his god: some prophets, who have spoken, however, not from human sense but from the Spirit of God, who have both foretold things to come and laid bare the secrets of the heart; let him bring out some psalm, some vision, some prayer, provided it is spiritual, in ecstasy, that is, out of one's senses, if any interpretation of a tongue has come with it; let him prove to me also that a woman among them has prophesied, one of those holier great women of his. I will say: if all these things are more readily brought forward by me, and all of them agreeing with the rules and arrangements and disciplines of the Creator, then without doubt the Christ and the Spirit and the apostle will belong to my God. Whoever wants to demand my declaration has it. (1 Corinthians 11:3; 1 Corinthians 11:7; Genesis 1:26; 1 Corinthians 11:10; 1 Corinthians 11:9; 1 Corinthians 11:18-19; 1 Corinthians 12:1; Isaiah 11:1-3; Luke 16:16; 1 Corinthians 4:15; Galatians 4:19; Galatians 4:4; Luke 10:27; 1 Corinthians 14:21; 1 Corinthians 14:34-35; 1 Corinthians 14:25; 1 Corinthians 14:26)

Meanwhile the Marcionite will produce nothing of this kind, even to declare to whom the Christ not yet revealed rather belongs: as mine is to be awaited, who was foretold from the beginning, his is not to be, precisely because he was not foretold from the beginning. So we believe better in a Christ to come than the heretic does in any. We must first consider how certain people then denied the resurrection of the dead. Surely in the same way as now; since it is always the resurrection of the flesh that is denied. The soul, in fact, many of the wise, claiming it to be divine, promise will be kept safe, and the common people themselves honor the dead on the assumption by which they are confident that their souls remain. But bodies, it is plain, are destroyed either at once by fire or by wild beasts, or, even when most carefully buried, still by time. So if the apostle beats back those who deny the resurrection, he is surely defending against them what they denied, namely the resurrection of the flesh. There you have the answer in brief. The rest is now more than is needed. For the very phrase “the resurrection of the dead” requires us to uphold the proper meanings of the words “dead” and “resurrection.” Nothing is dead except what has lost the soul by whose power it lived. It is the body that loses the soul and by losing it becomes dead; so the word “dead” suits the body. Further, if the resurrection is of the dead, and the dead is nothing other than the body, the resurrection will be of the body. So too the word “resurrection” claims no other thing than what has fallen. For a thing can be said to “rise” which has not fallen at all, which has always lain before. But to “rise again” belongs only to what has fallen; for it is said to rise again by rising a second time, because it fell. For the syllable “re” always denotes repetition. So we say that the body falls to the earth through death, as the fact itself bears witness from God's law. For it was said to the body, “You are earth, and to earth you shall go.” So what is from earth will go to earth; that falls which will go to earth; that rises again which falls. “Since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection.” Here Christ's body too is shown to me in the word “man,” which consists of a body, as we have often taught. And if we are all made alive in Christ just as we are put to death in Adam, then since in Adam we are put to death in the body, so we must also be made alive in Christ in the body. Otherwise the comparison does not hold, if the making alive in Christ does not meet the putting to death in Adam in the same substance. But he has inserted something more about Christ, which is not to be passed over, for the sake of the present dispute. For the resurrection of the flesh will be all the more proved, the more I show that Christ belongs to that God with whom the resurrection of the flesh is believed. When he says, “For He must reign until He puts his enemies under His feet,” even from this he already proclaims an avenging God, and so the very one who promised this to Christ: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet. The Lord will send forth the rod of your power from Zion, and you will rule in the midst of your enemies.” But I must show that those scriptures belong to my case which the Jews too try to take away from us. They say, in fact, that this psalm was sung of Hezekiah, because he sat at the right hand of the temple and God turned back and destroyed his enemies; and that therefore the rest too, “Before the morning star I begot you from the womb,” fits Hezekiah and Hezekiah's birth. We produce the Gospels (of whose trustworthiness we ought surely by now, in so great a work, to have convinced them to some extent), which declare that the Lord was born by night, so that this is “before the morning star”: both from the star, understood by the Magi, and from the testimony of the angel who announced by night to the shepherds that Christ had at that very moment been born, and from the place of the birth, for one comes to an inn for the night. Perhaps it was also done with a mystical meaning, that Christ was born by night, since He was to be the light of truth in the darkness of ignorance. And God would not have said “I begot you” except to a true son. For although He says of the whole people, “I have begotten sons,” He does not add “from the womb.” And why did He add “from the womb” (so pointlessly, as though anyone doubted that a man was born from the womb) unless because he wanted it to be understood more pointedly of Christ: “I begot you from the womb,” that is, from the womb alone, without the seed of a man, assigning to the flesh what is from the womb, and to the Spirit what is from himself? To this is added: “You are a priest forever.” But Hezekiah was not a priest, nor forever, even if he had been one. “According to the order of Melchizedek,” he says. What has Hezekiah to do with Melchizedek, priest of the Most High, and uncircumcised at that, who blessed the circumcised Abraham after receiving the offering of tithes? But the order of Melchizedek will fit Christ, since Christ, the proper and lawful high priest of God, the pontiff of the priesthood of the uncircumcised, then appointed among the nations, by whom He was rather to be received, will, when He comes at the last, deign to acknowledge the circumcision and the race of Abraham with acceptance and blessing. There is also another psalm that begins thus: “God, give your judgment to the king,” that is, to Christ who is to reign, “and your righteousness to the king's son,” that is, to Christ's people; for His sons are those who are born again in Him. But this psalm too is said to be sung of Solomon. Yet will not the things that fit Christ alone be able to teach that the rest too belongs not to Solomon but to Christ? “He will come down,” it says, “like rain upon a fleece, and like drops falling on the earth,” describing His gentle and imperceptible descent from heaven into flesh. But Solomon, even if he came down from somewhere, did not come down like rain, because not from heaven. But I will set out only the simpler points. “He will rule from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth”: this was given to Christ alone, whereas Solomon ruled over one small Judaea. “All kings will worship Him”: whom will all worship, if not Christ? “And all nations will serve Him”: whom will all serve, if not Christ? “May his name be forever”: whose name is eternal, if not Christ's? “His name will endure before the sun”: for before the sun is the Word of God, that is, Christ. “And all the nations will be blessed in him”: in Solomon no nation is blessed, but in Christ every nation is. What now, if this psalm even shows Him to be God? “And they will call Him blessed; for blessed is the Lord God of Israel, who alone does wonders. Blessed is the name of His glory, and the whole earth will be filled with his glory.” Solomon, on the contrary, I dare say, lost even the glory he had in God, being drawn by a woman all the way into idolatry. And so, since in the middle of the psalm this too is set, “His enemies will lick the dust,” that is, when put under His feet, it will bear on the point for which I brought in this psalm and defended it for my case: to confirm that the one who, according to the Creator's arrangement, will obtain both the glory of the kingdom and the subjection of His enemies is to be believed to be none other than the Creator's Christ. (1 Corinthians 15:12; 1 Corinthians 15:21; Isaiah 1:2)

Let us return now to the resurrection, a subject on which we have given satisfaction elsewhere in a volume of its own, resisting all the heretics; but we do not fail here either, for the sake of those who do not know that little work. “What will they do,” he says, “who are baptized for the dead, if the dead do not rise?” Let that practice see to itself: the Kalends of February, perhaps, will answer for it, praying for the dead. So do not at once brand the apostle as its new author or its supporter, He mentions it so as to uphold the resurrection of the flesh all the more firmly, inasmuch as those who were being baptized for the dead to no purpose did so out of faith in the resurrection. We have him elsewhere laying down one baptism. So to be dipped “for the dead” is to be dipped for bodies (for we have shown that it is the body that is dead): “What will they do who are baptized for bodies, if bodies do not rise?” And so we rightly fix our footing here, since the apostle introduced his second discussion also about the body: “But some will say, ‘How will the dead rise? And with what body will they come?'” For once the resurrection, which was being denied, had been defended, it followed to discuss the quality of the body, which could not be seen. But on that point one should engage with others. For Marcion, who does not admit the resurrection of the flesh at all and promises salvation to the soul alone, makes the question one not of quality but of substance. Moreover, he is most plainly refuted even by what the apostle discusses about the quality of the body for the sake of those who say, “How will the dead rise? And with what body will they come?” For he has already proclaimed that the body will rise, if he has discussed the quality of the body. Then, if he puts forward the examples of a grain of wheat or some such thing, to which God gives a body as he wills; if he says that each seed has its own body, so that there is one flesh of men and another of cattle and birds, and heavenly bodies and earthly ones, and one glory of the sun and another of the moon and another of the stars: does he not point to a fleshly and bodily resurrection, which he commends by fleshly and bodily examples? Does he not also pledge it from that God from whom the examples come? “So also is the resurrection,” he says. How? As a grain is sown a body, the body rises. In short, he called the dissolving of the body into the earth a sowing, because “it is sown in corruption, [in dishonor, in weakness, but rises in incorruptibility,] in honor, in power.” That to which the one sequence belongs in the dissolving is that to which the other belongs in the resurrection: the body, that is. [As the grain too.] But if you take away from the resurrection the body that you gave to the dissolving, where will the difference in outcome lie? Likewise, if it is sown an animal body and rises a spiritual one: even if the soul or the spirit has some body of its own, so that “animal body” might seem to mean the soul and “spiritual body” the spirit, he does not therefore say that the soul will be spirit in the resurrection, but that the body, which, by being born with the soul and living by the soul, can be called “animal,” will be spiritual, when it rises through the Spirit into eternity. In short, if it is not the soul but the flesh that is sown in corruption, when it is dissolved into the earth, then the animal body will not be the soul but the flesh, which was the animal body, since it is made spiritual from being animal, as he also says below: “It is not the spiritual that is first.” For this is why he laid a foundation about Christ Himself: “The first man Adam became a living soul, the last Adam a life-giving spirit”; although the most foolish heretic did not want it so. For he put “the last Lord” in place of “the last Adam,” afraid, of course, that if he kept “the last Adam” we should argue that Christ belongs to the same one, in the last Adam, as the first Adam does. But the forgery shines through. For why is there a first Adam, unless because there is also a last Adam? Things do not stand in order with one another unless they are alike and of the same name or substance or author. For even among different things there can be one that is first and another that is last, but of one author. But if the author is different too, then even though the other can indeed be called last, yet what he brought in is a first, and only “last” if it is like the first; and it is not like the first, because it is not of the same author. In the same way he will be refuted on the word “man.” “The first man,” he says, “was from the ground, earthly; the second, the Lord from heaven.” Why second, if not a man, as the first was? Or is the first a lord too, if the second is? But enough: if in the Gospel he admits Christ as the Son of Man, he will not be able to deny that he is both man and, as man, Adam. What follows also hems him in. For when the apostle says, “As was the one from the earth,” the man, of course, “so are those who are earthly,” men of course, then it follows, “As is the man from heaven, so are the men who are from heaven.” For he could not have set against earthly men anything but heavenly men, so as to distinguish more carefully their state and hope while keeping the name in common. For in state and hope he calls them earthly and heavenly, yet men alike, who according to their end are counted either in Adam or in Christ. And so now, to urge them to the heavenly hope, he says, “As we have borne the image of the earthly, let us bear also the image of the heavenly,” referring not to that substance of the resurrection but to the rule of life of the present time. For he says “let us bear,” not “we shall bear”: by way of precept, not of promise, wanting us to walk as he himself walked, and to depart from the image of the earthly, that is, the old man, which is the working of the flesh. In short, what does he add? “For this I say, brothers, that flesh and blood will not possess the kingdom of God”: that is, the works of flesh and blood, from which he also took away the kingdom of God when writing to the Galatians, since he is accustomed elsewhere too to put the substance for the works of the substance, as when he says that those who are in the flesh cannot please God. For when shall we be able to please God, except while we are in this flesh? There is no other time for working, I think. But if, though placed in the flesh, we flee the works of the flesh, then we shall not be “in the flesh”: not in the sense that we are outside the substance of the flesh, but that we are outside its guilt. And if under the name of flesh we are told to put off the works, not the substance, of the flesh, then under the name of flesh the kingdom of God is denied to the works of the flesh, not to the substance of the flesh. For what is condemned is not that in which evil is done, but what is done. To give poison is a crime; yet the cup in which it is given is not guilty. So too the body is the vessel of fleshly works; but it is the soul that mixes in it the poison of some evil deed. And what sort of thing is it, if the soul, the author of the works of the flesh, is to earn the kingdom of God through the expiation of what it committed in the body, while the body, merely its servant, remains under condemnation? Is the cup to be punished while the poisoner goes free? And yet we do not claim the kingdom of God for the flesh, but the resurrection of its substance, as the door of the kingdom through which it is entered. For resurrection is one thing and the kingdom another. First comes the resurrection, then the kingdom. So we say that the flesh rises, but obtains the kingdom when changed. “For the dead will rise incorrupt” (those, namely, who had been corrupted when their bodies fell into ruin) “and we shall be changed in an atom of time, in the twinkling of an eye. For this corruptible” (the apostle was holding his own flesh, surely, when he said it) “must put on incorruption, and this mortal immortality” (so that the substance may be made fit for the kingdom of God; “for we shall be like the angels”). This will be the change of the flesh, but of flesh raised up. Or if there is to be none, how will it put on incorruption and immortality? So, made something else through the change, it will then obtain the kingdom of God, no longer flesh and blood, but whatever body God has given it. And so the apostle rightly says, “Flesh and blood will not obtain the kingdom of God,” ascribing this to the change that follows the resurrection. And if then will come to pass the word that is written with the Creator, “Where, death, is your contention? Where, death, is your sting?” (and this word is the Creator's, through the prophet Hosea), then the thing too, that is, the kingdom, will belong to him whose word comes to pass in the kingdom. Nor does he give thanks to any other God for having granted us to carry off the victory, over death of course, than to Him from whom he received the word that mocks death and triumphs over it. (1 Corinthians 15:29; Ephesians 4:5; 1 Corinthians 15:35; 1 Corinthians 15:37-38; 1 Corinthians 15:38; 1 Corinthians 15:39-41; 1 Corinthians 15:42; 1 Corinthians 15:42-43; 1 Corinthians 15:44; 1 Corinthians 15:46; 1 Corinthians 15:45; 1 Corinthians 15:47; 1 Corinthians 15:50; Galatians 5:19-21; Romans 8:8; 1 Corinthians 15:52; 1 Corinthians 15:53; 1 Corinthians 15:55)

If “God” has become a common word through the fault of human error, since many gods are spoken of and believed in the world, yet “the blessed God of our Lord Jesus Christ” will be understood to be none other than the Creator, who both blessed all things (you have Genesis) and is blessed by all things (you have Daniel). Likewise, even if a barren god can be called “father,” [by no one's name more than the Creator's,] yet the Father of mercies will be the same one who has been called merciful and compassionate and abounding in mercy. You have in Jonah the example of His mercy itself, which He showed to the Ninevites when they entreated him; he was easily moved by the tears of Hezekiah, ready to pardon Ahab, Jezebel's husband, for the blood of Naboth when he begged, and at once indulgent to David when he acknowledged his sin, preferring, of course, the repentance of a sinner to his death, out of the feeling of mercy. If Marcion's god has done or declared anything of this kind, I will acknowledge him as the Father of mercies. But if he ascribes this title to him from the time he was revealed, as though he has been the Father of mercies from the time he set about freeing the human race, then we deny him from the very time from which he is said to have been revealed. For if it were first established that he exists, then something could also be ascribed to him. For what is ascribed is an accident, and accidents are preceded by the showing of the thing itself to which they belong. So one cannot ascribe anything to him whom he shows at the very moment he ascribes something to him; especially since what is ascribed to one who has not first been shown already belongs to another. For he will be all the more denied to exist, the more that by which he is affirmed to exist belongs to one who has already been shown. So too the new covenant will belong to no other than the one who promised it, “not of the letter but of the Spirit”: this will be its newness. In short, the one who had cut the letter on tablets of stone is the same who had also declared of the Spirit, “I will pour out of my Spirit on all flesh.” And if “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life,” both belong to Him who says, “I will kill and I will make alive; I will strike and I will heal.” We have already claimed for the Creator a twofold power, both of judge and of good God, killing by the letter through the law and giving life by the Spirit through the gospel. Things that, though different, were already considered to belong to one cannot make two gods. He also recalls the veil of Moses, with which he covered his face, which the children of Israel could not look upon. If he does so to uphold the greater brightness of the new covenant, which remains in glory, than that of the old, which was to be done away, this suits my faith too, which puts the gospel above the law. And see whether it does not suit mine more: for something can be put above only where there is also the thing it is put above. But when he says, “But the minds of the world were blunted” (not, of course, of the Creator, but of the people who are in the world; for he says of Israel, “To this day that same veil is upon their heart”), he shows that the veil on Moses' face was then a figure of the veil on the people's heart, because even now Moses is not seen by them with the heart, as he was not then seen with the face. What, then, is still veiled in Moses that concerns Paul, if the Creator's Christ, foretold by Moses, has not yet come? And how (to put it more plainly) are the hearts of the Jews marked as still veiled, if Moses' prophecies, that is, about Christ, in whom they ought to have understood him, have not yet been fulfilled? What does it matter to the apostle of another Christ if the Jews did not understand the mysteries of their own God, unless the veil on their heart meant the blindness by which they had not seen the Christ of Moses? Finally, what follows, “But when he turns to God, the veil will be taken away,” he says properly of the Jew, on whom Moses' veil lies, who, when he passes over to faith in Christ, will understand that Moses preached about Christ. Otherwise, how will the Creator's veil be taken away in the Christ of another god, whose mysteries the Creator could not have veiled, being, of course, things unknown of one unknown? He says, then, that we now, with unveiled face (the face of the heart, of course, which is veiled in the Jews), beholding Christ, are transfigured into the same image from glory, the glory by which Moses too was transfigured by the glory of the Lord, to glory. So, setting out Moses' bodily illumination from his meeting with the Lord and the bodily veil because of the people's weakness, and adding over them the spiritual unveiling and spiritual brightness in Christ (“as from the Lord,” he says, “of the spirits”), he testifies that the whole order of Moses was a figure of Christ, unknown among the Jews but recognized among us. We know that some sentences can admit of ambiguity from the sound of the pronunciation or from the way they are punctuated, when a double possibility arises. Marcion seized on this by reading thus: “in whom the God of this age,” so that, showing the Creator as the God of this age, he might suggest another god of another age. We say, on the contrary, that it should be punctuated thus: “in whom God,” and then, “has blinded the minds of the unbelievers of this age.” “In whom”: in the unbelieving Jews, in whom the gospel is still hidden from some under the veil of Moses. For God had threatened them, who loved Him with their lips but whose heart stood far off from Him: “With the ear you will hear and not hear, with the eyes you will see and not see,” and, “Unless you believe, you will not understand,” and, “I will take away the wisdom of the wise, and the understanding of the prudent I will bring to nothing.” And He surely was not threatening these things in order to hide the gospel of an unknown god. So, even if he is the God of this age, yet it is the heart of the unbelievers of this age that he blinds, because they did not of their own accord recognize His Christ, who was to be understood from the Scriptures. And content to have dealt this far with a point that depends on the ambiguity of punctuation, so that it should not profit the adversary, I could also have passed over this contention altogether. A simpler answer will be at hand: to interpret the god of this age as the devil, who said, as the prophet relates, “I will be like the Most High; I will set my throne in the clouds,” just as the whole superstition of this age has been made over to him, so that he blinds the hearts of unbelievers, and above all of the apostate Marcion. In short, he did not see the conclusion of the sentence that confronts him: “For God, who said that light should shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of His glory in the person of Christ.” Who said, “Let there be light”? And who says to Christ about the enlightening of the world, “I have set you as a light of the nations,” of those, that is, who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death? To whom the Spirit answers in the psalm, out of foresight of the future: “The light of your face, Lord, has been signed upon us.” And the face of God is Christ the Lord, which is why the apostle said above, “who is the image of God.” So if Christ is the face of the Creator who said, “Let there be light,” then Christ and the apostles and the gospel and the veil and Moses and the whole series, according to the testimony of the conclusion, belong to the Creator, the God of this age; certainly not to the one who never said, “Let there be light.” (Here I pass over another letter too, which we have headed “To the Ephesians” but the heretics “To the Laodiceans.” For it says that the nations should remember that at that time, when they were without Christ, aliens from Israel, without its way of life and the covenants and the hope of the promise, they were also without God in the world, even though it were of the Creator. So if he said that the nations were without God, and their god is the devil, not the Creator, it is plain that the god of this age is to be understood as the one whom the nations received as god, not the Creator, whom they do not know.) And how can it be that the treasure in earthen vessels, that is, in our bodies, should not be held to belong to the same one to whom the vessels also belong? Now if it is to God's glory that so great a treasure is held in earthen vessels, and the earthen vessels are the Creator's, then the glory is the Creator's, whose vessels taste of the surpassing greatness of God's power; and so is the power itself, since it was entrusted to earthen vessels for this reason, that its surpassing greatness might be proved. But it will not then be the glory of another god, and therefore not his power either (rather his disgrace and weakness), whose surpassing greatness earthen vessels, and others' vessels at that, have contained. And if these are the earthen vessels in which he says we suffer so much, in which we even carry about the dying of the Lord, then God is quite ungrateful and unjust if he is not going to raise up this substance too, in which so much is endured for faith in him, in which the death of Christ too is carried about, in which the surpassing greatness of his power is consecrated. For he puts it forward: “that the life of Christ too may be manifested in our body,” just as, that is, His death is carried about in the body. Of what life of Christ, then, is he speaking? Of that by which we now live in him? And how is it that in what follows he urges us not to things visible and temporal but to things invisible and eternal, that is, not to things present but to things to come? And if he is speaking of the future life of Christ, saying that it will appear in the body, he has plainly preached the resurrection of the flesh; saying that our outer man is being corrupted, yet not as by an eternal destruction after death, but by labors and hardships, of which he spoke before, and adding, “and we shall not lose heart.” For in saying that our inner man is being renewed day by day, he shows both here: the corruption of the body from the harassment of trials, and the renewal of the mind from the contemplation of the promises. (1 Corinthians 8:5; 2 Corinthians 1:3; Genesis 1:22; Jonah 3:8; 2 Samuel 12:13; Ezekiel 33:11; 2 Corinthians 3:6; Joel 2:28; Deuteronomy 32:39; 2 Corinthians 3:7; 2 Corinthians 3:7-8; 2 Corinthians 3:15; 2 Corinthians 3:16; 2 Corinthians 3:18; 2 Corinthians 4:4; Isaiah 29:13; Isaiah 14:14; 2 Corinthians 4:6; Genesis 1:3; Ephesians 2:12; 2 Corinthians 4:7; 2 Corinthians 4:8-12; 2 Corinthians 4:10; 2 Corinthians 4:16-18; 2 Corinthians 4:11; 2 Corinthians 4:14; 2 Corinthians 4:16)

As for the house of our earthly dwelling, he does not mean that we have an eternal house, not made with hands, in heaven, in the sense that what is made with hands, being the Creator's, perishes altogether, dissolved after death. For he is plainly treating these things to console the fear of death and the grief at that very dissolution, as is clear also from what follows, when he adds that we groan in this tabernacle of the earthly body, longing to put on over it what is from heaven, “since, having been stripped, we shall not be found naked,” that is, we shall receive back what we have been stripped of, that is, the body. And again: “For we who are in this tabernacle of the body groan, being weighed down, not wishing to be unclothed but to be clothed over.” For here He has spelled out what he touched on briefly in the first letter: “And the dead will rise incorrupt” (those who have already died) “and we shall be changed” (those who will have been found by God here in the flesh). For the former will rise incorrupt, having received back the body, and that whole, so as to be incorrupt from this; and the latter, because of the very last moment of time and as the reward of the harassments of Antichrist, will obtain a short cut past death, but changed, clothed over with what is from heaven rather than stripped of the body. So if these put that heavenly thing on over the body, the dead too will surely receive back the body, over which they too may put on incorruption from heaven, since of them also he says, “This corruptible must put on incorruption and this mortal immortality.” The former put it on when they have received back the body; the latter put it on over, because they have not lost the body. And so not idly did he say, “not wishing to be unclothed of the body, but to be clothed over,” that is, not wishing to experience death but to be overtaken by life, “that this mortal may be swallowed up by life,” while it is snatched from death by being clothed over with the change. Because he shows that this is better, so that we should not grieve if perhaps we are overtaken by death, he says too that we have from God the pledge of the Spirit, as though given in security for the same hope of being clothed over; and that we are away from the Lord as long as we are in the flesh, and that we ought therefore to think it good rather to be away from the body and to be with the Lord, so that we may even welcome death gladly. And so he says that we must all be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive what he has done through the body, whether good or evil. For if repayment for our actions is then, how can some be considered as already with the Lord? And by naming a judgment seat and the reckoning of good and evil work he both shows a judge who pronounces both sentences and confirms the bodily presence of all. For what was done in the body cannot fail to be judged in the body. For God would be unjust if one were not punished or rewarded in that through which he acted. “If, then, there is any new creation in Christ, the old things have passed away; look, all things have become new”: Isaiah's prophecy has been fulfilled. If also he commands us to cleanse ourselves from the defilement of flesh and blood, he denies admission to the kingdom of God [to the deeds of the substance], not to the substance itself. If he also means to present the church as a holy virgin to Christ, as a bride to a bridegroom, surely an image cannot be joined to what is hostile to the reality of the thing itself. If he also calls the false apostles deceitful workers who disguise themselves, through hypocrisy, of course, he taxes them as guilty of adulterated conduct, not of adulterated preaching. So the dispute was about the rule of life, not about deity. If Satan disguises himself as an angel of light, this cannot be directed at the Creator. For the Creator, being God and not an angel, would have been said to disguise himself as a god of light, not as an angel; unless he meant by it that Satan whom both we and Marcion know as an angel. (Paradise has its own treatise for every question it raises. Here I shall perhaps wonder whether a god who has no earthly arrangement of his own could have had a paradise of his own; unless he used the Creator's paradise too on sufferance, as he used the world. And yet taking a man up into heaven is a precedent of the Creator's, in Elijah.) But I shall wonder more that the best god, a stranger to striking and to harshness, applied to his own apostle, to buffet him, an angel of Satan, not even his own but the Creator's, and did not grant it when entreated by him three times. So Marcion's god too corrects in the Creator's way, who is jealous of the proud and brings down the mighty from their thrones. Or is he perhaps the very one who gave Satan power even over Job's body, that strength might be proved in weakness? And why does the chastiser of the Galatians still keep to the form of the law, laying down that every word will stand on three witnesses? Why does the preacher of the gentlest god threaten that he will not spare sinners, and even affirm that the very power to act more harshly when present has been given him by the Lord? Deny now, heretic, that your god is feared, whose apostle was feared! (2 Corinthians 5:1; 2 Corinthians 5:2-3; 2 Corinthians 5:4; 1 Corinthians 15:52; 1 Corinthians 15:53; 2 Corinthians 5:5; 2 Corinthians 5:6; 2 Corinthians 5:8; 2 Corinthians 5:10; 2 Corinthians 5:17; Isaiah 43:19; 1 Corinthians 15:50; 2 Corinthians 11:2; 2 Corinthians 11:13; 2 Corinthians 11:14; 2 Kings 2:11; 2 Corinthians 12:7-8; Galatians 1:6-9; 2 Corinthians 13:1; 2 Corinthians 13:2; 2 Corinthians 13:10)

As the little work draws to its close, what comes up again must now be treated briefly, and some things that have come up quite often must be passed over. I am weary of fighting still about the law, when I have so often proved that its giving way offers no argument for a different god in Christ, since it was foretold and promised with the Creator with a view to Christ; although this letter in particular seems to exclude the law most of all. But we have also often shown that a judging God is carried about by the apostle, and in the judge an avenger, and in the avenger the Creator. So here too, when he says, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel; for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew and to the Greek, because the righteousness of God is revealed in it from faith to faith,” he undoubtedly ascribes both the gospel and salvation to the just God, not to the good god (to speak according to the heretic's distinction), who transfers men from faith in the law to faith in the gospel, His own law, surely, and His own gospel; since he also says that the anger of God is revealed from heaven against the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold down the truth in unrighteousness. The anger of which God? Surely the Creator's. So the truth too will belong to him to whom the anger belongs, which is to be revealed to avenge the truth. And by adding, “But we know that the judgment of God is according to truth,” he both proved the anger itself, from which judgment comes on behalf of the truth, and again confirmed that the truth belongs to the same God whose anger he proved by proving the judgment. It would be another matter if the Creator, in anger, were avenging the truth of another god held down in unrighteousness. How many pits Marcion has dug in this letter above all, by taking away what he wished, will be plain from the completeness of our own document. For me it is enough to take up what he likewise failed to see should be erased, as his negligences and blind spots. For if God will judge the secrets of men, both of those who sinned under the law and of those who sinned without the law (since these too, even if they do not know the law, yet by nature do what the law requires), then surely that God will judge to whom belong both the law and nature itself, which serves as law for those who do not know the law. And how will He judge? “According to the gospel,” he says, “through Christ.” So both the gospel and Christ belong to him to whom belong both the law and nature, which will be vindicated through the gospel and Christ by God in that judgment of which he spoke above: “according to truth.” So, just as the anger revealed from heaven to defend these things comes only from the God of anger, so this sense too, which coheres with the former and in which the Creator's judgment is proclaimed, cannot be referred to another god, who neither judges nor is angry, but to Him to whom these things belong, I mean judgment and anger; and so those things too must be his through which these are to be carried out, the gospel and Christ. And so he inveighs against the transgressors of the law, who teach not to steal and steal themselves, as a man of the God of the law, not as attacking the Creator Himself in these ways, who, though he forbade stealing, ordered the fraud on the Egyptians over the gold and silver, just as they twist the other things against Him. The apostle, of course, was afraid to abuse openly the God from whom He was not afraid to have departed! And he so attacked the Jews that he threw at them the prophetic rebuke: “Because of you the name of God is blasphemed.” How perverse, then, that he should himself blaspheme the one for whose blaspheming he reproaches the wicked! He also prefers circumcision of the heart to the foreskin. But with the God of the law, too, circumcision of the heart was made, not of the flesh; in the spirit, not in the letter. And if this is Jeremiah's circumcision (“and circumcise the foreskins of your heart”), as it is also Moses' (“and circumcise your hardness of heart”), then the Spirit that circumcises the heart will belong to Him to whom the letter that cuts the flesh belongs; and the Jew who is one inwardly will belong to him to whom the Jew who is one outwardly belongs, since the apostle would not have wanted to name as a Jew one who was not a servant of the God of the Jews. Then the law; now the righteousness of God through faith in Christ. What is this distinction? Has your god been serving the Creator's arrangement, granting time to Him and to His law? Or does the “then” belong to Him to whom the “now” belongs? The law to him to whom faith in Christ belongs? The distinction is one of dispensations, not of gods. He admonishes those who are justified by faith in Christ, not by the law, to have peace with God. With which God? The one whose enemies we never were, or the one against whose law and nature we rebelled? For if peace applies to Him with whom there was war, we shall be justified by Him as well; and Christ will be his by faith in whom we shall be justified, to whose peace it is fitting that his once-enemies be brought back. “But the law came in,” he says, “that sin might abound.” Why? “That grace,” he says, “might abound all the more.” The grace of which God, if not of him whose the law is too? Unless the Creator inserted the law in order to do business for the grace of another god, and a rival at that, not to say an unknown one; so that, as sin had reigned with him to death, so grace also might reign in righteousness to life through Jesus Christ, with His adversary! For this reason, then, the Creator's law had shut up all things under sin, brought the whole world into guilt, and stopped every mouth, so that no one should boast through it, in order that grace might be kept for the glory of Christ, not the Creator's Christ, but Marcion's! Here too I can lay a foundation concerning the substance of Christ, looking ahead to the question that will follow. For he says that we are dead to the law through the body of Christ. So Christ has a body. It may be argued that a body is not straightaway flesh! But whatever substance it may be, since he names the body of one who, he goes on, rose from the dead, no other body can be understood than a body of flesh, to which the law of death was pronounced. But look: he even bears witness to the law and excuses it from being the cause of sin: “What then shall we say? That the law is sin? Far from it!” Blush, Marcion, at the apostle who recoils from accusing the law. “But I did not know sin except through the law.” What high praise of the law from this, that through it sin could not lie hidden! So it was not the law that led astray, but sin, taking occasion from the commandment. Why do you charge against the God of the law what His apostle does not dare to charge against his law? And yet he piles it up: “The law is holy, and its commandment just and good.” If he so reveres the Creator's law, how he could destroy the Creator Himself I do not know. Who distinguishes two gods, one just and another good, when He whose commandment is both good and just ought to be believed to be both? And if he also affirms that the law is spiritual, then surely it is prophetic too, surely figurative too. For from here too I ought to establish that Christ was preached in the law figuratively, in such a way that He could have been recognized even by all the Jews. (Romans 1:16-17; Romans 1:18; Romans 2:2; Romans 2:12-16; Romans 2:16; Romans 2:21; Exodus 3:22; Romans 2:24; Romans 2:29; Jeremiah 4:4; Romans 2:28; Romans 3:21-22; Romans 5:20; Romans 5:21; Galatians 3:22; Romans 3:19; Romans 7:4; Romans 7:7; Romans 7:8; Romans 7:13; Romans 7:14)

If the Father sent him in the likeness of sinful flesh, the flesh that was seen in him is not therefore to be called a phantom. For above he ascribed sin to the flesh and made it the law of sin dwelling in his members and opposing the law of the mind. For this reason, then, the Son was sent in the likeness of sinful flesh, to redeem the flesh of sin by a like substance, that is, by flesh which was like sinful flesh, though it was not itself sinful. For this too will be God's power: to accomplish salvation in a substance of the same kind. For it would be nothing great if the Spirit of God healed the flesh; but it is great if flesh does so, flesh altogether like sinful flesh in that it is flesh, but not flesh of sin. So the likeness will relate to the title of sin, not to a falsehood of substance. For he would not have added “of sin” if he wanted the likeness to be understood of the substance, so as to deny its reality; he would have put only “of flesh,” not also “of sin.” But since he framed it thus, “of sinful flesh,” he both affirmed the substance, that is, the flesh, and referred the likeness to the fault of the substance, that is, to sin. Suppose now that the likeness is said of the substance: not even so will the reality of the substance be denied. Why then “like,” if real? Because real indeed, but not from seed: like in its state and real, but unlike in its origin. Besides, there is no likeness between contraries. Spirit would not be called a likeness of flesh (since flesh would not admit a likeness of spirit either), but it would be called a phantom, if what was not there was seen. But a thing is called a likeness when what is seen really is; for it is, in being equal to another. A phantom, however, being only a phantom, is not a likeness. Here too, explaining how he does not want us to be in the flesh, though we are in the flesh, namely that we should not be in the works of the flesh, he shows that it was in this sense that he wrote, “Flesh and blood will not obtain the kingdom of God,” condemning not the substance but its works; and these, because they can be avoided by us while we are still placed in the flesh, will belong not to the guilt of the substance but to that of conduct. Again, if the body is indeed dead because of sin (so the death is not of the soul but of the body), but the spirit is life because of righteousness, that life belongs to that to which death came because of sin, that is, to the body. For a thing is restored to no one but to him who lost it, and so the resurrection of the dead will be the resurrection of bodies. For he also adds: “He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies.” So he both confirmed the resurrection of the flesh, without which neither can anything be called a body nor anything be understood as mortal, and proved that Christ's substance was bodily; since our mortal bodies will be given life in the same way as He too was raised, and in no other way the same, except because it was in the body. Here too I leap over a very large gap where the text has been cut away; but I seize on the apostle bearing witness to Israel that they have a zeal for God, their own God of course, yet not according to knowledge. “For,” he says, “not knowing God and seeking to establish their own righteousness, they did not submit to the righteousness of God; for Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” Here the heretic's argument will be that the Jews did not know the higher God, since against him they set up their own righteousness, that is, that of their own law, not receiving Christ, the end of the law. Why then does he bear witness to their zeal for their own God, unless he is also reproaching them with ignorance toward that same God, that they were driven indeed by zeal for God but not according to knowledge, not knowing him, that is, since they did not know His arrangements in Christ, who was to bring the law to its completion, and so they defended their own righteousness against Him? And so the Creator Himself also testifies to their ignorance toward Him: “Israel has not known me, and my people has not understood me,” and that they rather set up their own righteousness: “teaching the doctrines and precepts of men”; and that they had also gathered together against the Lord and against His Christ, out of ignorance, of course. So nothing that fits the Creator can be interpreted of another god, since otherwise the apostle would have wrongly taunted the Jews with ignorance toward an unknown god. For what wrong had they done if they were setting up the righteousness of their own God against one whom they did not know? And yet he cries out: “the depth of the riches and wisdom of God, and how unsearchable are His ways!” Where does this outburst come from? From the recollection, of course, of the Scriptures which he had been unrolling before, from the contemplation of the mysteries which he had set out above concerning faith in Christ coming from the law. If Marcion erased these on purpose, why does his apostle cry out, beholding no riches of God, of a god as poor and needy as one who founded nothing, foretold nothing, in short had nothing, since he came down into another's property? But in fact both the apostle and the riches belong to the Creator, riches once hidden and now unlocked. For so he had promised: “And I will give them hidden treasures; I will open to them things unseen.” From this, then, came the cry, “the depth of the riches and wisdom of God!” whose treasures now lay open. That is Isaiah's; and so is what follows, from the book of the same prophet: “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been His counselor? Who has given to Him, and it will be repaid him?” You who have taken so much away from the Scriptures, why did you keep these, as though they too were not the Creator's? Let us see, of course, the precepts of the new god. “Hating what is evil,” he says, “and cleaving to what is good”: is the Creator's precept any different, “Put away the evil from among you,” and, “Turn away from evil and do good”? “Loving one another with brotherly affection”: is this not the same as “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”? “Rejoicing in hope,” in God, of course: “For it is good to hope in the Lord rather than to hope in rulers.” “Enduring affliction”: “For the Lord will hear you in the day of affliction” (you have the psalm). “Bless, and do not curse”: who will teach this better than he who founded all things with blessings? “Not minding high things, but going along with the lowly; do not be wise in your own sight”: for they hear “woe” through Isaiah. “Repay no one evil for evil”: “and do not remember your brother's malice.” “Not avenging yourselves; for vengeance is mine, and I will repay, says the Lord.” “Have peace with all men.” So the law's retaliation did not permit repaying an injury, but checked its beginning by the fear of repayment. Rightly, then, he summed up the whole of the Creator's rule of life in His chief precept: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” If this completion of the law comes from the law itself, I no longer know who the God of the law is; I fear it may be Marcion's god! But if the gospel of Christ is fulfilled by this precept, and it is not the Creator's Christ, what are we still contending about? Whether Christ said it or not, “I have not come to destroy the law but to fulfill it,” the man from Pontus labored in vain at denying that saying: if the gospel has not fulfilled the law, then see, the law has fulfilled the gospel. And it is well that at the close he threatens the judgment seat of Christ, surely of a judge and avenger, surely the Creator's, certainly establishing that the one he holds out to be feared is the one whose favor must be won, even if he were preaching another. (Romans 8:3; 1 Corinthians 15:50; Romans 8:10; Romans 8:11; Romans 10:2-4; Isaiah 1:3; Romans 11:33; Isaiah 45:3; Romans 12:9; Romans 12:10; Leviticus 19:18; Romans 12:12; Romans 12:16; Isaiah 5:21; Romans 12:17; Leviticus 19:17-18; Romans 12:19; Romans 12:18; Romans 13:9; Matthew 5:17)

It will be no trouble to attend to the shorter letters too. There is flavor even in a little. The Jews had killed their own prophets. I can say: what has that to do with the apostle of another god, and the best god at that, who is said not to condemn even the sins of his own people, and who himself, by destroying those same prophets, in a way kills them? What wrong did Israel commit in his eyes if it killed those whom he too rejected, if it passed a hostile sentence on them before he did? But it sinned against its own God: he will reproach the iniquity to whom the injured party belongs; certainly anyone rather than the adversary of the injured. Nor would he have loaded them with the charge of the Lord's death too, saying that they killed both the Lord and their own prophets (although “their own” is the heretic's addition). For what would be so bitter in their having killed Christ, the preacher of another god, when they had slaughtered the prophets of their own God? But the point of the heightening is that they had killed both the Lord and His servants. In short, if they killed the Christ of one god and the prophets of another, he made the impiety equal; he did not heighten it. But it was not to be made equal; so it could not have been heightened unless both crimes were committed against the same God. So the Christ and the prophets belong to the same God. What sanctification of ours he calls “the will of God” may be recognized from the opposites which he forbids: “to abstain,” he says, from fornication, not from marriage; “that each should know how to possess his own vessel in honor.” How? “Not in lust, as the nations do.” But not even among the nations is lust ascribed to marriage, but to the extravagant, unnatural, and monstrous forms of self-indulgence. It is contrary to every kind of vileness and uncleanness; it does not exclude marriage but lust, and handles our vessel in the honor of marriage. I would treat this passage while keeping the preference for the other, that is, the fuller holiness, setting continence and virginity above marriage, yet without forbidding it. For I am beating back those who destroy the God of marriage, not those who pursue chastity. He says that those who remain until the coming of Christ, together with the dead in Christ, who will rise first, will be caught up in the clouds into the air to meet the Lord. I recognize that the heavenly beings, having already then foreseen these things, marveled at the Jerusalem that is above itself, and declared through Isaiah: “Who are these who fly here like clouds, like doves with their young, to me?” If Christ will prepare this ascent for us, He will be the Christ of whom Hosea speaks: “who builds His ascent into the heavens,” for Himself, surely, and for His own. From whom, then, shall I now hope for it, if not from Him from whom I heard these things? What Spirit does he forbid to be quenched, and what prophecies does he forbid to be despised? Surely not the Creator's Spirit nor the Creator's prophecies, in Marcion's view. For what he destroys he has himself already quenched and made nothing of, and he cannot forbid what he himself has done. So it falls to Marcion to produce today, in his own church, the Spirit of his god, which is not to be quenched, and prophecies which are not to be despised. And if he has produced what he thinks such, let him know that we will challenge whatever it is by the standard of spiritual and prophetic grace and power: that it foretell things to come, reveal the secrets of the heart, and expound mysteries. When he has brought forward and proved nothing of the kind, we will bring forward both the Spirit and the prophecies of the Creator, speaking according to His will. And so it will be clear what the apostle was speaking of: namely, of the things that were to be in the church of that God who, since He exists, also has His Spirit at work and His promise fulfilled. Come now, you who reject the salvation of the flesh, and, whenever the body is named in such a context, interpret it as some other thing, I know not what, rather than the substance of the flesh: how is it that the apostle distinguished all the substances in us by definite names and placed them all under one prayer for salvation, wishing that our “spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord and Savior Christ”? For he named both soul and body, as two things and as different. For even if the soul too is a body of some quality of its own, as the spirit also is, still, since body and soul are named separately, the soul has its own proper name and does not need the common word “body”; that is left to the flesh, which, not being named by its own name, must use the common one. And indeed I see no other substance in man, after the spirit and the soul, to which the word “body” can be applied, except the flesh; and I understand the flesh under the name “body” whenever it is not named, much more here, when what is called the body is called by its own name. (1 Thessalonians 2:15; 1 Thessalonians 4:3-4; 1 Thessalonians 4:5; 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17; Galatians 4:26; Isaiah 60:8; Amos 9:6; 1 Thessalonians 5:19-20)

We are compelled to repeat some things again and again, so as to confirm what hangs together with them. Here too we say that a Lord who repays both kinds of desert is carried about by the apostle: either the Creator or, which Marcion would not want, one like the Creator, with whom it is just to repay affliction to those who afflict us, and to us who are afflicted rest, at the revelation of the Lord Jesus coming from heaven with the angels of His power and in a flame of fire. But the heretic, by deleting “flame” and “fire,” has quenched them, so as not to make him our God. Yet the emptiness of the erasure shines through. For since the apostle writes that the Lord will come to take vengeance on those who do not know God and who do not obey the gospel, who, he says, will pay the penalty of eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of His power, it follows that He brings in a flame of fire, since He is coming to punish. So in this too, against Marcion's will, Christ belongs to the God who burns; and in that other point he belongs to the Creator, in that He also takes vengeance on those who do not know the Lord, that is, on the heathen. For he distinguished those who do not obey the gospel, whether sinful Christians or Jews. Now to exact penalties from the heathen, who may not have known the gospel, is not the part of that god who is by nature unknown and has been revealed nowhere except in the gospel, and so is not knowable by all. But to the Creator even natural knowledge is owed, by understanding him from His works and then seeking a fuller knowledge of him. It belongs, then, to Him to punish even those who do not know God, since he may not be ignored. The very words, “from the face of the Lord and from the glory of His power,” which use the words of Isaiah and for the same reason, savor of the same Lord, who rises up to shatter the earth. And who is the man of sin, the son of perdition, who must be revealed before the Lord's coming, exalting himself above everything that is called God and every object of worship, who will sit in the temple of God and boast himself to be God? In our view he is the Antichrist, as the ancient and the new prophecies teach, and as the apostle John teaches, who says that antichrists have already gone out into the world, forerunners of the Antichrist in spirit, denying that Christ has come in the flesh and dissolving Jesus, that is, in God the Creator. But in Marcion's view I do not know, unless He is the Creator's Christ; for in his view the Creator's Christ has not yet come. But whichever of the two he is, I ask why he comes “with all power and signs and lying wonders.” “Because,” he says, “they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved; and for this reason there will be for them an impulse of deceit, so that they believe the lie, that all may be judged who did not believe the truth but consented to iniquity.” So if he is the Antichrist, as on our view, the Creator will be God, who sends him to drive into error those who did not believe the truth so as to be saved; and the truth and salvation will belong to the same one who avenges them by sending error, that is, to the Creator, to whom such jealousy belongs, to deceive by error those whom he did not win by truth. But if he is not the Antichrist, as on our view, then He is the Creator's Christ, as on Marcion's. And how will it be that he sends the Creator's Christ to avenge his own truth? And even if he agrees about the Antichrist, I would say likewise: how is it that Satan, the Creator's angel, is necessary to him, and is killed by Him, though he has to perform the working of deceit for the Creator? In sum, if it is beyond doubt that the angel and the truth and the salvation belong to the one to whom the anger and the jealousy and the sending of deceit against despisers and deserters belong, and even against those who do not know Him (so that Marcion too now gives ground and grants that his god too is a jealous God), who will be angry with better right? I think the one who from the beginning of things laid a foundation in nature for the knowledge of Himself by works, benefits, plagues, prophecies, and witnesses, and yet was not known; not the one who was brought forward once, by the single document of the gospel, and that itself uncertain and not openly preaching another god. So to whom vengeance belongs, to him will belong the matter of vengeance: I mean the gospel and the truth and salvation. And to command that one who wants to eat should work is the rule of life of Him who ordered that the mouth of the ox treading out the grain be left free. (2 Thessalonians 1:6-8; 2 Thessalonians 1:8-9; 2 Thessalonians 1:8; 2 Thessalonians 1:9; 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4; 1 John 4:1-3; 2 Thessalonians 2:9; 2 Thessalonians 2:10-12; 2 Thessalonians 2:11; 2 Thessalonians 3:10; Deuteronomy 25:4)

By the truth of the church we hold that this letter was sent to the Ephesians, not to the Laodiceans; but Marcion was once eager to falsify its title too, as though he were a most diligent investigator in this too. But titles do not matter, since the apostle wrote to all when he wrote to some; certainly, however, preaching in Christ that God to whom the things preached belong. To whom, then, will it belong, according to the good pleasure which he purposed in the mystery of His will, for the arrangement of the fulfillment of the times (to put it as the word sounds in Greek), to “recapitulate” (that is, to bring back to the beginning, or to reckon up again from the beginning) all things in Christ, both those in the heavens and those on earth, if not to Him to whom all things will belong from the beginning, even the beginning itself, from whom come both the times and the fulfillment of the times and the arrangement of the fulfillment, on account of which all things are traced back to the beginning in Christ? But what beginning has the other god, that is, what starting point, when he has no work? What times without a beginning? What fulfillment without times? What arrangement without fulfillment? In short, what did he ever do on earth long ago, that some long arrangement of times to be fulfilled should be counted toward summing up all things in Christ, even those in the heavens? Nor shall we think that the things done in the heavens, whatever they are, were done by any other than the one by whom all agree the things on earth were done. And if it is not possible for all these things to be counted from the beginning as another's than the Creator's, who will believe that they are summed up by another into another Christ, and not by their own author into His own Christ? If they are the Creator's, they must be different from the different god; if different, then opposed. How, then, would opposed things be summed up into him by whom, in the end, they are destroyed? For what Christ does the sequel announce, when he says, “that we who hoped beforehand in Christ should be to the praise of His glory”? For who could have hoped beforehand, that is, hoped in God before he came, except the Jews, to whom Christ was foretold from the beginning? So he who was foretold was also hoped for beforehand. And so he refers this to himself, that is, to the Jews, in order to make a distinction when he turns to the nations: “in whom you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel, in which you believed, were sealed with His Holy Spirit of promise.” Of what promise? The one made through Joel: “In the last days I will pour out of my Spirit on all flesh,” that is, on the nations too. So both the Spirit and the gospel will be in that Christ who was hoped for beforehand while he was being foretold. And the Father of glory is He whose Christ is sung in the psalm as the King of glory ascending: “Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts, He is the King of glory.” From Him the spirit of wisdom is prayed for, with whom this kind of spiritual gift too is listed among the seven spirits through Isaiah. He will give enlightened eyes of the heart who also enriched the outward eyes with light, who is displeased at the people's blindness: “And who is blind but my servants?” and, “The servants of God have been blinded.” With him are also the riches of the inheritance among the saints, he who promised that inheritance from the calling of the nations: “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance.” He worked his might in Christ by raising Him from the dead and seating Him at His right hand, subjecting all things to him, he who also said, “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet”; since elsewhere too the Spirit says to the Father of the Son, “You have put all things under His feet.” If from these things, which are recognized in the Creator, another god and another Christ are inferred, let us now look for the Creator. Clearly, I think, we find Him when he says that they were dead in the sins in which they had walked according to the age of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, who works in the sons of unbelief. But here too Marcion cannot take “the world” for the God of the world. For the created is not like the Creator, the made like the maker, the world like God. Nor will one who is the prince of the power of the ages be called the prince of the power of the air. For the ruler of higher things is never designated from the lower, even if the lower too are counted as his. Nor can He seem to be the worker of unbelief, which He Himself rather suffers from both Jews and nations. It is enough, then, if these things do not fall upon the Creator. But if there is one to whom they apply better, the apostle surely knew this better. Who is he? Without doubt the one who hems in the sons of unbelief against the Creator Himself, having taken possession of this air, as the prophet reports him saying: “I will set my throne in the clouds; I will be like the Most High.” This will be the devil, whom elsewhere too, if they want the apostle to be read so, we shall recognize as the god of this age. For so he has filled the whole world with the lie of deity. If he had not existed, these things could indeed have looked toward the Creator. And if the apostle had lived in Judaism, when he interposed about sins, “in which we too all once lived,” he does not in this way give us to understand that the lord of sins and prince of this air is the Creator; but because in Judaism he had been one of the sons of unbelief, with the devil working in him, when he was persecuting the church and the Creator's Christ, for this reason he says, “We were of unbelief.” But “by nature” he says, so that the heretic should not argue that the lord of anger is the Creator because the Creator called the Jews sons. For when he says, “We were by nature children of anger” (and the Jews are sons of the Creator not by nature but by his choice of the fathers), he referred the children of anger to nature, not to the Creator. Finally, adding, “as the others too,” who are surely not sons of God, he plainly reckons sins and the lusts of the flesh and unbelief and anger to the common nature of all men, the devil, however, laying hold of that nature, which he himself had already infected by sowing the seed of sin. “We are His workmanship,” he says, “created in Christ.” For making is one thing and creating another; but he gave both to one. Man is the workmanship of the Creator: so the same one who made him created him in Christ. As regards substance, He made him; as regards grace, He created him. Look also at what hangs together with this: “Remember that you, once the nations in the flesh, who are called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision in the flesh made by hand, were at that time without Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants and their promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” Without what God were the nations, and without what Christ? Surely without Him to whom belonged the commonwealth of Israel and the covenants and the promise. “But now,” he says, “in Christ you who were far off have been brought near in His blood.” From what had they been far off before? From what he says above: from the Creator's Christ, from the commonwealth of Israel, from the covenants, from the hope of the promise, from God Himself. If this is so, then the nations are now brought near in Christ to those things from which they were then far off. But if we have been brought near in Christ to the commonwealth of Israel, which is in the worship of God the Creator, and to the covenants and the promise and to their very God, it is ridiculous enough that the Christ of another god has brought us from far off to the Creator. The apostle remembered that it had been foretold thus of the calling of the nations, who were to be called from far off: “Those who were far from me have drawn near to my righteousness.” For both the righteousness and the peace of the Creator were announced in Christ, as we have often shown. And so, he says, “He is our peace, who has made both one” (the Jewish, that is, and the Gentile, the near and the far), “having broken down the middle wall of enmity in His flesh.” But Marcion took away “His,” so as to make it “in the flesh” of the enmity, as though the rivalry were with fleshly vice, not with Christ. As I have said elsewhere, so here too, not man of the Marrucini but man of Pontus: why do you deny here the flesh of him whose blood you confessed above? If He made void the law of commandments by His decrees (by fulfilling the law, surely; for “You shall not commit adultery” is now void when it is said, “You shall not even look with lust”; “You shall not kill” is void when it is said, “You shall not even speak evil”; you cannot make a helper of the law into its adversary), “so as to create in Himself the two” (He who had made them, creating them too, as also above: “for we are His workmanship, created in Christ”) “into one new man, making peace” (if truly new, then truly a man too, not a phantom; and new, as newly born of a virgin by the Spirit of God), “that He might reconcile both to God” (to the God whom both races had offended, both Jewish and Gentile) “in one body,” he says, “having killed the enmity in it through the cross”: so here too the body in Christ is flesh, which could suffer the cross. So, since He announced peace to those who were near and those who were far off, having together obtained access to the Father, we are no longer strangers and sojourners but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God (of Him, surely, from whom we showed above that we had been aliens and far off), “built upon the foundation of the apostles.” The heretic took away “and of the prophets,” forgetting that the Lord placed prophets as well as apostles in the church; unless he feared that our building in Christ might also stand on the foundation of the old prophets, since the apostle himself never ceases everywhere to build us up from the prophets. For where did he get the idea of calling Christ the chief cornerstone, if not from the meaning of the psalm: “The stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner”? (Ephesians 1:9-10; Ephesians 1:12; Ephesians 1:13; Joel 2:28; Ephesians 2:17; Ephesians 1:17; Isaiah 11:2; Ephesians 1:18; Ephesians 1:19-22; Ephesians 2:1-2; Ephesians 2:3; Ephesians 2:10; Ephesians 2:11-12; Ephesians 2:13; Ephesians 2:14; Ephesians 2:15; Ephesians 2:15-16; Ephesians 2:16; Ephesians 2:17-20; Ephesians 2:20)

Given the heretic's mania for cutting, I do not wonder if he takes away syllables, when he often removes whole pages. The apostle says that grace was given to him, the least of all, to enlighten all, as to what is the arrangement of the mystery hidden from the ages in God, who created all things. The heretic snatched away the preposition “in” and has it read thus: “hidden from the ages from the God who created all things.” But the forgery flashes out. For the apostle goes on: “that the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places through the church.” Whose principalities and powers does he mean? If the Creator's, how can it be that that god wanted His wisdom to be shown to the Creator's principalities and powers, but not to the Creator Himself? When not even the powers could have learned anything without their own prince? Or if he did not name God here because the prince himself is also counted among them, then he would likewise have declared that the mystery was hidden from the principalities and powers of Him who created all things, counting Him among them in the same way. And if he says it was hidden from him, he ought to have said that it was made manifest to Him. So it was not hidden from God, but hidden in God, the Creator of all, and hidden from His principalities and powers. “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been His counselor?” Caught here, the heretic will perhaps change his ground and say that his god wanted to make known to his own powers and principalities the arrangement of his mystery, of which God, the Creator of all, had been ignorant. And what was the point of pleading the ignorance of the Creator, a stranger separated from him by a long distance, when even the household of the higher god had not known it? Yet the future event was known to the Creator too. Or was it not surely known to Him, since it was to be revealed under His heaven and on His earth? So from this too what we built up above is confirmed. For if the Creator was one day to know that hidden mystery of the higher god, and the text ran, “hidden from the God who created all things,” he ought to have gone on thus: “that the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to Him,” and then, “and to the powers and principalities of whatever god,” with whom the Creator would come to know it. So it is clear that something was removed, which in this way is kept safe for its truth. I too now want to join issue with you over the apostle's allegories, whose forms you will not allow to have been in the prophets. “He led captivity captive,” he says. With what arms? In what battles? By laying waste what nation? By overthrowing what city? What women, what children, what petty kings did the victor put in chains? For when in David Christ is sung as wearing a sword on His thigh, or in Isaiah as taking the captured wealth of Samaria and the strength of Damascus, you hammer Him out into a real and visible warrior. Recognize, then, now both His armor and his warfare as spiritual, if you have now learned that the captivity is spiritual, so that you may recognize this too as his; or because the apostle took the mention of this captivity from the prophets, from whom he also took the commands: “Putting away lying, speak the truth, each to his neighbor,” and, “Be angry, and do not sin” (to set out the psalm's sense in the psalm's own words); “Do not let the sun go down on your anger”; “Do not take part in the works of darkness” (for “with the righteous you will be righteous, and with the perverse you will be perverted,” and, “Remove the evil from your midst,” and, “Go out from among them and touch nothing unclean; be separate, you who carry the vessels of the Lord”). So too, to be drunk with wine, a disgrace, comes from where those who make the saints drunk are rebuked: “And you gave my holy ones wine to drink,” which Aaron and his sons were forbidden to drink when they went into the holy place. And to teach that they should sing to God in psalms and hymns belongs to him who knew that those who drink wine to the sound of timbrels and harps were rather accused by God. So the one whose precepts I find, and the seeds or the growth of those precepts, is the one whose apostle I recognize. Further, from where does he confirm that wives ought to be subject to their husbands? “Because the husband,” he says, “is the head of the wife.” Tell me, Marcion, does your god build up the authority of his law from the Creator's work? That is plainly a smaller matter, since he takes from there the standing of his Christ himself and of his church: “as Christ too is the head of the church.” Likewise when he says, “He who loves his wife loves his own flesh, as Christ too loves the church,” you see your Christ and your church compared to the Creator's work. What honor is given to the flesh under the name of the church! “No one,” he says, “hates his own flesh” (except, plainly, Marcion alone), “but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the church.” But you, who alone hate it, taking away its resurrection, will have to hate the church too, since it is loved by Christ in the same way. Indeed Christ loved the flesh as he did the church. No one will fail to love even the image of his bride; rather he will keep it and honor it and crown it. The likeness shares the honor with the reality. Shall I labor now to prove that the same God is God of the man and of Christ, of the woman and of the church, of the flesh and of the spirit, when the apostle himself brings in the Creator's sentence, and even expounds it: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother, and the two will be in one flesh. This mystery is great”? It is enough for now that, if these mysteries of the Creator are great with the apostle, they are very small with the heretics. “But I,” he says, “speak of Christ and the church.” You have an interpretation of the mystery, not a separation from it. He shows that a figure of the mystery was provided beforehand by the one to whom the mystery surely belonged. What does Marcion think? The Creator could not provide figures beforehand for an unknown god, and not for a known one either, being his adversary; and the higher god ought not to borrow anything from the lower, still less from one he was to destroy. “Children, obey your parents”: for (although Marcion took away “for this is the first commandment with a promise”) the law says, “Honor your father and mother.” “And parents, bring up your children in the discipline and correction of the Lord”: for you have heard that it was said to those of old too, “You shall tell these things in the ears of your children, and your children likewise in the ears of their children.” Why do I now need two gods, if the rule of life is one? And if there are two, I will follow the one who taught first. “But our struggle is against the rulers of the world”: oh, how many creator gods there are now! For why should not a single ruler of the world have been named, if he meant the Creator, to whom the powers he mentioned before would belong? Moreover, since above he bids us put on the armor in which to stand against the schemes of the devil, he now shows that what he joins to the devil belongs to the devil: the powers and the rulers of this darkness, which we too ascribe to the devil. Or if the devil is the Creator, who will be the devil with the Creator? Or are there, as two gods, so also two devils, and powers and world rulers in the plural? But how are the Creator and the devil and God the same, when the devil is not at the same time both God and devil? For either both are gods, if both are devils; or He who is God is not also the devil, just as the devil is not God. I ask about the very word “devil”: from what slander does it fit the Creator? Perhaps he slandered some purpose of the higher god, as He Himself suffered at the hands of the archangel, and a lying one at that. For He had not forbidden the tasting of that little tree so that they should not become gods, but so that they should not die of the transgression. Nor will “the spiritual forces of wickedness” mean the Creator because he added “in the heavenly places.” For the apostle knew that spiritual forces of wickedness had worked in the heavenly places, the angels who were drawn into sin by the daughters of men.⁠a And what sort of thing would it be for him to censure the Creator through ambiguities and riddles of some kind, he who, already placed in chains [for the freedom of his preaching], was surely showing the church the boldness to make known the mystery in the opening of his mouth, which he asked them to ask God for him?

In my prescription against all heresies I usually fix a short way from the testimony of times, claiming that our rule is earlier than every later heresy. The apostle will now prove this too, when he says: “because of the hope laid up in heaven, which you heard in the word of the truth of the gospel, which has come to you as it has into the whole world.” For if already then the gospel tradition had spread everywhere, how much more now? Further, if it is ours that has spread everywhere, more than any heretical one, let alone that of Marcion of the Antonine age, ours will be the apostolic one. And even when Marcion's has filled the whole world, not even then will it be able to defend itself as apostolic. For even so the apostolic one will be established to be that which first filled the world, the gospel, namely, of that God who also sang of its preachings: “Their sound has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.” He calls Christ the image of the invisible God. But we too say that the Father of Christ is invisible, knowing that it was always the Son who was seen in former times, if he was seen by any, in the name of God, as his image; so let him not tear from this too some distinction between a visible and an invisible god, when it has long been the definition of our God: “No one will see the Lord and live.” If Christ is not the firstborn of creation, as the Word of the Creator, through whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made; if all things were not created in Him, in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; if all things were not created through Him and in Him (for these things ought to have displeased Marcion), the apostle would surely not have put so baldly: “And He is before all.” For how is He before all, if not before all things? How before all things, if not the firstborn of creation, if not the Word of the Creator? And how will he be proved to have been before all who appeared after all? Who knows that he was earlier, whom he did not know to exist? Again, how did it please Him that all the fullness should dwell in himself? For first, what is this fullness, unless it consists of those things which Marcion has cut away, created in Christ in the heavens and on earth, angels and men; unless of those things invisible and visible; unless of thrones and dominions and principalities and powers? Or if our false apostles and Jewish preachers of the gospel brought these in of their own, let Marcion produce the fullness of his god, who created nothing. Besides, how can it be that the rival and destroyer of the Creator wanted the Creator's fullness to dwell in his own Christ? To whom, finally, does He reconcile all things in Himself, making peace through the blood of His cross, if not to Him whom all things had offended, against whom they had rebelled by transgression, to whom they had lately belonged? For they could be conciliated to a stranger; but they could be reconciled to none but their own. So too us, once alienated and enemies in mind in evil works, he brings back into favor with the Creator, whom we had offended by worshiping the creation against the Creator. And wherever he calls the church the body of Christ (as here he says that he fills up what is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in the flesh for His body, which is the church), he does not therefore transfer the mention of the body entirely away from the substance of the flesh. For above too he says that we are reconciled in His body through death: surely in that body in which he could die, dying through the flesh and not through the church; plainly for the church's sake, exchanging body for body, the fleshly for the spiritual. And when he warns us to beware of subtle speech and philosophy, as an empty seduction which is according to the elements of the world (meaning not according to heaven or earth, but according to worldly letters, and according to tradition, that is, of men of subtle speech and philosophers), it is a long task, and belongs to another work, to show that by this sentence all heresies are condemned, since they all consist of the powers of subtle speech and the rules of philosophy. But let Marcion recognize that the chief boundary of his faith is from the school of Epicurus, bringing in a god who is dull so that he may say He is not to be feared; and that he places matter alongside God the Creator from the porch of the Stoics; denying the resurrection of the flesh, on which likewise no philosophy agrees. Our truth is so far from their cleverness that it dreads to rouse the anger of God, and trusts that He brought forth all things out of nothing, and promises that he will restore the same flesh, and does not blush that Christ was born from a virgin's womb, while philosophers, heretics, and heathen themselves laugh. “For God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise,” without doubt the God who, in view of this arrangement of His, threatened beforehand that He would destroy the wisdom of the wise. By this simplicity of truth, the opposite of subtle speech and philosophy, we can think nothing perverse. Then, if God gives us life together with Christ, forgiving us our sins, we cannot believe that sins are forgiven by one against whom they were not committed, since he was formerly unknown. Come now, when he says, “Let no one judge you in food and drink, or in respect of a festival or a new moon or a sabbath, which is a shadow of things to come, but the body is Christ's,” what do you think, Marcion? We are no longer discussing the law, except that here too he teaches how it was excluded: by passing from the shadow to the body, that is, from figures to the reality, which is Christ. So the shadow belongs to him to whom the body belongs too; that is, the law belongs to him to whom Christ belongs too. Separate the law to one god and Christ to another, if you can separate any shadow from the body whose shadow it is. Plainly Christ belongs to the law, if he is the body of the shadow. And if he also censures some who said, on the strength of angelic visions, that one must abstain from foods (“do not touch, do not taste”), wanting to walk in humility of mind, not holding fast to the head, he is not therefore attacking the law and Moses, as though Moses had laid down the prohibition of certain foods from angelic superstition. For it is agreed that Moses received the law from God. Finally, this rule of life (“according to the commandments,” he says, “and doctrine of men”) he charged against those who did not hold fast to the head, that is, to Him in whom all things are summed up, called back to the beginning, even the distinction of foods. As for the rest of the precepts, being the same, let it be enough to have shown elsewhere how they flowed from the Creator, who, when he foretold that the old things would pass away and that He would make all things new, and commanded, “Break up for yourselves new ground,” was already then teaching us to put off the old man and put on the new. (Colossians 1:5-6; Colossians 1:15; Exodus 33:20; John 1:3; Colossians 1:19; Colossians 1:20; Colossians 1:21; Ephesians 1:23; Colossians 1:24; Colossians 1:22; Colossians 2:8; 1 Corinthians 1:27; Colossians 2:13; Colossians 2:16-17; Colossians 2:22)

When he lists the variety of the preaching, that some, from confidence in his bonds, spoke the word more boldly, others through envy and strife, some even for the reputation of their speaking, most out of love, some out of rivalry, and certain ones even out of ill will, preached Christ, here if anywhere was the place to censure the preaching itself for a difference of doctrine, which would have produced so great a variety of minds too. But setting out only the motives of their minds, not differing rules of the mysteries, he affirms that there was one Christ and one God of his, preached with whatever intention; and so he says, “It is nothing to me whether Christ is announced in pretence or in truth,” because one Christ was being announced, whether out of pretence or out of truth of faith. For he related the mention of truth to the faith of the preaching, not to the rule itself, because the rule was one, but the faith of the preachers was, in some, true, that is, simple, and in others over-clever. Since this is so, it is plain that the Christ preached was the one who was always announced. For if another, far different, were being brought in by the apostle, the newness of the thing would have produced a difference. For there would not have been lacking those who would nonetheless interpret the gospel preaching of the Creator's Christ, since even today in all places the greater part hold our view rather than the heretics'. So the apostle would not have kept silent here about marking and rebuking the difference. So, since difference is not even censured, newness is not proved. Plainly the Marcionites think that here too, about the substance of Christ, the apostle supports them, that there was a phantom of flesh in Christ, when he says that, being in the form of God, He did not think it robbery to be equal with God, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, not the reality, and in the likeness of man, not in a man, and found in fashion as a man, not in substance, that is, not in flesh. As though fashion and likeness and form did not also belong to substance! It is well that elsewhere too he calls Christ the image of the invisible God. Will Christ here too, then, where he places Him in the form of God, likewise not be truly God, if He was not truly man either, placed in the form of man? For in both places the reality will have to be excluded, if form and likeness and fashion are claimed for a phantom. But if, in the form and image of God, as Son of the Father, he is truly God, it is already decided that, in the form and image of man, as Son of Man, he was found truly man. For he used “found” with good reason, that is, most certainly a man. For what is found is established to exist. So as He was found God by His power, so was He found man by His flesh, since he would not have declared Him subject to death if He had not been placed in a mortal substance. And more is what he added: “even the death of the cross.” For he would not heighten its horror, extolling the courage of the struggle, if he had known it to be imaginary, in a phantom, one who eluded death rather than experienced it, and who did not exercise courage in his passion but put on a show. And what had he formerly counted as gain? What he lists above too: the glory of the flesh in the mark of circumcision, descent as a Hebrew of Hebrews, the title of the tribe of Benjamin, the dignity of a spotless Pharisee. These he now counts as loss for himself: not God, but the stupidity of the Jews. These too he counts as dung, in comparison with the knowledge of Christ, not in rejection of God the Creator, having no longer a righteousness of his own, which is from the law, but that which is through Him, that is, through Christ, from God. “So,” you say, “by this distinction the law did not belong to the God of Christ.” Clever enough. Take then something cleverer. When he says, “not that which is from the law, but that which is through Him,” he would not have said “through Him” of any other than the one whose the law was. “Our citizenship,” he says, “is in heaven.” I recognize the Creator's ancient promise to Abraham: “And I will make your seed like the stars in heaven.” So also “star differs from star in glory.” And if Christ, coming from heaven, will transform the body of our lowliness to be conformed to the body of his glory, then this body of ours will rise, which is humbled in sufferings and cast down to the earth by the very law of death. For how will it be transformed if it will not exist at all? Or if this was said of those who, overtaken in the flesh at the Lord's coming, are to be changed, what will those do who will rise first? Will they have nothing from which to be transformed? And yet, he says, “together with them we shall be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord.” If taken up with them, then surely transformed with them too. (Philippians 1:14-17; Philippians 1:18; Philippians 2:6-7; Colossians 1:15; Philippians 2:8; Philippians 3:7; Philippians 3:8; Philippians 3:9; Philippians 3:20; Genesis 22:17; 1 Corinthians 15:41; 1 Corinthians 15:51-52; 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17)

To this letter alone its brevity has been of help, so that it escaped Marcion's forging hands. I wonder, however, that, having accepted a letter written to one man, he rejected the two to Timothy and the one to Titus, composed about the order of the church. He was eager, I suppose, to tamper even with the number of the letters. Remember, reader, that we have proved from the apostle too what was treated before, and that we have dispatched here whatever had been postponed to this work; so that you should neither think the repetition here superfluous, by which we have confirmed the earlier matter, nor hold suspect the postponement there, by which we saved these things for their proper time. If you examine the whole little work, you will judge neither that there is redundancy here nor lack of confidence there.