Against Marcion

The man of Pontus brings forward two gods, like two Symplegades of his own shipwreck: the one whom he could not deny, that is the Creator, that is ours, and the one whom he will not be able to prove, that is his own; having suffered, in his unhappy way, the impulse of this presumption from a simple passage of the Lord's pronouncement, which disposes examples of the good and bad tree not for gods but for men, namely that neither does a good tree bring forth bad fruits, nor a bad tree good fruits: that is, neither does a good mind or faith produce bad works, nor a bad one good works.

For being feeble—as even now many are, and especially heretics—concerning the question of evil, "whence is evil?" and with his senses dulled by the very enormity of his curiosity, finding the Creator pronouncing: I am he who creates evils; to the degree that he had presumed him to be the author of evil, both from this and from other arguments which so persuade every perverse person, to that degree interpreting the Creator as the bad tree producing bad fruits, namely evils; he presumed there must be another god on the side of the good tree with good fruits. And so, finding in Christ what seemed to him another dispensation, of sole and pure benevolence, as diverse from the Creator, he readily argued for a new and alien divinity revealed in his Christ, and from that point, with a little leaven, he deceived the whole mass of faith with heretical sourness. He also had one Cerdo as the instructor of this scandal; whereby the more easily two blind men supposed they had seen two things.

For they had not seen the one clearly. Even a single lamp appears numerous to bleary eyes. The one god, therefore, whom he was compelled to acknowledge, he destroyed by defaming him as evil: the other, whom he was striving to fabricate, he constructed by presenting him as good. By what articles he has arranged these natures, we show through our very responses.

The principal, and thence the entire, engagement is therefore about number; whether it is permissible to introduce two gods, if perhaps by poetic and pictorial license, and now a third, heretical license. But Christian truth has pronounced decisively: God, if he is not one, does not exist; because we more rightly believe that not to exist, which shall not be such as it ought to be in order to exist. But that you may know God must be one, seek what God is, and you will find it no other way. As much as the human condition can define concerning God, I define what the conscience of all will also acknowledge: that God is the supreme great, established in eternity, unbegotten, unmade, without beginning, without end. For this is the condition of eternity that must be reckoned, which makes God the supreme great, since this is in God itself, and so also all the rest; so that God is the supreme great both in form, and in reason, and in power, and in might.

Since on this point there is agreement among all—for no one will deny that God is something supremely great, except one who could pronounce God to be something lowest and least, by contrast, so as to deny God by removing what belongs to God—what then will be the condition of this supreme great? Surely that nothing be equal to it, that is, that there be no other supreme great: because, if there were, it would be equal to it, and if it were equal, it would no longer be the supreme great, the condition being overturned, and, if I may so say, the law which allows nothing to be equal to the supreme great. Therefore that must necessarily be unique which shall be the supreme great, by having no equal, lest it not be the supreme great. Therefore it will not exist otherwise than through that by which it has its being, that is, as absolutely unique. Accordingly, since God is the supreme great, our truth has rightly pronounced: God, if he is not one, does not exist.

Not as though we doubt that God exists, by saying: If he is not one, he does not exist; but because him whom we are confident exists, we define him to be that which, if he is not, God does not exist, namely the supreme great. Furthermore, the supreme great must necessarily be unique. Therefore God also will be unique. God is not otherwise than as the supreme great; nor is the supreme great otherwise than as having no equal; nor does it have no equal otherwise than if it shall be unique. Certainly, whatever other god you shall introduce, you will not be able to maintain him as God under any other form than by ascribing to him also the proper attribute of divinity, just as eternity, so also supreme greatness. How then will two supreme greats subsist, since this is the supreme great: to have no equal? But to have no equal, since it belongs to one alone, can in no way exist in two.

But anyone will argue that two supreme greats can also subsist, distinct and separate within their own boundaries, and will certainly invoke the example: the kingdoms of the earth, so great in number, and yet supreme greats each within their own regions, and he will think that human things are certainly to be compared with divine. Now therefore, if room is given to this argument, what prevents the introduction of not only a third and fourth god, but already as many in number as there are kings of nations? The discussion is about God, whose principal property it is to admit the comparison of no example. This nature itself, if not some Isaiah, or God himself through Isaiah, will proclaim: To whom will you liken me? Shall human things perhaps be compared with divine? Not so with God: for God is one thing, and the things of God are another. In short, you who use the example of a king as of a supreme great, take care lest you can no longer use it.

For a king, even if he is a supreme great on his throne up to God, is nevertheless below God: but when compared to God, he will already fall from the supreme great, that having been transferred to God. If this is so, how do you use the example of a thing for comparison with God, which, when it comes to the comparison, is lost? What now, if not even among kings can the supreme great be seen to exist in many, but only as unique and singular; namely in him who is received as king of kings by reason of the summit of his greatness and the subjection of all other ranks, as the pinnacle of dominion?

But even kings of another kind, who rule singly in the unity of their empire, if they are brought together from all sides into examination with lesser kingdoms, so to speak, to determine which of them excels in the substance and forces of his kingdom, the summit of greatness must necessarily be distilled into one, all being gradually pressed out and excluded from the summit of greatness by the outcome of comparison. So even if the supreme great appears in many forms in a scattered way, by its own forces and its own nature and its own condition it is unique. Accordingly, when two gods are compared, as two kings and two supreme greats, the unity of the supreme great must necessarily yield to one of them, by the verdict of comparison, by which the supreme is established through its own victory, the rival other great being overcome, yet not supreme; and from the defeat of the rival, possessing a certain solitude from the singularity of its own pre-eminence, it is unique.

This inescapable argument constrains the conclusion to this: either it must be denied that God is the supreme great, which no wise man will allow, or it must be shared with no other.

Or what reason has composed two supreme greats? For first I will demand why not more, if two? Since the substance of divinity ought to be believed the richer, if it were also fitting in numbers. More honorable and more generous is Valentinus, who at once dared to conceive two, Bythos and Sige: since he poured forth a swarm of divinity up to thirty Aeons, like the sow of Aeneas. Whatever reason does not allow more supreme greats to be admitted, the same reason allows not even two, as themselves being more after one; for after one, there is number. What could admit two, the same could admit more; for after two, there is multitude, unity having already been exceeded. Finally, among us the force of this reasoning does not allow more gods to be believed, by that very limit, nor even two, by that rule which establishes one God, by which God must be that to which nothing is equal, as the supreme great; and unique must be that to which nothing is equal.

Now then, two supreme greats, two equals—to what purpose, to what advantage would they be reckoned? What difference did the number make, since two equals do not differ from one? For one thing is that which is the same in two. Even if there were more equals, all of them together would have been one, differing in no way among themselves, in that they are equals. Furthermore, if neither of the two differs from the other, then, as both supreme greats, as both gods, neither excels the other, they show no rational account of their number, having no pre-eminence. But the number of divinity ought to be established by the highest reason, especially since even its worship would be led into uncertainty. For behold, looking upon two gods as equal as two supreme greats, what would I do?

If I worshipped both, I would fear lest, by the abundance of my devotion, it be reckoned superstition rather than religion; because two so equal, and in one both, I could propitiate in one: bearing this very testimony to their equality and unity, while I venerated one in the other, while in one I have two. If I worshipped one, I would equally reflect lest I seem to expose the vanity of a number superfluous without distinction; that is, I would judge it safer to worship neither, than to worship one with scruple, or both in vain.

Thus we still seem to be arguing as though Marcion establishes two equal gods. For while we defend that the supreme great God must be believed to be unique, excluding from him equality, we have treated of these as though of two equals: nonetheless, by teaching that they cannot be equals according to the form of the supreme great, we have sufficiently confirmed that there cannot be two. Otherwise, being certain that Marcion establishes unequal gods—one a judge, fierce, mighty in war; the other mild, placid, and only good and most good—let us examine equally this aspect as well, whether diversity at least can accommodate two, if equality could not. Furthermore, here too the same rule of the supreme great will defend us, inasmuch as it vindicates the entire condition of divinity.

For it is fitting, and as it were laying hold of the adversary's reasoning by force—since he does not deny the Creator to be God—I most justly prescribe that there is no place for that diversity among those whom, having confessed equally to be gods, he cannot make diverse: not because men too, though under the same designation, may not be most diverse, but because he will not be called God, nor indeed believed to be God, unless he is the supreme great. Since therefore he is compelled to acknowledge as supreme great him whom he does not deny to be God, it cannot be admitted that he ascribes to the supreme great any diminution whereby he would be subjected to another supreme great: for he ceases to be supreme great if he is subjected. But it is not of God to cease from his condition, that is, from the supreme great. For even in that more powerful god the supreme great will be endangered, if it can be depreciated in the Creator.

Thus, when two gods are pronounced to be two supreme greats, it is necessary that neither be greater nor lesser than the other, neither more exalted nor more abased than the other. Deny that he is God whom you call inferior; deny that he is the supreme great whom you believe to be lesser. But having confessed him to be God, you have confessed both to be two supreme greats. You will take nothing from one, nor ascribe anything to the other. By acknowledging divinity, you have denied diversity.

You will attempt against these arguments to shake the discussion by the name of God, as though it were a passive name and permitted to others as well, because it is written: God stood in the assembly of gods; and in the midst he will judge gods. And: I said: You are gods; and yet for that reason the possession of the supreme great does not belong to them because they are called gods, and so neither to the Creator. I will answer even the fool, who has not reflected that this could equally be turned back against Marcion's god—that he too is called god, and yet is not thereby proved to be the supreme great, just as neither are the angels or men of the Creator. If the sharing of names creates a prejudice regarding conditions, how many wicked slaves insult the names of kings—Alexander, and Darius, and Holofernes?—and yet for that reason what kings are will not be taken from them.

For even the very idols of the nations are commonly called gods; but no one is god by reason of being called god. Thus I defend the supreme great in the Creator not by the name of God, nor by the sound, nor by the mark of this name, but by the very substance to which this name belongs. Finding this substance alone unbegotten, unmade, alone eternal and the founder of the universe: not to the name, but to the condition, not to the appellation but to the state of it, do I both ascribe and vindicate the supreme great. And therefore, because the substance to which I ascribe it has already obtained to be called god, you think I am ascribing it to the name; because I must needs show through the name to what substance I ascribe it; namely, that by which it is established that he who is called God is reckoned supreme great from substance, not from name. Finally, Marcion too, vindicating this for his god, vindicates it according to condition, not according to vocabulary.

That supreme great, therefore, which we ascribe to God by the law of substance, not by the lot of name, we contend must be equally present in both who consist of that substance by which God is called: because insofar as they are called gods, that is, supreme greats—by the merit, namely, of substance that is unbegotten and eternal, and thereby great and supreme—to that extent the supreme great cannot be held to be lesser and inferior to another supreme great. If the felicity and sublimity and integrity of the supreme great shall stand in Marcion's god, it shall stand equally also in ours: if not also in ours, equally not in Marcion's either. Therefore neither will two supreme greats be equal, because the rule of the supreme great already set forth forbids it, admitting no comparison; nor unequal, because another rule of the supreme great also presents itself, admitting no diminution. You are stuck, Marcion, in the midst of the surge of your Pontus: on both sides the waves of truth engulf you.

You can establish gods neither equal nor unequal. For there are not two, so far as pertains properly to the discussion of number. Although the whole matter is contested concerning two gods, we have for the present enclosed it within these lines, within which we shall now engage concerning their individual properties.

First, the Marcionites build their stupidity upon a haughty brow, because they put forward a new god, as though we were ashamed of an old God. Children too are puffed up with new shoes; but shod by the old pedagogue they will soon be beaten for their vain glory. Hearing therefore of a new god in the old world and in the old age, and unknown and unheard of under the old God, whom for so many ages past no one knew, and who is ancient by his very obscurity, whom a certain Jesus Christ—himself also new in old names—has revealed, and no other before him; I give thanks for this their glory, as the greatest aid to me in proving the heresy from this point, namely the profession of a new divinity. This will be the novelty that has also begotten gods for the pagans, always by some new and ever new title of consecration. What god is new, unless he is false?

Not even Saturn will so great an antiquity today prove to be a god, because novelty also once brought him forth, when it first consecrated him. But living and genuine divinity is reckoned not by novelty, nor by antiquity, but by its own truth. Eternity has no time; for it is itself all time. What it makes, it cannot suffer. It lacks age, because it is not permitted to be born. God, if he is old, will not be: if he is new, he was not. Novelty attests a beginning, antiquity threatens an end. But God is as alien from beginning and end as from time, the arbiter and measurer of beginning and end.

I know indeed in what sense they boast of a new god, namely in respect of recognition; but I wished also to strike back at that very notion of novelty in recognition, which strikes untrained souls, and at the natural attractiveness of novelty itself, and from this point to challenge them concerning the unknown god. For surely, in opposing him as new in recognition, they demonstrate him to have been unknown before recognition. Come then, back to the lines and to the position; persuade me that a god could have been unknown. I find indeed altars prostituted to unknown gods; but that is Attic idolatry: likewise, to uncertain gods; but that is Roman superstition. Furthermore, uncertain gods are less known, as less certain; and accordingly unknown, inasmuch as less certain. Which of these two titles shall we inscribe upon Marcion's god? Both, I think—now uncertain, and formerly unknown. For just as the known Creator God made him unknown, so also the certain God made him uncertain. But I will not wander so as to speak at length.

If God was unknown and lay hidden, some region of hiding places overshadowed him—itself also new, and unknown, and likewise now uncertain; certainly something immense, and without doubt greater than him whom it concealed. But I will set forth briefly, and pursue most fully, prescribing that a god could neither have been unknown, by reason of greatness, nor ought to have been, by reason of goodness—especially one who in both respects is more excellent than our Creator. But since I observe that in certain matters the proof of every new and formerly unknown god must be challenged according to the form of the Creator, I must first commend the fact that this is done by us on rational grounds, so that I may use the defense of the reason set forth with greater consistency.

Above all indeed, what manner of thing is it, that you who acknowledge the Creator as God, and confess him prior in knowledge, should not know that you must examine another by the same means by which you have already learned to know God in the one? Every prior thing has furnished a standard to what comes after. Two gods are now proposed, one unknown and one known. Concerning the known one the question is idle: it is established that he exists, because he would not have been known unless he existed. Concerning the unknown one the dispute presses: for he may also not exist; because if he existed, he would have been known. What therefore is sought, so long as it is unknown, is uncertain so long as it is sought: and it may not exist, so long as it is uncertain. You have a certain God, inasmuch as he is known; and an uncertain one, inasmuch as he is unknown.

If this is so, does it not seem to you to be defended by just reason, that uncertain things should be proved according to the standard and form and rule of certain things? Otherwise, if for this cause—itself still uncertain—arguments from uncertain things are also employed, the series of questions will become entangled, from the discussion of those very arguments, equally uncertain, which are endangered in their credibility through uncertainty; and one will proceed into those already indeterminable questions which the Apostle does not love. But if from certain and undoubted and absolute parts of the rule, prejudgment is made against uncertain and doubtful and unresolved parts, it will be clear in those cases where a diversity of principal condition is found, whether perhaps uncertain things are not to be challenged according to the form of certain things, as being freed from the remaining challenge of comparison by the diversity of principal condition. But when two gods are proposed, the principal condition is common to them. For what God is, both are: unbegotten, unmade, eternal.

This will be the principal condition. Let Marcion see to the rest, if he has arranged it in diversity; for those things are posterior in discussion: indeed they will not even be admitted, if the principal condition is established. Furthermore it is established that both are gods, and thus concerning those whose condition is established to be common, when they are summoned to proof under it; if there are uncertain things, they must be challenged according to the form of those certain things with which they are reckoned in the community of principal condition, so that they may likewise share also in the proof. From this point therefore I shall most consistently direct that he is not God who is today uncertain, because formerly unknown: since he who is established to exist is established from this very fact that he was never unknown, and therefore never uncertain.

For indeed from the beginning of things, their founder was discovered together with them, those things having been brought forth for this purpose, that God might be known. Nor indeed, if Moses at some later time appears to be the first to have dedicated the God of the world in the temple of his writings, are the origins of recognition therefore to be reckoned from the Pentateuch; since the whole style of Moses does not institute the knowledge of the Creator, but narrates it from the beginning—to be reviewed from paradise and Adam, not from Egypt and Moses. Finally, the greater part of the human race, not even possessing the name of Moses, much less his instrument, nevertheless know the God of Moses, even though so great a domination of idolatry overshadows them; yet apart from this they speak of him as God by his own proper name, as it were, and as God of gods, and, If God shall grant, and, What pleases God, and, I commend to God.

See whether they know him, whom they attest to be all-powerful. And this they owe to no books of Moses. The soul comes before prophecy. For the soul's awareness of God from the beginning is its endowment; the same and no other both in the Egyptians, and in the Syrians, and in the Pontics. For they call the God of the Jews the God of souls. Do not, barbarous heretic, place Abraham before the world. Even if the Creator had been the God of one family, he was not posterior to your god, being known even to the Pontics before him. Receive therefore from your predecessor the standard—the uncertain from the certain, the unknown from the known. God will never lie hidden, God will never be absent: he will always be understood, always heard; he will even be seen in whatever manner he wills.

God has as his testimonies all this that we are and in which we are. Thus he is proved both to be God and to be one, in that he is not unknown, while another still labors to be proved.

And rightly so, they say; for who is not better known to his own than to strangers? No one. I hold fast to this saying as well. For what manner of thing is it that anything should be foreign to God, to whom nothing would be foreign if there were such a one? Because it is God's nature that all things are his and all things pertain to him: lest he should straightway hear from us, What then has he to do with strangers?—which he shall hear more fully in its proper place. But for now it is enough that no one is proved whose nothing is proved. For just as the Creator, and on that account God, and God beyond doubt, because all things are his and nothing is foreign to him; so also another is therefore not God, because all things are not his, and therefore also foreign to him. Finally, if the universe belongs to the Creator, I see no place even for another god. All things are full and occupied by their own author.

If any space of any kind is vacant for some divinity among created things, it will plainly be vacant for a false one. Truth lies open to falsehood. So great is the power of idols—why should it not somewhere receive the god of Marcion? Therefore I also demand this, on the pattern of the Creator, that God ought to have been known from his works—from some world, and man, and age properly his own: seeing that even the error of the world has on that account presumed gods, whom it sometimes acknowledges to be men, because something from each one seems to have been provided for the utilities and conveniences of life: so also this has been believed on the pattern of God, that it is divine to establish or demonstrate what is fitting and necessary for human affairs. So much so that authority was accommodated to false divinity from the same source whence it had preceded for the true.

The god of Marcion ought at least to have brought forth one little plot of ground as his own, so that he might be proclaimed as some new Triptolemus. Or else produce a reason worthy of God why he founded nothing, if he exists; because he would have founded something, if he had existed—with that presumption, namely, by which our God also is manifest as existing in no other way than because he founded all this. For once and for all the rule shall stand: those men cannot both confess God as creator, and also have him whom they wish believed equally as god, without proving him according to the pattern of him whom both they themselves and all men call God: so that, when on this very ground no one doubts that the Creator is God because he founded all this, on this very ground no one ought to believe him God who founded nothing, unless perhaps a reason be brought forward.

That reason must necessarily appear twofold: either he was unwilling to found anything, or he was unable; a third option is absent. But to have been unable is unworthy of God; to have been unwilling—whether that is worthy I wish to inquire. Tell me, Marcion: did your God wish to be known at any time whatsoever? Or did he descend, and preach, and suffer and rise again, for any other purpose than that he might be known? And without doubt, if he was known, he willed it: for nothing would come to pass concerning him unless he had willed it. Why then did he take such great pains to procure knowledge of himself, so as to be displayed in the disgrace of the flesh—and a greater disgrace, if it was false? For this is more shameful: if he also lied about the substance of his body, he who also accepted upon himself the curse of the Creator, being hung upon a tree.

How much more honourably might he have prepared knowledge of himself through some tokens of his own workmanship? Especially since he had to be known in opposition to him with whom he had not been known from his works from the beginning. For what manner of thing is it that the Creator, ignorant that there was another god above him—as the Marcionites will have it—who even swearing affirmed that he alone existed, should have armed knowledge of himself with such great works, which he might not have taken such care about according to the presumption of his own singularity: while that more exalted one, knowing that the inferior god was so well equipped, should have provided no preparation for making himself known? Seeing that he ought even to have founded more remarkable and more magnificent works, so that God might be known from works after the manner of the Creator; and from more honourable ones, as one mightier and nobler than the Creator.

Moreover, even if we could confess that he exists, we ought to argue that he exists without cause. For he would exist without cause who had no property; because every property is a cause for there to be someone whose property it is. Furthermore, inasmuch as nothing ought to exist without cause, that is, without property—because if it exists without cause, it is the same as if it does not exist, having no cause of property, that is, the property itself—to that extent I would more worthily believe God not to exist than to exist without cause. For he is without cause who, having no property, has no cause. But God ought not to exist without cause, that is, without property. Thus, as often as I show him to exist without cause, as though he did exist, I establish by this that he does not exist, because if he had existed, he would by no means have existed without cause.

So also I say that he seeks faith in himself from man without cause, in a manner contrary to the usual way of believing God, formed by the authority of works, because he provided nothing of that kind through which man came to know God. For even if many believe in him, they do not straightway believe with reason, having no pledge of God—his works worthy of God. And so, on this account of the cessation and failure of works, he is akin to shamelessness and malice: to shamelessness, in that he seeks faith not owed to him, for the preparation of which he provided nothing; to malice, in that he made more people guilty of unbelief by procuring nothing for faith.

When we expel a god at this level, to whom no condition so proper and worthy of God as that of Creator has borne witness, the most shameless Marcionites, wrinkling their noses, turn to the destruction of the Creator's works. No doubt, they say, a great work and worthy of God—the world. Is the Creator therefore not at all God? Plainly he is God. Therefore neither is the world unworthy of God: for God made nothing unworthy of himself; even if he made the world for man, not for himself, even if every work is inferior to its own craftsman. And yet, if it is unworthy of God to have made something of such a kind, how much more unworthy of God is it to have made absolutely nothing, not even something unworthy, by which he might even be hoped to be the author of worthier things!

So then, to say something also about this unworthiness of this world—to which even among the Greeks the name belongs of ornament and beauty, not of filth—those very professors of wisdom themselves, from whose minds all heresy draws its life, pronounced unworthy substances to be gods: as Thales water, as Heraclitus fire, as Anaximenes air, as Anaximander all the heavenly bodies, as Strato heaven and earth, as Zeno air and aether, as Plato the stars, which he calls a fiery race of gods, when speaking of the world.

Contemplating, that is, the greatness, and force, and power, and honour, and beauty, the benefit, the faithfulness, the law of each individual element—which all conspire together for the begetting, nourishing, completing, and restoring of all things—most of the natural philosophers were afraid to assign a beginning and an end to the world, lest the substances of it, so great as they are, should be held to be less than gods; which the Magi of the Persians also worship, and the Hierophants of the Egyptians, and the Gymnosophists of the Indians. Even common popular superstition of ordinary idolatry, when it is ashamed of its idols on account of the names and fables of the old dead, takes refuge in the interpretation of natural things, and cloaks its disgrace with ingenuity, figuring Jupiter as a fiery substance, and his Juno as an airy one, according to the sound of the Greek words; likewise Vesta as fire, and the Camenae as water, and the Great Mother as earth—stripped of her seed-bearing produce, ploughed by arms, watered by baths.

So also Osiris—that he is always buried, and sought among the living, and found with joy—they argue as evidence of the faithfulness of recurring harvests and living elements and the returning year: just as the mysteries of a dry and burning nature are philosophized by the lions of Mithras. And indeed the substances higher in position or station it is enough to say were more easily held to be gods than unworthy of God. I will descend to lowly things. One little flower, I think, from the hedgerows—I do not say from the meadows; one little shell of any sea—I do not say of the Red Sea; one little feather of a grouse—I say nothing of the peacock—will pronounce the Creator a sordid craftsman to you?

But when you also mock the smaller animals, which the greatest craftsman by design has enlarged in their faculties or their strengths, thus teaching that greatness is proved in smallness just as virtue is proved in weakness, according to the Apostle; imitate, if you can, the constructions of the bee, the storehouses of the ant, the nets of the spider, the threads of the silkworm: endure, if you can, those very creatures of your little bed and mat, the poisons of the beetle, the stings of the fly, the trumpet and lance alike of the gnat. How great will the greater things be, when by things so small you are either helped or harmed, so that not even in small things do you despise the Creator? Finally, carry yourself around with yourself, consider man within and without.

This work of our God will please you—even this—which that lord and better God of yours fell in love with; for whose sake he laboured to descend from the third heaven into these poverty-stricken elements; for whose cause he was even crucified in this little cell of the Creator. But indeed he up to now has not rejected the water of the Creator, with which he washes his own; nor the oil, with which he anoints his own; nor the fellowship of honey and milk, with which he makes his own into infants; nor the bread, by which he represents his very body; even in his own sacraments being in want of the Creator's poor resources. But you, a disciple above your master and a slave above your lord, think more sublimely than he, destroying what he desires. I wish to examine whether at least out of faith, so that you yourself do not also crave what you destroy. You oppose heaven, and yet you seize the freedom of heaven in your dwellings.

You despise the earth—plainly now the mother of your flesh which is your enemy—and you wring out all her marrow for your food. You also reject the sea; but only up to its stores, which you reckon a more holy food. If I offer you a rose, you will not disdain the Creator. Hypocrite, in order to prove yourself a Marcionite by apocartesis—that is, by repudiation of the Creator (for this ought to have been sought among you as a substitute for martyrdom, if the world displeased you)—into whatever matter you dissolve, you make use of the substance of the Creator. How great is the obstinacy of your hardness! You despise the things in which you both live and die.

After these things, or before these things, when you shall have said that he too has his own creation, and his own world, and his own heaven—concerning that third heaven we shall see, if we also come to examine your apostle; in the meantime, whatever the substance may be, it ought to have appeared together with its own god. But now what manner of thing is it that the Lord was revealed in the twelfth year of Tiberius Caesar, yet no substance whatsoever has been discovered up to the fifteenth year now of the Emperor Severus, which, surpassing the trifling things of the Creator, would certainly have ceased to be hidden, since its Lord and author is no longer hidden? And therefore, if the substance itself could not be made manifest in this world, how did its Lord appear in this world? If this world received the Lord, why could it not receive the substance—unless the substance is perhaps greater than the Lord?

Now the question is about place, pertaining both to that world above and to God himself. For behold, if he also has his own world below himself and above the Creator, he made it in a place, certainly, whose space was vacant between his own feet and the head of the Creator. Therefore God himself also was in a place, and was making a world in a place; and that place will now be greater than both God and the world. For nothing is not greater—that which contains—than that which is contained; and one must consider whether there may still be some vacant remnant-spaces there, in which some third god might also pack himself together with his world. Therefore begin now to count the gods. For the place also will be a god, not only in that it is greater than God, but also in that it is unborn and unmade; and on that account eternal, and equal to God; in which God has always been.

Next, if he also fashioned his world from some underlying matter—unborn, and unmade, and co-eternal with God—just as Marcion thinks also concerning the Creator, you reduce this too to the majesty of place, which enclosed both god and matter, two gods. For matter, according to the form of divinity, is unborn, that is, and unmade, and eternal. Or if he fashioned the world from nothing, he will be compelled to think the same also concerning the Creator, to whom he assigns matter in the substance of the world. But he too will have had to make it from matter; the same reasoning meeting that God also which would be urged against the Creator, as equally God. And so count me out for now three gods of Marcion: the Maker, and the Place, and the Matter. Likewise he makes the Creator in a place, reckoning him certainly by the same condition; and assigns matter to him, certainly unborn and unmade, and on that account eternal, as to a Lord.

Moreover, also assigning evil to matter—unborn to the unborn, unmade to the unmade, and eternal to the eternal—he has now made a fourth god from this. You have therefore in the higher realm three substances of divinity, in the lower realm four. When to these are added also their own Christs—one who appeared under Tiberius, another who is promised by the Creator—Marcion now plainly suffers fraud at the hands of those who presume to introduce two gods into him, since he assigns nine, though unknowingly.

Since no other world appears, just as neither does its God, it follows that they divide two kinds of things—visible and invisible—between two author-gods, and defend the invisible things as belonging to their God. But who could bring himself to believe, unless it be a heretical spirit, that the invisible things belong to him who has put forward nothing visible, rather than to him who, having wrought visible things, has also established credibility for invisible ones—since it is far more reasonable to assent to some examples than to none? We shall also see to whom the Apostle assigns the invisible things, when we have examined him as well.

For now, by common sense for the most part and by just arguments, we are laying the groundwork of credibility for the subsequent advocacy of the Scriptures also, confirming that this distinction of visible and invisible things is to be attributed to the Creator, just as his entire operation consists of distinctions: of corporeal and incorporeal, of animate and inanimate, of vocal and mute, of mobile and stationary, of fertile and barren, of dry and moist, of hot and cold. So too diversity has tempered man himself, both in body and in mind. Some members are strong, others weak; some honorable, others dishonorable; some double, others single; some equal, others unequal. Likewise also in the mind: now joy, now anxiety; now love, now hatred; now anger, now gentleness.

But if it is so, that this whole universe has been ordered as mutually contrasting in its constitution, then already therefore the invisible things are owed to the visible, and are not to be attributed to another author than him to whom their counterparts also belong—the very things that mark the Creator as diverse, commanding what he has forbidden and forbidding what he has commanded, striking and healing. Why do they conceive him as uniform in this one category alone—of visible things only—when he is the author of both life and death, both evil and peace? And surely, if those invisible things are greater than the visible creatures which are great in their own place, it likewise befits that the greater things belong to him whose the great things also are; because neither great things, much less greater things, are fitting for him whose even small things are nowhere to be found.

Pressed by these arguments, they burst out saying: "It is enough—this one work of our God, that he has liberated man by his supreme and surpassing goodness, which is to be preferred above all locusts." O great God, whose so great a work could be found nowhere but in the man of the lesser god! Indeed, it is first necessary that you prove him to exist by those means by which a God ought to be proved: by works; and then afterwards by benefits. For first it is asked whether he exists; and then, what kind he is. The one is discerned from works, the other from benefits. Otherwise, it is not established that he exists merely because he is said to have liberated man; but if it is established that he exists, then he will also be said to have liberated; so that it may also be established whether he has liberated, because he could both exist and not have liberated.

How then, because he is said to have liberated, will he also be believed to exist, since he could both exist and not have liberated? Now at this point, having been drawn away from the question of the unknown God, it has been sufficiently established that he has founded nothing, just as he ought to have founded something, in order to be known from his works; because, if he had existed, he ought to have been known, and indeed from the beginning of things: for it would not have been fitting for God to have lain hidden. I must return to the origin of the question of the unknown God, in order to shake off its other branches as well. For it will first be necessary to ask why he who afterwards put himself forward into knowledge did so afterwards, and not from the beginning of things—to whom he was surely necessary, as God, and indeed the better the more necessary, and therefore ought not to have lain hidden.

For it cannot be said that there was neither matter nor cause for knowing God, since both man existed from the beginning in the world—to whom he now comes to the aid—and the malice of the Creator existed, against which, as a good God, he comes to the aid. Therefore he either did not know the cause and the matter of his necessary revelation, or he doubted, or he was unable, or he was unwilling. All these things are unworthy of God, most of all of the best God. But this point too we shall fill out elsewhere, with a reproach of his late revelation, as now only with a demonstration.

Let him have come forth into knowledge when he willed, when he was able, when the fated hour arrived. For perhaps the ascending node was obstructing him, or some malefic stars, or Saturn in square, or Mars in trine. For the Marcionites are also very much given to astrology, not even blushing at this—that they live even by the very stars of the Creator. We must treat here also of the quality of the revelation: whether he has been known in a worthy manner, so that it may be established whether he has been truly revealed, and thus whether he may be believed to exist, whom it has been established was revealed worthily. For things worthy of God will prove God. We define that God is first to be known by nature, and then to be recognized by teaching: by nature from his works, by teaching from his proclamations. But he who has no nature lacks the natural instruments.

Therefore he ought to have accomplished the revelation of himself at least by proclamations; especially since he was to be revealed against one who, by so many and so great works both of creation and of proclamation, had yet scarcely filled men with faith. How then was he revealed? If by human conjecture, deny that God can be known by any means other than through himself—appealing not only to the pattern of the Creator, but also to the condition both of divine greatness and of human mediocrity: lest man seem greater than God, who, by his own powers, has in some manner dragged into the public light of recognition one who did not of his own will wish to be known—since human mediocrity, according to the experience of every age, is more skilled at fashioning gods for itself than at following the true one whom they already understand by nature.

Otherwise, if man is to devise a god in this way—as Romulus devised Consus, and Tatius Cloacina, and Hostilius Pavor, and Metellus Alburnus, and someone before this time Antinous—this will be permitted to others: we know Marcion as a shipmaster, not a king, nor an emperor.

"Nay," say the Marcionites, "our God, though not from the beginning, though not through creation, has been revealed through himself in Christ Jesus." A book will also be devoted to Christ, concerning his entire state; for subjects must be distinguished, so that they may be treated more fully and in order. For the present stage it will be enough to meet the argument thus, so that I may show that Christ Jesus is the bearer of no other God than the Creator; and that briefly. In the fifteenth year of Tiberius, Christ Jesus deigned to descend from heaven, a saving spirit—Marcion's salvation, for those who so willed it—in what year of Antoninus the Elder the dog-star blast exhaled from his Pontus, I have not troubled to investigate. Of him, however, it is agreed that he is an Antonine heretic, impious under Pius. But from Tiberius to Antoninus there are approximately one hundred and fifteen and a half years, with half a month: they place the same span of time between Christ and Marcion.

Since therefore Marcion first introduced this god under Antoninus, as we have proved, straightway, if you are wise, the matter is plain. The dates prejudge the case: that what first came forth under Antoninus did not come forth under Tiberius; that is, that he was a god of the Antonine reign, not of the Tiberian; and thus that he was not revealed by Christ, but was first proclaimed by Marcion. To prove that this is established, I shall take what remains from the adversaries themselves. The separation of the Law and the Gospel is the proper and principal work of Marcion: nor will his disciples be able to deny it, since they have it in their chief document, by which they are in fact initiated and hardened in this heresy. For these are the Antitheses of Marcion, that is, the contrary oppositions; which endeavor to bring about a discord of the Gospel with the Law, so that from the diversity of the sentiments of the two testaments they may also argue a diversity of gods.

Therefore, since that separation of the Law and the Gospel is itself what has insinuated another God of the Gospel against the God of the Law, it is apparent that before that separation the God was not in knowledge who became known by the argument of the separation; and thus that he was not revealed by Christ, who existed before the separation, but was devised by Marcion, who instituted the separation against the peace of the Gospel and the Law—which peace, formerly uninjured and unshaken from the appearance of Christ up to the audacity of Marcion, was preserved by that reasoning which defended no other God of both the Law and the Gospel besides the Creator, against whom so long afterwards the separation was introduced by the man from Pontus.

Against this most straightforward proof a defense is also necessary on our part against the clamors of the opposing side. For they say that Marcion did not so much introduce a new rule by the separation of the Law and the Gospel as restore one that had been corrupted long before. O most patient Lord Christ! Who for so many intervening years endured the perversion of your preaching, until Marcion, of course, should come to your aid. For they also bring forward that even Peter himself and the others, the pillars of the Apostolate, were rebuked by Paul for not walking with a straight foot toward the truth of the Gospel—by that Paul, certainly, who was still a novice in grace, and indeed trembling lest he had run or was running in vain, and was then for the first time conferring with the apostles who had preceded him.

Therefore, if in his fervor, as still a new convert, he judged something in their conduct to be reprehensible with regard to Judaism—namely their passive table-fellowship—he himself being afterwards to become all things to all men by practice, in order to gain all, to the Jews as a Jew, and to those under the law as under the law—do you wish that rebuke, which concerned conduct alone and would later please his accuser, to be held suspect even of a transgression in preaching concerning God? And yet concerning the unity of preaching, as we read above, they had joined right hands, and by that very distribution of office had agreed upon a fellowship of the Gospel; as also elsewhere: Whether I, he says, or they, so we preach.

But also when he described certain false brethren who had crept in and wished to transfer the Galatians to another gospel, he himself shows that that adulteration of the Gospel had its intention not in transferring them to faith in another God and Christ, but in preserving the discipline of the Law—rebuking, that is, those who were vindicating circumcision and observing times and days and months and years of Jewish ceremonies, which they ought to have recognized as already excluded, according to the renewed dispensation of the Creator, who had long before proclaimed this very thing through his prophets, as through Isaiah: The old things have passed away, he says; behold the new things which I now do; and elsewhere: And I will establish a covenant, not such as I established with your fathers, when I led them out of the land of Egypt; and so also through Jeremiah: Renew for yourselves a new renewal, and be circumcised to your God, and circumcise the foreskins of your heart.

Therefore the Apostle, now putting a stop to this circumcision and this renewal, was also dissuading those ancient ceremonies, concerning which the same Founder of them was declaring through Hosea that they would one day cease: And I will turn away all her joys, and her feast days, and her new moons, and her sabbaths, and all her ceremonies. So also through Isaiah: Your new moons and sabbaths and great day I cannot endure: your festivals and fasts and feast days my soul hates. But if the Creator had long since rejected all these things, and the Apostle was now declaring them to be rejected, the very sentence of the Apostle, consonant with the decrees of the Creator, proves that no other God was proclaimed by the Apostle than he whose decrees he desired to be now recognized; marking as false both apostles and brethren in this cause, who were transferring the Gospel of Christ the Creator from the newness foretold by the Creator to the antiquity rejected by the Creator.

But if, as one proclaiming a new God, he wished to exclude the law of the old God, why does he prescribe nothing concerning the new god, but only concerning the old law, unless it was because, faith remaining in the Creator, only his law ought to cease? As that Psalm also had foretold: Let us break their bonds asunder from us, and cast away their yoke from us: from the time, that is, when the nations raged, and the peoples meditated vain things; the kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ. And certainly, if another god were being proclaimed by Paul, there would be no dispute about keeping the law or not, since it would plainly not pertain to the new lord and rival of the law. For the very newness and diversity of the god would have removed not only the question of the old and alien law, but every mention of it.

But the whole state of the question was this: that, while the same God and law were being proclaimed in Christ, derogation was being made from his law. Faith therefore stood always in the Creator and his Christ, but conduct and discipline wavered. For some disputed about eating things sacrificed to idols, others about the veiling of women, others about marriages or divorces, and some also about the hope of resurrection; about God, no one. For if this question too had been disputed, it would also be found in the Apostle, or how much more as the principal one. But if after the times of the apostles, truth suffered adultery regarding the rule of God, then the apostolic tradition suffered nothing in its own time regarding the rule of God, and no other tradition of the apostles is to be acknowledged than that which is today published among their own Churches. But you will find no Church of apostolic standing which does not hold Christianity in the Creator.

Or if those which were corrupted from the beginning will be the sound ones, which will be the uncorrupted? Doubtless the adversaries of the Creator. Show therefore some one of yours of apostolic sense, and you will have prevailed. Therefore, since it is established by every means that no other god than the Creator was in the rule of this sacrament from Christ until Marcion, our proof is now sufficiently fortified, by which we have shown that the knowledge of the heretic's god began from the separation of the Gospel and the Law, and the earlier definition is confirmed: that a god whom a man has composed out of his own notions is not to be believed, unless he has plainly used prophets, that is, not his own notions. But if Marcion can be said to have done so, it will also need to be proved. Nothing needed to be reconsidered, for by this wedge of truth every heresy is driven out, when Christ is shown to be the herald of no other god than the Creator.

But how shall Antichrist be utterly overthrown, unless opportunity be given for crushing his other assaults as well, the defense of prescriptions being relaxed? Let us therefore proceed from here to the very person of his God, or rather the shadow and phantom, according to his own Christ, and let him be examined by that through which he is preferred to the Creator. And certainly there will be fixed rules for examining the goodness of God. But first I must find it, and lay hold of it, and so bring it to the rules.

For when I survey the times, it is nowhere from the beginning of matter, and the entrance of causes, together with which it ought to have been found acting from that point what it was bound to act. For there was already both death, and the sting of death which is sin, and the very malice of the Creator; against which the goodness of another god ought to have come to the rescue, meeting this first rule of divine goodness, if it would prove itself natural, coming to the rescue at once, as soon as the cause began. For all things in God will need to be natural and innate, that they may be eternal, according to his own state, lest they be reckoned as adventitious and foreign, and thereby temporal and alien to eternity. So also a perennial and continuous goodness will be required in God, which, stored and ready in the treasury of natural properties, would precede its causes and occasions; and would take up each first one, not despise and abandon it, if it preceded.

Finally, here too I shall ask no less why his goodness did not operate from the beginning, than we asked of himself, why he was not revealed from the beginning? Why not? Since he would have had to be revealed through goodness, if he had existed. What God cannot do is not permitted to him, much less to exercise his natural properties: which, if they are restrained from running their course, will not be natural. For even idleness by its own nature knows itself not: hence it is reckoned, if it acts, if it will not seem to have been unwilling to exercise goodness even in the meantime in the name of nature. For nature cannot will against itself, which so directs itself that if it ceases, it is not. But goodness in the god of Marcion did at some time cease from its work. Therefore that goodness was not natural, which could at some time have ceased, which is not permitted to natural things.

And if it will not be natural, then neither is it to be believed eternal, nor equal to God, because not eternal, since not natural: which finally establishes no perpetuity of itself, either from the past or promises it for the future. For it was not from the beginning, and without doubt will not be at the end. For it can also not exist at some time, just as it did not exist at some time. Therefore, since it is established that the goodness of that God ceased at the beginning (for he did not liberate man from the beginning), and that it ceased by will rather than by weakness, now the will of suppressed goodness will be found to be the limit of malice. For what is so malicious as to be unwilling to benefit when you can? As to be tormented by the opportunity of doing good? As to allow injury? In short, the whole indictment of the Creator will be written back against him, who aided his cruelties by the delay of his own goodness.

For in whose hand it lies that something not happen, to him it is already charged when it does happen. In that manner man is condemned to death on account of the tasting of a single little tree, and thenceforth sins multiply with their punishments, and now all perish who know not a single tuft of paradise. And does some better God either not know this, or endure it? If, in order that he might be found better by this means, the more the Creator was held to be worse, he is sufficiently malicious even in that design, who both wished the Creator burdened with the deeds admitted under him, and kept the world in vexation. What will you judge of such a physician, who nourishes a disease by delay of remedy, and prolongs the danger by postponement of the cure, so that he may treat it more gloriously or more famously?

Such also is the verdict to be pronounced upon the god of Marcion: a permitter of evil, an abettor of injury, a pander of grace, a betrayer of benevolence, which he did not exhibit at once to its own cause—plainly, if naturally good, he would have exhibited it, and not by accession, if best by nature and not by training, if God from eternity and not from Tiberius; nay, which is truer, from Cerdo and Marcion. That god has now rendered service to Tiberius, so that under his reign divine goodness was dedicated upon earth.

I put forward another rule against him: just as all things in God ought to be natural, so also they ought to be rational. I demand a reason for his goodness, because nothing else may be held good which is not rationally good, much less that goodness itself be found irrational. An evil thing, to which some element of reason has been added, will more easily be held for good, than that a good thing deserted by reason should not be judged for evil. I deny the rationality of the goodness of the god of Marcion, first on this ground, that it proceeded to the salvation of a man who was another's. I know they will say: But this is the principal and perfect goodness, when it is poured out voluntarily and freely upon strangers without any debt of familiarity, according to which we are also commanded to love even our enemies, and on that account already strangers.

Since therefore he did not regard man from the beginning—man who was from the beginning a stranger—by ceasing he prejudged that he had nothing to do with a stranger. Moreover, the discipline of loving a stranger or enemy was preceded by the commandment of loving your neighbor as yourself. Which, even if it is from the law of the Creator, you too will need to receive it, as not destroyed by Christ but rather built up. For the more you are commanded to love your neighbor, you are commanded to love your enemy and stranger. It is an intensification of due goodness, a demand of undue goodness. But due goodness precedes undue goodness, as the principal, as the worthier, with its minister and companion, that is, the undue.

Since therefore the first reason of goodness is to be shown toward one's own by justice, and the second toward another's by the overflow of justice beyond that of the Scribes and Pharisees, what manner of thing is it that the second reason should be attributed to him who lacks the first? Who has no man of his own, and is thereby also of little account? Furthermore, how did that which was of little account, which had no one of its own, overflow toward another's? Show the principal reason, and then vindicate the consequent. No thing can be vindicated as rational without order, so far is it from reason itself losing order in anything. Let the reason of goodness now also begin from the second degree, that is toward a stranger, and not even that second degree will stand by reason, being destroyed in another way.

For even the second goodness toward a stranger will be held rational, if it operates without injury to him whose the matter is; whatever goodness justice as the first makes rational, so also in the principal degree it will be rational when it is shown toward one's own, if it be just. So also toward a stranger it can appear rational, if it be not unjust. But otherwise, what kind of goodness is that which consists through injustice, and indeed on behalf of a stranger? For perhaps injurious goodness might to some extent be held rational on behalf of one of the household: but on behalf of a stranger, to whom not even upright goodness would be legitimately owed, by what reason will so unjust a thing be defended as rational?

For what is more unjust, what more inequitable and dishonest, than to do good to another's slave in such a way that he is snatched from his master, claimed for another, suborned against his master's life, and indeed, the more outrageously, while still in his master's own house, still living from his own storehouses, still trembling under his own stripes? Such an assertor would even be condemned in the world, much less a kidnapper. Not otherwise does the god of Marcion break into another's world, snatching man from God, a son from his father, a ward from his guardian, a servant from his lord; to make him impious toward God, irreligious toward his father, ungrateful toward his guardian, worthless toward his lord. I ask you, if rational goodness makes such a man, what would irrational goodness make?

I think none more shameless than he who is baptized in another's water for another god, who stretches out his hands toward another's heaven for another god, who is laid prostrate on another's earth for another god, who gives thanks over another's bread for another god, who works from another's goods on account of another god in the name of almsgiving and love. Who is this god so good that man becomes evil through him? So propitious that he makes another god, and indeed his own lord, angry at him?

But God, as he is eternal and rational, so I think he is also perfect in all things: For ye shall be perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven. Show then his goodness to be perfect as well. Even if his imperfect goodness is sufficiently established—goodness which is found to be neither natural nor rational—it shall now be exposed on another count also: no longer merely imperfect, but even deficient, meagre and exhausted, inferior in number to its own materials, as it is shown to be in all things. For not all are saved, but fewer than all—fewer than both the Jews and the Christians of the Creator. Since the greater part perish, how is perfect goodness defended when it ceases to act for the majority?—something for a few, nothing for the many, yielding to perdition, a partner in destruction? But if the greater number shall not be saved, then what exists will no longer be goodness but rather a more perfect malice.

For just as the operation of goodness is that which saves, so the operation of malice is that which does not save. Moreover, that which does not save, while saving a few, will be more perfect in not helping than in helping. You will not be able to attribute goodness to the Creator either, along with failure toward all. For the judge you hold, you show to be understood perhaps as a dispenser of goodness, not a lavisher of it—which is what you claim for your god. To this extent alone do you prefer him to the Creator on the ground of this goodness; which, if he professes it alone and in its entirety, he ought to have left no one without it.

But I am unwilling now to argue the imperfection of Marcion's god's goodness from the greater part of those who perish: it is enough to show his goodness imperfect from the fact that those very ones whom he saves are found to have an imperfect salvation—saved, that is, only as far as the soul, but lost as to the flesh, which does not rise again with him. Whence comes this halving of salvation, if not from a deficiency of goodness? For what belongs so fully to perfect goodness as to bring the whole man into salvation—the whole man condemned by the Creator, the whole man drawn to the best God? As far as I know, the flesh is also baptized with him, and the flesh is taken away from marriage, and the flesh is tormented in the confession of his name.

But even if sins are charged to the flesh, the guilt of the soul comes first, and the primacy of fault is to be ascribed rather to the soul, to which the flesh is attached under the name of servant. For flesh without a soul sins only to that extent. So in this respect too his goodness is unjust, and thus also imperfect; abandoning to destruction the more innocent substance, which offends by compliance, not by choice—the substance whose very truth Christ, as your heresy has decided, did not put on, yet whose image he deigned to assume. The very fact that he counterfeited it meant he owed it something—owed it something. But what is man other than flesh? For indeed the name of man, as a material and bodily thing, not a spiritual one, received its designation from its author: And God made man, it says, of clay from the earth, not a soul; for the soul came from the breath: And man became a living soul. Who? Surely he who came from the clay.

And God placed man in paradise—what he had formed, not what he had breathed; he who is now flesh, not he who is soul. And so, if this is the case, with what face will you contend for the perfect title of goodness, which has now failed not merely in the particular division of the man to be freed, but in his general nature? If the grace is full and the mercy solid which is saving to the soul alone, then this present life, in which we enjoy ourselves whole and entire, provides more. Otherwise, to rise in part will be to be punished, not to be freed. It would also have belonged to perfect goodness that man, freed into faith in the best God, should immediately be removed from the dwelling-place and dominion of the cruel god.

But as it is, even now you suffer fever, O Marcionite, and the other thorns and thistles of pain in your flesh; and you are exposed not only to the thunderbolts, wars, pestilences, and other plagues of the Creator, but even to his scorpions; in which respect do you think yourself freed from the kingdom of him whose very flies still trample you? If you have been rescued from what is to come, why not also from what is present, so as to be perfectly freed? Our condition is different—with our author, with our judge, with the offended sovereign of our race. You merely prefer a good god. But you cannot show him to be perfectly good, from whom you are not perfectly freed.

With regard to the question of goodness, we have traced it along these lines: that it is in no way adequate to God, being neither innate, nor rational, nor perfect; but also dishonest, and unjust, and now unworthy even of the very name of goodness—because, to the extent that it befits God, to that same extent it is unfitting that he who is commended on the basis of such goodness should be God, and not merely on the basis of such a kind, but of it alone. For it is now fitting to examine this as well: whether God is to be judged by goodness alone, with all other appendages denied—the feelings and emotions which the Marcionites indeed drive away from their god onto the Creator, while we both acknowledge them in the Creator as worthy of God. And on this ground too we shall deny him to be God in whom all things that are worthy of God do not cohere.

If someone from the school of Epicurus has aspired to give the name of Christ to a God, so that what is blessed and incorruptible should cause trouble neither to itself nor to others—for it is this maxim that Marcion ruminates upon, having removed from him all severity and judicial powers—he ought either to have conceived of a God altogether immovable and inert; and what has such a one to do with Christ, who was troublesome to the Jews through his teaching, and to himself through his feeling? Or else he ought to have acknowledged in him the other emotions as well; and what has such a one to do with Epicurus, who is necessary neither to himself nor to Christians? For behold, by this very fact that he who was previously at rest, having perceived so great an age for man's salvation—surely through an act of will—was he not then shaken by a new will, so as to appear subject to other emotions as well?

But what will is there without the spur of desire? But care too will accompany the will. Who will desire what he does not long for? For who will desire something, and long for it, and not care for it? Therefore, since he both willed and longed for man's salvation, he has now made business for himself and for others—against Epicurus's wish, with Marcion as his counsellor. For he has also set up as his adversary that very thing against which he both willed and longed and cared—whether it be sin or death; and above all, the very arbiter of these things and lord of man, the Creator. Furthermore, nothing will run its course without rivalry that does not have an adversary. Finally, willing and longing and caring to free man, by this very fact he already rivals him from whom he frees; namely, he is about to free man against him; and from those things from which he frees, he is about to free into other things.

Accordingly, the officers of his rivalry must necessarily join in that rivalry in the things he rivals: anger, discord, hatred, disdain, indignation, bile, unwillingness, offense. All these, if they attend upon rivalry, and rivalry is engaged in freeing man, and the freeing of man is the operation of goodness, then that goodness will not be able to exist without its own endowments—that is, without the feelings and emotions through which it is administered against the Creator; lest in this way too it be condemned as irrational, if it lacks even the feelings and emotions proper to it. All this we shall defend much more fully in the cause of the Creator, in which these things are also brought as reproaches.

But here it is enough to show that god to be most perverse in the very proclamation of his solitary goodness, by which they refuse to ascribe to him those movements of soul which they reproach in the Creator. For if he neither rivals, nor is angry, nor condemns, nor vexes—inasmuch as he does not even act as judge—I do not see how the principle of his disciplines can hold together, and indeed in fuller measure. For what kind of thing is it to lay down precepts which he will not execute? To forbid sins which he will not avenge, because he will not judge?—being, of course, a stranger to all feelings of severity and punishment. For why does he forbid the commission of what he does not defend once committed?

When it would have been far more right not to have forbidden what he was not going to defend, than not to defend what he had forbidden; indeed, he ought directly to have permitted it, since he was going to forbid it to no purpose, as one who was not going to defend it. For that which is forbidden without punishment is in effect tacitly permitted. And surely he forbids nothing to be done except what he does not love to be done. Most foolish, therefore, is he who is not offended by the doing of what he does not love to be done, since offense is the companion of a frustrated will. Or if he is offended, he ought to be angry; if he is angry, he ought to take vengeance. For vengeance is the fruit of anger, and anger is the due of offense, and offense, as I said, is the companion of a frustrated will. But he does not take vengeance; therefore he is not offended either.

But he is not offended; therefore his will is not injured when what he willed not to be done is done: and the sin is now done according to his will, because it is not done against his will, since it does not injure his will. Or if it shall be the mark of divine power or goodness to be unwilling that something be done, and to forbid it to be done, yet not to be moved if it is done—we say that he who was unwilling was already moved; and it is vain for him not to be moved at the deed, who was moved at the not-doing, when he was unwilling that it be done: for by being unwilling he forbade it. Did he not also judge? By being unwilling that it be done, and therefore forbidding it, he judged it not to be done and pronounced it to be forbidden. Therefore he too already judges.

If it is unworthy of God to judge, or if it is worthy of God to judge only to the extent of being unwilling and forbidding—but not also of defending against what has been committed—yet nothing is so unworthy of God as not to execute what he was unwilling to have committed and forbade. First, because to any sentence and law of his, however qualified, he owes punishment for the sake of authority and the necessity of obedience. Second, because what he was unwilling to have committed, and forbade by willing, must necessarily be his rival. But for God to spare evil is more unworthy than to punish it—and especially for the best God, who is not otherwise fully good except as a rival of evil, so that he may exercise love of good through hatred of evil, and fulfil the protection of good through the defeat of evil.

But he plainly judges evil by being unwilling, and condemns by forbidding; yet he dismisses by not avenging, and acquits by not punishing. O God, transgressor of truth, circumscriber of his own sentence: he fears to condemn what he condemns, he fears to hate what he does not love, he permits to be done what he does not permit to be done, he prefers to show that he is unwilling rather than to prove it. This will be an imaginary goodness, a phantom of discipline; and the precepts themselves transitory, the sins secure: hear, O sinners, and you who are not yet such, so that you may become so: a better God has been found, who is neither offended, nor angry, nor takes vengeance, for whom no fire is heated in Gehenna, for whom no gnashing of teeth bristles in the outer darkness; he is only good, and accordingly forbids transgression, but in writing only.

It is in your power, if you will, to subscribe your obedience to him, so that you may appear to have shown honor to God: for he does not want fear. And indeed the Marcionites boast that they do not fear their God at all. But the evil one, they say, will be feared, while the good one will be loved. Foolishly: him whom you call Lord you deny to be feared, though this name belongs to power, which is also to be feared. But how will you love, unless you fear not to love? Surely he is not even your father, toward whom both love is fitting on account of piety, and fear on account of power? Nor a lawful master, that you should love him for his kindness and fear him for his discipline? Thus indeed kidnappers are loved, but not also feared. For none will be feared except a just and orderly dominion. But even an adulteress can be loved. For it rests on enticement, not authority; and on flattery, not power.

What indeed is more flattering than not to execute sins? Come then, you who do not fear God as good—why do you not boil over into every lust? The highest fruit of life, as I know, for all who do not fear God; why do you not frequent those so solemn pleasures of the raging circus, the savage arena, and the wanton stage? Why do you not also in persecutions, when the incense-box is at once offered, save your soul by denial? Far be it, you say, far be it. Therefore you already fear sin, and by fearing you have proved that he is to be feared who forbids sin. It is another matter if you observe the same perversity of your god, whom you do not fear, as he also forbids what he does not avenge. Far more vain still, when, being asked what will happen to each sinner on that day, they answer that he will be cast away as from before his eyes. Is not this also done by judgment?

For he is judged as one to be cast away, and surely by a judgment of condemnation—unless the sinner is cast away unto salvation, so that this too may befit the best God. And what will it be to be cast away, except to lose what he would have obtained had he not been cast away? That is, salvation. Therefore he will be cast away to the detriment of salvation: and this cannot be decreed except by one who is angry, and offended, and an executor of sin—that is, a judge.

But what end awaits that castaway? He will be seized by the fire, they say, of the Creator. Has he then no element at all, even one provided for this purpose, by which he might banish his own sinners without cruelty, so as not to hand them over to the Creator? And what then will the Creator do? I suppose he will prepare a more sulphurous Gehenna for them—for his blasphemers, of course—unless perhaps the jealous God may spare the deserters of his adversary. O God utterly perverse in every respect, irrational everywhere, vain in all things, and thus no one at all! Whose condition, whose state, whose nature, whose order of any kind I see to be consistent in nothing; and now not even the very sacrament of faith in him. For to what end is baptism also required among his followers? If it is the remission of sins, how will he appear to remit sins who will not appear to retain them? For he would retain them if he judged.

If it is release from death, how would he release from death who has not bound over to death? For he would have bound over, had he condemned from the beginning. If it is the regeneration of man, how does he regenerate who has not generated? For repetition does not belong to one by whom a thing has not even been done once. If it is the obtaining of the Holy Spirit, how will he bestow the spirit who has not first conferred the soul? For the soul is in some manner sufficient as a foundation for the spirit. He seals therefore a man never sealed by him; he washes a man never defiled by him; and in all this sacrament of salvation he plunges into the water flesh that has no share in salvation. Not even a rustic will water ground that will bear no fruit, unless he be as vain as the god of Marcion. Likewise, why does he lay so great a burden—or so great a glory—of holiness upon flesh most weak or most unworthy?

What shall I say moreover of the vanity of the discipline by which he sanctifies a substance already holy? Why does he either burden the weak or adorn the unworthy? Why does he not recompense with salvation that which he burdens or adorns? Why does he defraud the reward of the work, not repaying salvation to the flesh? Why does he suffer the honour of holiness to die in it?

Among his followers no flesh is baptised unless it be virgin, or widowed, or celibate, or having purchased baptism by divorce—as though it were not also born of wedlock even in the case of eunuchs. Without doubt this institution rests upon the condemnation of marriage. Let us see whether it is just: not as though we were about to destroy the blessedness of holiness, as certain Nicolaitans do, assertors of lust and licentiousness; but as those who know holiness without the condemnation of marriage, and both pursue it and prefer it—not as a good over against an evil, but as a better over against a good. For we do not cast away marriage, but lay it aside.

Marriage: nor do we prescribe holiness, but commend it; preserving both the good and the better, to be pursued according to each person's strength; then openly defending marriage when it is hostilely accused under the name of impurity, to the destruction of the Creator, who accordingly blessed marriage for the honourableness of the thing, for the increase of the human race, just as he also blessed the whole of creation for wholesome and good uses. Foods, however, will not on that account be condemned, because when sought out with excessive elaboration they lead into gluttony; nor will clothing on that account be accused, because when procured at too great a price it swells into ambition. So neither will the matter of matrimony on that account be despised, because when spread with too little restraint it blazes into licentiousness. There is a great difference between a cause and a fault, between a state and an excess.

Thus in such matters it is not the institution but the deviation that is to be reprobated, according to the judgment of the institutor himself; whose word it is both, Increase and multiply, and also, Thou shalt not commit adultery, and, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife: who punishes with death both the incestuous, the sacrilegious, and the monstrous madness of lusts toward males and toward beasts. But even if the impulse to marry is now being restrained—which indeed among us a spiritual principle, under the authority of the Paraclete, defends, prescribing one marriage in the faith—it will belong to the same one to set a limit who once had spread the limit abroad: he will gather who scattered; he will cut down the forest who planted it; he will reap the harvest who sowed it; he will say, It remaineth that they also who have wives be as though they had none, whose word it was also aforetime, Increase and multiply: the end belongs to the same one as the beginning.

Not however as though the forest were cut down as something to be accused, nor as though the harvest were reaped as something to be condemned, but as yielding to its own season. So also the matter of wedlock admits the axe and sickle of holiness not as something evil, but as something ripe to be done with, as something reserved for holiness itself, to which by being cut it renders even its existence. Whence I shall now say that the god of Marcion, when he reprobates marriage as an evil and a business of impurity, acts against holiness itself, which he seems to promote: for he destroys the material of it; because if there are no marriages, there is no holiness. For the testimony of abstinence is void when the liberty is taken away; since certain things are thus proved in their contraries. Just as virtue is perfected in weakness, so also abstinence from marrying is discerned in the faculty of marrying.

Who in the end will be called abstinent, when that from which one must abstain has been removed? What temperance of appetite in famine? What renunciation of ambition in poverty? What restraint of lust in castration? Moreover, to suppress entirely the sowing of the human race—I know not whether this too befits the supremely good God. For how will he wish man to be saved, when he forbids him to be born, by taking away that from which he is born? How will he have one in whom to set his seal of goodness, when he does not permit him to exist? How does he love one whose origin he does not love? He fears perhaps an abundance of offspring, lest he labour to liberate more, lest he make many heretics, lest he have Marcionites of nobler birth from Marcionites. The harshness of Pharaoh, slayer of the newborn, will not be more monstrous. For Pharaoh takes away souls, this one does not give them; Pharaoh removes from life, this one does not admit into life.

In neither case does anything differ as regards homicide: under both, man is killed; under the one, already born; under the other, about to be born. You would be grateful, O heretical god, if you were in the arrangement of the Creator, who mingled male and female: for indeed your own Marcion too was born of marriage. Enough of this concerning the god of Marcion, whom both the unique definitions of divinity and the conditions of his states confirm to be altogether nothing. But also the whole course of this little work tends to this conclusion. Therefore, if we seem to anyone to have accomplished too little, let him hope that it is reserved for its own time, as also the examination of the very Scriptures which Marcion uses.

The occasion of revising this little work—what befell its first booklet we have stated in the preface—has also afforded us this benefit, that in treating of two gods against Marcion, we should distinguish for each its own title and volume according to the division of the subject matter, defining the one god to be altogether non-existent, and defending the other as being worthily God: inasmuch as it pleased the Pontic to introduce the one and exclude the other. For he could not build a lie without demolishing the truth. He was compelled to undermine one thing in order to construct what he wished. Thus builds one who lacks materials of his own.

He ought however to have disputed on this point alone, that that god who is superimposed upon the Creator is no god at all; so that with the false god expelled, and the rules of divinity being certain and unique and perfect in the present, nothing further would be sought concerning the true God: whom, inasmuch as it is established that he exists, so also while it is not established that another exists, one ought by so much the more to hold without controversy, whatever his character, as one to be adored rather than judged; and to be propitiated rather than scrutinised, or even feared on account of his severity.

For what more is necessary for man than devotion toward the true God, upon whom, so to speak, he had stumbled, because there was no other God.

But now God almighty, Lord and Maker of the universe, is put on trial; for this reason alone, I suppose, because he has been known from the beginning, because he has never been hidden, because he has always shone forth, even before Romulus himself, let alone before Tiberius: except that he is unknown only to heretics, who put him on trial; for this reason supposing that another God must be assumed, because the one whose existence is established they are better able to censure than to deny, weighing God according to the judgment of their own sense: just as if a blind man, or one with wandering eyes, should therefore wish to assume another sun, milder and more wholesome, because the one he sees he does not see. There is one sun, O man, which governs this world; and when you do not think it, it is most good and useful; and when it is to you more harsh and hostile, or even more foul and corrupt, it is nevertheless equal to its own purpose.

If you are unable to perceive that purpose, you would not have been able to endure the rays of any other sun either, if there had been one—certainly of a greater one. For if you are blind to an inferior god, what will you do before a loftier one? Nay rather, spare your own weakness, and do not stretch yourself into danger, having a God certain and undoubted, and for this very reason sufficiently seen, when you have first discerned this much—that he is one whom you can know only in the measure in which he himself has willed. But God indeed you do not deny as one who knows him; as one who does not know him you scrutinise him; nay, you even accuse him as one who knows him; whom if you truly knew, you would not accuse, nay, you would not even scrutinise.

Granting him the name, you deny the substance of the name, that is, the greatness by which he is called God, not acknowledging it to be so great as it would not be greatness if man could know it in every respect. Isaiah, already then an apostle, foreseeing heretical hearts, says: Who hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been his counsellor?

Or with whom did he take counsel? Or who showed him the way of understanding and knowledge? With whom also the Apostle agrees: O the depth of the riches and wisdom of God! How unsearchable are his judgments—of God the judge, of course—and how unsearchable are his ways!—of understanding and knowledge, of course, which no one showed him—unless perhaps those censors of divinity, saying: Thus God ought not to have done; and thus he ought rather to have done: as though anyone knew the things that are in God, save the Spirit of God. But having the spirit of the world, not knowing God through wisdom in the wisdom of God, they seem wiser to themselves than God. For as the wisdom of the world is foolishness with God, so also the wisdom of God is foolishness with the world. But we know that the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

And so God is then most great when he is small to man; and then most good when he is not good to man; and then most truly one when to man he seems two or more. But if from the beginning the natural man, not receiving the things that are of the Spirit, counted the law of God foolishness, as one which he neglected to observe: and therefore, not having faith, even that which he seemed to have was taken away from him—the grace of paradise and the intimacy of God, through which he would have known all things of God, had he obeyed—what wonder if, given back to his own material and relegated to the prison-house of the earth to be tilled, in that very labour bent and bowed down to the earth, he transmitted to his whole race the spirit of the world usurped from it—to the natural and heretical race, of course, not receiving the things that are of God?

Or who will hesitate to pronounce that very sin of Adam heresy, which he committed by choosing his own judgment rather than the divine? Except that Adam never said to his Maker: "Thou hast not defined me wisely." He confessed the seduction; he did not conceal the seductress: he was a very rudimentary heretic. He did not obey; yet he did not blaspheme the Creator, nor censure the Author, whom from the beginning of his existence he had found good and most good, and whom he himself had perhaps made a judge from the beginning.

Therefore, those entering upon an examination of the known God ought, if it is asked in what condition He is known, to begin from His works which are prior to man, so that His goodness, discovered at once together with man himself, and thenceforth established and prescribed, may suggest to us some sense of understanding how the subsequent ordering of things came to pass. Moreover, the disciples of Marcion, recognizing the goodness of our God, may also acknowledge it as worthy of God by the same titles by which we show it to be unworthy in their god. For this very thing—that which is the material of His own recognition—He found not in another, but made it for Himself out of His own. The first goodness of the Creator, then, was this: that God willed not to lie hidden in eternity, that is, not to be without something to which God might be known. For what is so good as the knowledge and enjoyment of God?

For even though it did not yet appear that this was good, because there was not yet anything to which it might appear, yet God foreknew what good would appear; and therefore He committed it to His own supreme goodness, as the agent of the good that was to appear—not something sudden, nor of an accidental goodness, nor of a provoked impulse, as though it were to be reckoned from the point at which it began to operate. For if goodness itself established a beginning, from the point at which it began to operate, it did not itself have a beginning when it acted. But once a beginning was made, the reckoning of times was also born from it, inasmuch as stars and heavenly luminaries were set in order for distinguishing and marking those times: For they shall be, He says, for seasons, and months, and years. Therefore that which made time had no time before time; just as it had no beginning before beginning, which established beginning.

And so, lacking both the order of a beginning and the measure of time, it shall be reckoned as belonging to an immense and indeterminate age, and cannot be counted as sudden or accidental or provoked, having nothing by which it might be so reckoned, that is, no form of time; but it must be presumed eternal, and innate to God, and perpetual, and thereby worthy of God—already from this point overwhelming the goodness of Marcion's god, not merely in respect of beginnings and times, but as posterior even to the very wickedness of the Creator, if indeed wickedness could be committed by goodness.

Therefore, when the goodness of God had provided for man in the knowing of God Himself, it also added this to its own proclamation: that it first devised a dwelling for man—some great mass first, then a greater still—so that in the great it might rehearse and perfect itself as in the lesser; and so man might be advanced from the good of God, that is, from the great, to His best, that is, to a greater habitation. To the good work it also applies the best minister, His own Word: My heart, He says, has uttered a good Word. Let Marcion recognize here first the best fruit—of the best tree, certainly: a most unskilled husbandman indeed has grafted a good branch into a bad tree; but the shoot of his blasphemy shall not prevail, it shall wither together with its craftsman, and so the nature of the good tree shall bear witness to itself.

Look to the sum of what the Word has brought forth: And God said: Let it be made; and it was made, and God saw that it was good—not as though He did not know the good unless He saw it, but because it was good, He therefore looked upon it, honoring and sealing and approving the goodness of His works by the dignity of His gaze. So also He blessed what He made well, that the whole God might be commended to you—good both in speaking and in doing. The Word did not yet know how to curse, because it did not yet know how to do evil. We shall see the causes which demanded this also from God. Meanwhile the world was constituted of all good things, sufficiently foreshadowing how much good was being prepared for him for whom all this was being prepared. Who indeed is worthy to inhabit the works of God, but His own image and likeness?

This also goodness wrought—and with greater effort—not by an imperial word, but by a familiar hand, with even a gracious word sent before: Let us make man in our image and likeness. Goodness spoke, goodness poured forth man from clay, into so great a substance of flesh built up from one material with so many qualities. Goodness breathed in a soul not dead but living. Goodness set him over all things to enjoy and to rule, and even to name them. Goodness added further delights for man, so that, though possessing the whole world, he might dwell in more pleasant places, translated into paradise—even then from the world into the Church. The same goodness also provided a helper, lest anything should be lacking of good: For it is not good, He says, for man to be alone. He knew that the female sex would be of benefit to him through Mary, and thereafter through the Church.

But also the law which you censure, which you twist into controversies, goodness dispensed, consulting man's interest that he might cleave to God, lest he seem not so much free as abandoned, made equal to His other servants the animals, loosed from God and free through disdain; but that man alone might glory, because he alone had been deemed worthy to receive a law from God, and that a rational animal, capable of understanding and knowledge, might also be contained by rational freedom itself, subject to Him who had subjected all things to him. The counsel for observing this law, goodness likewise appended: But on the day you eat thereof, you shall die the death. For most graciously He pointed out the consequence of transgression, lest ignorance of the danger should aid negligence of obedience. Furthermore, if the reason for imposing the law came first, the reason for observing it followed also, so that punishment was attached to transgression—which, however, He who foretold it beforehand did not wish to come to pass.

Acknowledge therefore the goodness of our God, at least thus far, from His good works, from His good blessings, from His indulgences, from His providences, from His good and gracious laws and forewarnings.

Now from this point to all the questions. O dogs, whom the Apostle drives out of doors, barking at the God of truth! These are the bones of argumentation which you gnaw. If God is good and foreknowing of the future and able to avert evil, why did He suffer man—and indeed His own image and likeness, nay even His own substance, reckoned by the soul's account—to slip from obedience to the law into death, circumvented by the devil? For if He is both good, in that He would not wish such a thing to happen, and foreknowing, in that He would not be ignorant of what was to happen, and powerful, in that He would be able to drive it away, in no way would that have happened which under these three conditions of divine majesty could not happen.

But if it did happen, it is settled by the contrary that God is to be believed neither good, nor foreknowing, nor powerful: inasmuch as, to the degree that nothing such would have happened if God were such—that is, good and foreknowing and powerful—to that same degree it did happen because God is not such. To this I reply: it is first necessary to defend those attributes in the Creator which are called into doubt—I mean goodness, and foreknowledge, and power. And I shall not linger on this point, since even Christ's own definition leads the way: proofs are to be entered upon from works. The works of the Creator bear witness to both His goodness, in that they are good, as we have shown; and His power, in that they are so great; and indeed from nothing. For even if from some matter, as some will have it, yet from nothing in this very respect, in that they were not what they are.

Finally, great at least in this, that they are good; and God powerful in this, that all things are His—whence also He is almighty. As for foreknowledge, what shall I say? It has as many witnesses as He made prophets. Although what title of foreknowledge belongs to the Author of all things, by which He foreknew all things in ordering them, and ordered them in foreknowing them—certainly the transgression itself, which, had He not foreknown it, He would not have attached its warning under threat of death. If therefore these faculties were in God, under which nothing evil could or should have happened to man, and yet it happened nonetheless, let us also look at the condition of man, lest it happened rather through that condition than through God, through whom it could not have happened. I find man instituted by God as free and of his own will and his own power, observing no image and likeness of God in him more than this form of his state.

For he was not expressed after the uniform God by face and bodily features, so various in the human race; but in that substance which he drew from God Himself—that is, the soul, answering to the form of God—he was marked by the freedom and power of his own will. This his state was also confirmed by the law itself, then laid down by God. For a law would not be laid down for one who did not have in his own power the obedience owed to the law; nor again would the threat of death be attached to transgression, if contempt of the law were not also reckoned to man as belonging to the freedom of his will. So also in the later laws of the Creator you may find Him setting before man good and evil, life and death: and otherwise the whole order of discipline arranged through precepts, with God calling away and threatening and exhorting, only because man was free and voluntary both for obedience and for contempt.

But since from this we are already understood to be building up the free power of man's own will, so that what befalls him ought to be charged not to God but to himself; lest you too should now object from this point that he ought not to have been so constituted if the freedom and power of will was going to prove destructive—this also I will first defend, that he ought to have been so constituted, in order the more forcefully to commend both that he was so constituted, and that he was constituted worthily of God, by showing the superior cause which brought about such a constitution. The goodness of God and his reason will be patrons of this institution also, conspiring together in all things with our God. For neither is reason without goodness truly reason, nor is goodness without reason truly goodness—unless perhaps with the god of Marcion, goodness is irrational, as we have shown. It was fitting that God should be known: this is surely both good and rational.

It was fitting that there should be something worthy to know God: what could be looked upon as so worthy as the image and likeness of God? This too is good, without doubt, and rational. It was fitting, therefore, that the image and likeness of God should be constituted with free will and its own power, in which this very thing—image and likeness of God—should be reckoned, namely the freedom and power of will: for which purpose that substance was fitted to man which was suited to this condition, the breath of God, which is assuredly free and its own master. But also, in other respects, what kind of thing would it have been that man, possessing the whole world, should not reign first of all in possession of his own soul—lord of others, yet slave of himself? You have therefore both the goodness of God to acknowledge from the dignity of the gift, and the reason from the arrangement.

Let goodness alone now be reckoned, which bestowed so great a thing upon man, that is, freedom of will. Let reason defend something else for itself in such an institution. For God alone is good by nature. For he who has what he has without beginning does not have it by institution but by nature. Man, however, who is wholly from institution, having a beginning, received together with his beginning the form in which he was to be: and so he was not disposed toward good by nature, but by institution; not having goodness as his own, because he was not disposed toward good by nature but by institution, according to the institutor who is good, namely the founder of good things.

In order, therefore, that man might now have his own good, emancipated to him by God, and that the property of good in man might become, as it were, his nature, there was assigned to him by institution, as a kind of holder of the scales of the good emancipated from God, freedom and power of will, which would cause good to be rendered by man as his own, now spontaneously; since reason of goodness also requires this, that it be exercised voluntarily—from freedom of will, that is, not favouring the institution under compulsion, not serving it as a slave: so that man might at last stand firm as good, if, while acting according to institution, he were found good now from his own will, as though from the property of his nature: and likewise that against evil (for God foresaw that also) man might stand the stronger, being free and his own master: because, if he lacked this right, so that he would pursue good not by will but by necessity, he would also be liable to be seized by evil through the weakness of servitude, a slave to evil just as to good.

The whole freedom of will was therefore granted to him in both directions, so that, as his own master, he might steadfastly meet both good by voluntarily keeping it, and evil by voluntarily avoiding it: since also, man being placed under the judgment of God, it was fitting that that judgment should be made just from the merits of his own will, which is free. Otherwise, neither the reward of good nor of evil could justly be weighed out to one who had been found good or evil by necessity, not by will. For this purpose also the law was established, not excluding but proving freedom by the obedience voluntarily rendered, or the transgression voluntarily committed; thus freedom of will lay open to either outcome.

Therefore, if both the goodness and the reason of God are found in the freedom of will granted to man, one ought not, setting aside the primary definition of goodness and reason which must be established before all discussion, to prejudge after the facts that God ought not to have so constituted things because the outcome was other than befitted God; but, having considered that he ought to have so constituted things, and keeping safe what has been considered, to examine the rest. Otherwise it is easy, stumbling at once upon the ruin of man before examining his condition, to refer what happened to the author, because the reason of the author has not been examined. Finally, the goodness of God, perceived from the beginning of his works, will persuade us that nothing evil could have come from God, and the freedom of man, when recognized, will show itself rather as the guilty party, for what it itself committed.

By this definition all things are preserved safe for God: both the nature of his goodness, and the reason of his arrangement, and the abundance of his foreknowledge and power. Yet you ought to require of God the utmost gravity and the most excellent faithfulness in every institution of his, so that you may cease to ask whether anything could have come to pass against God's will. For holding fast to the gravity and faithfulness of the good God, yet to be vindicated in his rational institutions, you will not marvel at this either, that God did not intervene against those things which he did not will to happen, in order to preserve those things which he did will.

For if he had once granted to man freedom and power of will, and had granted them worthily, as we have shown, and had granted them to be enjoyed by the very authority of the institution; to be enjoyed, however, so far as in himself, according to himself, that is according to God, that is unto good—for who will permit anything against himself?—but so far as in man, according to the movements of his own freedom—for who does not grant this to one to whom he once grants the enjoyment of something, that he enjoy it according to his own mind and will?—it followed therefore that God should withdraw from the freedom once granted to man, that is, should restrain within himself both his foreknowledge and his supreme power, by which he could have intervened, lest man, having set about making ill use of his freedom, should slip into danger. For if he had intervened, he would have rescinded the freedom of will which he had granted with reason and goodness.

Finally, suppose he had intervened, suppose he had rescinded the freedom of will by calling him back from the tree, by keeping the very serpent the deceiver away from his encounter with the woman—would not Marcion cry out: O what a futile, unstable, faithless lord, rescinding what he instituted! Why had he permitted free will, if he intervenes? Why does he intervene, if he permitted it? Let him choose where he would note himself in error, in the institution or in the rescission. Would he not then seem all the more deceived through ignorance of the future, by having intervened? And who would not say that he had indulged something as though ignorant of how it would turn out? But even if he had foreknown that man would make ill use of his institution, what is so worthy of God as gravity, as faithfulness to his institutions of whatever kind?

Man should have seen to it if he had not rightly settled the account of what he had rightly received; so that he himself should have been liable to the law which he had refused to obey, not that the lawgiver himself should have made a fraud of his own law by not allowing its prescription to be fulfilled. These things you would most worthily have urged against the Creator, had he by his providence and power—which you demand—intervened against the free will of man; now whisper in his favour, as Creator, both gravity and patience and faithfulness, having fulfilled his institutions as both rational and good.

For he had not brought man forth merely to live, but also to live rightly, with regard, that is, to God and his law. Therefore, to live he had himself bestowed upon him, by making him into a living soul; but to live rightly he had enjoined upon him, by admonishing him to obedience to the law. Thus he proves that man was not constituted unto death, who now desires him to be restored unto life, preferring the repentance of a sinner to his death. Therefore, as God brought upon man the condition of life, so man drew upon himself the condition of death: and this not through weakness, nor likewise through ignorance, lest anything should be imputed to the author. For even if it was an angel who seduced, yet he who was seduced was free and his own master; he was the image and likeness of God, stronger than an angel; he was the breath of God, more noble than the material spirit of which the angels were constituted.

He who makes, it says, his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire. For neither would he have subjected the whole universe to man as one too weak to rule, and not superior to the angels, to whom he subjected nothing of the kind; nor would he have laid upon him the burden of the law, if the law were too heavy for one unable to bear it; nor would he have charged with the sentence of death one whom he knew to be excusable on the ground of weakness; finally, he would not have made him weak by freedom and power of will, but rather by the lack of them. And indeed the same man, the same substance of soul, the same condition of Adam, the same freedom and power of will, makes him a conqueror today over the same devil, when it is exercised in obedience to his laws.

In whatever manner, you say, the substance of the Creator is found capable of sin, since the breath of God, that is, the soul, sinned in man. And the corruption of the portion cannot but be referred back to the original sum. For this purpose the nature of the soul must be interpreted. First of all, it must be held fast what the Greek Scripture has marked, calling it breath, not spirit. For certain persons translating from the Greek, not having reconsidered the difference, nor having taken care of the proper meaning of the words, put spirit in place of breath, and give heretics occasion for staining the spirit of God with sin, that is, God himself; and the question has already been usurped. Understand therefore that breath is less than spirit, even if it arises from spirit, as a breeze from it, yet the breeze is not the spirit. For even a breeze is rarer than wind, even if the breeze is from the wind, yet the breeze is not the wind.

One may also take the image of spirit to mean breath. For man is therefore the image of God, that is, of spirit: for God is spirit. The image therefore of spirit is breath. Moreover, an image will not in every respect be equal to the truth. For it is one thing to be according to the truth, another to be the truth itself. So also breath, since it is the image of spirit, cannot so compare the image of God, that because the truth, that is, the spirit, that is, God, is without sin, therefore also the breath, that is, the image, ought not to have admitted sin.

In this the image will be less than the truth, and the breath inferior to the spirit, possessing indeed those lineaments of God whereby the soul is immortal, whereby it is free and of its own will, whereby it is often foreknowing, whereby it is rational, capable of understanding and knowledge: yet even in these things an image, and not reaching to the very power of divinity; so neither reaching to freedom from sin; because this belongs to God alone, that is, to the truth; and this alone is not permitted to the image. For just as an image, though it expresses all the lineaments of the truth, yet lacks the very power, having no motion; so also the soul, the image of the spirit, was unable to express its one power alone, that is, the happiness of not sinning. Otherwise it would not be a soul, but a spirit; nor would man, who has received a soul, be man, but God.

And besides, not everything that belongs to God will be held to be God: so that you should demand that God and the breath, that is, freedom from sin, be the same, because the breath is of God. For neither, if you blow into a flute, have you made the flute a man, although you have blown from your own soul, just as God also from his spirit. Finally, since Scripture plainly says that God breathed into the face of man, and man became a living soul, not a life-giving spirit, it has separated the soul from the condition of its maker. For the work must necessarily be other than the craftsman, that is, inferior to the craftsman. For neither does a jar made by a potter become the potter himself; so neither does breath made by a spirit therefore become spirit. The very thing that is soul was called breath. See also whether through the condition of being breathed it may have passed into some more diminished quality.

Therefore, you say, you have granted to the soul the weakness previously denied. Plainly, when you demand that it be equal to God, that is, immune from sin, I call it weak. But when it is compared to an angel, I must defend as stronger the lord of the universe; to whom angels already minister: who is also to judge angels, if he shall have stood firm in the law of God, which in the beginning he was unwilling to do. This very thing therefore the breath of God was able to admit. It was able, but it ought not. For it had the ability, through the slenderness of its substance, whereby it is breath, not spirit: but it ought not, through the power of free will, whereby it is free, not a slave; with the further demonstration of not sinning reinforced by the threat of death, whereby the slenderness of substance would be undergirded, and the freedom of judgment governed.

And so the soul cannot now be seen to have sinned through that which it has in common with God, through the breath: but through that which accrued to its substance, that is, through free will; rationally granted indeed by God; but exercised by man as he willed. If things are so, then every disposition of God is cleared of the charge of evil. For the freedom of free will will not cast its fault back upon him by whom it was given, but upon him by whom it was not administered as it ought to have been. What evil in the end will you ascribe to the Creator? If the sin is man's, it will not be God's, which is man's: nor is he to be held the author of the sin who is found to be its forbidder, nay even its condemner. If death is an evil, not even death will bring reproach upon its threatener, but upon its despiser, as upon its author.

For by despising it he brought it about; it would certainly not have come to pass, had he not despised it.

But even if you transfer the charge of evil from man to the devil, as the instigator of sin; so as in this way also to direct the blame upon the Creator, as the author of the devil, who makes his angels spirits: therefore what was made by God, that is, the angel, will belong to him who made it; but what was not made by God, that is, the devil, that is, the accuser, it remains that he made himself, by informing against God; and indeed falsely: first, that God had forbidden them to eat of every tree; then, as though they would not die if they ate; thirdly, as though God had envied them divinity. Whence therefore the malice of lying and deceit toward men, and of slander toward God? Not from God certainly, who also established the angel good by the form of good works. Finally he is brought forth as the wisest of all, before he became a devil; unless wisdom is evil.

And if you unroll the prophecy of Ezekiel, you will easily perceive that angel to have been as good by institution as he was corrupted by his own will. For in the person of the prince of Tyre, it is pronounced against the devil: And the word of the Lord came to me, saying: Son of man, take up a lamentation over the prince of Tyre; and say to him: Thus says the Lord: You are the seal of the likeness (who, that is, have unsealed the integrity of the image and likeness), full of wisdom, a crown of beauty (this as to the most eminent of angels, as archangel, as the wisest of all), in the delights of the paradise of your God you were born (for there where God in the second formation of living creatures had made the angels). You were clothed with every precious stone; sardius, topaz, emerald, carbuncle, sapphire, jasper, lyncurium, agate, amethyst, chrysolite, beryl, onyx; and you filled your storehouses with gold, and your treasuries.

From the day you were created, I placed you with the Cherub on the holy mountain of God; you were in the midst of the stones of fire; you were blameless in your days, from the day you were created, until iniquities were found in you. From the multitude of your trading you filled your storehouses, and you sinned: and so forth. That these things pertain to the reproach of the angel, and not properly to that prince, is manifest from the fact that no man was born in the paradise of God; not even Adam himself, who was rather translated there: nor was he placed with the Cherub on the holy mountain of God, that is, in the height of heaven, from which the Lord also testifies that Satan fell; nor did he dwell among the stones of fire, among the gem-like rays of the burning stars, from which also Satan was cast down as lightning.

But the very author of sin was being marked out in the person of the sinful man; formerly indeed blameless from the day of his creation, created good by God, as by a good creator of blameless creations, and adorned with all angelic glory, and established with God, as one good with the Good: but afterwards transferred by himself into evil. For from the time, he says, your iniquities appeared: reckoning those to him, by which, that is, he injured man cast out from the service of God: and from that time he sinned, from the time he sowed sin; and so from that point he exercised the multitude of his trading, that is, of his malice; of sins and schemes, he too being established with no less free will, as a spirit. For God would not have ordered anything close to himself without freedom of this kind.

Yet by predamning him he testified that he had strayed from the form of his institution into malice conceived of his own lust; and by measuring out scope for his operations, he acted in accordance with the reason of his goodness; by the same design also man, with the same freedom of will, might crush the enemy by that whereby he had been cut down; proving his own fault, not God's; and so might worthily recover salvation through victory, and the devil might be more bitterly punished by him whom he had crushed, having been defeated; and God might be found so much the more good, sustaining man more glorious to return to paradise, to the liberty of plucking the tree of life, now returning from death to life.

Therefore up to the sin of man, God from the beginning was only good, and from that point a judge, and severe, and what the Marcionites would have, cruel. Straightway the woman is condemned to bear children in pain, and to serve her husband: she who before without any sorrow through the blessing heard for the increase of the race, only Increase and multiply: she who had been destined as a helper to the male, not as a servant. Straightway also the earth is cursed; but before it was blessed. Straightway thorns and thistles; but before grass, and herbs, and the fruit of trees. Straightway sweat and the labor of bread; but before free sustenance from every tree, and secure nourishment. Thenceforth man to the earth, but before from the earth. Thenceforth to death, but before to life. Thenceforth in garments of skin, but before naked without scruple. Thus the prior goodness of God, according to nature; the subsequent severity, according to cause.

The former innate, the latter accidental: the former proper, the latter adapted: the former put forth, the latter applied. For neither ought nature to have kept goodness inoperative, nor ought cause to have let severity escape dissembled. The one God rendered to himself, the other to the matter. Begin now also to charge the state of a judge as akin to evil, you who have dreamed up another God as solely good, because you cannot accept a judge: although we have shown even him to be a judge. Or if not a judge, certainly perverse and vain, the establisher of a discipline not to be vindicated, that is, not to be judged. But do you not disapprove of God as judge, you who do not approve God as judge? You will doubtless have to accuse justice itself, which makes a judge, or also to reckon it among the kinds of malice, that is, to ascribe injustice to the titles of goodness. For now justice is evil, if injustice is good.

But since you are compelled to pronounce injustice among the worst things, by the same yoke you are pressed to judge justice among the best. For nothing that is the rival of evil is not good, just as nothing that is the rival of good is not evil. Therefore by as much as injustice is evil, by so much is justice good. And it is to be reckoned not only a kind, but a guardian of goodness; because goodness, unless it be governed by justice, so as to be just, will not be goodness, if it be unjust. For nothing is good that is unjust; but everything is good that is just.

Thus if the fellowship and concord of goodness and justice cannot admit their separation, with what mouth will you establish the diversity of two gods in separation, assigning separately a good god, and separately a just god? There goodness abides, where justice also abides. From the beginning therefore the Creator, as good as he was just, proceeded equally as both. His goodness wrought the world, his justice ordered it, which even then judged the world to be made from good things, because it judged with the counsel of goodness. It is the work of justice that a separation was pronounced between light and darkness, between day and night, between heaven and earth, between the upper and lower water, between the surge of the sea and the mass of the dry land, between the greater and lesser luminaries, those of day and those of night, between male and female; between the tree of the knowledge of death and of life, between the world and paradise, between the creatures of the water and those of the earth.

All things as goodness conceived, so justice distinguished. All this was disposed and ordered by judgment. Every position, condition of the elements, effect, motion, state, rising, setting of each individual thing, are judgments of the Creator; lest you think him to be defined as judge only from the point at which evil began, and so obscure justice with the cause of evil. For by these means we have shown him to have come forth together with goodness, the originator of all things, so that even goodness itself is to be reckoned innate to God and natural, and not adventitious, which is found in the Lord as the arbiter of his works.

But when evil afterwards broke out, and from that point the goodness of God began to contend with the adversary, that same justice of God also acquired another task—now directing goodness in opposition to evil—so that, setting aside the freedom by which God of his own accord is reckoned good according to each person's deserts, goodness is offered to the worthy, denied to the unworthy, taken away from the ungrateful, and likewise vindicated against all who are hostile to it. Thus the entire work of justice is the administration of goodness: in that it condemns by judging, punishes by condemning, and—as you say—rages; it profits the good, assuredly, not the evil. In the end, fear of judgment conduces to good, not to evil. For it was not sufficient that good should be corrected by itself alone, already laboring under the adversary.

For even if it were correctable by itself, it was not also preservable, because it was already assailable by the adversary, unless some force of fear were set over it to compel men to seek and guard the good even against their will. Otherwise, with so many enticements of evil assailing the good, who would seek that which he could despise with impunity? Who would guard that which he could lose without danger? We are warned of the broad way, and the far more frequented one: would not all slide down it, if nothing were to be feared on it? We shudder at the terrible threats of the Creator, and are scarcely torn away from evil: what if he threatened nothing? Will you call that justice evil, which does not foster evil? Will you deny that to be good, which looks out for the good? Not what kind of God you ought to want; what kind would it suit you better to have?—one under whom sins would rejoice? Whom the devil would mock?

Would you judge that God good, who could make man all the more evil by the security of sin? Who is the author of good, except one who is also its exactor? Likewise, who is a stranger to evil, except one who is also its enemy? Who is its enemy, except one who is also its assailant? Who is its assailant, except one who is also its punisher? Thus God is wholly good, in that he is all things for the sake of good. Thus likewise he is omnipotent, because he is powerful both to help and to harm. It is a defect to be able only to benefit, because one can do nothing other than benefit. With what confidence shall I hope for good from such a one, if this alone is what he can do? How shall I pursue the reward of innocence, if he does not also kindle its image? I must distrust that he will recompense even the one side, who has been unable to deal with both.

So greatly is justice also the fullness of the divinity itself, exhibiting God as perfect, and as father, and as lord: as father, in clemency; as lord, in discipline; as father, in gentle authority; as lord, in severe authority; as father, to be loved with piety; as lord, to be feared of necessity: to be loved, because he prefers mercy to sacrifice; and to be feared, because he wills not sin: to be loved, because he prefers the repentance of the sinner to his death; and to be feared, because he wills not sinners who are no longer repentant of themselves. Therefore the law defined both: Thou shalt love God, and Thou shalt fear God. It set forth one thing for the obedient, another for the one who goes astray.

God meets you at every point: the same one striking, but also healing; killing, but also making alive; humbling, but also exalting; creating evils, but also making peace: so that I may answer the heretics on this point as well. For behold, they say, he himself professes to be the creator of evils, saying: I am he who creates evils. For seizing upon the common use of the word, which confounds two species of evils in ambiguity—since both sins and punishments are called evils—they everywhere wish him to be understood as the creator of evils, so that he may be proclaimed the author of wickedness.

But we, applying a distinction between the two forms, separating the evils of sin and the evils of punishment, the evils of guilt and the evils of penalty, assign to each part its own author: to the devil, the evils of sin and guilt; to God the creator, the evils of punishment and penalty; so that the former part is reckoned to wickedness, the latter to justice—to justice creating the evils of judgment against the evils of sin. Of these evils, therefore, the creator makes profession—those which befit a judge. These are indeed evils to those upon whom they are repaid, but by their own name they are good, being just, and defenders of the good, and enemies of sins, and in this order worthy of God. Either prove them unjust, so as to prove them to be reckoned to wickedness, that is, to be evils of injustice: for if they belong to justice, they will no longer be evils, but good; evil only to the evil, to whom even things directly good are condemned as evil.

Establish, then, that it was unjust for the man who willingly despised the divine law to have suffered the loss of what he was unwilling to be without; that it was unjust for the wickedness of that age to have been the cause of floods, and thereafter of fires; that it was unjust for Egypt—most foul, superstitious, and moreover the afflicted of the people that had been her guest—to have been smitten with a tenfold chastisement. He hardens the heart of Pharaoh; but Pharaoh had deserved to be furnished for destruction, who had already denied God; who had already proudly shaken off his ambassadors so many times; who had already added the burden of labor upon the people: and finally, because as an Egyptian he had long since been guilty before God of gentile idolatry, worshipping the ibis and the crocodile more readily than the living God. He also assails the people itself, but an ungrateful one. He also sent bears against the boys, but against those who were disrespectful toward the Prophet.

Consider first, therefore, the justice of the judge: if its rationale holds, then also the severity; and the means through which the severity runs its course will be reckoned to reason and justice. And lest we linger over many cases, establish the causes of the other cases as well, so as to condemn the sentences: excuse the sins, so as to repudiate the judgments. Do not reproach the judge, but refute the evil judge. For even if he exacted the sins of fathers from the children, the hardness of the people had compelled such remedies, so that men might obey the divine law at least out of regard for their posterity. For who does not care more for the welfare of his children than for his own? But if the blessing of the fathers was also destined for their seed, without any merit of its own as yet; why should not the guilt of the fathers also overflow upon the children? As grace, so also offense; so that through the whole race both grace might run, and offense.

This being preserved, which was afterwards to be decreed: that they would not say that the fathers had eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth were set on edge; that is, that the father would not bear the sin of the son, nor the son the sin of the father; but that each would be guilty of his own sin, so that after the hardness of the people, the hardness of the law being tamed, justice would now judge not the race but individuals. Although if you accept the gospel of truth, you will learn to whom the sentence belongs that renders upon children the sins of the fathers; namely, to those who were about to impose this sentence upon themselves of their own accord: His blood be upon our heads and upon our children's. This, therefore, is what the entire providence of God decreed, which it had already heard.

Good, therefore, is also severity, because it is just, if the judge is good, that is, just. Likewise the other things are good through which the good work of good severity runs its course, whether wrath, or jealousy, or fierceness. For all these are due to severity, just as severity is due to justice. The insolence of an age that owes reverence must be avenged. And thus the things that befall a judge cannot be reproached in the judge, being themselves also without fault, just as the judge is. For what if you were to say that a physician ought indeed to exist, but were to accuse his instruments, because they cut, and burn, and amputate, and bind? Since without the instrument of his art, a physician cannot exist. But accuse the one who cuts badly, who amputates unseasonably, who burns rashly, and thus also reproach his instruments as evil ministers. It is the same, therefore, when you admit God as judge, but destroy those emotions and feelings by which he judges.

We are instructed concerning God by the Prophets and by Christ, not by philosophers, nor by Epicurus. We who believe that God also acted on earth, and took upon himself the lowliness of human form for the sake of human salvation, are far from the opinion of those who are unwilling for God to care about anything. From this there comes also to the heretics a definition of this kind: If God is angry, and jealous, and is provoked, and is exasperated; then he will also be corrupted, then he will also die. But it is well that it belongs to Christians to believe that God even died, and yet lives in the age of ages. Most foolish are those who prejudge divine things by human ones, so that because passions of this kind are held to be of a corrupting condition in man, they are therefore supposed to be of the same state in God.

Distinguish the substances, and distribute to them their own proper feelings, as diverse as the substances require, even though they may seem to share the same names. For we read of the right hand, and the eyes, and the feet of God, and yet they will not therefore be compared to human ones, because they are associated in name. As great as will be the difference between the divine body and the human, under the same names of members, so great also will be the difference between the divine mind and the human, even under the same names of feelings, which the corruptibility of human substance renders as corruptible in man, as the incorruptibility of the divine substance renders them incorruptible in God. Surely you confess God to be the creator? Surely, you say. How then do you suppose anything human in God, and not everything divine? He whom you do not deny to be God, you confess to be not human.

For in confessing him to be God, you have already prejudged that he is different from every quality of human conditions. Furthermore, since you equally acknowledge that man was breathed into by God as a living soul, and not God by man, it is sufficiently perverse that you should establish human qualities in God rather than divine ones in man; that you should imbue God rather with the image of man, than man with the image of God. And so let this image—the human mind—possess the same feelings as God, though not such as God has them. For according to substance, both their state and their issue differ. Finally, why do you presume their contrary feelings—I mean gentleness, patience, mercy, and goodness itself as their very source—to be divine? And yet we do not perfectly attain these, because God alone is perfect. So also we do not experience those other kinds—I mean wrath and exasperation—so happily; because God alone is blessed by the property of incorruptibility.

For he will be angry, but will not be exasperated, will not be endangered: he will be moved, but will not be overthrown. He must necessarily employ all things on account of all things; as many feelings as there are causes: wrath for the wicked, and indignation for the ungrateful, and jealousy for the proud, and whatever does not benefit the evil. So also mercy for those who err, and patience for those who do not repent, and excellence for those who deserve it, and whatever the good have need of. All these things he experiences after his own manner, in the way that befits him to experience them, on account of whom man experiences the same things, likewise after his own manner.

These things, then, having been examined, show the entire order of God the judge to be the servant, and—to speak more worthily—the guardian of that universal and supreme goodness: which the Marcionites are unwilling to recognize in the same God, removed from judicial feelings and pure in its own state—goodness that rains upon the good and the evil, and makes his sun to rise upon the just and the unjust; which no other God at all provides.

For even if Marcion dared to erase this testimony of Christ against the Creator from the Gospel, yet the world itself is inscribed with it, and it is read by every conscience; and this very patience of the creator will be for the judgment of Marcion: that patience which awaits the repentance of the sinner rather than his death, and prefers mercy to sacrifice; turning away the already destined destruction from the Ninevites, and granting a space of life to Hezekiah through his tears, and restoring the state of the kingdom to the tyrant of Babylon when he had done penance. I speak of that mercy which also granted the son of Saul who was to die by the devotion of the people: and freed David, who had confessed his sins against the house of Uriah, with pardon: and restored Israel itself as many times as it judged it; as many times refreshed it as it also rebuked it. Therefore, not only looking upon the judge, turn also to the examples of the most good.

Noting when he takes vengeance, consider when he grants indulgence. Weigh leniency against austerity: when you have found both in the Creator, you will find in him also that on account of which you believe in another God. Come then to the examination of his teachings, disciplines, precepts, and counsels. You will perhaps say that these things are also determined by human laws. But before all the Lycurguses and Solons, there were Moses and God. No later age does not receive from the beginnings. Yet my Creator did not learn from your God to prescribe: Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not bear false witness; thou shalt not covet what belongs to another; honor thy father and thy mother; and: thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

To these chief counsels of innocence, chastity, justice, and piety, there are added also precepts of humanity: when every seventh year servitudes are dissolved by freedom; when at the same time the field is spared, yielding its place to the needy; when even to the ox treading out the grain the bonds of its mouth are loosened for the fruit of its present labor, so that humanity, first practiced upon cattle, might the more readily be trained for the refreshment of men.

But what good things of the law shall I rather defend than those which heresy has coveted, such as the definition of retaliation, demanding an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a bruise for a bruise?

For it does not savour of a licence to inflict injuries upon one another, but looks to the restraining of violence altogether; so that, because to a people most hard and faithless toward God it seemed a long or even incredible thing to await the defence from God—to be proclaimed later through the Prophet: Vengeance is mine, and I will repay, saith the Lord—in the meantime the commission of injury might be checked by fear of a retaliation immediately to follow, and the licence of retribution might be a prohibition of provocation; so that in this way wicked audacity might cease, since, the second blow being permitted, the first is deterred, and the first being deterred, the second is not committed either, since also in other respects the fear of retaliation is more readily felt through the very same experience of suffering. Nothing is more bitter than to suffer the very same thing that you have done to others.

And if the law takes away certain foods and pronounces unclean animals that were once blessed, understand it as a plan for exercising continence, and recognise the bridles imposed upon that gluttony which, while eating the bread of angels, was longing for the cucumbers and melons of the Egyptians. Recognise at the same time also that provision was made for the companions of gluttony, namely lust and luxury, which are generally cooled by the chastening of the belly. For the people had eaten and drunk, and risen up to play. Likewise, that the ardour for money might also be quenched in the part that is pleaded from the necessity of sustenance, the craving for costly foods was removed: finally, that a man might more easily be formed for fasting before God, being accustomed to few and inglorious foods, and having no appetite for more sumptuous fare. The Creator is surely to be blamed for having taken away foods from his own people rather than from the more ungrateful Marcionites.

Let no one reproach the burdens of sacrifices also, and the laborious scrupulosities of observances and oblations, as though God had properly desired such things for himself, who so plainly cries out: To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices to me? And who hath required these things at your hands? But let him perceive that industry of God, by which he wished to bind to his own religion a people prone to idolatry and transgression, by means of those very offices by which the superstition of the age was conducted, so as to call them away from it, commanding these things to be done for himself as though he desired them, lest they should go astray in making idols.

But also in the very transactions of life and human intercourse, at home and abroad, even to the care of vessels, he made distinctions in every direction, so that by these legal disciplines meeting them everywhere, they might not be free from regard for God even for a single moment. For what would make a man blessed, but that his will is in the law of the Lord, and in the law of the Lord shall he meditate day and night? Which law he promulgated not from the harshness of its author, but from the reason of supreme benevolence, subduing rather the hardness of the people, and smoothing a faith raw in obedience by laborious duties: to say nothing of the hidden significances of the law, spiritual and prophetic, figured in almost all its arguments. For it is sufficient for the present, if it simply bound man to God, so that no one ought to reprobate it, except one to whom it is not pleasing to serve God.

To aid this benefit—not burden—of the law, the same goodness of God also ordained Prophets, teaching things worthy of God: To take away iniquities from the soul, to learn to do good, to seek judgment, to judge for the orphan, and to justify the widow, to direct causes, to flee the company of the wicked, to set free the oppressed woman whole, to destroy the unjust writing, to break bread to the hungry, and to bring him that hath no roof into thy house; if thou seest one naked, to cover him, and not to despise the members of thine own seed: to restrain the tongue from evil, and the lips that they speak no guile; to decline from evil, and to do good; to seek peace, and pursue it; to be angry and sin not, that is, not to persist in anger, or to rage; not to go into the council of the ungodly, nor to stand in the way of sinners, nor to sit in the seat of the pestilent. But where?

See: how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity, meditating day and night in the law of the Lord; because it is good, namely, to trust in the Lord, rather than to trust in man, and to hope in the Lord, rather than to hope in princes. For what reward is there for man before God? And he shall be as a tree which is planted by the outlets of waters, which shall give its fruit in its season; and its leaf shall not fall, and all whatsoever he shall do shall prosper for him. But the innocent and pure in heart, who hath not taken the name of God in vain, and hath not sworn deceitfully to his neighbour, he shall receive a blessing from the Lord, and mercy from God his saviour. For the eyes of the Lord are upon them that fear him, that hope in his mercy, to deliver their souls from death, namely eternal death, and to nourish them in famine, namely of eternal life.

For many are the afflictions of the just, and out of them all the Lord will deliver them. Precious is the death in the sight of the Lord of his saints. The Lord keepeth all their bones: not one of them shall be broken. The Lord shall redeem the souls of his servants. These few things out of so many scriptures of the Creator have we brought forward, and I think nothing is now lacking for the testimony of the most good God, which the precepts of goodness and the promises sufficiently attest.

But indeed these cuttlefish—whose kind the Law also rejected among edible fish—when they feel themselves exposed, vomit forth from this point the darkness of blasphemy, and so scatter the attention of each person already closely engaged, by throwing out and asserting things that may obscure the shining goodness of the Creator. But even through these darknesses we shall pursue their wickedness, and drag into the light the devices of the shadows, which object to the Creator above all that fraud and robbery of gold and silver commanded by him to the Hebrews against the Egyptians. Come now, most wretched heretic, I call upon you yourself as judge: first acquaint yourself with both peoples, and so you will judge concerning the author of the command.

The Egyptians demand back from the Hebrews vessels of gold and silver; on the other side the Hebrews institute counter-claims, alleging that wages also ought to be restored to them in the name of the same ancestors, from the same documentary record of scripture, for that servile labour, for the brickwork performed, for the cities and estates built. What will you judge, O chooser of the best God? That the Hebrews ought to acknowledge fraud, or the Egyptians compensation? For they say that the matter was conducted thus through envoys on both sides; the Egyptians indeed demanding back the vessels, but the Jews demanding back their own labours: and that at last the Egyptians renounced those vessels to them. Today against the Marcionites the Hebrews allege further, denying that however great that gold and silver might be, it is sufficient for compensation, if the labours of six hundred thousand men over so many years be reckoned even at single daily coins. But which part is greater? Those demanding back vessels, or those who inhabited villas and cities?

Is the complaint therefore on the side of the Egyptians, or the gratitude on the side of the Hebrews? So that by the judgment of injuries alone the Hebrews might strike back against the Egyptians—free men reduced to a workhouse, so that their backs alone their taskmasters might show at their benches, lacerated by the shameful atrocity of scourges—would you not have pronounced that satisfaction must be made to the Hebrews not by a few dishes and cups, belonging certainly to fewer wealthy men everywhere, but by the whole of their own resources and by the contributions of all the common people? Therefore if the cause of the Hebrews is good, then good also is the cause, that is, the command of the Creator, who both made the Egyptians willing without their knowing it, and compensated his own people, in the narrow time of their departure, with some solace of a quiet settlement. Plainly he commanded less to be exacted: for the Egyptians ought to have restored even their children to the Hebrews.

So also you reproach him with contradictions of precepts in other matters, as one fickle and unstable; forbidding work on the sabbaths, and commanding the ark to be carried around for eight days, that is, even on the sabbath, in the assault upon the city of Jericho. For you do not look at the law of the sabbath, which forbids human works, not divine. For it says: Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy works, but on the seventh day, the sabbath of the Lord thy God, thou shalt do no work. What work? Thine own, of course. For it follows that he removed from the sabbath those works which he had enjoined above for the six days: thine own, that is, human and daily works. But to carry the ark around can be seen as neither a daily work nor a human one; but both rare, and most sacred, and from the very command of God at that time, certainly divine.

What this also signified I would explain, were it not that it would be lengthy to unfold the figurative arguments of all the Creator's works, which perhaps you do not even admit. But it is more to the point if you are refuted on plain matters, by the simplicity of truth, not by subtlety: as also now the distinction of the sabbath is certain, forbidding human, not divine works. And therefore he who had gone to gather wood on the sabbaths was put to death: for he had done his own work, forbidden by the law. But those who had carried the ark around on the sabbaths did so with impunity: for they had administered not their own work, but God's, namely by his own command.

Likewise also in forbidding the likeness of all things in heaven and on earth and in the waters, he shows the reasons as well, namely those restraining the substance of idolatry. For he adds: Ye shall not adore them, nor serve them. But the image of the bronze serpent, afterwards commanded to Moses by the Lord, did not pertain to the title of idolatry, but to the healing of those who were afflicted by serpents. And I say nothing of the figurative meaning of the remedy. So also the golden Cherubim and Seraphim as a figured example for the ark, certainly a simple ornament, fitted to the purpose, having causes far different from the condition of idolatry—on account of which likeness is forbidden—do not seem to conflict with the law of forbidden likenesses, not being found in that state of likeness on account of which likeness is forbidden.

We have spoken of the rational institution of sacrifices, calling away, namely, from idols to God those offices which, if he again rejected them, saying: To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices? He wished this very thing to be understood, that he had not properly required them for himself: For I will not drink, he says, the blood of bulls; because elsewhere also he says: The eternal God shall neither hunger nor thirst. For even if he took notice of the offerings of Abel, and willingly smelled the burnt offerings of Noah, what delight is there either in the entrails of rams or in the smoke of burning victims? But the simple spirit and God-fearing disposition of those offering what they had from God, both of food and of sweet fragrance, was reckoned as gratitude before God—not what was done as demanded by one who required it, but that for the sake of which it was done, namely for the honour of God.

If a client should offer to a rich man or a king who desires nothing, yet some most trifling little gift, will the quantity and quality of the gift put the rich man and king to shame, or will the mark of duty delight him? But if a client offers gifts to him of his own accord, or even in the prescribed order of his own rank, and observes the solemnities of the king, yet not in faith, nor with a pure heart, nor with full devotion in the other duties as well, is it not a consequence that that king or rich man should cry out: To what purpose is the multitude of your gifts? I am full; and: Your solemnities, and feast days, and your sabbaths my soul hateth.

By saying yours, because they celebrated them according to their own desire, not according to the religion of God, and had thus made them already their own and not God's, he showed that his rejection of those things which he had prescribed to be administered was conditional and rational.

But if you also wish him to be understood as fickle in regard to persons, when he sometimes reprobates those who were approved; or as improvident, when he sometimes approves those who are to be reprobated, as though he either condemned his past judgments or was ignorant of the future; yet nothing so befits one who is both good and a judge, as to reject and to choose according to present merits. Saul is chosen, but not yet as one who despises the prophet Samuel. Solomon is rejected, but already possessed by foreign women, and enslaved to the idols of the Moabites and Sidonians. What would the Creator do, so as not to be reproached by the Marcionites? Would he pre-condemn those still acting well on account of future sins? But it was not of a good God to pre-condemn those not yet deserving it. Would he then not reject those now sinning on account of their former good deeds?

But it was not of a just judge to pardon crimes when former good deeds had already been cancelled. Or who among men is without sin, so that God might always choose him whom he could never reject? Or likewise who is without some good work, so that God might always reject him whom he could never choose? Show good always, and he will not be rejected: show evil always, and he will never be chosen. But if the same man, as in both cases according to the times, in both cases he will be assessed by God, both good and judge, who does not change his sentences through fickleness or improvidence; but by a most grave and most provident censure, dispenses the merits of each period of time.

So also you perversely interpret repentance in him, as though he repents on account of fickleness or lack of foresight, or indeed from the recollection of some wrongdoing: because he said: It repented me that I made Saul king; prescribing, of course, that repentance implies confession of some evil deed or error. But this is not always so.

For confession of repentance occurs also in connection with good deeds, to the reproach and upbraiding of one who has proved ungrateful for a benefit, just as at that time it is announced by the Creator concerning the person of Saul who was to be honoured, who had not sinned when he takes Saul into the kingdom and enriches him with the Holy Spirit; for he had chosen one who was still excellent—for, he says, there was none like him among the sons of Israel, most worthy had he chosen him—nor had he been ignorant that it would turn out so, for no one will allow you to ascribe lack of foresight to that God whom, not denying him to be God, you confess also to be provident.

For this is established as his own proper divinity; but the evil deed of Saul (as I said) he was burdening with the profession of his repentance; which, since there was no offence on Saul's part at the time of his appointment, it follows must be understood as expressing reproach rather than guilt. Behold, you say, I observe it to be guilty in the case of the Ninevites, when scripture says in Jonah: And the Lord repented of the evil which he had said he would do to them, and he did it not. As also Jonas himself says to the Lord: Therefore I made haste to flee to Tharsis, because I knew that thou art merciful and compassionate, patient, and of great mercy, repenting of evils. Well then, it is good that he set forth beforehand the title of the best God, namely most patient toward the wicked, and most abundant in mercy and compassion toward those who acknowledge and lament their sins, as the Ninevites did at that time.

For if he is best who does such things, you will first have to concede concerning him that the concurrence of evil also does not befit such a one, that is, the best. And because Marcion maintains that a good tree is not permitted to produce bad fruits either, yet he named evil, which the best does not admit—is there not perhaps some interpretation underlying even those evils that are to be understood, which could have run down even into the best? There is indeed. We say, then, that evil is here signified, not such as is referred back to the nature of the Creator as though he were evil, but such as belongs to his power as judge, according to which he declared: I am he who creates evils, and: Behold, I send evils upon you—not sins, but punishments; the ill repute of which we have sufficiently cleared away, as befitting a judge.

But just as, even though they are called evils, they are not blamed in a judge, nor do they by this their name show the judge to be evil; so also this evil is now to be understood, which, reckoned among those judicial evils, befits a judge along with them. For even among the Greeks the word for evils is sometimes used for afflictions and injuries, not for malicious acts, as also in this passage; and accordingly, if the Creator repented of that evil, it was as of something belonging to the creature that was to be condemned and devoted to destruction. And yet not even any criminal act will be reckoned against the Creator, who had justly and deservedly decreed the abolition of a most wicked city. Thus, what he had justly purposed, not purposing it evilly, he had purposed out of justice, not out of malice; but he named the punishment itself evil, from the evil and deserved nature of the suffering itself.

Therefore, you will say, if you excuse the evil under the name of justice, because he had justly destined destruction for the Ninevites, so also he is to be blamed who repented of justice, which surely ought not to be repented of. Nay, I say, God will not repent even of justice, and it remains now to acknowledge what the repentance of God is. For if a man repents from the recollection of very many sins, and sometimes also from the ingratitude shown for some good deed, it does not follow that God repents in the same way. For inasmuch as God neither admits evil nor condemns good, to that extent there is no place with him for repentance of good or evil.

For this too the same scripture determines for you, when Samuel says to Saul: The Lord has rent the kingdom of Israel from your hand today, and will give it to your neighbour, who is better than you; and Israel shall be divided into two parts, and he will not turn back, nor will he repent, because he is not as a man, to repent. This definition, therefore, establishes in all cases a different form of divine repentance, which is to be reckoned as arising neither from lack of foresight nor from any condemnation of a good or evil deed, as is the human kind. What then will be the manner of divine repentance? It already becomes clear, if you do not refer it to human conditions. For nothing else will be understood by it than a simple change of a prior decision, which can be admitted even without blame upon it, even in a man, much more in God, whose every decision is free from fault.

For even in the Greek sound, the name of repentance is composed not from confession of wrongdoing, but from a change of mind, which we have shown to take place in God in response to the varying occurrence of circumstances.

Now, that I may dispatch all matters of this kind, I shall proceed to interpret and clear away the remaining instances of pettiness, weakness, and incongruity (as you regard them). God cries out: Adam, where are you?—as though ignorant of where he was? And when Adam pleads shame at his nakedness as an excuse, he asks whether he had eaten of the tree—as though uncertain? Nay, he was neither uncertain of the offence nor ignorant of the place. For indeed it was necessary that the man who was hiding in the consciousness of sin, when called out, should come forth into the presence of the Lord—not by the mere calling of his name alone, but with some reproach already at that point for the offence committed. For it is not to be read in a simple manner, that is, in an interrogatory tone: Adam, where are you?

But with emphasis and force and imputation: Adam, where are you?—that is, you are in perdition; that is, you are no longer here; so that the utterance may be one both of rebuke and of grief. Besides, he who holds the whole world in his hand as a nest, whose heaven is a throne and earth a footstool—surely some portion of paradise had escaped the eyes of such a one, so that Adam wherever he was before being called out would not be visible to him, whether hiding or taking of the forbidden fruit? A wolf or a thief does not escape the notice of the watcher of your vineyard or garden. I think that God, looking down from on high, cannot fail to see anything of what lies beneath. Foolishly do you treat so great an argument of divine majesty and human instruction with a sneer.

God asked as though uncertain, in order that even from this, proving man to be possessed of free will, he might give him occasion in the matter of either denial or confession to confess the sin of his own accord, and thereby to be relieved of it; just as he inquires of Cain where his brother was—as though he had not already heard the blood of Abel crying out from the earth—but so that he too might have the power, from that same power of free will, to deny the sin of his own accord, and thereby to aggravate it; and so that examples might be established for us of sins to be confessed rather than denied: so that even then the evangelical teaching might be initiated: By your mouth you will be justified, and by your mouth you will be condemned.

For even though Adam was delivered over to death on account of the condition of the law, yet hope was preserved for him, the Lord saying: Behold, Adam has become as one of us—referring, of course, to the future drawing of man into divinity. What follows then? And now, lest at any time he stretch forth his hand and take of the tree of life and live for ever. For by interposing and now, a word of present time, he showed that he had made the delay of life temporal and for the present. And therefore he cursed neither Adam himself nor Eve, as candidates for restoration, as those relieved by confession. But Cain he both cursed and, when Cain desired to atone for his sin by death, forbade him to die for the time being, as one burdened not only with the offence but also with the denial of it.

This will be the ignorance of our God, which is feigned for this purpose, that the man who has sinned may not be ignorant of what he ought to do. But descending to Sodom and Gomorrah, he says: I will see whether they have completed according to the cry that has come to me; but if not, that I may know. And here, forsooth, is he uncertain from ignorance and desirous of knowing? Or is this sound of utterance a necessary one, expressing not a doubtful but a threatening sense under the guise of inquiry? But if you also mock at God's descent, as though he could not otherwise have executed judgment unless he had descended—take care lest you equally strike at your own God. For he too descended in order to accomplish what he willed.

But God also swears. Does he perhaps swear by the God of Marcion? Nay, he says, which is far more vain, by himself. What would you have him do, if there was no other God in his awareness, especially when swearing at that very moment that there is absolutely no other besides himself? Do you then catch him swearing falsely, or swearing vainly? But he cannot be seen to have sworn falsely, who, as you say, did not know that another existed. For what he knows, swearing by that truly, he did not swear falsely. Nor does he swear vainly that there is no other God. For he would swear vainly only if there had been no one who believed in other gods—at that time indeed the worshippers of idols, but now also heretics. He swears therefore by himself, so that you may believe even God swearing that there is absolutely no other God. That God should do this, you too, Marcion, have compelled: for even then you were being provided for.

Likewise, if he also swears in promises or threats, extorting in the early days a faith that was difficult to obtain, nothing is unworthy of God which brings it about that God is believed. Small enough also was God at that time even in his very fierceness, when, inflamed with anger against the people on account of the consecration of the calf, he demands of his servant Moses: Let me alone, and being indignant in wrath I will destroy them, and I will make of you a great nation. From this you are accustomed to assert that Moses is better than his God, as one who intercedes, nay even restrains his wrath. For he said: You shall not do this, or else blot me out together with them. Pitiable are you too along with the people, who do not recognise Christ figured in the person of Moses, as the intercessor with the Father and the offerer of his own soul for the salvation of the people.

But it is enough if the people were also properly given to Moses for the present. In order that a servant might be able to ask this of the Lord, the Lord asked it of himself. For to this end he said to the servant: Let me alone, and I will destroy them, so that he by asking and offering himself might not allow it; and so that you might learn how much is permitted to a faithful man and a prophet before God.

Now, that I may also dispatch the remaining matters briefly, whatever things you still collect as petty and weak and unworthy for the destruction of the Creator, I will set forth by a simple and certain argument: that God could not have entered into human intercourse unless He had taken on human feelings and affections as well, by which He might temper the force of His majesty—utterly intolerable to human mediocrity—with humility; unworthy indeed of Himself, but necessary for man; and thus already worthy of God, because nothing is so worthy of God as the salvation of man. I would treat this at greater length if I were dealing with pagans; although even with heretics the engagement is not much different. Inasmuch as you yourselves have already believed that God sojourned in the form and in the rest of the order of the human condition, you will surely not require to be persuaded any longer that God conformed Himself to humanity, but you are refuted by your own faith.

For if God—and indeed a more exalted one—laid low the height of His majesty with such great humility as even to subject Himself to death, and to the death of the cross; why should you not think that certain small things also befitted our God, yet more tolerable than Jewish insults and gibbets and tombs? Or are these the small things which ought now to prejudge that Christ, exposed to human sufferings, belongs to that God against whom human condescensions are reproached by you?

For we also profess that Christ always acted in the name of God the Father; that it was He who from the beginning conversed with men; that it was He who met with the Patriarchs and Prophets, the Son of the Creator, His Word, whom He made a Son by bringing Him forth from Himself, and thereafter set over all His dispensation and will; diminishing Him a little below the angels, as it is written in David: by which diminution He was also disposed in this dispensation by the Father—which you censure as human—learning from the very beginning, learning from the very beginning what man was, which He was to be in the end. It is He who descended; He who asks; He who demands; He who swears.

Moreover, that the Father has been seen by no one, even the common gospel will attest, Christ saying: No one has known the Father except the Son; for He Himself had also declared in the Old Testament: No one shall see God and live; determining the Father to be invisible, in whose authority and name He Himself was God, the Son of God, who was seen. But also among us Christ is understood in the person of Christ, because in this way too He is ours. Therefore, whatever things you require as worthy of God, will be found in the Father, invisible and unapproachable and tranquil, and—if I may so say—the God of the philosophers.

But whatever things you censure as unworthy, will be attributed to the Son, both seen and heard and encountered, the arbiter and minister of the Father, mingling in Himself man and God; in mighty works, God; in small things, man; so that He confers as much upon man as He takes away from God: in short, all the dishonor of my God in your eyes is the sacrament of human salvation. God conversed with man, that man might be taught to act divinely. God dealt on equal terms with man, that man might be able to deal on equal terms with God. God was found small, that man might become great. You who disdain such a God, I know not whether you believe in faith that God was crucified. How great therefore is your perversity toward each order of the Creator? You designate Him a judge, and you reproach the severity of the judge—fitting according to the merits of causes—as cruelty.

You demand a most good God, and His gentleness—fitting to His goodness—having conversed in a manner somewhat lowly for the grasp of human mediocrity, you despise as smallness. Neither the great pleases you, nor the moderate; neither the judge, nor the friend. What if now the same things are found also in your God? That he is indeed a judge we have already shown in his own book; and from a judge necessarily severe, and from severe as it were savage—if indeed savage.

Now I will also make rival antitheses against Marcion, concerning the small things and the malicious acts and the other noted charges. If my God did not know there was another above Him, your God likewise did not at all know there was another below him. For as that obscure Heraclitus says, the way up and the way down are the same. Indeed, if he had not been ignorant, he would have encountered from the beginning both sin and death, and the very author of sin the devil, and every evil, which my God suffered to exist; this too your God did, who suffered him to suffer it. Our God changed His purposes. Likewise so did yours. For he who regarded the human race so late changed the purpose by which for so long an age he did not regard it. Our God repented of something. But so did yours. For in that he at last took notice of man's salvation, he repented of his former disregard—a repentance owed to an evil deed.

Moreover, an evil deed will be reckoned the neglect of human salvation, corrected only by repentance in your God. Our God commanded a fraud; but of gold and silver. But inasmuch as man is more precious than gold and silver, your God is the more fraudulent, who snatches man away from his Lord and Maker. Our God demands an eye for an eye; but yours, by forbidding retaliation, makes injury more repeatable. For who will not strike again, if not struck back? Our God did not know what sort of men He was choosing? Then neither would your God have chosen Judas the traitor, if he had foreknown. So also you say the Creator lied somewhere: far greater is the lie in your Christ, whose body was not real. Many were destroyed by the severity of my God? Your God too, those whom he does not save, he surely disposes to destruction. My God commanded someone to be killed?

Your God willed Himself to be killed; no less a murderer of Himself than of him by whose hand he wished to be killed. But that his God killed many I will prove to Marcion. For he made a murderer—one who would surely perish—unless the people committed no sin against Christ. But the ready power of truth loves brevity. Many things will be necessary for falsehood.

Moreover, I would have attacked Marcion's own antitheses at close quarters as well, if the defense of the Creator—as good as He is also a judge—had required a more laborious refutation of them, according to examples on both sides fitting to God, as we have shown. But if both sides of goodness and justice produce a fullness of divinity worthy of one almighty in all things, I can for the present briefly have beaten back the antitheses, which are eager to distinguish and thereby alienate Christ from the Creator by the qualities of characters or laws or virtues—as the most good from the judge, and the mild from the fierce, and the saving from the destructive. For they rather join together those whom they place in those diversities which are fitting to God. Remove the title of Marcion and the intention and purpose of the work itself, and it demonstrates nothing other than that the same God is both most good and a judge: because these two things belong to God alone.

For even the very zeal in those examples of opposing Christ to the Creator tends rather toward unity. So much so indeed was the very substance of the divinities one—both good and severe—and in the same examples and in similar arguments, that He wished to show His goodness in those very things in which He had previously shown His severity. For the temporal diversity will not be surprising, if God was afterwards milder for things that had been tamed, who was formerly more austere for things untamed. Thus through the antitheses it can more easily be shown that the order of the Creator was reformed and reflected by Christ, and restored rather than excluded—especially since you separate your God from every more bitter movement, and therefore also from rivalry with the Creator of course.

For if it is so, how then do the antitheses demonstrate that he emulated the individual aspects of the Creator, I will therefore acknowledge also in this through them my God as zealous, who in the beginnings provided for His rougher matters with a good and rational emulation of maturity by His own right. Whose antitheses even the world itself will acknowledge, being modulated from the contrarieties of the elements, yet by the highest reason. Wherefore, most inconsiderate Marcion, you ought to have shown one God of light and another of darkness, so that you might more easily have persuaded us of one God of goodness and another of severity. Otherwise the antithesis will belong to him to whom it also belongs in the world.

Following the traces of the former work, which we persevere in reforming now that it has been lost, the order concerning Christ comes next—though as a matter of abundance—after the completed defense of the unity of the divine nature. For it has been sufficiently prejudged that Christ is not to be understood as belonging to another God than the Creator, since it has been determined that no other God is to be believed in besides the Creator, whom Christ accordingly preached, and thereafter the Apostles announced Christ as belonging to no other God than that God whom Christ preached, that is the Creator, so that no mention of another God, and thus no mention of another Christ, was raised before the scandal of Marcion. This is most easily proved by a review of the apostolic and heretical churches; there, namely, the inversion of the rule is to be pronounced, where posteriority is found—which I also wove into the first book.

But also now this engagement, which will examine Christ separately, will profit to this end: that while we prove Christ to be the Creator's, so also the God of Marcion may be excluded. It befits truth to use all its own strength, not as one laboring.

Moreover, in the compendiums of prescriptions it conquers. But it has been resolved to meet the adversary everywhere eager, raging to such a degree that he has more readily presumed that Christ came who was never announced, than He who was always preached.

From this point then I join battle: whether He ought to have come so suddenly. First, because He is also Himself the Son of His own God—for this would have been the order of things, that the Father should first acknowledge the Son before the Son acknowledged the Father; and that the Father should first bear witness concerning the Son before the Son concerning the Father. Then also because He was sent, beyond the name of Son. Accordingly the patronage of the sender ought to have preceded as testimony to the one sent, because no one coming on the authority of another defends that authority for himself by his own assertion, but rather expects to be defended by it, with the recommendation of him who grants the authority going before. Otherwise, neither will the Son be acknowledged, whom the Father never named; nor will the one sent be believed, whom the mandator never designated; the Father would have named, and the mandator would have designated, if it had been so.

Everything that has deviated from the rule will be held suspect; and the primary order of things does not allow the Father to be acknowledged after the Son, and the mandator after the mandate, and Christ after God. Nothing is prior to its origin in recognition, because neither in dispensation. A Son suddenly, and suddenly sent, and suddenly Christ? And yet I think nothing is sudden with God, because nothing is undispensed by God. But if it was dispensed, why was it also not foretold, so that it might be proved both dispensed from the foretelling, and divine from the dispensation? And surely so great a work—which was being prepared for human salvation—would not have been sudden even to this extent, in that it was to profit through faith.

For to the degree that it had to be believed in order to profit, to that degree it desired a preparation so that it could be believed, built upon the foundations of dispensation and preaching; by which order faith, being formed, might both rightly be enjoined upon man by God, and be rendered to God by man; owing from recognition to believe because it could, which had of course learned to believe from preaching.

Such an order, you say, was not necessary, because he was going to prove himself straightway, both as the Son, and as the sent one, and as the Christ of God, by the very facts, through the evidences of his mighty works. But I shall deny that this was the only form of testimony suited to him—the very form which he himself afterwards discredited. For in declaring that many would come, and would perform signs, and would put forth great mighty works, and would lead even the elect astray, and yet were not on that account to be received; he showed that faith based on signs and mighty works is rash, as being most easy even among false Christs. Or what sort of thing is it, if he wished to be proved, and understood, and received from mighty works (I mean from mighty works), by the same means from which he did not wish others to be received—others who were equally going to come so suddenly, just as he came unannounced by any author?

If, because he came before them and first set his seal on the evidences of mighty works, he thereby, as one who secures a place in the baths, so seized upon faith and snatched it away from all who came after—take care lest he himself be found in the condition of those who come after, discovered to be later than the Creator, who was already known beforehand, and who accordingly had already wrought mighty works before him, and had in no other way forewarned that no one else was to be believed after him. Therefore if having come first, and having pronounced first concerning those who come after, this will elude faith; he will himself already be condemned in advance by the fact that he is recognized as the later one, and the authority will belong to the Creator alone—the authority of establishing this rule against those who come after—since the Creator could be posterior to no one.

Now, since I am about to prove that the Creator had already put forth through his servants those same mighty works which you claim as the sole ground of faith for your Christ, and had at other times appointed them to be put forth through his own Christ; I can on this ground also rightly lay down the rule that Christ was all the more not to be believed on the basis of mighty works alone, inasmuch as those works could not have been interpreted as belonging to any other than the Creator, answering as they do to the mighty works of the Creator—both those put forth through his servants and those promised in his own Christ.

Although even if other evidences had been found in your Christ, novel ones of course, we should more readily believe that even novel things belong to him to whom the old things also belong, than to him to whom only novel things belong—things lacking the proofs of a faith victorious through antiquity; so that in this way too he ought to have come as one foretold, with both his own predictions building up faith in him and also his mighty works; especially against the Christ of the Creator who was to come, fortified with his own signs and prophets; so that as a rival Christ he might shine forth through every kind of contrast. But how could his Christ be proclaimed by a God who was never proclaimed? This, then, is what the situation demands: that neither your God nor your Christ is to be believed, because God ought not to have been unknown, and Christ ought to have been recognized through God.

He disdained, I suppose, to imitate the order of our God, as one who displeased him, as one who was above all to be refuted. Novel, he wished to come in a novel manner; the Son before the profession of the Father, and the sent one before the authority of the sender; so as to introduce even that most monstrous faith, by which Christ would be believed to have come before it was known that he existed. It is also fitting for me to examine why he did not come after Christ.

For when I consider his lord, most patient for so long an age of the most bitter Creator who was in the meantime announcing his own Christ to mankind—whatever the reason he did so, deferring both his revelation and his intervention—I say by the same reasoning that he ought to have shown patience toward the Creator also in his own Christ who was yet to carry out his purposes; so that, when the rival God and the rival Christ had completed and fulfilled all their work, then he too might superimpose his own purposes. But he repented of so great patience, in that he did not persevere to the end of the Creator's dispensation. Did he vainly endure the proclamation of his Christ, whom he did not endure to see presented? Or was there no reason why he did not intervene for so long? What held him back, or what disturbed him?

And yet he committed an error on both counts: revealed indeed after the Creator, yet far too late; but before his Christ, yet far too soon. The one he ought to have exposed long ago, the other not yet; he ought not to have endured the former raging so long, yet he disturbed the latter while still at rest—falling short with regard to both of the title of the best God, certainly himself also inconsistent and uncertain; lukewarm toward the Creator, and hot toward Christ, and vain in both directions. For he no more restrained the Creator than he stood in the way of Christ. The Creator remains, exactly as he is; and Christ will come, exactly as he is written. Why did he come after the Creator, whom he was unable to amend? Why was he revealed before his Christ, whom he could not call back?

Or if he did amend the Creator, he was revealed after him, so that the things to be amended might come first; therefore he ought equally to have waited to amend his Christ as well, and thus to be the later amender of him also, just as of the Creator. It is another matter if he himself is also going to come again after him; so that at his first coming he proceeded against the Creator, destroying his Law and Prophets; but at his second coming he proceeds against Christ, refuting his kingdom. Then therefore he will be concluding his order, then perhaps he is to be believed; or if his business is already finished from this point, then he will come in vain, having nothing further to accomplish.

With these points I have made a preliminary skirmish, as it were from the first position still, and as it were from a distance. But now, about to fight from this point onward in a definite and close engagement, I see that certain lines must also be drawn in advance, along which the fighting will take place—namely, the Scriptures of the Creator. For since I am going to prove by them that Christ belonged to the Creator, as afterwards fulfilled in his own Christ, I am obliged also to set forth the form of those very Scriptures, and (if I may so say) their nature, lest when they are brought into controversy, being applied to cases and their own defense intermingled with the defense of the cases, they blunt the reader's attention. I therefore allege two characteristics of prophetic speech to be recognized henceforth by our adversaries. The first is that by which future things are sometimes announced as already past.

For it is fitting to the Godhead to reckon whatever it has decreed as already accomplished, since there is no difference of time with him, with whom eternity itself directs the uniform state of times; and it is more natural to prophetic divination to represent that which it foresees, while foreseeing it, as already seen, and thus already discharged—that is, to demonstrate it as in every way future—as through Isaiah: I gave my back to the scourges, and my cheeks to blows; and my face I turned not away from spittings. For whether Christ was then speaking of himself according to us, or the prophet of himself according to the Jews, it was not yet done, yet it sounded as already past. The other kind will be that by which most things are portended figuratively through enigmas and allegories and parables, to be understood otherwise than as they are written.

For we read also that the mountains shall drop sweetness; yet you are not to expect must from rocks, or new wine from crags: and we hear of a land flowing with milk and honey; yet you are not to believe that you will ever gather cakes and Samian delicacies from clods of earth: because the mouth of God did not straightway promise a water-finder and a farmer, when it said: I will set rivers in the thirsty region, and in the wilderness cedar and box-tree. As also when proclaiming the conversion of the Nations: The beasts of the field shall bless me, the sirens and the daughters of the sparrows; he is not of course going to receive good omens from swallows' chicks and little foxes, and those monstrous and fabulous singing creatures. And why should I say more about this kind of thing?

When even the apostle of the heretics himself, interprets the very law that grants oxen treading out the grain the freedom to eat, not as being about oxen but about us: and alleges that the rock which supplied drink as a companion was Christ; teaching the Galatians likewise that the two accounts of Abraham's sons ran allegorically, and suggesting to the Ephesians that what was proclaimed in the beginning concerning man—leaving father and mother, and the two becoming one flesh—he recognizes as referring to Christ and the Church.

If these two properties of Jewish literature are sufficiently established for the present; remember, reader, that it has been settled that when we bring forward any such thing, the question is not to be re-examined concerning the form of the scripture, but concerning the state of the case. Since, therefore, heretical madness presumed that Christ had come who had never been announced, it followed that it would contend that Christ had not yet come who had always been proclaimed: and thus it was compelled to join itself with Jewish error, and to build its argumentation from that source, as though the Jews, themselves certain that he who came was another, had not only rejected him as a stranger but also slain him as an adversary, and would without doubt have acknowledged him and attended him with every duty of religion, had he been their own.

Of course, the Pontic shipmaster had been warned—not indeed by the Rhodian law, but by his own—that the Jews were not permitted to err concerning their own Christ; since even if nothing of the sort had been foretold concerning them, the mere human condition, subject to deception, would at least have persuaded us that the Jews could err, being men; and that a prejudgment ought not immediately to be drawn from the opinion of those who might credibly have erred. Moreover, since it was also foretold that they would not acknowledge Christ, and would therefore also put him to death, he himself then will be both unrecognized and slain by those who were forewarned that they would so act against him.

If you require this to be proved, I shall not unroll those scriptures which, in declaring Christ liable to be slain, affirm him equally liable to be unrecognized—for unless he were unrecognized he could of course suffer nothing—but reserving those for the cause of the passions, it will suffice for the present to bring forward those prophecies which for now prove Christ to be unrecognizable, and this briefly, while they show that all the force of understanding was taken away from the people by the Creator.

I will take away, he says, the wisdom of their wise men, and the prudence of their prudent men I will hide; and, With the ear you shall hear, and shall not hear; and with the eyes you shall see, and shall not see: for the heart of this people has been made gross, and with their ears they have heard heavily, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should hear with their ears and see with their eyes, and understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them. For this dulling of the saving senses they deserved, loving God with their lips, but with their heart standing far from him.

If therefore Christ was indeed announced by the Creator who solidifies the thunder and creates the spirit, and announces his Christ among men, according to the prophet Amos; if all the hope of the Jews—not to mention also of the Gentiles—was destined for the revelation of Christ, without doubt they were being shown that they would not recognize and would not understand—the powers of recognition and understanding, namely wisdom and prudence, having been taken away—what was announced, that is Christ; their chief wise men, that is the scribes, and their prudent men, that is the Pharisees, being destined to err concerning him; and likewise the people destined to hear with their ears and not hear, namely Christ teaching, and to see with their eyes and not see, namely Christ working signs, according to what is also said elsewhere: And who is blind, but my servants? And who is deaf, but he that rules over them? But also when he reproaches through the same Isaiah: I have begotten sons, and exalted them; but they have rejected me.

The ox has known his owner, and the ass the manger of his lord; but Israel has not known me, and the people has not understood me. We indeed, being certain that Christ always spoke in the Prophets—the spirit, that is, of the Creator, as the prophet testifies, The Spirit of his person, Christ the Lord, who from the beginning as the vicar of the Father was both heard and seen in the name of God—know that these very words of his were already then reproaching Israel, who were foretold to commit such things against him: You have forsaken the Lord, and have provoked to anger the Holy One of Israel. But if you should wish to refer all the reckoning of Jewish ignorance not to Christ but rather to God himself from of old, being unwilling also that the word and spirit from of old, that is, Christ of the Creator, was despised and unrecognized by them, you are refuted in this way as well.

For not denying that the Son and spirit and substance of the Creator is Christ, his own, you must necessarily concede that those who did not acknowledge the Father could not acknowledge the Son either, by reason of the condition of the same substance; of which if the fullness was not understood, much less the portion, certainly as a sharer of the fullness. These things having been thus examined, it now appears in what manner the Jews both rejected Christ and slew him—not understanding him as a foreign Christ, but failing to recognize him as their own. For how could they have understood him as a stranger, concerning whom nothing had ever been announced, when they could not understand him concerning whom there had always been proclamation? For that which, by having the substance of proclamation, will also have the material of either recognition or error, is capable of being understood or not understood. But that which lacks material does not admit the outcome of wisdom.

And so it was not as belonging to another God that they turned away from and persecuted Christ; but solely as a man, whom they considered a deceiver in his signs and a rival in his teachings, so that they brought him to judgment even as a man who was their own, that is a Jew, but a transgressor and destroyer of Judaism, and punished him by their own right—they would of course not have judged one who was a stranger. So far is it from appearing that they understood Christ as a stranger, that they did not even judge his humanity as belonging to a stranger.

Let the heretic now learn in abundance, together with the Jew himself if permitted, the reason also for his errors—he who, having borrowed his lead from him, blind led by blind, has fallen into the same pit. We say that two aspects of Christ, demonstrated by the Prophets, foretold an equal number of his comings: one in humility, the first, namely; when he was to be led as a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer without a voice, so not opening his mouth; not even honorable in appearance. For we have announced, he says, concerning him; as a little child, as a root in a thirsty land; and there is no form to him, nor glory.

And we saw him, and he had no form nor comeliness; but his form was without honor, failing short of the sons of men; a man in plague, and knowing how to bear infirmity; placed by the Father as a stone of stumbling and a rock of scandal; diminished by him a little below the angels; pronouncing himself a worm, and not a man; the reproach of men, and the outcast of the people. These proofs of ignobility belong to the first coming, just as those of sublimity belong to the second; when he will be no longer a stone of stumbling nor a rock of scandal, but the chief cornerstone, taken up after rejection and exalted to the completion of the temple, namely the Church; and indeed that rock, in Daniel, cut from the mountain, which will crush and grind the image of the kingdoms of the world.

Concerning this second coming the same prophet says: And behold, with the clouds of heaven as a son of man coming, he came even to the Ancient of Days, and was present in his sight; and those who stood by brought him near, and there was given to him royal power, and all the nations of the earth according to their kinds, and all glory in service; and his power unto eternity, which shall not be taken away; and his kingdom, which shall not pass away. Then of course he will have both an honorable form and an unfailing comeliness above the sons of men. For he is timely, he says, in beauty beyond the sons of men; grace is poured out upon your lips: therefore God has blessed you for ever. Gird your sword upon your thigh, O mighty one, in your timeliness and your beauty; when also the Father, after he has diminished him a little below the angels, will crown him with glory and honor, and will subject all things under his feet.

Then also they shall recognize him whom they pierced, and shall beat their breasts tribe by tribe; because formerly they did not acknowledge him when he was set in the humility of the human condition. And he is a man, says Jeremiah; and who shall know him? Because also, His nativity, says Isaiah, who shall declare? So also in Zechariah, in the person of Jesus—indeed also in the very sacrament of his humanity—the true high priest of the Father, Christ Jesus, is delineated in a double aspect for two comings. First, clothed in filthy garments, that is, in the unworthiness of passible and mortal flesh, when also the devil opposed him, the instigator, that is, of Judas the betrayer, not to mention also the tempter after baptism. Then, stripped of his former filth, and adorned with a long robe, and a mitre, and a clean tiara, that is, with the glory and honor of the second coming.

For if I also interpret the two goats which were offered on the fast, do not they too figure both orders of Christ? Equal indeed and alike on account of the same Lord's appearance, because he is not going to come in another form, since he must be recognized by those by whom he was also injured. But one of them, wrapped in scarlet, was cursed and spat upon and torn and pierced by the people and cast outside the city to destruction, marked with the plain tokens of the Lord's passion. The other, however, offered for sins and given to the priests of the temple for food, signified the proofs of the second manifestation, whereby, all sins having been expiated, the priests of the spiritual temple, that is of the Church, would enjoy as it were a certain feast of the Lord's grace, while the rest fasted from salvation.

Therefore, since the first coming was sung of as both greatly obscured by figures and prostrated in all dishonor, but the second as both manifest and worthy of God; for this reason, looking only upon that one which they could easily both understand and believe, that is the second, which is in honor and glory, they were not undeservedly deceived concerning the more obscure, certainly the more unworthy one, that is the first. And so to this day they deny that their Christ has come, because he did not come in sublimity, while they are ignorant that he was also to come in humility.

Let the heretic now cease to borrow poison from the Jew, as they say the asp borrows from the viper; let him henceforth vomit forth the venom of his own genius, claiming that Christ was a phantom. Except that this opinion too will have other authors—certain premature and, as it were, abortive Marcionites, whom the apostle John pronounced antichrists, denying that Christ came in the flesh; and yet not in order to establish the right of another God, because they would have been marked out on that account as well; but because they had presumptuously deemed it incredible that God should take on flesh. All the more, then, did Marcion the antichrist seize that presumption for himself; being, of course, better fitted to deny the bodily substance of Christ, since he had introduced the very God of Christ as neither the author of flesh nor its restorer—most excellent, forsooth, and in this respect most utterly different from the lies and deceits of the Creator.

And therefore, lest his Christ should lie, lest he should deceive, and so perhaps be reckoned as belonging to the Creator, he was not what he appeared to be, and what he was he concealed by lying; flesh, yet not flesh; man, yet not man: and likewise God, yet not God. For why should he not also have borne the phantom of God? Am I to believe him concerning his inner substance, when he has proved deceptive in his outer? How shall he be held truthful in what is hidden, when he has been found so deceitful in what is open? Moreover, how did he, confounding in himself the truth of the spirit with the falsehood of the flesh, bring about that communion of light, that is of truth, with falsehood, that is with darkness, which the Apostle denies? Now, since the flesh of Christ is detected as a lie, it follows that all things done through the flesh of Christ were done in a lie—his meetings, his contacts, his companionship, and even his miracles.

For if he freed someone from a disease by touching him, or was touched by someone, what was done bodily cannot be truly believed to have been done without the truth of the body itself. Nothing solid can be accomplished by what is empty, nothing full by what is hollow. A pretended condition, a pretended act: an imaginary worker, imaginary works. Thus neither will the sufferings of his Christ deserve credence; for he suffered nothing who did not truly suffer. But a phantom could not truly suffer. The whole work of God is therefore overthrown. The whole weight and fruit of the Christian name—the death of Christ—is denied, which the Apostle so earnestly commends, as being certainly real, establishing it as the supreme foundation of the Gospel, and of our salvation, and of his own preaching: For I delivered unto you, he says, first of all, that Christ died for our sins, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day.

Furthermore, if his flesh is denied, how is his death affirmed, which is the proper suffering of flesh, departing through death into the earth from which it was taken according to the law of its author? But with death denied, since flesh is denied, neither will the resurrection stand firm. For by the same reasoning he did not rise again by which he did not die, namely by not having the substance of flesh; of which, as death, so also resurrection is. Accordingly, with the resurrection of Christ undermined, our own resurrection is also overthrown. For that resurrection too will not avail, for the sake of which Christ came, if Christ did not rise again.

For just as those who said there is no resurrection of the dead are refuted by the Apostle from the resurrection of Christ; so, with the resurrection of Christ not standing firm, the resurrection of the dead is also taken away, and thus our faith is vain, the preaching of the Apostles is vain, and they are found moreover to be false witnesses of God, in that they bore testimony as though he raised up Christ, whom he did not raise up, and we are still in our sins, and those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished—destined indeed to rise again, but perhaps as a phantom, even as Christ was.

In this question, you who have thought to oppose to us the angels of the Creator, as though they too acted in the phantom of a merely putative flesh with Abraham and Lot, and yet truly both met with men, and ate, and performed what had been commanded them—first, you are not admitted to the examples of that God whom you are destroying: for the better and more perfect you represent your God to be, the less do the examples of that God suit him, in comparison with whom, unless he is altogether different, he will not be at all better and more perfect. Next, know that not even this is conceded to you, that the flesh in the angels was putative, but that it was of true and solid human substance. For if it was not difficult for him to exhibit true senses and actions in putative flesh, it was far easier for him to have given true substance of flesh to true senses and actions, especially as he is the proper author and artificer thereof.

Your God, however, because he produced no flesh at all, perhaps rightly introduced a phantom of that whose reality he had been unable to produce. But my God, who fashioned that flesh taken from the clay, reformed it in this quality—not yet from conjugal seed, and yet flesh—was equally able from whatever material to have furnished flesh also to the angels, seeing that he also built the world out of nothing into so many and such great bodies, and that by a word. And surely if your God at some point promises to men the true substance of angels: For they shall be, he says, as the angels; why should not my God also have furnished to angels the true substance of men, taken from whatever source? Since you will not be able to answer me either, from what source that angelic substance is derived in your system, it is enough for me to define what befits God—namely, the truth of that thing which he set before three witness-senses: sight, touch, and hearing.

It is harder for God to lie than to produce the truth of flesh from whatever source, even if not born. Moreover, to other heretics who maintain that that flesh in the angels ought to have been born of flesh if it was truly human, we reply with a sure argument, by which it was both truly human and unborn: truly human, on account of the truthfulness of God, who is a stranger to lying and deceit, and because men could not be dealt with in human fashion except in human substance; unborn, however, because Christ alone was destined to be born into flesh from flesh, so that by his birth he might reform our birth, and thus also dissolve our death by his death, rising again in the flesh in which he was born, so that he could also die.

And therefore he himself, when he appeared at that time with the angels before Abraham, appeared indeed in the truth of flesh, but not yet of flesh that had been born, because not yet of flesh that was to die; but already learning to converse among men. All the more, then, the angels, not being appointed to die for us, ought not to have taken on a brief loan of flesh by being born, since they were not going to lay it aside by dying, but having taken it from whatever source and dismissed it in whatever manner, they nevertheless did not lie about it. If the Creator makes his angels spirits and his ministers a flaming fire, as truly spirits as also fire; the same made them truly flesh also: so that now we may recall, and declare to the heretics, that it belongs to him who at some time formed angels into men, to promise that men will at some time be reformed into angels.

Therefore, not being admitted to share in the examples of the Creator, as belonging to another and having their own reasons, I would have you set forth the counsel of your own God, by which he did not present his Christ in the truth of flesh. If he disdained it as earthly and, as you say, stuffed with excrement, why did he not likewise despise even a likeness of it? For no image of a thing that is to be disdained is worthy of regard: likeness follows the condition of the original. But how was he to converse among men, except through the image of human substance? Why then not rather through the truth of it, so that he might truly converse, if he had need to converse? How much more worthily would necessity have furnished credibility than a trick? You set up a sufficiently wretched God in this very fact, that he could not present his Christ except in the likeness of an unworthy thing, and indeed of one that was another's.

For it will sometimes be fitting to use certain unworthy things, if they are our own; as it will not be fitting to use things that are another's, even if they are worthy. For why did he not come in some other more worthy substance, and first of all in his own, so that he might not seem to have needed something both unworthy and alien? If my Creator held converse with man through a bush and fire, and afterwards through a cloud and a globe, and made use of the bodies of the elements in representations of himself, these examples sufficiently show the power of God—that God had no need of either false or even true flesh as a provision. Besides, if we look at the matter strictly, no substance is worthy for God to put on. Whatever he himself puts on, he makes worthy, yet without lying. And therefore, what manner of thing is it that he should have deemed the truth of flesh more shameful than the lie of flesh?

And yet he honoured it by feigning it. How great a thing is flesh, whose phantom was necessary to the superior God!

All these illusions of a putative corporeality in Christ, Marcion undertook with that intention, that the birth of Christ might not also be defended from the testimony of his human substance, and that Christ might thus be claimed as the Creator's, as one who was announced as capable of birth and therefore fleshly. Most foolishly here too, O man of Pontus, as though it were not more easily believed that flesh in God was unborn than false—a belief prepared above all by the angels of the Creator, who conversed in true flesh, yet flesh that was not born. For indeed that Philumene persuaded Apelles and the other deserters of Marcion more effectively, that Christ had carried flesh about with him in truth of faith, yet of no birth, having borrowed it, as it were, from the elements.

But if Marcion feared that belief in the flesh would lead to belief in the birth as well—without doubt one who appeared to be a man was believed to have been born: for a certain woman had cried out: Blessed is the womb that bore thee, and the breasts which thou hast sucked. And how were his mother and brothers said to be standing outside? And we shall see about these passages in their proper place. Certainly, since he himself also proclaimed himself the Son of Man, he was thereby professing himself to have been born. Now, though I have deferred all these matters to the examination of the Gospel, yet, as I established above, if in every way he who appeared to be a man had to be believed to have been born, it was in vain that he thought the belief in birth was to be blotted out by the device of imaginary flesh. For what did it profit that what was held for true—both flesh and birth—was not truly so?

Or if you say, let human opinion look to itself, you are already honouring your God with the title of deceit, if he knew himself to be other than what he had caused men to suppose. You could then also have assigned to him a putative birth, so as not to have stumbled into this question as well. For sometimes women imagine themselves pregnant, being swollen either by the suppression of their monthly flow or by some ailment. And surely the scene of the phantom ought to have been played out to the end, lest he who had acted the part of the substance itself should not have danced out the origin of the flesh as well. Plainly you refused the lie of birth, for you did put forward the flesh itself as real. Most shameful for God, forsooth, is birth—even when everything else is real.

Come now, declaim against those most holy and venerable works of nature: inveigh against all that you are: destroy the origin of flesh and soul: call the womb a sewer, the workshop for producing so great a creature, that is, man: pursue also the unclean and shameful agonies of birth, and the foul, distressing, ridiculous issues of the delivery itself. Yet when you have destroyed all these things, to confirm them as unworthy of God, birth will not be more unworthy than death, nor infancy than the cross, nor nature than punishment, nor flesh than condemnation. If Christ truly suffered these things, it was a lesser thing to be born. If he suffered them in a lie, as a phantom, he could also have been born in a lie. These chief arguments of Marcion, by which he makes Christ to be another, I think we have sufficiently shown to be altogether untenable, while we teach that truth of the condition in which he presented his Christ befits God far more than a lie thereof.

If it was truth, it was flesh; if it was flesh, he was born. For the things which this heresy attacks are confirmed when the things by which it attacks are destroyed. And so, if he is to be held fleshly because born, and born because fleshly, because he was not a phantom, he himself must be acknowledged as the one who was announced by the Creator's prophets as coming in flesh and from birth—as being, that is, the Christ of the Creator.

Challenge now, as you are wont, this comparison of Christ with Isaiah, contending that it agrees in nothing. For first, you say, the Christ of Isaiah was to be called Emmanuel; then to take the power of Damascus, and the spoils of Samaria, against the king of the Assyrians. But he who came was neither published under a name of that kind, nor performed any warlike act. But I will admonish you to recognize also the coherence of both chapters together. For the interpretation of Emmanuel is also subjoined: God with us; so that you should regard not only the sound of the name, but also its meaning. For the Hebrew sound, which is Emmanuel, belongs to its own nation. But its meaning, which is God with us, is common through interpretation. Ask therefore whether that expression, God with us, which is Emmanuel, has been in use regarding Christ from the time that Christ shone forth. And I think you will not deny it, inasmuch as you yourself also say, God-with-us is said, that is, Emmanuel.

Or if you are so vain that, because among you it is said God-with-us and not Emmanuel, you therefore refuse to acknowledge that he has come whose proper name it was to be called Emmanuel, as though this were not also God with us, you will find among Hebrew Christians, nay even among Marcionites, that they name Emmanuel when they wish to say God-with-us: just as every nation, in whatever sound it has said God-with-us, has pronounced Emmanuel, cancelling the sound in the meaning. But if Emmanuel is God-with-us, and God-with-us is Christ, who is also in us: For as many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ; Christ is as properly signified in the meaning of the name which is God-with-us, as in the sound of the name which is Emmanuel. And thus it is established that he who was foretold as Emmanuel has already come; because what Emmanuel signifies has come, that is, God-with-us.

Equally also you are led by the sound of words, when you take the power of Damascus, and the spoils of Samaria, and the king of the Assyrians, as though they portray Christ of the Creator as a warrior, not observing what Scripture sets before them: For before he shall know how to call father and mother, he shall receive the power of Damascus, and the spoils of Samaria, against the king of the Assyrians. First you must look at the indication of age, to see whether it could present Christ as already a man, let alone a commander. Forsooth, an infant would have summoned men to arms with his wailing; and would have given the signals of war not with a trumpet but with a rattle: and not from horseback, or from a chariot, or from a wall; but from the neck or back of his nurse or bearer would he have aimed at the enemy, and so would have subdued Damascus and Samaria instead of breasts.

Something else perhaps among the Pontics, where infants of a barbaric nation burst forth into battle, anointed first with oil, I believe, to the sun, then armed with swaddling-bands, and provisioned with butter, who would know how to hurl a lance before they know how to be torn to pieces. But indeed, if nature nowhere allows this, to be a soldier before one lives; to take the power of Damascus before one knows the names of father and mother; it follows that the expression must be understood as figurative. But, he says, nature does not allow a virgin to give birth, and yet the prophet is believed. And rightly so. For he established credibility for an incredible thing by declaring the reason, that it was to be a sign. Therefore, he says, the Lord shall give you a sign: Behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb, and shall bear a son. But a sign from God, unless it were something new and extraordinary, would not have been worthy of the name.

Finally, even the Jews, whenever they dare to lie in order to overthrow us, as though Scripture contained not a virgin but a young woman who would conceive and bear, are refuted from this very point, that an everyday occurrence could not be seen as a sign, namely the pregnancy and delivery of a young woman. Therefore a virgin and mother appointed as a sign is rightly believed; but an infant warrior is not equally so. For here too the logic of a sign does not apply. But with the sign of a new birth assigned, thereafter after the sign, another order of the infant is declared, of one who is to eat honey and butter. Nor is this in any way a sign of one who will not assent to evil; for this too is infancy; but of one who is to receive the power of Damascus, and the spoils of Samaria, against the king of the Assyrians.

Preserve the measure of age, and seek the meaning of the prophecy: nay rather, restore to the Gospel of truth what you have taken away in the latter part, and the prophecy is as intelligible as it is declared to be cancelled. For let those eastern magi remain, honouring the infant Christ in his infancy with gold and frankincense, and the infant shall have received the power of Damascus without battle and arms. For besides the fact that it is known to all that the power of the East, that is its force and strength, was wont to abound in gold and perfumes; it is certainly the Creator's way to reckon gold as the power of other nations as well; as through Zechariah: And Judah shall fight at Jerusalem, and shall gather all the strength of the peoples round about, gold and silver. Concerning that gift of gold at that time, David also says: And there shall be given to him of the gold of Arabia; and again: The kings of Arabia and Saba shall bring him gifts.

For the East has generally had magi as kings, and Damascus was formerly reckoned as part of Arabia, before it was transferred to Syrophoenicia, by the distinction of the Syrias; whose power Christ then received, by receiving its tokens, namely gold and perfumes; but the spoils of Samaria were the magi themselves: who, when they had recognized him, and honoured him with gifts, and having bent the knee had worshipped him as God and king, under the testimony of the star as indicator and guide, became the spoils of Samaria, that is of idolatry, by believing in Christ. For he designated idolatry by the name of Samaria, as one infamous for the idolatry by which it had then defected from God under king Jeroboam. Nor is this new for the Creator to use figurative transference of names, from comparison of crimes.

For he also calls the rulers of the Jews rulers of Sodom; and the people itself he calls the people of Gomorrah, and the same elsewhere says: Your father, he says, was an Amorite, and your mother a Hittite, on account of similar impiety, those whom he had at other times also called his own sons: I have begotten sons and exalted them. So also Egypt is sometimes understood by him as the whole world, by the designation of superstition and malediction. So also Babylon, in our John, is a figure of the city of Rome: likewise great, and proud in its dominion, and a conqueror of the saints of God. By this usage, therefore, he also designated the magi by the title of Samaritans despoiled, because they had in common with the Samaritans, as we said, idolatry. But against the king of the Assyrians, understand against Herod; against whom the magi at that time certainly acted in opposition, by not reporting back concerning Christ, whom he was seeking to destroy.

This our interpretation will be supported, while also elsewhere, when you suppose Christ to be a warrior on account of certain names of weapons and words of that kind, you are convicted by comparison with the remaining meanings as well: Gird yourself, says David, with the sword upon your thigh. But what do you read above concerning Christ? Comely in beauty beyond the sons of men: grace is poured out upon your lips. I laugh, if to one whom he was girding for war with a sword, he was flattering about comeliness of beauty and grace of lips. So likewise, subjoining: Stretch forth, and prosper, and reign; he added: For the sake of truth, and meekness, and justice. For who shall accomplish these things with a sword, and not rather their opposites, contrary to meekness and justice, deceit and harshness and injustice, the proper business of battles? Let us see therefore whether that sword is a different one, whose action is different.

For the apostle John also in the Apocalypse describes a sword proceeding from the mouth of God, twice sharp, very keen; which must be understood as the word of God, twice sharp with the two Testaments, of the Law and the Gospel; sharp with wisdom, hostile to the devil; arming us against the spiritual enemies of all wickedness and concupiscence, cutting us off even from those most dear for the name of God. But if you are unwilling to acknowledge John, you have the common teacher Paul, girding our loins with truth and the breastplate of justice, and shod with the preparation of the Gospel of peace, not of war: commanding us to take up the shield of faith, with which we can extinguish all the fiery darts of the devil; and the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is, he says, the word of God. This also is the sword which the Lord himself came to send upon the earth, not peace.

If this is your Christ, then he too is a warrior; if he is not a warrior, brandishing an allegorical sword, then let it be permitted also to the Christ of the Creator in the Psalm, without warlike deeds, to be girded figuratively with the sword of the word of God, to which the aforesaid comeliness is fitting, and the grace of lips; with which he was then already being girded upon the thigh in David, about to send it upon the earth at some time. For this is what he says, stretch forth, and prosper, and reign. You shall stretch forth the word into all the earth for the calling of all nations; about to prosper through the success of the faith by which he is to be received; and reigning thenceforth, because he conquered death by resurrection. And your right hand shall lead you wonderfully, he says; namely the power of spiritual grace, by which the knowledge of Christ is led.

Your arrows are sharp, the precepts flying everywhere, and the threats, and the piercings of the heart, pricking and transfixing every conscience. The peoples shall fall under you, namely in adoration. Thus mighty in war and armed is the Christ of the Creator, thus also now receiving spoils, not of Samaria alone, but of all nations. Recognize also the figurative spoils, whose weapons you have learned to be allegorical. Since therefore the Lord speaks in such a manner figuratively, and the Apostle writes so, we do not rashly use his interpretations, examples of which even adversaries admit: and thus Christ who came will be Isaiah's Christ to the extent that he was not a warrior, because he is not foretold as such by Isaiah.

Concerning the question of the flesh, and through it of the nativity, and of the one name Emmanuel, thus far. But concerning the other names, and first of all the name Christ, what will the opposing party answer? If the name of Christ is equally common among you as that of God, so that just as it is fitting to call the son of either God Christ, so either father Lord, certainly reason will resist this argument. For the name of God, as a natural designation of divinity, can be communicated to all to whom divinity is attributed, as also to idols, as the Apostle says. For there are those who are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth. But the name of Christ, coming not from nature but from a dispensation, becomes proper to him by whom the dispensation is found to have been arranged. Nor is it subject to communication to another god, especially a rival one, who has his own dispensation, to which also his own private names will be owed.

For what kind of thing is it that, having devised different dispensations of two gods, they admit a sharing of names in the discord of dispensations? When no proof would more readily establish two rival gods than if in their dispensation a diversity of names were also found. For no condition of differences is marked out except by the proper designations of names: and when these are sometimes lacking, then the Greek catachresis of borrowing from another comes to the rescue. But in God I think nothing ought to be lacking, nor should his dispensations be furnished from another's store. Who is this God, who claims for his son also names from the Creator? I do not say foreign names, but old and common ones, which even so would not befit a new and unknown god. How then does he teach that a new patch is not to be sewn onto the Old Testament, nor new wine trusted to old wineskins, when he himself is sewn on and clothed in the old age of names?

How does he cut off the Gospel from the Law, while clothed entirely in the Law? In the name of Christ, forsooth. Who prevented him from being called something else, while preaching something else, coming from elsewhere? Since for that reason he did not take on the reality of a body, lest he should be believed to be the Christ of the Creator? But he vainly refused to appear to be him whom he wished to be called: since, even if he had truly had a body, he would less appear to be the Christ of the Creator, if he were not so called. But now he rejects the substance of him whose name he has taken, about to prove even the substance from the name. For if Christ is the anointed one, anointing is certainly a property of the body. He who had no body could not have been anointed at all: he who could not have been anointed at all could in no way have been called Christ.

It is another matter if he also affected a phantom of the name. But how, he says, would he have crept into the faith of the Jews, except through a name solemn and familiar among them? You describe an inconsistent or crafty god, or a counsel of diffidence or malice, advancing something by deception. The false prophets acted far more freely and simply, coming against the Creator in the name of their own god. But I do not even find the effect of this counsel, since they would more easily have believed him to be their own Christ, or rather some impostor, than the Christ of another god, as the Gospel will prove.

Now if he seized the name of Christ, as a petty thief seizes a gratuity, why did he also wish to be called Jesus, a name not so much expected among the Jews? For even if we, having obtained through God's grace an understanding of his mysteries, also recognize this name as destined for Christ, the matter will not therefore be known to the Jews, from whom wisdom has been taken away. In short, to this day they hope for a Christ, not a Jesus; and they interpret Elijah as the Christ rather than Jesus. He therefore who came also under that name in which Christ was not anticipated, could have come under that name alone which alone was anticipated. But since he mingled both—the hoped-for and the unhoped-for—each of his purposes is defeated.

For if he is Christ in order that he might meanwhile creep in as it were as the Creator's, Jesus obstructs him, because Jesus was not hoped for in the Christ of the Creator; or if he is Jesus in order that he might be held to belong to another, Christ does not permit it, because a Christ of another than the Creator was not hoped for. Which of these positions can stand, I know not. But both will stand in the Christ of the Creator, in whom Jesus also is found. How, you ask? Learn here too, along with your partners in error, the Jews. When Auses the son of Nave was appointed as the successor of Moses, he was certainly transferred from his former name, and began to be called Jesus. Certainly, you say. This we first declare to have been a figure of the future.

For because Jesus Christ was going to lead the second people—which is what we are, born in the deserts of the world—into the land of promise, flowing with milk and honey, that is, into the possession of eternal life, than which nothing is sweeter; and this was to come about not through Moses, that is, not through the discipline of the Law, but through Jesus, that is, through the grace of the Gospel, we having been circumcised with a blade of stone, that is, by the precepts of Christ—for Christ is the Rock—therefore that man who was being prepared as an image of this mystery was also inaugurated with the figure of the Lord's name, being surnamed Jesus. This name Christ himself testified at that time to be already his own, when he spoke to Moses. For who was speaking, if not the Spirit of the Creator, who is Christ?

When therefore he said by commandment to the people: Behold, I send my angel before your face, who shall keep you on the way, and bring you into the land which I have prepared for you: attend to him, and hearken to him; be not disobedient to him: for he has not concealed from you, that my name is upon him. He called him an angel indeed, on account of the greatness of the powers he was to display, and on account of the office of Prophet, namely as one announcing the divine will; but Jesus, on account of the mystery of his own future name. In like manner he confirmed his own name, which he himself had given him; because he had commanded him to be called thenceforth not angel, nor Auses, but Jesus. Therefore if both names belong to the Christ of the Creator, by so much the more do both not belong to the Christ of one who is not the Creator, just as neither does the rest of the order.

A definite and just rule of prescription must now at last be established between us, necessary for both parties, because it is determined that the Christ of another god ought to have absolutely nothing in common with the Christ of the Creator. For diversity must be defended by you just as it must be resisted by us: because neither will you be able to prove that the Christ of another God has come, unless you demonstrate him to be far different from the Christ of the Creator; nor can we claim him as the Creator's, unless we show him to be such as is established by the Creator. Concerning the names we have now concluded. I claim Christ for myself; I defend Jesus for myself.

Let us compare the rest of his order with the Scriptures. Whatever that little body may be, since it was worn and since it was seen; if inglorious, if ignoble, if without honor, he will be my Christ: for such was he announced in appearance and aspect. Isaiah is at hand again: We have announced, he says, before him; as a little child, as a root in a thirsty land, and there is no form in him nor glory; and we saw him, and he had no form nor comeliness; but his form was without honor, failing beyond all men. As also above the voice of the Father to the Son: As many shall be astonished at you, so without glory shall your form be among men.

For even if he is timely in beauty, in David, above the sons of men; yet that is in that allegorical state of spiritual grace, when he girds on the sword of the word, which is truly his form and comeliness and glory: but otherwise in bodily appearance in the same prophet, even a worm and not a man, the reproach of men and the outcast of the people. Nor do they announce his inner quality to be of a different kind. For if the fullness of the Spirit rested in him, I recognize the rod from the root of Jesse, its flower: he will be my Christ, in whom, according to Isaiah, rested the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and of strength, the spirit of knowledge and of piety, the spirit of the fear of God.

For the diversity of spiritual gifts was fitting for no man, except in Christ: equal indeed to the flower on account of the grace of the Spirit; but reckoned from the stock of Jesse, to be traced through Mary thence. The exposition of the proposition: if you grant him every intention of humility and patience and tranquility, he will also be the Christ of Isaiah: A man in affliction, and knowing how to bear weakness; who was led as a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer opened not his mouth; who neither strove nor cried out, nor was his voice heard outside; who did not break the bruised reed, that is, the shaken faith of the Jews; who did not quench the burning flax, that is, the momentary ardor of the Gentiles, but rather made it a lamp by the rising of his light. He cannot be other than he who was foretold.

His course must be recognized according to the rule of the Scriptures, distinguished, unless I am mistaken, by a twofold operation, of preaching and of power. But concerning both titles I shall so arrange matters that, since it has been decided that Marcion's own Gospel also should be examined, we defer to that place as to the matter at hand the particular kinds of teachings and signs: but here let us generally complete the order begun, teaching that the preacher is meanwhile announced as Christ through Isaiah: For who, he says, among you fears God, and will hearken to the voice of his Son? Likewise the healer: For he himself, he says, took away our weaknesses, and bore our infirmities.

Concerning his end, plainly, I think you attempt to introduce a difference, denying that the passion of the cross was foretold in the Christ of the Creator, and arguing moreover that it is not to be believed that the Creator would have exposed his Son to that kind of death which he himself had cursed: Cursed, he says, is everyone who has hung upon a tree. But the meaning of this curse I defer, worthy of the preaching of the cross alone, concerning which the chief inquiry is now being made, because in other respects also the proof of facts precedes the reason. I will first instruct by means of figures. And certainly this mystery ought above all to be prefigured in the preaching, the more incredible it was, the more it was going to be a stumbling-block if preached nakedly; and the more magnificent it was, the more it was to be veiled, so that the difficulty of understanding might seek the grace of God.

And so first Isaac, when delivered by his father as a sacrifice, himself carrying the wood, was even then marking out the end of Christ, given as a victim by the Father, and bearing the wood of his own passion. Joseph also himself figured in Christ—not in this alone (lest I delay the course) that he suffered persecution from his brothers, and was sold into Egypt on account of God's grace, just as Christ also was sold by the Jews, his brothers in the flesh, when he is betrayed by Judah. For he is also blessed in these words: The beauty of a bull is his, the horns of a unicorn are his horns, with them he shall scatter nations together to the ends of the earth: not that a rhinoceros was intended as the unicorn, nor a Minotaur as the two-horned; but Christ was signified in him, a bull on account of both his dispensations; fierce to some, as judge; gentle to others, as savior; whose horns would be the extremities of the cross.

For even in the yard-arm of a ship, which is part of the cross, the extremities are called horns: but the unicorn's, the middle stake of the upright post. By this power of the cross, and horned after this fashion, he now scatters all nations through faith, lifting them from earth to heaven; and then at the judgment he will scatter them, casting them down from heaven to earth. The same will also be a bull elsewhere in the same scripture, when Jacob, extending the blessing over Simeon and Levi, that is, over the Scribes and Pharisees (for from those the lineage of these is derived), interprets spiritually. Simeon and Levi completed iniquity from their own heresy, by which namely they persecuted Christ.

Let not my soul come into their council, and let not my liver rest upon their assembly: because in their indignation they slew men, that is the Prophets, and in their desire they hamstrung a bull, that is Christ, whom after the slaying of the Prophets they killed, and by nailing his sinews with nails they raged against him. Otherwise it would be vain if, after acts of homicide, he reproaches them with the butchering of some ox. Now indeed Moses, why at that particular time, when Jesus was fighting against Amalek, did he pray with hands spread out, sitting; when in affairs so alarming, he ought rather to have commended prayer by kneeling, and with hands beating his breast, and his face rolling on the ground; unless because there, where the name of the Lord Jesus was fighting, the posture of the cross was also necessary for those who were one day to fight against the devil, through which cross Jesus was to win the victory?

The same Moses again, after the prohibition of every likeness of any thing, why did he set up a bronze serpent placed upon wood, in the posture of one hanging, as a saving spectacle for Israel at the time when they were being destroyed by serpents, unless because here also he was pointing to the power of the Lord's cross, by which the serpent the devil was made a public spectacle, and to every one wounded by spiritual serpents, yet looking upon it and believing in it, health from the bites of sins, and salvation was thenceforth proclaimed.

Come now, if you have read in David, The Lord hath reigned from the tree, I await what you understand by it, unless perchance some carpenter king of the Jews is signified, and not Christ, who from that time reigned from the passion of the tree, death being overcome. For even if death reigned from Adam until Christ, why should Christ not be said to have reigned from the tree, from which tree of the cross, having died, he shut out the kingdom of death? Likewise also Isaiah: For, he says, a child is born unto us, and a son is given unto us. What is new, if he does not speak of the Son of God? Whose government was made upon his shoulder.

Who altogether bears the badge of his power upon his shoulder, and not either a diadem upon his head, or a sceptre in his hand, or any mark of his own garment; but the one new king of new ages, Christ Jesus, alone bore his new glory and power and loftiness upon his shoulder—the cross, that is—so that, according to the earlier prophecy, the Lord should thenceforth reign from the tree. This tree Jeremiah also suggests to you, foretelling what the Jews were about to say: Come, let us cast wood into his bread, meaning into his body. For thus God in your Gospel also revealed it, calling bread his body, so that from this too you may now understand that he gave the figure of his body to bread, whose body the Prophets had previously figured in bread, the Lord himself being afterwards to interpret this mystery.

If you still seek the proclamation of the Lord's cross, the twenty-first psalm can already satisfy you sufficiently, containing the whole passion of Christ, singing even then of his own glory: They pierced, he says, my hands and my feet; which is the peculiar atrocity of the cross. And again, when he implores the help of the Father: Save, he says, me from the mouth of the lion, meaning death; and from the horns of the unicorn his humiliation; from the tips of the cross, that is, as we showed above. Which cross neither David himself suffered, nor any king of the Jews; lest you think the passion of some other is prophesied, rather than his who alone was so notably crucified by the people.

Now even if heretical hardness shall have spurned and mocked all these interpretations, I will grant it that no cross of Christ was signified by the Creator: because not even from this will it prove that another is he who was crucified, unless perchance it shall show that this end of his was foretold by its own God; so that the diversity of passions, and thereby also of persons, may be vindicated from the diversity of predictions. Otherwise, with not even Christ himself of his predicted, much less his cross, the prophecy of death alone is not sufficient against my Christ.

For from the fact that the manner of death was not set forth, it could also have come to pass through the cross, then to be attributed to another, if it had been foretold concerning another—unless he shall also refuse to have the death of my Christ prophesied; whereby he may the more blush, if he announces his own Christ as dead, whom he denies to have been born; yet denies my Christ to be mortal, whom he confesses capable of birth. And death and burial and resurrection of my Christ I wish to show by a single utterance of Isaiah, saying: His burial is taken away from the midst. For he would not have been buried unless he had died; nor would his burial have been taken away from the midst, except through the resurrection. Finally he added: Therefore he himself shall have many as an inheritance and shall divide the spoils of many. For who else, but he who was born, as we showed above? Because his soul was delivered unto death.

For the cause of this grace was shown, namely for the requiting of the wrong of death: it was equally shown that he would obtain these things on account of death, that is, after death he would obtain them through the resurrection.

It is sufficient thus far to have run through the order of Christ in these matters for the present, so that, proved to be such as he was announced, he ought not to be held to be another than he who was announced as such; so that now from this consonance of his deeds and the Scriptures of the Creator, faith may also be restored to those things which, on account of the prejudice of the greater part, are either drawn into doubt or denied, as they bear upon diverse opinions. We now build further upon these things also, the parallels from the Scriptures of the Creator, which were foretold as about to come to pass after Christ. For the dispensation would be found to have been cancelled, if he had not come after whom it was to take effect. Behold all nations emerging thenceforth from the abyss of human error toward God the Creator and toward God Christ; and if you dare, deny that it was prophesied.

But straightway the promise of the Father will meet you in the Psalms: Thou art my Son, I have this day begotten thee. Ask of me, and I will give thee the nations for thine inheritance, and the ends of the earth for thy possession. Nor will you be able to claim him as the son of David rather than as Christ; or the ends of the earth as promised to David rather than to Christ—David who reigned within the single nation of the Jews, whereas Christ has already taken the whole world captive by the faith of his Gospel. So also through Isaiah: Behold, I have given thee as a covenant of my people, as a light of the nations, to open the eyes of the blind; meaning those who wander; to loose the bound from their chains, that is, to free from sins; and from the prison cell, that is, of death; those sitting in darkness, namely of ignorance.

Which things if they come to pass through Christ, they will have been prophesied concerning none other than him through whom they come to pass. Likewise elsewhere: Behold, I have set him as a witness to the nations, a prince and commander of the nations. Nations that knew thee not shall call upon thee, and peoples shall flee unto thee. For you will not interpret these things of David, because he prefaced: And I will make with you an everlasting covenant, the holy and faithful things of David. But rather from this you ought to understand Christ as reckoned from David by carnal descent, on account of the lineage of the virgin Mary; for concerning this promise an oath is sworn in the psalm to David: Of the fruit of thy womb will I set upon thy throne. Whose womb is this? David's own? Certainly not; for David was not going to give birth.

Nor yet his wife's; for he would not have said: Of the fruit of thy womb; but rather, "Of the fruit of the womb of thy wife." Therefore, by saying his own womb, it remains that he pointed to someone of his lineage, of whose womb the fruit was to be the flesh of Christ, which blossomed from the womb of Mary. And therefore he named only the fruit of the womb, as properly of the womb; as if of the womb alone, and not also of a man: and he referred that very womb to David, as the head of the lineage and father of the family. For because he could not attribute to a husband that womb of the virgin, he attributed it to the father. Thus, what new dispensation is found in Christ today, this will be that which the Creator then promised; holy and faithful of David, now holy by holy religion, and faithful from the resurrection.

For Nathan the prophet also in the second book of Kings makes a declaration to David: To his seed which shall be, he says, from his own womb. If you expound this simply of Solomon, you will make me laugh. For it will appear that David gave birth to Solomon. Or is Christ also signified here, the seed of David from that womb which was of David, that is, of Mary? Nay, Christ was rather going to build the house of God—namely the holy man, in whom as a more excellent temple the Spirit of God would dwell—and Christ was rather to be held as the Son of God than Solomon the son of David. Finally, both the throne for ever and the kingdom for ever belong more fittingly to Christ than to Solomon, who was a temporal king. But also the mercy of God did not depart from Christ; whereas the wrath of God also came upon Solomon after his licentiousness and idolatry. For God raised up against him an Idumaean adversary through Satan.

Since therefore none of these things befits Solomon, but Christ, the reasoning of our interpretations will be certain, the very outcome of events also proving it, which are manifestly foretold concerning Christ; and so in him shall be the holy and faithful things of David. Him God set as a witness to the nations, not David: a prince and commander of the nations, not David, who ruled over Israel alone. The nations today call upon Christ, who knew him not; and peoples today flee to Christ, whom they formerly knew not. That cannot be called future which you see coming to pass.

If you cannot even sustain that objection of yours to establish a difference between two Christs—as though the Jewish Christ is indeed destined by the Creator for the people alone, to be gathered back from dispersion, whereas yours is bestowed by the good God for the liberation of all mankind—since in the end Christians of the Creator are found to be earlier than those of Marcion; from that time all peoples being called into his kingdom, from the time when God reigned from the tree, with no Cerdo yet, much less Marcion. But also, refuted on the calling of the nations, turn now to the proselytes. You ask who from the nations pass over to the Creator, when proselytes of a different and distinct condition are named separately by the Prophet: Behold, says Isaiah, Proselytes shall come to thee through me; showing that even the proselytes themselves were to come to God through Christ.

And the nations, which is what we are, likewise had their own designation, hoping in Christ: And in his name, he says, shall the nations hope. But proselytes, whom you substitute in the proclamation to the nations, are not accustomed to hope in the name of Christ, but in the ordinance of Moses, from whom their institution derives. Moreover, the drawing in of the nations arose from the last days. The same Isaiah in other words: And it shall come to pass, he says, in the last days that the mountain of the Lord shall be manifest; meaning the loftiness of God; and the house of God above the highest mountains; meaning Christ, the catholic temple of God, in which God is worshipped, established above all eminences of virtues and powers: And all nations shall come unto him; and many shall go, and shall say: Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he shall announce to us his way, and we shall walk in it.

For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. This shall be his way, the Gospel of the new law and of the new word, now in Christ, not in Moses. And he shall judge among the nations; concerning their error, that is. And they shall overcome a great people, first of all the Jews themselves and the proselytes. And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks, that is, the devices of harmful minds and hostile tongues and all malice and blasphemy they shall convert into pursuits of modesty and peace. And nation shall not take up sword against nation: meaning the sword of discord; and they shall learn war no more, that is, to carry out enmities; so that here too you may learn that Christ was promised not as mighty in war, but as a peacemaker. Either deny these things to have been prophesied, when they are plainly seen; or deny them to have been fulfilled, when they are read.

Or if you deny neither, they will have been fulfilled in him in whom they were prophesied. For behold, consider also the very entry and course of the calling into the nations, coming to God the Creator in the last days, not as proselytes, whose drawing in belongs rather to the earliest days. For the Apostles introduced this faith.

You have also the work of the Apostles proclaimed: How timely are the feet of those who preach good things! Not war, nor evil things. The Psalm also answered: Their sound has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the earth; of those, that is, who carried abroad the law that went forth from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem; so that what is written might come to pass: Those who were far from my justice have drawn near to my justice and to my truth. When the Apostles were girding themselves for this task, they renounced the elders, and the rulers, and the priests of the Jews. Was it not especially, he says, as preachers of another God? Nay rather of that very same God, whose scripture they were at that very moment fulfilling. Depart, depart, Isaiah cries out, go forth from thence, and touch not the unclean thing; meaning, of course, blasphemy against Christ.

Go out from the midst of her, that is, of the synagogue; be ye separate, ye who bear the vessels of the Lord. For already, according to what is written above, the Lord had revealed his holy arm, that is, Christ by his power, before the nations, so that all nations and the ends of the earth might see the salvation that was from God. So also, turning away from Judaism itself, when they were exchanging the bonds and burdens of the Law for evangelical liberty, they were fulfilling the psalm: Let us break their bonds asunder, and cast away their yoke from us: certainly after the nations had raged, and the peoples had meditated vain things; the kings of the earth stood up, and the princes were gathered together against the Lord, and against his Christ. What did the Apostles suffer thereafter? Every iniquity of persecutions, you say, from the men of the Creator, as enemies of him whom they were preaching.

Did the Creator, if he was an adversary of Christ, not only foretell that his apostles would suffer these things, but even reproach them for it? For he would neither have foretold the plan of another God, whom he did not know, as you would have it; nor would he have reproached what he himself had arranged. See how the just man perishes, and no one takes it to heart, and just men are taken away, and no one considers it. For the just man was taken away from the presence of injustice. Who, if not Christ? Come, they say, let us take away the just man, because he is unprofitable to us. Therefore, foretelling this, and adding that Christ also suffered, he likewise prophesied that his just ones would suffer the same things, both the apostles and thereafter all the faithful, marked with that sign, namely, of which Ezekiel speaks: The Lord says to me: Pass through the midst of the gate in the midst of Jerusalem, and set the sign Tau upon the foreheads of the men.

For this is the letter Tau of the Greeks, and our T, the form of the cross, which he was portending as future upon our foreheads in the true and catholic Jerusalem, in which the brethren of Christ, that is, the sons of God, are to render glory to God the Father, as the twenty-first psalm sings in the person of Christ himself to the Father: I will declare thy name to my brethren: in the midst of the church I will sing a hymn to thee. For what was to be done in his name and spirit today, he rightly foretold would be done by himself. And a little further on: From thee is my praise in the great church.

And in the sixty-seventh: In the churches bless ye the Lord God; so that the prophecy of Malachi might likewise concur: I have no pleasure, saith the Lord, and I will not accept your sacrifices; because from the rising of the sun even to the going down, my name is glorified among the nations, and in every place a sacrifice is offered to my name, and a clean sacrifice; meaning, of course, the rendering of glory, and blessing, and praise, and hymns. Since all these things are found in you as well—both the sealing of foreheads, and the sacraments of the churches, and the cleanness of sacrifices—you ought now to burst forth and say that the Spirit of the Creator prophesied concerning your Christ.

Now, since you deny that their Christ came among the Jews, recognize also their end, which was foretold as coming upon them after Christ, on account of the impiety by which they both despised him and put him to death. For first, from the day on which, according to Isaiah, A man casts away his idols of gold and silver, which they made for worshipping vanities and owls; that is, from the time when the human race, the truth having been made clear through Christ, cast away idols; see whether what follows has been fulfilled: For the Lord of hosts has taken away from Judah and from Jerusalem, among other things, both the prophet and the wise master-builder; meaning, of course, the Holy Spirit, who builds the Church, that is, the temple and house and city of God: for from that time his grace ceased among them. And it was commanded to the clouds that they should not rain upon the vineyard of Sorech; that is, that heavenly benefits should not come to the house of Israel.

For it had brought forth thorns, with which it had crowned the Lord; and not justice, but the clamour by which it had extorted his crucifixion. And so, with the dews of the gifts of grace withdrawn, the Law and the Prophets were until John. Thereafter, when through their persisting fury even the name of the Lord was blasphemed through them, as it is written: Because of you my name is blasphemed among the nations (for from them the infamy began), and the intervening time from Tiberius to Vespasian, they had not understood repentance, their land was made desolate, their cities burned with fire, strangers devour their region before their very eyes; the daughter of Zion is left like a watchtower in a vineyard, or a hut in a cucumber field; from the time, that is, when Israel did not know the Lord, and the people did not understand him, but forsook him, and provoked the Holy One of Israel to indignation.

So also the threat of the conditional sword: If ye will not, and will not hear me, the sword shall devour you; proved that it was Christ whom, by not hearing, they perished. He also in the fifty-eighth psalm demands their dispersion from the Father: Scatter them in thy power. He also again through Isaiah, speaking out concerning their burning: Because of me, he says, these things have been done to you: in anguish shall ye sleep. Quite vainly, if they did not suffer these things on account of him who had declared they would suffer them on his account, but on account of the Christ of another God. But he says, I maintain, the Christ of another God, driven to the cross by the powers and authorities of the Creator, as by rivals.

But behold, he is shown to be defended by the Creator: and the wicked were given for his burial; those, namely, who had asserted that he had been stolen away: and the rich for his death; those, namely, who had both purchased the betrayal from Judas, and the false testimony of the stolen corpse from the soldiers. Therefore, either these things did not happen to the Jews on his account; but you are refuted by the concurring sense of the Scriptures together with the outcome of events and the order of times; or if they happened on his account, the Creator could not have avenged anyone but his own Christ, since he would rather have rewarded Judas, if they had destroyed an enemy of his Lord. Certainly, if the Christ of the Creator has not yet come, on whose account they are foretold to suffer these things, then when he comes, they will suffer them. And where then is the daughter of Zion to be forsaken, she who today is nothing?

Where are the cities to be burned, which are already in ruins? Where is the dispersion of the nation, which is already in exile? Restore the state of Judaea, which the Christ of the Creator may find, and then contend that another has come. But indeed, what manner of thing is it that he admitted through his own heaven one whom he was about to destroy in his own land, with the more honourable and glorious region of his kingdom violated, his very court and citadel trodden underfoot? Or did he rather desire this? Plainly a jealous God, yet he conquered. Blush, you who believe in a conquered God. What will you hope from him who was unable to protect himself? For either he was overcome through weakness by the powers and men of the Creator, or through malice, so as to fasten so great a crime upon them by his patience.

Nay, you say, I hope from him what he himself also makes—as a testimony to the difference—the kingdom of God as an eternal and heavenly possession. But your Christ promises the Jews their former state, through the restoration of the land, and after the course of life, refreshment in the bosom of Abraham in the underworld. O most good God! If, when appeased, he restores what he had also taken away when angered. O your God who both smites and heals, who creates evil and makes peace! O God merciful even to the underworld! But concerning the bosom of Abraham, in its own time.

Concerning the restoration of Judaea, however, which the Jews themselves also hope for, as it is described, led by the names of places and regions—how the allegorical interpretation applies spiritually to Christ and to the Church, and to its character and fruit—it is both lengthy to pursue, and set out in another work, which we entitle On the Hope of the Faithful; and in the present work it is idle even for this reason, because the question is not about an earthly but about a heavenly promise. For we also confess that a kingdom on earth has been promised to us; but before heaven, but in a different state; namely, after the resurrection, for a thousand years, in the divinely built city of Jerusalem brought down from heaven, which the Apostle also designates as our mother above, and declaring that our politeuma, that is, our citizenship, is in the heavens, assigns it to some heavenly city.

This city Ezekiel also knew, and the apostle John saw, and the word of the new prophecy which belongs to our faith bears witness, so that it also foretold that even the image of the city would be seen before its manifestation as a sign. Indeed, recently it was verified by the eastern expedition. For it is established, even by pagan witnesses, that in Judaea for forty days, in the morning hours, a city hung from heaven, with the whole appearance of its walls vanishing as the day advanced, and at other times none was seen from nearby. This city we say was provided by God for receiving the saints at the resurrection, and for refreshing them with the abundance of all good things, of course spiritual things, in compensation for those which we have either despised or lost in this world. Since it is both just and worthy of God that his servants should rejoice there also, where they were afflicted in his name.

This is the rationale of the earthly kingdom, after whose thousand years, within which age the resurrection of the saints is concluded—those rising sooner or later according to their merits—then, with the destruction of the world and the conflagration of judgment committed, changed in an instant into angelic substance, namely through that supervestment of incorruption, we shall be transferred into the heavenly kingdom, which is now being discussed as though it were not proclaimed by the Creator, and thereby proving the Christ of another God, by whom it was first and solely revealed. Learn now from this that it was both proclaimed by the Creator, and is to be believed without proclamation in the Creator. What does it seem to you, when the seed of Abraham, after the first promise by which it is promised to be as the multitude of the sand, is also destined to be like the stars; are these not auspices of both an earthly and a heavenly dispensation?

When Isaac, blessing his son Jacob, says: May God give thee of the dew of heaven, and of the fatness of the earth; are these not examples of both kinds of bounty? Finally, the very structure of the blessing itself is to be noted here. For concerning Jacob, who is indeed the figure of the later and more preferred people, that is, of ours, the first promise is of heavenly dew; the second, of earthly fatness. For we are first invited to heavenly things, when we are torn away from the world, and so afterwards we are found to attain earthly things as well. And your gospel also has: Seek first the kingdom of God, and these things shall be added unto you. But to Esau he promises an earthly blessing, and subjoins the heavenly: Of the fatness of the earth, he says, shall be thy dwelling, and of the dew of heaven.

For the dispensation of the Jews is in Esau—of the firstborn in birth and the later-born in affection among the sons—imbued with earthly goods through the law, and afterwards led to heavenly things by believing through the Gospel. But when Jacob dreams of ladders fixed in the earth reaching to heaven, and angels some ascending and others descending, and the Lord leaning from above, we shall not rashly interpret, if perhaps we say that by these ladders the way to heaven is shown, by which some arrive and from which others fall, established by the judgment of the Lord. But why, when he awoke and was first shaken by the dread of the place, does he turn to the interpretation of the dream? For when he had said: How terrible is this place! It is, he says, none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. For he had seen Christ the Lord, who is both the temple of God and the gate, through whom heaven is entered.

And surely he would not have named the gate of heaven, if heaven were not entered through the Creator. But there is also a gate which receives, and one which leads, already laid open by Christ; of whom Amos says: Who builds his ascent into heaven; not for himself alone, of course, but also for his own who shall be with him, and, For thou shalt put them on thee, he says, as the ornament of a bride. Thus, as those who through him tend toward the heavenly kingdoms, the Spirit marvels, saying: They fly as eagles fly. As clouds they fly, and as the young of doves unto me; that is, simply as doves.

For we shall be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord, according to the Apostle, that is, when that Son of Man comes in the clouds, according to Daniel, and so we shall always be with the Lord, so long as He who, on account of those ungrateful for both promises, calls even the elements themselves to witness: Hear, O heaven, and give ear, O earth. And I indeed, even if Scripture stretching out to me so often no hand of heavenly hope were enough, would still have this prejudgment of that promise too, that since I already hold the earthly grace, I should expect something also from heaven; from the God of heaven, just as of earth, so I would believe that Christ, promising higher things, belongs to Him who had also promised the lower things, who had made trial of greater things through lesser ones, who had perhaps reserved this proclamation of an unheard-of kingdom for Christ alone, so that through servants earthly glory might be announced, but heavenly glory through God Himself.

But you argue from this also another Christ, because He announces a new kingdom. First, bring forward some example of His generosity, lest I rightly doubt the trustworthiness of so great a promise, which you say is to be hoped for; nay, before all else, you must prove that He whom you proclaim as promising heavenly things has a heaven. But now you call to a banquet, yet show no house; you allege a kingdom, yet point to no palace. Or because your Christ promises a heavenly kingdom, not having a heaven, just as he also presented a man, not having flesh? O empty phantom, a great imposture even of promise!

Every opinion and every contrivance of the impious and sacrilegious Marcion we now challenge to his very Gospel, which by interpolating he has made his own. And in order to establish credibility, he devised for it a kind of dowry, a work composed of opposing contradictions, called the Antitheses, and forced toward a separation of the Law and the Gospel, whereby dividing two Gods, likewise diverse, one belonging to each Instrument, or (which is more customary to say) Testament; so that thereby he might also lend support to the Gospel by belief in the antitheses. But those too I would have struck down in close combat, that is, through each of their individual thrusts, had they not far more opportunely been refuted in and together with the very Gospel which they serve. Although it is so easy to meet them by way of prescription, and indeed so as to accept them, to ratify them, to say they make for our side, that our antitheses against Marcion may all the more put his author to shame for his blindness.

And I confess that one order ran its course in the old dispensation under the Creator, another in the new under Christ. I do not deny that the documents of speech differ, the precepts of virtue, the disciplines of the law; provided that the whole diversity falls within one and the same God; that is, the one by whom it is established that it was arranged, just as it was also foretold. Long ago Isaiah proclaims that a law would go forth from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem: another law, that is, and another word.

And then: He shall judge, he says, among the nations, and shall rebuke many a people; that is, not of one nation of the Jews alone, but of the nations, which through the new law of the Gospel and the new word of the Apostles are judged and rebuked within themselves concerning their former error, as soon as they have believed, and thereupon beat their swords into ploughshares; and their spears, which is a kind of hunting-javelin, into pruning-hooks, that is, they turn their once fierce and savage spirits into upright minds, and into workers of good fruit. And again: Hearken unto me, hearken unto me, my people; and ye kings, give ear unto me, for a law shall go forth from me, and my judgment for a light of the nations, whereby He had judged and decreed that the nations also should be enlightened through the law and word of the Gospel. This will be the law found blameless in David, by which, being perfect, it converts souls, namely from idols to God.

This too will be the word, concerning which the same Isaiah says: For the Lord shall make a decisive word upon the earth. For the New Testament is abridged, and freed from the tattered burdens of the law. But why say more? When the renewal is proclaimed more plainly, and more clearly than the light itself, by the Creator through the same prophet: Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. The old things have passed away, new things arise. Behold, I make new things, which shall now spring forth. The same through Jeremiah: Break up for yourselves a new breaking, and sow not among thorns, and circumcise the foreskins of your heart; and elsewhere: Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, and I will make with the house of Jacob and with the house of Judah a new testament, not according to the testament which I made with their fathers in the day that I took hold of their arrangement, to lead them out of the land of Egypt.

So much does the former testament signify a temporal one, in that He shows it to be changeable, even while He promises an eternal one for the future. For through Isaiah: Hearken unto me, and ye shall live, and I will make a testament with you; adding: The holy and faithful things of David; so as to show that that testament would run its course in Christ. The same one from the stock of David according to Mary's lineage, He also figuratively foretold as coming forth in a rod from the root of Jesse.

If therefore the Creator declared that other laws, other words, and new dispositions of testaments would come from Him, so that He also appointed other and better offices of sacrifices themselves, and indeed among the nations, as Malachi says: I have no pleasure in you, saith the Lord, and your sacrifices I will not receive from your hands; for from the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my name is glorified among the nations, and in every place a sacrifice is offered to my name, and a pure sacrifice, namely simple prayer from a pure conscience: it follows of necessity that every change coming from renewal enters into diversity with those things of which it is made, and into contrariety from diversity. For just as nothing is changed that is not different, so nothing is different that is not contrary. Therefore the contrariety also arising from diversity will be attributed to the same one to whom the change arising from renewal belongs.

He who arranged the change, He also established the diversity; He who foretold the renewal, He also announced the contrariety. Why do you interpret the difference of things as a distance of powers? Why do you twist the antitheses of examples against the Creator, when you can recognize them in His very own thoughts and affections? I, He says, will smite, and I will heal: I, He says, will kill, and I will make alive; creating evil, and making peace; for which reason you are also accustomed to reproach Him by the name of inconstancy and fickleness, as one who forbids what He commands, and commands what He forbids. Why then did you not reckon the antitheses also as belonging to the natural character of a Creator who is always contrary to Himself? And could you not at least reflect that the world, unless I am mistaken, even among the Pontics, is built from diversities of mutually rival substances?

You ought therefore first to have determined one God of light and another of darkness, so that you might then be able to assert one God of the Law and another of the Gospel. Otherwise, it is prejudged from manifest things that whose works and contrivances consist in antitheses, by the same pattern do their mysteries also consist.

You have now our answer to the antitheses set forth. I pass now to the demonstration of the Gospel—not Jewish, to be sure, but Pontic—as adulterated in the meantime, laying out beforehand the order which we are undertaking. We establish in the first place that the evangelical Instrument has the Apostles as its authors, upon whom this charge of publishing the Gospel was imposed by the Lord Himself; and if also Apostolic men, yet not alone, but together with the Apostles, and after the Apostles. Since the preaching of disciples could become suspect of vainglory, unless the authority of the masters stood beside it, or rather of Christ, who made the Apostles masters. In short, faith is conveyed to us from the Apostles by John and Matthew; from the Apostolic men, it is renewed by Luke and Mark, beginning with the same rules, so far as concerns the one God the Creator, and His Christ, born of a virgin, the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets.

For let it be seen whether the arrangement varied the narrative, provided there be agreement on the head of the faith, on which there is no agreement with Marcion. On the contrary, Marcion ascribes no author to his Gospel, namely his own; as though it were not permitted to him to affix a title also to that whose very body it was not wrong for him to overturn. And I could here already plant my foot, contending that a work ought not to be acknowledged which does not raise its face, which displays no consistency, promises no credibility from the fullness of a title and the due profession of an author. But we prefer to engage on all points, and we do not conceal what can be understood from our own side. For from those commentators whom we have, Marcion seems to have chosen Luke to mutilate.

Now Luke is not an apostle but an apostolic man; not a master but a disciple; certainly less than his master; assuredly so much the later as he is the follower of a later apostle, Paul without doubt: so that, even if Marcion had introduced the Gospel under the very name of Paul, the singularity of the Instrument, destitute of the patronage of predecessors, would not suffice for credibility; for that Gospel also would be required which Paul found, to which he gave credence, with which he then was eager to have his own agree. For indeed it was for this reason that he went up to Jerusalem to become acquainted with the Apostles and to consult them, lest perhaps he had run in vain, that is, lest he had not believed according to them, and had not preached the Gospel according to them.

Finally, when he had compared notes with the authors and agreed with them on the rule of faith, they joined right hands, and thereupon divided the offices of preaching, so that they should go to the Jews, Paul to the Jews and to the nations. If therefore the very enlightener of Luke desired the authority of predecessors for his own faith and preaching, how much more do I demand it for the Gospel of Luke, which was necessary for the Gospel of his master? It is another matter if, in Marcion's view, the sacrament of the Christian religion began with Luke's discipleship. But if it also ran back through earlier times, it had at any rate an authentic preparation, through which it came down as far as Luke, with whose testimony standing by, Luke too could be admitted.

But indeed Marcion, having gotten hold of Paul's epistle to the Galatians, in which even the apostles themselves are rebuked, as not walking with upright feet toward the truth of the Gospel, and at the same time certain false apostles are accused of perverting the Gospel of Christ, strives to destroy the standing of those Gospels which are published as proper and under the name of apostles, or even of apostolic men; so as, namely, to transfer to his own the credibility which he takes away from them. Now, even if Peter and John and James, who were reputed to be pillars, were rebuked, the reason is plain. For they seemed to vary their manner of life out of respect of persons. And yet, since Paul himself became all things to all men, that he might gain all, it could also have been Peter's purpose to act somewhat differently from what he taught. Likewise, if false apostles also had crept in, their character too is set forth, as those who were vindicating circumcision and Jewish observances.

So much so that they were noted by Paul not for their preaching, but for their manner of life; and he would equally have noted them, had they erred in anything concerning God the Creator or His Christ. The several points must therefore be distinguished. If Marcion complains that the Apostles are to be held suspect of transgression and dissimulation, even to the point of corrupting the Gospel, he is already accusing Christ, by accusing those whom Christ chose. But if the Apostles delivered the Gospel intact, having been rebuked only for inequality of manner of life, while the false apostles interpolated their truth, and from that source our texts were compiled; what will that genuine instrument of the Apostles be, which suffered the adulterators? That which enlightened Paul, and through him Luke? Or if it was so utterly destroyed, as if obliterated by some deluge, by such an inundation of falsifiers; then Marcion too has no true Gospel.

Or if it will be the true one, that is the Apostolic one, which Marcion alone has; and how does it agree with ours, which is attributed not to the Apostles but to Luke? Or if what Marcion uses is not immediately to be attributed to Luke, because it agrees with ours—which is, of course, adulterated even as to its title, but otherwise is of the Apostles—then our Gospel too, which agrees with his, is equally of the Apostles, but adulterated also as to its title.

An end of the dispute must therefore be drawn, if the effort wavers on both sides. I say mine is true, Marcion says his is; I affirm that Marcion's is adulterated, Marcion affirms mine is. Who shall decide between us, except the reckoning of time, which prescribes authority to that which shall be found more ancient, and prejudges corruption against that which shall be proved more recent? For inasmuch as falsehood is the corruption of truth, to that same degree must truth precede falsehood. The thing will be prior to its suffering, and the original prior to its imitation. Otherwise, how absurd it would be, if we have proved ours to be more ancient and Marcion's more recent, that ours should appear to be false before it had the material from truth, and that Marcion's should be believed to have experienced imitation from ours before it was published?

And finally, that that should be reckoned more true which is more recent, after so many and so great works and proofs of the Christian religion already published to the world, which could not have been published at all without the truth of the Gospel, that is, before the truth of the Gospel? Now as regards the Gospel of Luke in the meantime, insofar as its common ground between us and Marcion disputes about truth, that which is ours is so much more ancient than Marcion that Marcion himself once believed it; since he also contributed money to the Catholic Church in the first warmth of faith, money soon cast back along with himself after he had defected from our truth into his own heresy. What now if the Marcionites deny his first faith among us, even against his own letter? What if they do not acknowledge the letter either? Certainly they not only confess the Antitheses to be Marcion's, but even put them forward. From these my proof is sufficient.

For if that Gospel which is attributed to Luke among us (we shall see whether also among Marcion) is the very one which Marcion attacks through his Antitheses as having been interpolated by the defenders of Judaism to incorporate the Law and the Prophets, by which they also fabricated Christ from that source, he certainly could not have attacked it except as something he had found. No one reproves after the fact things he does not know are yet to come: correction does not precede the fault.

Granted that the Gospel had been corrupted from the times of Tiberius until the overthrow of the Antonine era, Marcion alone and first appeared, awaited so long by Christ, now repenting that he had sent the apostles ahead in haste without the protection of Marcion; except that heresy is a matter of human rashness, not of divine authority, which always thus corrects the Gospels while it corrupts them: since even Marcion is a disciple, yet not above his master; and if Marcion is an apostle, Whether I, says Paul, or they, so we preach. And if Marcion is a prophet: the spirits of the prophets shall be subject to the prophets; for God is not of confusion but of peace. Even if Marcion is an angel, he is to be pronounced anathema sooner than a preacher of the gospel, because he preached a different gospel.

And so, while he corrects, he confirms both things: both that ours is prior, by correcting what he found; and that his is posterior, by making it his own and new when he constituted it out of the correction of ours.

In sum, if it is established that that is more true which is prior, that is prior which is from the beginning, that is from the beginning which is from the Apostles; it will equally be established that that has been handed down from the Apostles which has been held sacred among the churches of the Apostles. Let us see what milk the Corinthians drank from Paul; to what rule the Galatians have been corrected; what the Philippians read, the Thessalonians, the Ephesians; what also the Romans sound forth from nearby, to whom both Peter and Paul left the Gospel sealed with their own blood as well. We also have the churches that are nurslings of John. For even if Marcion rejects his Apocalypse, yet the succession of bishops, traced back to its origin, will rest in John as its author. So also the noble lineage of the rest is recognized.

I say therefore that among those churches—and not only the apostolic ones now, but among all which are confederated with them by the fellowship of the sacrament—that Gospel of Luke which we especially defend has stood from the beginning of its publication; whereas Marcion's is unknown to most, and to none known without being condemned. To be sure, that one also has its churches, but its own; as recent as they are spurious; whose pedigree, if you inquire into it, you will more readily find to be Marcionite than apostolic—Marcion being the founder, or someone from Marcion's school. Wasps also make combs: Marcionites also make churches. The same authority of the apostolic churches will also be a patron to the other Gospels, which we likewise have through them and according to them—I mean those of John and Matthew; though also what Mark published is affirmed to be Peter's, whose interpreter Mark was: for they are also accustomed to ascribe Luke's digest to Paul.

It is fitting that those things should be considered the masters', which the disciples have published. And so Marcion must be challenged on these as well: why, passing them over, he has rather pressed upon Luke's—as if these also had not been in the churches from the beginning, just as Luke's has been. But indeed it is more credible that these were from the beginning, as being prior, inasmuch as they are apostolic; as having been dedicated together with the churches themselves. Otherwise, what sort of thing is it, if the Apostles published nothing, that the disciples rather published, who could not even have come to be disciples without any teaching from their masters? Therefore, since it is established that these also were in the churches, why did Marcion not touch these as well—either to correct them if adulterated, or to acknowledge them if intact?

For it is also fitting that if any were perverting the Gospel, they would rather take care to pervert those whose authority they knew to be more widely received—and for that reason also the false apostles, because through falsehood they imitated the Apostles. To the degree, therefore, that he would have corrected what needed correcting, had it been corrupted, to that same degree he confirmed that what he did not think needed correcting had not been corrupted. Finally, he corrected what he judged to be corrupted. But not rightly so, because it was not corrupted. For if the apostolic ones ran on intact; and Luke's, which is ours, agrees so fully with their rule that it remains with them in the churches, then it is also established that Luke's ran on intact right up to the sacrilege of Marcion. Finally, when Marcion laid his hand upon it, then it became different and rival to the apostolic ones.

I will therefore give counsel to his disciples, either to convert those others as well, though late, to the form of their own, so that they may appear to agree with the apostolic ones (for they also reform it daily, as they are daily refuted by us), or to be ashamed of their master everywhere exposed, who now out of conscience lets the truth of the Gospel pass through, now out of impudence overturns it. These are roughly the compendious arguments we use when we contend about the faith of the Gospel against heretics, with time's order prescribing against the lateness of forgers, and the authority of the churches patronizing the tradition of the Apostles: because truth must precede falsehood, and must proceed from those by whom it was handed down.

But from this point we enter upon another stage, challenging the very Gospel of Marcion (as we have declared), so as to prove it adulterated in this way as well. For certainly the whole of what he has labored at, even by prefacing the Antitheses, he forces to this end: to establish the diversity of the Old and New Testament; and accordingly to separate his Christ from the Creator, as belonging to another God, as alien to the law and the prophets. Certainly for this reason he erased whatever passages were contrary to his view, as having been woven in by the defenders of the Creator, those agreeing with the Creator; but reserved those agreeing with his view. These we shall meet. These we shall embrace, if they shall be more on our side; if they shall have struck down Marcion's presumption—then it will also be established that those others were erased by the same vice of heretical blindness by which these were reserved.

Thus the intention and form of our little work will proceed, under that condition, of course, which has been agreed upon by both sides. Marcion has established that there is another Christ, who was revealed in the times of Tiberius by a God formerly unknown, for the salvation of all nations; and another who was appointed by God the Creator for the restoration of the Jewish state, destined to come at some future time. Between these he cuts a great and total difference, as great as that between the just and the good, as great as that between the Law and the Gospel, as great as that between Judaism and Christianity.

Hence also our prescription, by which we lay it down that Christ of another God ought to have nothing in common with the Creator: otherwise, he is to be declared the Creator's, if he has administered the Creator's dispensations, if he has fulfilled the Creator's prophecies, if he has upheld the Creator's laws, if he has made good the Creator's promises, if he has restored the Creator's powers, if he has reformed the Creator's judgments, if he has expressed the Creator's moral character and attributes. Of this compact and this prescription I beg you, reader, to be mindful everywhere, and begin to recognize either Marcion's Christ or the Creator's.

In the fifteenth year of the principate of Tiberius, he sets forth that he descended into a city of Galilee, Capernaum; from the heaven of the Creator, of course, into which he had previously descended from his own. Was there then any order to be observed, that he should first be described as descending from his own heaven into that of the Creator? For why should I not also find fault with those things which do not fulfil the credibility of an orderly narrative, always falling short in falsehood? Let those things be said once for all, through which we have already elsewhere examined whether one descending through the Creator's realm, and indeed against him, could have been admitted by him, and thence conveyed through to the earth equally his own. But now I also press for the remaining order of the descent, holding that he descended. For let him see to it wherever he is said to have appeared.

To appear savours of a sudden and unexpected sight, when one has cast his eyes once upon that which appeared without delay. But to descend, while it is happening, is seen, and comes before the eyes; it also makes an order of the act. And so it compels one to demand in what guise, in what manner, with what impulse or moderation, and also at what time of day or night he descended; moreover, who saw him descending, who reported it, who affirmed a thing which would not easily be believed even from one who affirmed it. It is unworthy, finally, that Romulus indeed had Proculus as a witness of his ascent into heaven, but Christ the Son of God found no announcer of his descent from his heaven; as though that one did not ascend by the same steps of falsehood by which this one descended. But what had he to do with Galilee, if he was not the Creator's?

For that region was destined for him as he was about to enter upon his preaching, Isaiah saying: Drink this first, act quickly, region of Zebulun, and land of Naphtali, and the rest who are by the sea toward Jordan, Galilee of the nations, O people who sit in darkness, behold a great light; you who inhabit the land, sitting in the shadow of death, a light has risen upon you. It is well, moreover, that even the God of Marcion is vindicated as the enlightener of the nations: all the more should he have descended even from heaven, though of course rather into Pontus than into Galilee. Furthermore, both the place and the work of enlightenment meeting Christ according to the prophecy, we begin now to recognise him as foretold, showing at his very first entry that he came not to dissolve the Law and the Prophets, but rather to fulfil them. For this Marcion erased as an addition. But he will deny in vain that Christ said what he straightway in part performed.

For he fulfilled the prophecy meanwhile as to the place, coming down from heaven at once to the synagogue, as the saying goes, To the business for which we came. Marcion, remove also that from the Gospel: I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and: It is not right to take the bread from the children and give it to the dogs; lest Christ should appear to be Israel's. His deeds suffice me in place of words. Take away the words of my Christ, the facts will speak. Behold, he comes into the synagogue; certainly to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Behold, he offers the bread of his teaching first to the Israelites; certainly he prefers them as sons. Behold, he does not yet impart it to others; certainly he passes them by as dogs. But to whom would he rather have imparted it than to the strangers of the Creator, if he himself had not been first and foremost the Creator's?

And yet how could he have been admitted into the synagogue, so sudden, so unknown; of whom no one was yet certain as to tribe, as to people, as to house, as to the census of Augustus, which the Roman archives preserve as the most faithful witness of the Lord's nativity? They would certainly have remembered that one who was not known to be circumcised was not to be admitted into the holy of holies. But even if the synagogue were freely approached, it was not for teaching, except by one thoroughly known and examined and approved, long since designated for this very purpose, or else commended from elsewhere with this office. Now all were astonished at his teaching; plainly: because, it says, his word was with authority: not because he was teaching against the Law and the Prophets. For everywhere the divine utterance displayed both power and grace, building up rather than destroying the substance of the Law and the Prophets.

Otherwise they would not have been astonished, but horrified; nor would they have marvelled, but would have immediately opposed the destroyer of the Law and the Prophets; and above all the preacher of another God: because he could not have taught against the Law and the Prophets, and on that account against the Creator, without first professing a different and rival divinity. Since therefore Scripture indicates nothing of the sort, but only that the power and authority of his word was the object of admiration, it more readily shows that he taught in accordance with the Creator, because it did not deny it, than against the Creator, because it did not indicate it. And so either he must be acknowledged as belonging to him in accordance with whom he taught; or he must be judged a transgressor, if he taught in accordance with him against whom he had come. The spirit of a demon cries out in the same place: What have we to do with thee, Jesus? Hast thou come to destroy us?

I know who thou art, the Holy One of God. Here I will not re-examine whether this title also befitted him who ought not even to be called Christ, if he were not the Creator's. The matter of names has already been disputed elsewhere. But now I dispute how the demon could have known to call him by this name, when no proclamation concerning him had ever previously been sent forth by the unknown God, who had been silent until that time, and who could not even testify him to be his holy one, as unknown even to his own Creator. But what had he yet displayed of a new divinity, by which he could be understood as the holy one of another God? Only that he had entered the synagogue, and had not even by word done anything against the Creator? As therefore he whom he did not know he could in no way recognise as Jesus and the Holy One of God; so he recognised him whom he did know.

For he also remembered that a Prophet had been proclaimed as the Holy One of God, and that Jesus was the name of God in the son of Nave. These things he had also received from the angel according to our Gospel: Therefore that which shall be born in thee shall be called holy, the Son of God, and thou shalt call his name Jesus. But he also had some sense of the Lord's dispensation (though a demon nonetheless) rather than of an alien and as yet insufficiently known one. For he also prefaced it with: What have we to do with thee? Not as to one foreign to Jesus, to whom the spirits of the Creator belong. For he did not say: "what hast thou to do with us?" but: What have we to do with thee? Lamenting himself and reproaching his own lot: which, already seeing it, he adds: Thou hast come to destroy us.

So thoroughly had he recognised Jesus as the Son of the judging and avenging God, and, if I may so say, of the severe God, not of that most good one who knows neither how to destroy nor to punish. To what end have we set forth this passage? That we might show that Jesus was recognised by the demon as none other, and was confirmed by himself as none other than the Creator's. But, you say, Jesus rebuked him. Plainly, as one who was invidious, and insolent even in his very confession, and basely flattering; as though the chief glory of Christ were that he had come for the destruction of demons, and not rather for the salvation of men; who wished his disciples to glory not in the subjection of spirits, but in the bright glory of salvation. Or why did he rebuke him? If as one who had lied entirely, then he was not Jesus, nor the Holy One of God at all.

If as one who had lied in part, because while he had supposed him to be Jesus and the Holy One of God, but of the Creator, he most unjustly rebuked one who thought what he knew ought to be thought, and did not think what he did not know ought to be thought, namely another Jesus and the holy one of another God. But if the rebuke has no more plausible basis than the one we interpret, then the demon told no lie, and was not rebuked for a lie: for he himself was that Jesus, beyond whom the demon could not have recognised another; and Jesus confirmed him whom the demon had recognised, since he rebuked the demon not for a lie.

The Christ of the Creator was to be called a Nazarene according to prophecy: whence also the Jews call us Nazarenes after him by that very name. For we also are those of whom it is written: The Nazarenes were made white above snow. Those, that is, who were formerly discoloured by the stains of transgression, and darkened by the shadows of ignorance, but in Christ. And the appellation of Nazarene was to belong to Christ from the concealments of his infancy, to which he withdrew at Nazareth, avoiding Archelaus the son of Herod. I have not omitted this because the Christ of Marcion ought to have rejected all association even with the places familiar to the Christ of the Creator, having so many towns of Judaea not thus handed over to the Christ of the Creator through the Prophets. For the rest, Christ will belong to the Prophets wherever he is found in accordance with the Prophets.

And yet at Nazareth also he is noted to have preached nothing new, while for another reason, on account of a single proverb, he is reported to have been driven out. Here, first noticing that hands were laid upon him, I find it necessary now to establish beforehand concerning his bodily substance, that he cannot be believed to be a phantom, who, being detained and seized and dragged even to a precipice, admitted contact, and that full of violence. For even if he escaped through the midst of them, yet he had already experienced violence, and was afterwards released; the tumult having been dissolved, as usually happens; or even broken through, yet not evaded by means of a mist, which would have yielded to no touch at all, had it existed. For that nothing but a body can touch or be touched is a maxim worthy even of secular wisdom.

In sum, he himself also presently touched others, laying hands upon them—hands certainly meant to be felt—conferring the benefits of healings, as real, as not imaginary, as were the means by which he conferred them. He himself therefore is also the Christ of Isaiah, the healer of infirmities. This one, it says, takes away our weaknesses and bears our infirmities. Now the Greeks are also accustomed to use the word for bearing in the sense of taking away. The general promise suffices me for the present. Whatever Jesus has healed belongs to my Christ. We shall come, however, also to the particular kinds of healings. Moreover, to free from demons is also a healing of infirmity. And so the unclean spirits, as if following the pattern of the earlier example, departed with testimony, crying out: Thou art the Son of God. Of which God, let this also make clear. But they were likewise rebuked and commanded to be silent. For likewise Christ wished to be recognised as the Son of God by men, not by unclean spirits.

That Christ at least, for whom this was fitting; because he had foretold through whom he could be recognised, and those certainly more worthy heralds. It belonged to him to reject the proclamation of an unclean spirit, who had an abundance of holy ones. But one who had never been announced, if he nevertheless wished to be recognised (for he had come in vain if he did not wish it), would not have spurned the testimony of an alien and whatever substance, who had none of his own, who had descended into what belonged to another. Moreover, as the destroyer of the Creator, nothing would have pleased him more than to be recognised and proclaimed abroad in fear by the Creator's own spirits, were it not that Marcion denies that his God is feared, defending that the good one is not feared, but the judge, with whom are the materials of fear—wrath, cruelty, judgements, vengeance, condemnation. But the demons also departed certainly out of fear.

Therefore they confessed the Son of a God who was to be feared, and would have had occasion not to depart, if there were no fear. And he, driving them out by command and rebuke, not by persuasion as a good one, showed himself to be one who was to be feared. Or did he perhaps rebuke them because he was feared, being unwilling to be feared? And how did he wish them to depart, since they would not do so except out of fear? He fell therefore into a necessity by which he acted contrary to his own nature: when as the good one he could have spared them once for all. He fell also into another mark of transgression; since he allowed himself to be feared by the demons as the Son of the Creator, so that he would no longer be driving out demons by his own power, but by the authority of the Creator. He goes forth into a solitary place.

It is customary there also to be seen in a body, where he had once also been in a cloud. The character of the place also befitted the Gospel, which had pleased the Law as well. Let the solitude therefore receive its joy; this Isaiah had promised. Detained by the crowds: I must, he says, announce the kingdom of God to other cities. Had he already shown his God somewhere? I think not yet. But he was speaking of those who also knew another God. Nor do I believe this. Therefore if neither had he revealed another God, nor did they know any besides the Creator, he was proclaiming the kingdom of that same God whom alone he knew to be known to those who were listening.

Of so many kinds of works, why did he look particularly to fishing, so as to take from it Simon and the sons of Zebedee as apostles? For that act cannot seem a simple one, from which an argument was to proceed, when he said to Peter trembling at the great catch of fish: Fear not, for henceforth thou shalt be catching men. For by this saying he was suggesting to them the understanding of a fulfilled prophecy, that he was the one who had declared through Jeremiah: Behold, I will send many fishers, and they shall fish them; men, that is. And so, leaving their boats, they followed him; understanding him to be the one who had begun to do what he had proclaimed. It is another matter if he sought to enroll men from the guild of boatmen, being about to have at some point the shipmaster Marcion as an apostle.

We have already argued against the Antitheses that the diversity of Law and Gospel, which Marcion supposes, profits his purpose nothing, inasmuch as that diversity too was arranged by the Creator, and indeed proclaimed in the promise of a new law and a new word and a New Testament. But since he argues more carefully before that certain fellow-sufferer of his, I know not whom, that is his fellow-sufferer, and his co-hater, that is, co-hater, concerning the cleansing of the leper, it will not be irksome to meet him, and first to show the force of the figurative law; which, in the example of the leper not to be touched, nay, to be removed from all intercourse, forbade association with a man defiled by sins; with such persons the Apostle also forbids even to eat: for one shares the marks of sins, as if by contagion, if anyone mingles with a sinner.

And so the Lord, wishing the Law to be understood more deeply, signifying spiritual things through carnal ones, and on this account not destroying it but rather building it up as something he wished to be recognized more pertinently, touched the leper, by whom even if a man could have been defiled, God certainly would not be defiled, being incapable of defilement. Thus it will not be prescribed to him that he ought to have observed the law and not touched the unclean, since contact with the unclean was not going to defile him. I show that this is more fitting to my Christ, while I demonstrate that it is not fitting to yours. For if he touched the leper as a rival of the law, doing nothing that the law commanded, through contempt of defilement, how could he be defiled, who had no body that could be defiled? For a phantom could not be defiled.

He therefore who could not be defiled as a phantom will now be incapable of defilement not by divine power but by the emptiness of a phantom: nor can he seem to have despised defilement, of whose matter he had none: and so neither to have destroyed the law, who had escaped defilement by the occasion of a phantom, not by the display of power. But if Elisha, the prophet of the Creator, healed the one leper Naaman the Syrian out of so many Israelite lepers, this too does not make for a difference of Christ, as though he were in this way superior, while a foreigner cleansed an Israelite leper whom his own lord had not been able to cleanse; the Syrian being more easily cleansed, signifying through the nations the cleansing in Christ of their light, which bristled with the seven stains of capital sins: idolatry, blasphemy, murder, adultery, fornication, false witness, fraud.

Wherefore he washed seven times as if through each individual charge in the Jordan, and at the same time so as to obtain the expiation of the whole week; because the power and fullness of a single washing was dedicated to Christ alone, who was to accomplish on earth, as a compendious word, so also a compendious washing. For Marcion also objects this: that Elisha needed material, used water, and that seven times; but that Christ, by word alone, and that once, immediately produced the cure. As if I would not dare to claim even the word itself as belonging to the substance of the Creator. He is the more powerful author of nothing who is the prior author of nothing. It is plainly incredible that the power of the Creator should by a word have wrought a remedy for one man's disease, when by a word it once brought forth so great a mass of the world. Whence is Christ more recognized as the Creator's than from the power of the word?

But therefore he is a different Christ, because he acted differently from Elisha, because the lord is more powerful than his servant. What are you establishing, Marcion, that things should be done by servants in the same manner as by their lords themselves? Are you not afraid lest it turn to your disgrace, if you deny Christ to be the Creator's on the ground that he was more powerful than the Creator's servant, who is recognized as greater in comparison with the smallness of Elisha, if indeed greater? For the cure is equal, though the operation differs. What more did your Christ accomplish than my Elisha? Nay, what great thing did the word of your Christ accomplish? Since it accomplished what the river of the Creator accomplished. In accordance with these things, the rest also present themselves.

For as far as it pertained to turning away from human glory, he forbade him to spread it abroad: but as far as it pertained to the protection of the law, he commanded the order to be fulfilled: Go, show thyself to the priest, and offer the gift which Moses commanded. For the figurative arguments of the prophesied law he still maintained in their own images, which signified that a man who had once been a sinner, soon cleansed by the word of God, ought to offer a gift to God at the temple—that is, prayer and thanksgiving at the Church, through Christ Jesus the universal priest of the Father. And so he added: That it may be for a testimony to you; without doubt, whereby he testified that he was not dissolving the law but fulfilling it; whereby he testified that he himself was the one who was announced as about to take up their diseases and infirmities.

This so fitting and due interpretation of the testimony, Marcion, the flatterer of his Christ, seeks to exclude under the pretext of gentleness and mildness. For he says: Moreover, being good and knowing that everyone who had been freed from leprosy would carry out the customary rites of the law, he therefore gave that command. What then? Did he persevere in goodness, that is, in permission of the law, or not? For if he persevered in goodness, he will never be a destroyer of the law, nor will he be held to belong to another God, since the destruction of the law ceases, by which he is claimed as belonging to another God. If he did not persevere in goodness by afterwards destroying the law, then he placed a false testimony among them in the healing of the leper: for he abandoned goodness while destroying the law. Already evil when an overthrower of the law, if good when an indulger of the law.

But also by the fact that he indulged obedience to the law, he confirmed the law as good. For no one suffers obedience to be paid to an evil thing. Therefore also thus evil, if he indulged obedience to an evil law; and thus worse, if he came as a destroyer of a good law. Likewise, if as one knowing that everyone who had been freed from leprosy would do so, he therefore commanded the gift to be offered, he could also have not commanded what he knew would happen of its own accord. In vain therefore did he come down as though about to destroy the law, since he yields to those who obey the law. And yet, as one knowing their custom, he ought rather to have forestalled them so as to turn them away from it, if he had come for this purpose. Why therefore did he not keep silent, so that the man might obey the law by his own choice alone? For then he could to some extent have seemed to have shown forbearance.

But he also added his own authority, heightened by the weight of testimony. Whose testimony now, if not that of the law asserted? Certainly it matters not in what way he confirmed the law, whether as one good, or as one superfluous, or as one patient, or as one inconstant, so long as I drive you, Marcion, from your position. Behold, he commanded the law to be fulfilled. In whatever way he commanded it, in the same way he could also have uttered that sentence beforehand: I came not to dissolve the law, but to fulfil it. What then was the point of your erasing from the Gospel what is sound? For you have confessed that he did out of goodness what you deny he said. It is established therefore that he said it, because he also did it; and that you rather erased the word of the Lord from the Gospel, than that our people inserted it.

The paralytic also is healed, and indeed in the sight of an assembled people. For the people, says Isaiah, shall see the majesty of the Lord, and the glory of God. What majesty and what glory? Be strong, ye feeble hands, and ye trembling knees. This will be paralysis. Be strong, and fear not. Not idly repeating, Be strong, nor vainly adding, And fear not: since together with the restoration of the limbs he was also promising the return of strength: Arise, and take up thy bed; and vigour of spirit, so as not to fear those who were about to say: Who can forgive sins but God alone? You have therefore now both the detailed prophecy of the specific healing, and of those things which followed upon the healing. Likewise recognise Christ also as the forgiver of sins in the same prophet: For he, it says, shall remit their sins in the multitude, and he himself takes away our sins.

For also in the earlier passage, in the person of the Lord himself: Though your sins be as rose-red, I will make them white as snow; and though they be as scarlet, I will make them white as wool. In rose-red showing the blood of the prophets; in scarlet that of the Lord, as being more vivid. Micah also concerning the pardon of sins: Who is a God like thee, taking away iniquities, and passing over the transgressions of the remnant of thine inheritance? He hath not held fast his wrath for a testimony, because he desired mercy. He will turn, and have compassion on us. He will plunge our sins down, and will plunge our transgressions into the depths of the sea. But even if nothing of the sort had been foretold concerning Christ, I would have examples of this kindness in the Creator, promising me in the Son also the affections of the Father.

I see the Ninevites having obtained pardon of their crimes from the Creator—not to say even then from Christ, because from the beginning he acted in the name of the Father. I read also that Nathan the prophet said to David when he acknowledged his sin against Uriah: And the Lord hath put away thy sin, and thou shalt not die; likewise also that Ahab the king, husband of Jezebel, guilty of idolatry and of the blood of Naboth, merited pardon in the name of repentance; that Jonathan, the son of Saul, blotted out by entreaty the guilt of a broken fast. Why should I recount the people itself, so often restored by the indulgence of their sins? By that God, of course, who prefers mercy to sacrifice, and the repentance of a sinner to his death.

It is therefore first necessary that you deny the Creator ever having pardoned sins; and the consequence is that you show he never predicted any such thing in his own Christ: and so you will prove this new kindness of Christ—of the new Christ, that is—if you prove it to be neither equal to the Creator's nor foretold by the Creator. But whether forgiving sins can belong to one who is denied to retain them; and whether it belongs to one to absolve whom it does not belong to condemn; and whether it is fitting for him to pardon, against whom nothing has been committed: having already engaged these questions elsewhere, we prefer to remind rather than to re-examine.

Concerning the Son of Man our twofold argument is this: that Christ could not have lied in pronouncing himself the Son of Man if he was not truly so; nor can one be constituted Son of Man who is not born of a human being, whether father or mother: and so it must be examined of which human being he ought to be taken as the son, of the father or of the mother. If he is of God the Father, then certainly not of a human father: if not also of a human being, it remains that he is of a human being through his mother: if of a human being, it is already apparent that it is of a virgin. For to one to whom a human father is not given, neither will a husband be assigned to his mother; moreover, to one to whom no husband will be assigned, his mother is a virgin. Otherwise, two fathers will now be had, God and a man, if the mother is not a virgin.

For she will have a husband, so as not to be a virgin; and by having a husband she will make two fathers, God and a man, for one who would be both the son of God and the son of a man. Such a birth, perhaps, the fables assign to Castor or Hercules. If these things are thus distinguished—that is, if he is the son of man through his mother, because he is not so through his father; and through a virgin mother, because not through a human father—this will be the Christ of Isaiah, who foretells that a virgin shall conceive. By what reasoning therefore you could admit the Son of Man, Marcion, I cannot see.

If of a human father, you deny him to be the Son of God; if also of God, you make Christ a Hercules out of fable; if only of a human mother, you concede my point; if not even of a human mother, then he is the son of no human being, and he who said he was what he was not must have uttered a lie. One thing can come to the aid of your straits, if you dare either to call your God the father of Christ a human being also, as Valentinus did with the Aeon; or to deny that a virgin is a human being, which not even Valentinus did. What now, if Christ is designated by the very title of Son of Man in Daniel? Will that not suffice for proof that he is the prophesied Christ? For when he calls himself that which was foretold concerning the Christ of the Creator, he without doubt presents himself to be understood as the very one concerning whom it was foretold.

A mere sharing of names, perhaps, may seem a simple matter, and yet we maintain that he ought not to have been called either Christ or Jesus, holding to the condition of distinction. But the designation Son of Man, inasmuch as it comes about from an accidental circumstance, is to that degree difficult to have concur even of itself upon a mere sharing of a name. For it is proper to an accident, especially when the same cause also agrees, through which it comes into the sharing. And so if the Christ of Marcion were also said to have been born of a human being, then he too would partake of the sharing of the designation, and there would be two Sons of Man, just as there are two Christs and two Jesuses.

Therefore since the designation properly belongs to him in whom it has its cause, if it is claimed for another in whom there is a sharing of the name but not also of the designation, the sharing of the name itself now becomes suspect in him for whom the sharing of the designation is claimed without cause; and it follows that one and the same person is to be believed, who is found more capable of both the name and the designation, while the other is excluded, who has no sharing of the designation, lacking the cause; nor will any other be more capable of both than he who first both received the name of Christ and the designation of Son of Man—namely, Jesus of the Creator. He was seen by the Babylonian king in the furnace with his martyrs as a fourth, like the Son of Man; the same was revealed directly to Daniel himself as the Son of Man, coming with the clouds of heaven as judge, as Scripture also shows.

This I said could have sufficed concerning the prophetic designation with regard to the Son of Man. But Scripture furnishes me with more, namely through the interpretation of the Lord himself.

For when the Jews, beholding only his humanity and not yet certain also of his divinity as the Son of God, rightly debated that a man could not forgive sins but God alone, why did he not answer them concerning the man according to their intention, that he had the power to forgive sins, seeing that in naming himself Son of Man he was naming a man?—unless it was because he wished by that very designation of Son of Man to strike them back from the text of Daniel, so as to show that it was God and man who forgave sins; namely that sole Son of Man who, in the prophecy of Daniel, had obtained the power of judging, and through that power certainly also of forgiving sins: for he who judges also acquits: so that, with that stumbling-block removed through the recollection of Scripture, they might more readily recognise that he himself was the Son of Man, from the very remission of sins.

Finally, he has nowhere yet declared himself the Son of Man until this very place for the first time, in which he first forgave sins, that is, in which he first judged, while he acquitted. To all this, consider what sort of thing it is that the opposing party will have argued. For it must tend toward that madness of both defending the Son of Man and not making him a liar, and yet denying him to have been born of a human being, lest it concede him to be the son of a virgin. But if both divine authority and the nature of things and common wisdom do not admit the heretical insanity, here too is occasion for interposing, as briefly as possible, concerning the substance of the body against the phantoms of Marcion. If he is born of a human being, as Son of Man, then body is from body. Plainly you would more easily find a man born without a heart or a brain—as Marcion himself—than without a body, as the Christ of Marcion.

And so examine the heart of the Pontic, or his brain.

I grant that a physician is not necessary for the healthy, but for the sick. For if he wished the sick to be understood as the gentiles and tax-collectors whom he was citing, he was confirming the Jews as healthy, to whom he denied that a physician was necessary. If this is so, he descended badly to destroy the Law, as if to remedy a sick condition, in which those who lived were in good health, and for whom a physician was not necessary. But what kind of thing is it that he proposed the likeness of a physician and did not fulfill it? For just as no one applies a physician to the healthy; so neither to those so foreign as a man is from the God of Marcion, who has his own author and protector, and from him rather would have Christ as physician. The likeness prejudges this, that a physician is furnished rather by him to whom those who are sick belong. But why does John also come into the midst?

Suddenly Christ, and suddenly John too. Thus all things are with Marcion, which have their own full order with the Creator. But concerning John, the rest elsewhere; for one must respond to each present point in turn.

Now I will maintain this, so as to demonstrate that John agrees with Christ, and Christ with John—John being assuredly a prophet of the Creator, and Christ being of the Creator—and so let the heretic blush, having vainly frustrated the order of John. For if John had administered nothing at all, as the one crying in the wilderness according to Isaiah, and as the preparer of the Lord's ways, through the proclamation and praise of repentance; if he had not also baptized Christ himself among the rest, no one would have challenged the disciples of Christ, eating and drinking, after the pattern of the disciples of John who were constantly fasting and praying: because if any difference stood between Christ and John, and the flock of each, there would be no demand for comparison, the intent of the challenge would be void.

For no one would marvel, and no one would be troubled, if rival proclamations of different divinities also disagreed with one another in their disciplines, not agreeing first in the authorities of their disciplines: so thoroughly was Christ John's, and John Christ's; both of the Creator, and both preachers and teachers from the Law and the Prophets. But Christ would also have rejected John's discipline, as belonging to another God; and would have defended his disciples, as rightly walking differently, being instructed, that is, in another and contrary divinity.

But as it is, humbly rendering the reason that the sons of the bridegroom could not fast as long as the bridegroom was with them; but promising that they would fast afterwards, when the bridegroom should be taken away from them; he neither defends the disciples, but rather excuses them, as though they had been rebuked not without reason; nor does he reject John's discipline, but rather concedes it, granting it to John's time, as destining it to his own time; since he would otherwise have rejected it and defended its rivals, if it had not already been his own. I hold my Christ, even in the name of bridegroom, of whom the Psalm says: He himself as a bridegroom going forth from his chamber: his going forth is from the height of heaven, and his circuit even to the height thereof.

Who also, rejoicing through Isaiah, says to the Father: Let my soul exult in the Lord; for he has clothed me with the garment of salvation, and with the tunic of gladness as a bridegroom: he has placed a mitre upon me as upon a bride. For he reckons in himself also the Church, concerning which the same Spirit says to him: And thou shalt put them all on thee as an ornament of a bride. This bride Christ also summons to himself through Solomon from the calling of the gentiles. For you have read: Come, bride, from Lebanon. Elegantly indeed, with the mention of the mountain of Lebanon introduced, which is the word for frankincense among the Greeks, for he was betrothing to himself the Church from idolatry. Deny now that you are most mad, Marcion. Behold, you also attack the law of your own God: he does not join marriages, he does not admit those already joined, he baptizes no one except the celibate or the eunuch, he reserves baptism for death or divorce.

Why then do you make Christ his bridegroom? That name belongs to him who joined male and female, not to him who separated them. You have also erred in that pronouncement of the Lord by which he seems to distinguish the new from the old. You have been inflated by old wineskins, and had your brains knocked out by new wine; and so you have sewn a patch of heretical novelty onto the old, that is, the prior Gospel. In which matter, when the other creator (I would like to learn) commanded through Jeremiah: Break up for yourselves a new breaking; did he not turn them away from the old? When through Isaiah he declares: The old things have passed away; behold the new things which I do; does he not convert them to the new? Long ago we established that this destination of former things was rather promised by the Creator, to be exhibited by Christ, under the authority of one and the same God, whose are both the old and the new.

For he who has not had old wineskins either does not put new wine into old wineskins; and no one puts a new patch onto an old garment, unless he has not lacked an old garment either. He does not do a thing, if it is not to be done, who has not the means to do it, if it were to be done. And so if he was directing the likeness to this end, to show that he was separating the newness of the Gospel from the oldness of the Law, he was demonstrating that his own, and that from which he was separating, were not to be noted by the separation of alien things, because no one joins his own things to alien things so as to be able to separate them from alien things. Separation takes its origin through conjunction, from which it is made. Thus the things he was separating, he also showed to have been in one, just as they would have been, if he had not separated them.

And yet we thus concede that separation through reformation, through enlargement, through advancement, just as fruit is separated from seed, since the fruit is from the seed: so also the Gospel is separated from the Law, while it advances from the Law: other than it, but not alien; different, but not contrary. Nor is the form of speech in Christ new: when he puts forward likenesses, when he refutes questions, he comes from the seventy-seventh psalm: I will open, he says, my mouth in a parable, that is, a likeness: I will utter problems, that is, I will expound questions. If you had wished to prove a man of another nation, you would surely prove it from the property of his speech.

Concerning the sabbath also I premise this: that not even this question could have arisen, if Christ had not been carrying about with him the Lord of the sabbath. For it would not be disputed why he was destroying the sabbath, if he ought to destroy it. Now, he ought to destroy it, if he belonged to another God, and no one would marvel at him doing what was fitting for that God. They marvelled, therefore, because it was not fitting for one who bore about the Creator God to assail his sabbath.

And that we may settle each point at the outset, so that we need not encounter the same arguments everywhere in every disputation of the adversary, straining upon some new institution of Christ; this definition shall now stand: that the dispute about the novelty of each institution arose because nothing had as yet been put forth concerning the novelty of the divinity, just as nothing had been disputed about it; and that it is not possible to turn back from the very novelty of each institution to prove a divinity sufficiently distinct from Christ's, since it has been established that even that novelty itself was proclaimed by the Creator, and is not to be marvelled at in Christ. And it would have been necessary first to set forth another God, and afterwards to introduce his discipline; because God lends authority to discipline, not discipline to God: unless indeed Marcion also plainly learned his letters so perversely, not through a teacher by means of letters, but through letters by means of a teacher.

The rest concerning the sabbath I direct thus: If Christ overturned the sabbath, he acted according to the example of the Creator. For indeed in the siege of the city of Jericho, when the ark of the Testament was carried around the walls for seven days, including the sabbath, by the Creator's command, he destroyed the sabbath by work, as those think who hold the same opinion about Christ—men who are ignorant that neither Christ destroyed the sabbath, nor the Creator, as we shall presently show. And yet through Joshua even then the sabbath was shaken, so that this too might be reported back against Christ, even if he pursued with hatred the most solemn day of the Jews, as Christ did—not as a Jew's. In professing hatred of the sabbath also, he was following the Creator, as Christ follows him, who cries out through the mouth of Isaiah: My soul hateth your new moons and your sabbaths.

But let these things also be said for now in passing; we know that in this matter the abrupt challenge must also be employed. Now I shall also argue about the very substance of the dispute, in which the discipline of Christ seemed to destroy the sabbath. The disciples were hungry; on that day they had rubbed in their hands ears of grain that they had plucked: having worked for food, they had broken the holy day. Christ excuses them, and is himself accused of violating the sabbath: the Pharisees accuse, Marcion seizes upon the state of the controversy (to use some term together with the truth of my Lord) of written law and intention. For the colour is taken from the Creator's Scripture, and from Christ's intention, as from the example of David who entered the temple on the sabbath and worked for food, boldly breaking the shewbread.

For he too remembered that this privilege had been granted to the sabbath from the beginning, on which day that very thing was discovered: I mean the indulgence of fasting. For when the Creator had forbidden manna to be gathered for two days, he permitted it only on the day of preparation, so that by the previous day's provision of food he might free the rest of the following sabbath from fasting. Well, therefore, that the Lord also followed the same cause in the destruction—if they will have it so called—of the sabbath: well, that he also expressed the Creator's feeling in the honour of not fasting on the sabbath. In short, he would then have truly destroyed the sabbath, and the Creator himself along with it, if he had commanded the disciples to fast on the sabbath, contrary to the state of the Creator's written law and intention.

But since he does not defend the disciples consistently, but excuses them; since he sets human necessity against the charge as a kind of intercessor; since he preserves the higher honour of the sabbath in not causing grief rather than in resting; since he equates David and his companions with his disciples in fault and in pardon; since it pleases him because the Creator indulged it; since from his example he himself is so good—therefore he is alien from the Creator. Thereupon the Pharisees watch whether he would perform cures on the sabbath, that they might accuse him: certainly as a destroyer of the sabbath, not as a professor of a new God; for perhaps I shall press this single point everywhere, that another Christ was nowhere proclaimed. But the Pharisees were altogether wrong about the law of the sabbath, not observing that it conditionally enjoined rest from works under a certain specific kind of them.

For when it says of the sabbath day: Thou shalt do no work of thine in it; by saying thine, it defined human work, which each person carries out from his craft or trade, not divine work. But the work of health and safety is not man's but God's own. As also again in the law: Thou shalt do, it says, no work in it, except what shall be done for every soul—that is, in the cause of liberating a soul; because the work of God can also be done through man for the salvation of a soul, by God nevertheless, which Christ also, being man, was about to do, because he is also God. Wishing therefore to lead them into this sense of the law through the restoration of the withered hand, he asks: Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath, or not? To save a soul, or to destroy it?

So that, by promising that work which he was about to do for the soul's sake, he might remind them what works the law of the sabbath forbids—human works, namely—and what it commands—divine works, namely, which are done for every soul; and he was called Lord of the sabbath because he protected the sabbath as his own thing. Which even if he had destroyed, it would have been rightly done, as Lord—rather he who instituted it. But he did not destroy it at all, as Lord; so that from this it may now appear that not even then, in the carrying of the ark around Jericho, was the sabbath destroyed by the Creator. For that too was the work of God, which he himself had commanded, and which he had arranged for the sake of the souls of his people placed in the peril of war.

But also if he somewhere professed hatred of sabbaths, by calling them your sabbaths, reckoning them as men's, not his own—sabbaths which a people full of sins celebrates without fear of God, loving God with their lips and not with their heart—for his own sabbaths, that is, whatever was done according to his discipline, he made a different standing, which through the same prophet afterwards he pronounces to be true, and delightful, and not to be profaned. So neither does Christ rescind the sabbath at all, whose law he upheld even above in the cause of the disciples, working for the soul's sake—for he granted to the hungry the comfort of food; and now healing the withered hand, everywhere pressing upon them by his deeds: I came not to dissolve the law, but to fulfil it; nor did Marcion stop his mouth with this saying.

For he fulfilled the law here also, while he interprets its condition, while he illuminates the distinction of works, while he does what the law excepts from the sabbath's rest, while he makes the very day of the sabbath—hallowed by the Father's blessing from the beginning—more holy by his own benefaction; on which day, namely, he was ministering divine aids, which the adversary would have rendered on other days, lest he should adorn the Creator's sabbath, lest he should render to the sabbath the works due to it. On which day, if also the prophet Elisha restored to life the dead son of the Shunammite, thou seest, O Pharisee, and thou, O Marcion, that it has long been the Creator's way to do good on sabbaths, to save a soul and not to destroy it; that Christ introduced nothing new that is not from the pattern, from the gentleness, from the mercy, from the proclamation also of the Creator. For here too he represents the prophecy of a specific healing.

Feeble hands are made strong, just as also feeble knees in the paralytic.

Surely he preaches to Sion and Jerusalem peace and all good things: surely he ascends the mountain, and there spends the night in prayer; and assuredly he is heard by the Father. Unroll the prophets, therefore, and recognise the whole order. Ascend into the high mountain, says Isaiah, thou that bringest good tidings to Sion; lift up thy voice with strength, thou that bringest good tidings to Jerusalem. Still in strength. They were astonished at his teaching; for he was teaching as one having power. And again: Therefore shall my people know my name in that day. What name, if not Christ's? Because I am he that speaketh. For it was he himself who spoke in the Prophets, the Word, the Son of the Creator: "I am present, when the hour is come, in the mountains, as one bringing good tidings of the hearing of peace, bringing good tidings of good things." Likewise Nahum from the twelve: For behold upon the mountains the feet of him that bringeth good tidings of peace.

Now concerning the nocturnal voice of prayer to the Father, the Psalm speaks plainly: My God, I will cry by day, and thou wilt hear me; and by night, and it shall not be in vain to me; and elsewhere, of the same place and voice, the Psalm: With my voice I cried unto the Lord, and he heard me from his holy mountain. Thou hast the representation of the name, thou hast the act of him that bringeth good tidings, thou hast the place of the mountain, and the time of night, and the sound of the voice, and the hearing of the Father; thou hast the Christ of the Prophets. But why did he choose twelve Apostles, and not some other number? Indeed from this too I could interpret my Christ as proclaimed not only by the voices of the Prophets, but also by the arguments of facts?

For I find figures of this number with the Creator: the twelve fountains of Elim; and the twelve gems on the priestly robe of Aaron; and the twelve stones chosen by Joshua from the Jordan and laid up in the ark of the testament. For so many Apostles were portended; just as fountains and rivers, to water the world of the Nations, formerly dry and desert from lack of knowledge; as also through Isaiah: I will place rivers in the waterless land; just as gems, to illuminate the sacred garment of the Church, which Christ the high priest of the Father put on; just as also stones, solid in faith, whom the true Jesus chose from the washing of the Jordan, and received into the sanctuary of his testament. What such defence of the number befits the Christ of Marcion? Nothing can be seen as done simply by him, which can be seen as not done simply by mine. The matter belongs to him with whom the preparation for the matter is found.

He also changes Peter's name from Simon; because the Creator also reformed the names of Abraham, and Sarah, and Oshea, calling this one Joshua, adding syllables to those. But also why Peter? If on account of the strength of faith, many names of solid material would have lent themselves from their own meaning. Or is it because Christ is both rock and stone? Since we also read that he was set as a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence. I omit the rest. And so he chose to share with his dearest disciple a name more particularly from his own figures, more properly, I think, than from things not his own. A multitude also from beyond the sea assembles from Tyre and from other regions. This the Psalm had in view: And behold the Philistines and Tyre, and the people of the Ethiopians, these were there.

The mother Sion shall say: Man; and man was made in her (because God was born as man), and he built her by the will of the Father: so that thou mayest know that the Gentiles then assembled to him, because God had been born as man, about to build the Church from the will of the Father, from the Philistines also. So also Isaiah: Behold, these come from far; and these from the north and from the sea; and others from the land of the Persians. Of whom also again: Lift up thine eyes round about, and see, all are gathered together. Of whom also below: Thou seest those unknown and strange: and thou shalt say in thine heart: Who hath begotten these for me? Moreover, who hath brought these up for me? But where were these for me? Is this Christ not of the Prophets? And who will the Christ of the Marcionites be, if perversity pleases them, who was not of the Prophets?

I come now to his ordinary maxims, through which he introduces the distinctive character of his teaching as a kind of edict (if I may so say) of Christ: Blessed are the beggars (for so the interpretation of the word that is in Greek requires), for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Now this very fact that he began with blessings belongs to the Creator, who, as he brought forth all things, consecrated them with no other word than that of blessing. For, it says, My heart has belched forth a most excellent word. This will be the most excellent word, namely of blessing, which is also recognized as the inaugurator of the New Testament from the Old example.

What wonder is it then, if he also entered through this kind of utterance from the affections of the Creator, who always loved, consoled, championed, and vindicated the beggars and the poor and the humble and the widows and the orphans; so that you might believe this, as it were, private benevolence of Christ to be a rivulet from the fountains of the Saviour. Indeed, I know not where to direct my steps, in so great a multitude of utterances of this kind, as in a forest, or in a meadow, or in an orchard, the matter must be sought here and there as it presents itself. The Psalm cries out: Judge for the orphan and the beggar, and deal justly with the humble and the poor. Deliver the poor, and rescue the beggar from the hand of the sinner. Likewise the seventy-first Psalm: Justice shall judge the beggars of the people, and shall save the children of the poor. And in what follows, concerning Christ: All nations shall serve him.

But David ruled over the single nation of the Jews, lest anyone should think it was said of David, because he too had taken up the humble and those labouring under necessities. Because he has freed, it says, the beggar from the mighty man, he will spare the beggar and the poor, and will save the souls of the poor. From usury and injustice he will redeem their souls, and their honoured name shall be in his sight. Likewise: Let sinners be turned into hell, all the nations that forget God, for the beggar shall not be forgotten unto the end: the patience of the poor shall not perish unto the end. Likewise: Who is like our God, who dwells on high, and looks upon the humble things in heaven and on earth? Who raises up the beggar from the earth, and exalts the poor from the dunghill, to make him sit with the princes of the people; in his kingdom, of course.

So also in former times in the Books of Kings, Anna the mother of Samuel, rendering glory to God in the spirit: Who, she says, raises up the poor from the earth, and the beggar, to make him sit with the mighty ones of the people; in his kingdom, of course: and on thrones of glory; royal ones, of course. But through Isaiah, how does he inveigh against the oppressors of the needy? But you, why do you set fire to my vineyard, and have the spoil of the beggar in your houses? Why do you injure my people, and put to shame the faces of the beggars? And again: Woe to those who write iniquity; for writing they write wickedness, turning aside the judgments of the beggars, and plundering the decided causes of the poor of my people. Which judgments he also requires for orphans and widows, as consolations for the needy themselves. Judge for the orphan, and deal justly with the widow, and come, let us be reconciled, says the Lord.

To him whose affection for every condition of humility belongs to the Creator, his also will be the kingdom which is promised by Christ; to whose affection those to whom it is promised have long since belonged. For even if you think that the Creator's promises were indeed earthly, but Christ's heavenly; it is well that heaven appears to belong to no other God thus far than to him whose the earth also is: it is well that the Creator promised lesser things, so that I may more readily believe him also concerning greater things, than one who never first built up faith in his generosity by means of lesser things. Blessed are the hungry, for they shall be filled. I could have transferred this heading to the one above, since the hungry are none other than the poor and the beggars, were it not that the Creator had also specially destined this promise as a preparation, that is, for his own Gospel.

For indeed through Isaiah, concerning those whom he was about to call from the ends of the earth, namely the nations: Behold, he says, they shall come swiftly and lightly. Swiftly, because hastening under the limits of the times; lightly, because without the burdens of the former law. They shall not hunger, nor shall they thirst: therefore they shall be filled; which assuredly is not promised except to those who hunger and thirst. And again: Behold, he says, those who serve me shall be filled; but you shall hunger; behold those who serve me shall drink; but you shall thirst. We shall also see whether these contraries are ministered beforehand to Christ: meanwhile, that he promises fullness to the hungry belongs to God the Creator. Blessed are those who weep, for they shall see. Run through the sentence of Isaiah: Behold, those who serve me shall exult in gladness; but you shall be put to shame. Behold, those who serve me shall rejoice; but you shall cry out for pain of heart. Recognize these contraries also in Christ.

Certainly rejoicing and exulting in gladness is promised to those who are in the opposite condition, namely the sorrowful, and the sad, and the anxious; as also: They who sow, it says, in tears, shall reap in exultation. Moreover, as laughter accompanies those who exult and take hold of gladness, so weeping accompanies those who mourn and grieve. Thus the Creator, foretelling the occasions of laughter and weeping, was the first to say that those who weep shall see. Therefore he who began from the consolation of the poor, and the humble, and the hungry, and the weeping, was eager straightway to present himself as that one whom he had pointed out through Isaiah: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. Blessed are the beggars, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. He has sent me to heal the broken-hearted. Blessed are those who hunger, for they shall be filled. To call the faint.

To give to those who mourn in Sion glory, and instead of ashes the gladness of ointment, and the garment of glory instead of the spirit of weariness. If Christ, once admitted, administered these things, either he himself is the one who foretold that he would come for these purposes; or if he who foretold has not yet come, I shall say, ridiculously but necessarily, that perhaps he commissioned the Christ of Marcion: Blessed shall you be when men shall hate you, and shall reproach you, and shall cast out your name as wicked, for the sake of the Son of man. By this pronouncement he without doubt exhorts to endurance. What less does the Creator say through Isaiah: Fear not the reproach of men, and be not diminished by their contempt. What reproach? What contempt? That which was to come for the sake of the Son of man. Which Son of man? He who is according to the Creator. Whence shall we prove it?

From the destruction foretold against him also; as through Isaiah against the authors of hatred, the Jews: Because of you my name is blasphemed among the nations. And elsewhere: Sanctify him who circumscribes his own soul, who is held in contempt by the nations, by servants and rulers. For if hatred against that Son of man who is according to the Creator was foretold, and the Gospel moreover attests that the name of Christians, derived of course from Christ, is to be hated for the sake of the Son of man, because it established the Son of man as the cause of hatred, who was according to the Creator, against whom hatred was foretold. And assuredly, if they had not yet come, the hatred of the name, which is enacted today, could not have preceded the person of the name. For he is also sanctioned among us, and circumscribes his own soul, laying it down for us; and is held in contempt by the nations.

And he who was born, he himself will be the Son of man, on account of whom our name also is rejected.

According to these things, he says, their fathers did to the Prophets. O Christ of shifting shape, now a destroyer, now a defender of the Prophets! He destroyed them as a rival, turning away their disciples; he defended them as a friend, rebuking their persecutors. Moreover, to the extent that the defense of the Prophets would not have suited the Christ of Marcion, who had come for their destruction; to that same extent does the rebuke of those who persecute the Prophets suit the Christ of the Creator, who fulfilled them in all things; or because it belongs more to the Creator to reproach children for the sins of their fathers, than to that God who does not even chastise each person's own faults. But, you say, he was not straightway defending the Prophets if he wished to affirm the iniquity of the Jews, in that they had not dealt piously even with their own Prophets.

And yet there was no iniquity here to be reproached in the Jews—who ought rather to be praised and approved—if they prefigured those for whose destruction the supremely good God was moved after so great an age. But I think he is by now no longer supremely good, having tarried somewhat even with the Creator, and no longer altogether the god of Epicurus. For behold, he turns to cursing, and shows himself to be one who knows how to be offended and to be angry: for he says Woe. But a question arises for us concerning the quality of this word, as though it were not so much a word of cursing as of warning. And what does the distinction of cause matter, when even a warning is not without the sting of a threat, made all the more bitter by the Woe? Both warning and threat, moreover, will belong to one who knows how to be angry.

For no one will warn, and no one will threaten that something not be done, unless he will avenge what has been done; no one will avenge, except one who knows how to be angry. Others indeed acknowledge the word as one of cursing, but wish that Christ pronounced the Woe not as if from his own proper judgment, but because the Woe belongs to the Creator, and he wished to set before them the harshness of the Creator, so as to commend by contrast his own forbearance shown above in the blessings—as though it did not befit the Creator, who excels in both, as both good God and judge, that since he had set forth his benevolence in the blessings, he should also subjoin his severity in the curses, the fullness of a twofold discipline to be instilled, both for pursuing the blessing and for guarding against the curse. For thus he had said beforehand: Behold, I have set before you blessing and curse. Which also pointed forward to this arrangement of the Gospel.

Otherwise, what manner of being is he, who, in order to insinuate his own goodness, set against it the harshness of the Creator? It is a weak commendation that is propped up by the destruction of another. Moreover, by setting the harshness of the Creator against it, he confirmed that the Creator is to be feared; if to be feared, then certainly to be obeyed rather than neglected; and the Christ of Marcion now begins to teach obedience to the Creator. Then, if the Woe directed against the rich belongs to the Creator, it is not Christ who is offended at the rich, but the Creator; and Christ holds the causes of the rich to be valid—I mean their pride, and glory, and worldly pursuits, and disregard of God, on account of which they deserve the Woe from the Creator. But how should it not belong to the same one to reprove the rich, who above approved the poor? No one fails to reprove the contrary of what he has approved.

And so if the curse against the rich is to be attributed to the Creator, the blessing upon the poor will be defended as his also; and the whole work of Christ is already the Creator's. If the blessing upon the poor is to be ascribed to the God of Marcion, then the curse upon the rich will be laid to him as well; and the Creator will be his equal, both as good and as judge; and there will no longer be room for the distinction by which two Gods are made; and with the distinction removed, there will remain only one God, the Creator, to be proclaimed.

Therefore, if Woe is also a word of cursing, or of some more austere exclamation, and is directed by Christ against the rich, I must prove that the Creator also is a scorner of the rich, just as I have proved him to be an advocate of the poor, so that I may show Christ in this sentence also to be the Creator's—who indeed enriched Solomon, but because, when a choice was offered him, he preferred to ask for those things which he knew were pleasing to God, namely wisdom, and had thereby merited to obtain riches also, which he had not sought; although even to bestow riches is not incongruous with God, through which both the rich are aided with comfort, and many works of justice and love are administered from them. But the vices that attach themselves to riches, those are what in the Gospel also ascribe the Woe to the rich: For, he says, you have received your consolation; that is, from riches, from their glory and worldly fruits.

And so in Deuteronomy Moses says: Lest, when you have eaten and been filled, and have built great houses, and your flocks and herds have multiplied, and your silver and gold, your heart be lifted up, and you forget the Lord your God. Just as also he falls upon king Hezekiah, inflated with his treasures and glorying in them rather than in God before those who had come from Persia, through Isaiah: Behold, the days are coming, and all that is in your house shall be taken away; and what your fathers have gathered shall be carried to Babylon. So also through Jeremiah he declares: Let not the rich man glory in his riches; and he who glories, let him glory in God.

So also he inveighs against the daughters of Zion through Isaiah, puffed up with adornment and abundance of riches; and threatening elsewhere against the noble and the proud: Hell has enlarged its soul and opened its mouth, and the renowned and the great and the rich shall descend (this will be Christ's woe upon the rich) and man shall be humbled; that is, he who was exalted by riches; and the man shall be dishonored; that is, he who was honorable on account of his substance. Concerning whom again: Behold, the Lord of hosts shall trouble the glorious with strength, and the exalted shall be broken, and the lofty shall fall by the sword—who more than the rich? Because they have received, that is, their consolation, glory and honor, loftiness from riches.

Turning us away from these also in Psalm forty-eight: Fear not, he says, when a man shall be made rich, and when the glory of his house shall be multiplied; for when he dies he shall take nothing away, nor shall his glory descend with him. Likewise in Psalm sixty-one: Set not your heart upon riches; and if they abound, add not your heart to them. This same word woe, finally, was long ago destined through Amos against the rich wallowing in pleasures: Woe, he says, to those who sleep upon beds of ivory, and revel in luxury upon their couches; who eat kids from the flocks of goats, and suckling calves from the herds of cattle, clapping their hands to the sound of instruments. They have reckoned these things as lasting, and not as fleeting: who drink strained wine, and anoint themselves with the finest ointments.

Therefore, even if I were showing only that the Creator dissuades from riches, without also pre-condemning the rich by the very word which Christ also uses, no one would doubt that the threat against the rich through Christ's woe was added by the same one from whom the dissuasion from those very materials, that is, from riches, had run before; for a threat is the complement of a dissuasion. He adds: Woe also to those who are full, for they shall hunger; and to those who laugh now, for they shall mourn. To these will correspond those things which above were set in opposition to the blessings in the Creator: Behold, those who serve me shall be filled; but you shall hunger; that is, because you are now filled. And: Behold, those who serve me shall rejoice; but you shall be confounded; that is, those who now laugh shall weep.

For just as in the Psalm, those who sow in tears shall reap in joy: so in the Gospel, those who sow in laughter, that is in joy, shall reap in tears. These things the Creator set forth long ago together; Christ renewed them only by distinguishing, not by changing: Woe when men shall bless you—according to these things their fathers also did to the false prophets. Likewise the Creator through Isaiah rebukes those who pursue human blessing and praise: O my people, those who call you blessed lead you astray, and disturb the paths of your feet. He also forbids trusting in man at all in other places, and likewise in the praise of man, as through Jeremiah: Cursed is the man who puts his hope in man. For also in Psalm one hundred and seventeenth: It is good to trust in the Lord, rather than to trust in man. And: It is good to hope in the Lord, rather than to hope in princes.

Thus the Creator has renounced everything that is sought from man, let alone blessing. Moreover, to reproach the false prophets as praised or blessed by their fathers belongs as much to him as to reproach the prophets as harassed and rejected; just as the injuries done to the prophets would not have pertained to God himself, so neither would the favors shown to the false prophets have displeased any but the God of the prophets.

But I say to you, he says, who hear; showing that this was commanded of old by the Creator: Speak in the ears of those who hear. Love your enemies, and bless those who hate you, and pray for those who slander you. These things the Creator enclosed in a single utterance through Isaiah: Say, Ye are our brethren, to those who hate you. For if those who are enemies and hate, and curse, and slander, are to be called brethren; he surely also commanded that those who hate should be blessed, that prayer should be made for slanderers, who enjoined that they should be counted as brethren. Christ plainly teaches a new patience, even restraining the return of injury, which was permitted by the Creator who required an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth: whereas he himself commands that the other cheek be offered in addition, and that over and above the tunic the cloak also be yielded. Christ may indeed have added these things as supplements consonant with the discipline of the Creator.

And so this must straightway be declared: whether the teaching of patience is proclaimed in the Creator. If through Zechariah he commanded that no one should remember the malice of his brother; nor yet of his neighbour: for again he says: Let no one devise the malice of his neighbour in his heart. Far more did he enjoin patience toward injury, who enjoined the forgetting of it. But also when he says: Vengeance is mine, and I will repay; he likewise teaches a patience that awaits vengeance.

To the extent, therefore, that it cannot be supposed that the same one who not only forbids the return but even the taking of vengeance, even the recollection and reconsideration of injury, should also appear to require a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye in return for injury: to that same extent it is opened up to us how he ordained an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—not to permit a second injury by way of retaliation, which he had forbidden by interdicting vengeance, but to restrain the first, which he had forbidden by setting retaliation against it, so that each person, looking upon the license of a second injury, might restrain himself from the first. For he knows that violence is more easily checked by the presentation of retaliation than by the promise of vengeance.

Both provisions, however, had to be established according to the nature and faith of men; so that he who believed God might await vengeance from God, and he who trusted less might fear the laws of retaliation. This intention of the law, laboring under misunderstanding, Christ the Lord both of the sabbath and of the law and of all the paternal ordinances both revealed and brought to fulfilment, commanding also the offering of the other cheek; so that he might the more extinguish the return of injury, which even the law had wished to hinder through retaliation, and which prophecy had manifestly restrained, both forbidding the memory of injury and referring vengeance to God. Thus if Christ introduced anything, it was not as an adversary but as a helper of the precept; he did not destroy the disciplines of the Creator. Finally, if we consider the very rationale of enjoining patience, and indeed so full and perfect a patience, it will not hold together if it does not belong to the Creator, who promises vengeance, who furnishes a judge.

Otherwise, if one who is not going to defend me lays upon me so great a burden of patience—not only of not striking back, but also of offering the other cheek; and not only of not cursing in return, but even of blessing; and not only of not retaining the tunic, but of yielding the cloak as well—he has enjoined patience in vain, not providing me the reward of the precept: I mean the fruit of patience, which is vengeance; which he ought to have permitted me, if he himself does not provide it; or if he did not permit me, he ought himself to provide it; since it is also in the interest of discipline that injury be avenged: for by fear of vengeance all iniquity is restrained. Otherwise, with license freely let loose, it will dominate; ready to gouge out both eyes, and to knock out every tooth in the security of impunity.

But this is the work of the supremely good God, and of goodness alone, to do injury to patience, to throw open the door to violence, not to defend the upright, not to restrain the wicked. Give to every one who asks of you; that is, to every one in need: or so much the more to one in need, if also to one in abundance. Lest anyone therefore be in need, you have in Deuteronomy the form of the Creator ready for the giver: There shall be, he says, no needy person among you; that the Lord your God may bless you with blessing; meaning the giver, who shall have caused there to be no needy person. And here he goes further, for he does not command that it be given only to one who asks.

But, Let there be, he says, no needy person among you; that is, take care of your own accord that there be none: whereby he gives all the more prior judgment that it must be given even to one who asks, even in what follows: But if there be a needy person among your brethren, you shall not harden your heart, nor shut your hand from your needy brother. You shall surely open your hand to him, you shall surely lend him as much as he desires. For a loan is not usually given except to one who asks. But concerning the loan, more later. Now if anyone should wish to argue that the Creator commanded giving to brethren, but Christ to all who ask; so that this might be something new and different: nay, it will be one of those things through which the law of the Creator will be in Christ. For Christ commanded nothing different toward all than what the Creator commanded toward brethren.

For even if the goodness that works toward strangers is greater, yet it is not prior to that which is first owed to those near. For who, not loving those near, will be able to love strangers? But if the second degree of goodness is toward strangers, and the first toward those near; the second degree will belong to the same one to whom the first belongs; more readily than that the second should belong to one in whom the first did not exist. Thus the Creator, both according to the order of nature, first taught kindness toward those near, being about to extend it afterward to strangers; and according to the rationale of his dispensation, first toward the Jews, and afterward toward the whole human race. And therefore, as long as the mystery was within Israel, he rightly commanded mercy toward brethren alone.

But when he gave to Christ the nations as an inheritance and the ends of the earth as a possession, and what was said through Hosea began to be fulfilled: Not my people, my people; and she who had not obtained mercy, having obtained mercy—that is, the nation; from that point Christ extended the law of paternal kindness to all, excepting no one in compassion just as in calling. Thus also if he taught anything further, this too he received as the inheritance of the nations. And as you wish men to do to you, so also do to them. In this precept the other part of it is surely understood: And as you do not wish men to do to you, so also do not do to them.

If a new God, unknown until now and not yet fully revealed, who had formed me by no prior instruction by which I might first know what I ought to wish or not wish for myself, and so also do to others what I would wish for myself, and not do what I would not wish for myself—if such a one enjoined this, he left the passivity of my judgment open, and did not bind me to a correspondence of will and deed, so that I should do to others what I wish for myself and not do to others what I do not wish for myself.

For he did not define what I ought to wish or not wish for myself and for others, so that I might match my deed to the law of my will, and be able not to render to another what I wish rendered to me by another—love, service, comfort, protection, and goods of that kind: and likewise not to do to another what I do not wish done to me by another—violence, injury, insult, fraud, and evils of that kind. Finally, in this inconsistency of will and deed, the pagans act who have not yet been instructed by God. For even if good and evil are known by nature, they are not known by the discipline of God: which once known, then at last the correspondence of will and deed proceeds from faith, as under the fear of God.

And so the god of Marcion, though he has been revealed most fully, yet being revealed could not have put forth so strict and obscure and still blind a summary of this precept under discussion—one more easily to be interpreted according to my own judgment—for which he had laid down no prior definition. But my Creator both long ago and everywhere commanded that the needy, the poor, and orphans and widows be protected, helped, and refreshed: as also through Isaiah: Break your bread for the hungry; and bring the homeless poor into your house; and if you see one naked, cover him. Likewise through Ezekiel, concerning the just man: He shall give his bread to the hungry, and shall cover the naked. Sufficiently therefore even then did he teach me to do to others what I wish done to myself.

Likewise by declaring: You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness; he taught me not to do to others what I do not wish done to myself: and therefore the precept in the Gospel will belong to him who both beforehand laid it down and defined it, and arranged it according to the judgment of his discipline: and rightly has he now compressed it into a brief summary, since also the Lord, that is Christ, was proclaimed as one who would elsewhere make a concise word upon the earth.

Here now, when he introduces the matter of lending: And if ye lend to those from whom ye hope to receive back, what thanks is that to you?—run through the following passages of Ezekiel, concerning the same just man: His money, he says, he hath not given to usury, and what is over he shall not take; namely, the excess of usury, which is interest. First, therefore, it was his purpose to root out the profit of usury, so that he might the more easily accustom man to losing even the principal itself, if perchance, since he had learned to let go the profit thereof. For this, we say, was the work of the Law making provision for the Gospel. It was gradually forming the faith of certain persons toward the perfect brightness of Christian discipline, by those first precepts of a benevolence still as yet stammering.

For also above: And the pledge, he says, he shall restore;—certainly if the debtor be unable to pay: for that the pledge ought to be restored to one who is able to pay, would any man need to write that? Far more plainly in Deuteronomy: Thou shalt not sleep upon his pledge: thou shalt surely restore to him the garment about the going down of the sun, and he shall sleep in his garment. Still more clearly above: Thou shalt release every debt which thy neighbour oweth thee, and thou shalt not exact it of thy brother: because the remission of the Lord thy God hath been proclaimed. Furthermore, when he commands the debt to be released, it is certainly to one who cannot pay—which is even more; and, if to one who can pay, when he forbids exacting it, what else does he teach than that we should lend to one who cannot pay, he who has already pronounced loss upon usury? And ye shall be sons of God.

Nothing is more shameless, if that one will not make sons for himself, who did not permit us to make sons, by taking away marriage. How will he allure his own into that name which he has already erased? I cannot be the son of a eunuch, especially since I have the same father as all things. For he is as much the father of all who is the creator of the universe, as the eunuch who is the creator of no substance. And if the Creator had not joined male and female, and if he had not granted offspring even to all animals, this was I before paradise, before the transgression, before the exile, before two, one; made a son again forthwith, when he fashioned me with his hands, when he moved me with his own breath. He now calls me son again, begetting me no longer into a soul, but into a spirit. Because he himself, it says, is kind toward the unthankful and the evil.

Well done, Marcion, you have cleverly taken away from him the rains and suns, lest he should appear to be the Creator. But who is this kind one, who has not even been known until now? How is he kind, from whom no benefits have preceded? This is the kind of kindness by which he had lent suns and rains, not about to receive them back from the human race as Creator; who, for so great a generosity of the elements, endures men until now rendering the debt of gratitude more readily to idols than to himself. Truly kind also in spiritual benefits. For the words of the Lord are sweeter than honey and the honeycomb. He therefore also rebuked the unthankful, who deserved to experience the thankful; whose suns and rains even thou, Marcion, hast held in ingratitude. But thy god could not yet complain of the unthankful, who had not prepared any thankful ones. Also in commanding mercy: Be ye, he says, merciful, as your Father hath had mercy upon you.

This will be: Break thy bread to the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into thy house, and if thou seest the naked cover him; and: Judge for the fatherless, and justify the widow. I recognize his ancient teaching, who prefers mercy to sacrifice. Or if another has now commanded mercy, because he too is merciful, why for so long an age was he not merciful to me? Judge not, that ye be not judged. Condemn not, that ye be not condemned. Forgive and ye shall be forgiven. Give and it shall be given unto you. Good measure, pressed down and running over, shall they give into your bosom. With the same measure that ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. As I think, these words sound a retribution provoked according to merits. From whom therefore is the retribution? If from men only, then he teaches a human discipline and reward, and we shall obey men entirely.

If from the Creator, as from a judge and reckoner of merits; then he drives our obedience toward him, with whom he has established the retribution to be sought or feared, according as each one shall have judged, or condemned, or forgiven, or measured. If from himself, then he too already judges, which Marcion denies. Let the Marcionites therefore choose, lest it cost as much to fall away from the rule of their master, as to have Christ teaching either for men or for the Creator. But the blind leads the blind into the pit. Some believe Marcion. But the disciple is not above his master. This also Apelles ought to have remembered, the corrector of Marcion from being his disciple. Let the heretic remove the beam from his own eye, then let him refute the mote in the eye of the Christian, if he thinks there is one.

Likewise also a good tree bringeth not forth evil fruit, because neither does truth bring forth heresy: nor an evil tree good fruit, because neither does heresy bring forth truth: So neither did Marcion bring forth anything good from the evil treasury of Cerdo, nor Apelles from that of Marcion: for we shall interpret these things far more fittingly as applied to themselves, which Christ allegorized concerning men, not concerning two gods according to the scandal of Marcion. I think I am not rashly persisting up to this point in the line by which I define that nowhere at all has another God been revealed by Christ. In this alone I marvel that the hand of Marcion's adultery has been benumbed—unless because even robbers are afraid. No evil deed is without fear, because neither is it without consciousness of itself. For so long therefore even the Jews knew no other God than him beside whom they had known no one yet; nor did they call upon any other God than him whom alone they knew.

If this is so, who will seem to have said: Why call ye me, Lord, Lord? Whether he who had never been so called, as having never yet been made known? Or he who had always been held as Lord, as known from the beginning? The God of the Jews, of course. Who likewise could have added, And do ye not what I say? Whether he who was just then attempting to teach them, or he who from the beginning had entrusted to them the words both of the law and of the prophets: who could also reproach them with disobedience, even if he had never reproached them otherwise? Furthermore, he who before Christ proclaimed: This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me, was certainly imputing to them their ancient stubbornness. Otherwise how absurd, that a new God, a new Christ, the illuminator of a new and so great religion, should pronounce stubborn and disobedient those whom he could not have had experience of!

Likewise, the faith of the Centurion being extolled, it would be incredible if he professed that he had not found such faith even in Israel, to whom the faith of Israel did not pertain. But neither could it yet pertain thence, being too raw to be proved or compared, not to say as yet nonexistent. But why should it not have been lawful for him to use the example of another's faith? Because if it were so, he would have said that such faith had never existed in Israel; whereas, saying that such faith ought to have been found in Israel; and that he had come for this purpose, that he might find it—the God and Christ of Israel, of course—he would not have rebuked it, unless he were the exactor and pursuer of it. A rival, moreover, would rather have preferred to find it such, toward the weakening and destroying of which he had come rather than to confirm it. He also raised from the dead the only son of a widow—no new proof.

The prophets of the Creator had also done this; how much more the Son? So much so, indeed, that up to that very moment the Lord Christ had introduced no other God, so that all there gave glory to the Creator, saying: A great prophet is risen up among us, and God hath visited his people. Which God? Surely he whose people it is, and from whom the prophets come. But if they were glorifying the Creator, and Christ both hearing and knowing did not correct them—and that too in so great a proof of a dead man raised, while they were still praying to the Creator—without doubt he was either not carrying about another God than him whom he endured to be honoured in his benefits and mighty works: or what manner of thing is it that he should endure them erring so long, he who had come for this purpose, to heal their error! But John is scandalized upon hearing of the mighty works of Christ, as belonging to another.

But I will first explain the reason of the scandal, so that I may the more easily explode the scandal of the heretics. Since the Lord himself, the Word and Spirit of the Father, was now working on earth and preaching, it was necessary that the portion of the Holy Spirit, which in the form of the prophetic measure had wrought in John the preparation of the ways of the Lord, should now depart from John, being gathered back, that is, into the Lord, as into its own total sum. And so John, now a common man, and now one of the crowd, was indeed scandalized as a man, but not as one hoping for or understanding another Christ, who would not even have hoped for the same one, as teaching or doing nothing new. No one will hesitate about someone whom, while he knows him not to be, he neither hopes for nor understands.

But John was certain that there was no God except the Creator, both as a Jew and as one who had plainly read the prophets—he rather hesitated, as it were, about him whom, while he knows him to exist, he does not know whether he himself is that one. In this fear therefore also John: Art thou, he says, he that cometh, or do we look for another? Simply inquiring whether he himself had come whom he expected. Art thou he that cometh; that is, who art to come, or do we look for another? That is, is there another whom we look for, if thou art not he whom we expect to come? For he hoped, as all supposed from the similarity of the proofs, that a prophet might meanwhile have been sent, after whom another would be, that is a greater one, namely the Lord himself, who was expected to come.

And so this was the scandal of John, that he doubted whether he himself had come whom they expected, whom also they ought to have recognized from the works proclaimed, so that the Lord announced to John that he was to be recognized through those same works. Since these are agreed to have been foretold concerning the Christ of the Creator, as we have shown in each case, it is sufficiently perverse that Christ should not have announced himself through them as the Christ not of the Creator, through those very things by which he was compelling the recognition of the Christ of the Creator.

Far more perverse, if he also bears testimony to John not as John's Christ, while confirming him as a prophet, nay even as above a prophet, inserting also what is written concerning him: Behold I send my angel before thy face, who shall prepare thy way; elegantly recalling the prophecy to the higher sense of the scandalized John, so that, by confirming that the forerunner John had already come and fulfilled his office, he might extinguish the scruple of that question, Art thou he that cometh, or do we look for another? For with the forerunner having now fulfilled his office, the way of the Lord having been prepared, he himself was to be understood as the one to whom the forerunner had ministered.

Greater indeed than all born of women, but not on that account is he who shall be lesser in the kingdom of God subject to him; as though the kingdom of God, in which some lowly one shall be greater than John, belongs to one God; and John, who is greater than all born of women, to another. For whether he speaks of any lowly person through humility, or of himself, because he was held to be less than John—since all were running out into the wilderness to John rather than to Christ—What went ye out into the wilderness to see?—it equally belongs to the Creator both that John is his greatest among those born of women, and that Christ or any lowly one who shall be greater than John in the kingdom equally of the Creator, and whoever is greater than so great a prophet, shall not have been scandalized at Christ, which then diminished John. We have spoken of the remission of sins.

But the argument of that sinful woman will pertain to this: that when she pressed the feet of the Lord with kisses, flooded them with tears, wiped them with her hair, anointed them with ointment, she handled the reality of a solid body, not an empty phantom. And that the repentance of a sinful woman, according to the Creator, merited pardon—he who was accustomed to prefer mercy to sacrifice. But also if the spur of repentance had come from faith, through repentance justified by faith, she heard from him: Thy faith hath made thee whole: from him who had declared through Habakkuk: The just shall live by his faith.

And you will not hear; he gave Christ occasion to press it repeatedly: He who has ears, let him hear. Not as though Christ were granting hearing by way of contrast with what the Creator had taken away: but because an exhortation followed the threatening: first, with the ear you will hear; then, he who has ears, let him hear. For those who had ears were not listening of their own accord; but he was showing that the ears of the heart were necessary, those very ears by which the Creator had denied they would hear. And therefore through Christ he adds: Take heed how you hear, and hear not; that is, hearing not with the heart but with the ear. If you assign a worthy meaning to the utterance in accordance with the sense of him who was rousing men to hearing, even in saying, Take heed how you hear, he was threatening those who would not hear. Surely the mildest of Gods is named, because he neither judges nor is angry.

This is proved also by the underlying sense: To him who has, it shall be given; but from him who has not, even what he thinks he has shall be taken away. What shall be given? An increase of faith, or of understanding, or salvation itself. What shall be taken away? Surely what would have been given. By whom shall it be given and taken away? If it is taken away by the Creator, it is also given by him: if it is given by the god of Marcion, it is also taken away by him. Yet by whatever name he threatens removal, he will not belong to that God who does not know how to threaten, because he does not know how to be angry.

I marvel, moreover, that he who had hidden himself through so great an age denies that a lamp is usually hidden—a greater and more necessary light—while he who keeps his own God veiled to this day promises that all things shall come from the hidden into the open, waiting, I suppose, for Marcion to be born. We come now to the most persistent argument of all those who bring the Lord's birth into controversy. He himself, they say, testifies that he was not born, by saying: Who is my mother, and who are my brothers? Thus heretics always either seize upon bare and simple words and drag them wherever they wish by conjecture; or again they dissolve conditional and reasoned statements by the condition of simplicity, as in this very place.

We on the contrary say: first, it could not have been announced to him that his mother and brothers were standing outside seeking to see him, if he had had no mother and no brothers; persons whom he who announced it must have known, either as known before, or as then and there identified while they desired to see him, or while they themselves sent the message. Against this our first proposition it is customary to reply from the other side: What if it was announced to him for the purpose of testing him? But this the Scripture does not say, which is accustomed to indicate whenever something is done by way of testing: Behold, a lawyer stood up testing him; and concerning the question of tribute: And the Pharisees came to him testing him; so that where it makes no mention of testing, it does not admit the interpretation of testing. And yet I demand from the abundance of reasons what purpose the testing served, and to what end they tested him by naming his mother and brothers.

If it was to find out whether he had been born or not; when was there a question about this, which they were to resolve by this testing? But who would doubt that one was born whom he saw to be a man, whom he had heard professing himself the Son of man, whom men doubted, from the appearance of every human quality, whether to believe him God or the Son of God, more readily supposing him a prophet, though some great one, yet certainly born? Even if he had to be tested regarding the fact of his birth, any other argument would have been more suited to the test than the mention of those persons whom even one who was born might not have had. Tell me: does a mother survive for all who are born? Are brothers also begotten for all who are born? Is it not permitted to have rather a father and sisters, or indeed no one at all?

But also it is established that censuses were conducted under Augustus now in Judaea through Sentius Saturninus, in whose records they could have inquired into his lineage. So in no way does the logic of that testing hold together. But his mother and brothers were standing outside. It remains also to examine the sense of one who does not speak simply, Who is my mother or my brothers? As though to deny his kindred and his birth; but rather out of the necessity of the occasion and on a rational condition. For he was justly indignant that persons so closely related should be standing outside while strangers were fixed within at his words, and moreover were seeking to call him away from his solemn work. He did not so much disown them as disavow them. And indeed, having first said, Who is my mother, and who are my brothers? He added, but those who hear my words and do them? And transferred the names of blood to others whom he judged more closely related by faith.

But no one transfers anything except from him who possesses what is transferred. If therefore he made those his mother and brothers who were not, how did he deny those who were? By the condition of their merits, of course, not by the denial of the former; teaching in his own person that whoever would prefer father or mother or brothers to the word of God is not worthy to be a disciple. Moreover, from this very act he was rather confessing his mother and brothers, in that he was unwilling to acknowledge them; and in adopting others, he confirmed those whom he rejected through displeasure, substituting the others not as more genuine but as more worthy. Finally, it would be no great thing if he set faith before blood, which he did not have.

But who is this one who commands both winds and sea? Doubtless a new lord and possessor of the elements, the Creator having now been subdued and expelled. It is not so. But the elements had recognized their own Author, they who had been accustomed to obey even his servants. Look into Exodus, Marcion, behold the Red Sea, vaster than all the pools of Judaea, with the rod of Moses commanding it, so that, cleft to its very bottom and fixed on either side with equal wonder at the division, it might let the people pass through on dry foot by a path through its midst, and again at the nod of the same rod, nature returning, might overwhelm the Egyptian army with the concord of the waves: in which work the south winds also served. Read also the lots for dividing the family inheritance, that the Jordan was a sword for his passage, whose onset and current Jesus had plainly taught the prophets to stand still as they crossed. What of these things?

If your Christ is he, he will not be more powerful than the servants of the Creator. But I would have used these examples alone, had not also the proclamation of that maritime expedition preceded Christ. For when he crosses the sea, the Psalm is fulfilled: The Lord, it says, is upon many waters: when he scatters the waves of the strait, Habakkuk is fulfilled: Scattering, it says, the waters on the way: when the sea is dashed to pieces at his threats, Nahum also is discharged: Threatening, it says, the sea and drying it up; together with the winds by which it was being disturbed. From what source do you wish to vindicate my Christ? From the examples or from the prophets of the Creator?

Come now, you who think that a warlike and armed warrior is proclaimed, not figuratively nor allegorically, who was to wage spiritual war against spiritual enemies, fighting spiritually with spiritual warfare and spiritual arms: when you find in one man a multitude of demons, a legion as they called themselves, and therefore spiritual, learn also that Christ is to be understood as the conqueror of spiritual enemies, spiritually armed and spiritually warlike; and thus that he is the very one who was to fight even with a legion of demons; and also concerning this battle the Psalm may be seen to have declared: The Lord mighty, the Lord powerful in battle. For having fought against death, the last enemy, he triumphed through the trophy of the cross. Now of which God's Son did the legion testify Jesus to be?

Without doubt of him whose torments and abyss they knew and feared; for they do not seem to have been able to be ignorant still of what the power of a new and unknown God was doing on earth; because it is not plausible that the Creator was ignorant of it. For if he had at some time been ignorant of another God above himself, yet he had by now certainly discovered him acting below his own heaven. And what the Lord had discovered would by now have become known also to his entire household, in the same world and within the same compass of heaven, in which the foreign Divinity would be dwelling. To the extent therefore that even the Creator would have known it, and the substances of his being, if it had existed; to that same extent, because there was none, the demons knew no other than the Christ of their own God.

They do not seek from another what they would have remembered must be sought from the Creator, namely the pardon of the Creator's abyss. In the end they obtained it. On what merit? Because they had lied? Because they had made him the son of a savage God? And what sort of being will he be who helped those who lied, who endured those who defamed him? But because they had not lied, because they had recognized the God of the abyss as their own, thus he himself confirmed as the one whom the demons had recognized, Jesus, judge and Son of the avenging God. Behold something also concerning those weaknesses and infirmities of the Creator in Christ. For I too wish to ascribe ignorance to him. Allow me this against the heretic. He is touched by a woman who had a flow of blood, and he does not know by whom. Who touched me? He says.

Even when the disciples make excuses, he persists in the voice of ignorance: Someone touched me; and he affirms this from the evidence: For I perceived that power has gone out from me. What does the heretic say? Did he know the person? And why did he speak as though ignorant? Surely to provoke a confession, to prove her fear. So also Adam was once questioned, as though in ignorance: Adam, where are you? You have both the Creator excused along with Christ, and Christ made equal to the Creator. But also this, as an adversary of the law: that because the law removes one from contact with a woman flowing with blood, he therefore rejoiced not only to admit her touch but also to grant her health. O a God beneficent not by nature but by rivalry!

But if we find that the faith of the woman had so merited it, when he says: Your faith has made you whole, who are you to interpret rivalry with the law in that act which the Lord himself showed to have been performed as a reward of faith? But you wish to establish the faith of the woman as that by which she had despised the law. And to whom is it credible that a woman, as yet conscious of no God, as yet initiated into no new law, would break through that law to which she was still bound? By what faith, finally, did she break through? Believing in which God? Despising which? The Creator? For certainly she touched him out of faith. If out of faith in the Creator, which knew no other God, how did she break through his law? For she broke through it, if she broke through it, just as much out of faith in the Creator.

For how will both things be consistent, that she both broke through it and broke through it out of faith in the very one on account of whom she ought not to have broken through? I will say. This was her faith first: by which she trusted that her God preferred mercy to sacrifice itself; by which she was certain that he, her God, was working in Christ; by which she touched him thus, not as a holy man, nor as a prophet, whom she knew to be capable of defilement on account of human substance; but as God himself, whom she had presumed could be polluted by no impurity. And so she did not rashly interpret the law to herself, the law signifying that those things are defiled which are capable of defilement, not God, whom she trusted to be in Christ. But she also reflected that the ordinary and regular flow of menstrual or partial blood is censured in the law, which comes from the function of nature, not from the fault of illness.

But she was overflowing from the fault of illness, for which she knew that not a limit of time but the aid of divine mercy was necessary. And so she can be seen not to have broken through the law but to have made a distinction. This will be the faith which had also conferred understanding. Unless you believe, it says, you will not understand. Christ approving this faith of that woman, who believed only in the Creator, responded as the God of that faith which he approved. Nor will I omit this: that while his garment is touched, a garment put upon a body, not a phantom, the body also was being demonstrated; not as though we were now reconsidering this matter, but because it conspires with the present question. For if there were no reality of body, a phantom, being an empty thing, could not be defiled. He therefore who cannot be defiled on account of the emptiness of his substance, how would he have wished to be?

As a rival of the law he was pretending, he who was not truly being polluted.

He sends the disciples to preach the kingdom of God. Did he even here declare whose kingdom? He forbids them to carry anything for food or clothing on the way? Who would have commanded this? None but he who also feeds the ravens, and clothes the flowers of the field, who also goes before even the ox treading out the grain with freedom of mouth for the indulgence of fodder drawn from the work of threshing: because the labourer is worthy of his hire. Let Marcion delete these things, so long as their meaning remains safe. But when he commands the dust to be shaken off from the feet against those by whom they had not been received, and orders this to be done as a testimony; no one bears witness to what is not destined for judgment; he who orders inhumanity to be turned into testimony threatens a judge.

That no new god was proved by Christ was also declared by the opinion of all, because some asserted to Herod that Christ Jesus was John, others Elijah, others one of the ancient prophets. Whichever of these he might have been, he was not raised up for this reason, namely to preach another god after the resurrection. He feeds the people in the wilderness, after his former custom, of course. Or if the majesty is not the same, then he is already less than the Creator, who sustained them not for one day but for forty years, and not from inferior materials of bread and fish, but from heavenly manna, and not about five thousand, but six hundred thousand men. So great indeed was that majesty, that he willed, after the former example, not only that the scantiness of the food should suffice, but even overflow. For so also in the time of famine under Elijah, the small and last provisions of the widow of Zarephath overflowed from the prophet's blessing throughout the whole time of the famine.

You have the Third of the Books of Kings. If you also open the Fourth, you will find this whole order of Christ in that man of God, who had ordered twenty barley loaves brought to him to be distributed among the people, and his servant, comparing accordingly the multitude and the smallness of the food, had answered: What then, shall I give this in the sight of a hundred men? Give, he said, and they shall eat, for thus says the Lord: And they ate, and left remnants, according to the word of the Lord. O Christ, ancient even in new things! These things, therefore, which Peter had seen, and had compared with former deeds, and had recognized as not only done in the past but even then already prophesying for the future, when the Lord asked who they thought him to be, as he answered for all: Thou art the Christ, he cannot but have understood him to be the Christ whom he knew in the Scriptures, whom he was already recognizing in his deeds.

This he himself also confirms, still bearing with it, nay even enjoining silence. For if Peter indeed could not confess him as other than the Creator's Christ, yet he commanded that no one should say this; he certainly did not wish that to be published abroad which Peter had understood. Nay, you say, because Peter had not understood rightly, he did not wish a falsehood to be spread. But he declared another reason for the silence: Because it was necessary that the Son of man should suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and scribes and priests, and be killed, and rise again after the third day. Since these things were also foretold concerning the Christ of the Creator, as we shall fulfil in their proper places, so also he shows himself to be the one concerning whom they were foretold. Certainly even if they had not been foretold, he put forward as the reason for enjoining silence not Peter's error, but the necessity of undergoing the passions.

He who wishes, he says, to save his soul shall lose it; and he who has lost it for my sake shall save it. Certainly the Son of man uttered this sentence. Look therefore also with the king of Babylon into his burning furnace, and you will find there one like the Son of man (for he was not yet truly so, not yet born of man), even then establishing these outcomes. He saves the souls of the three brothers, who had conspired to lose them for God; but he destroyed those of the Chaldeans, who had preferred to save them through idolatry. What is this new teaching whose proofs are ancient? Although also the proclamations of martyrdoms, both of those to come and of those who would receive their reward from God, have run their course. See, says Isaiah, how the just man perishes, and no one takes it to heart; and just men are taken away, and no one considers it. When is this done more than in the persecution of his saints?

Certainly not a simple one, nor one common by the law of nature, but that notable and military one for the faith; in which he who loses his soul for God preserves it: so that even here you may recognize a judge, who will recompense the evil gain of the soul with its loss, and the good loss of the soul with its salvation. But he also presents to me a jealous God, rendering evil for evil: He who has been ashamed of me, he says, I also will be ashamed of him. Since not even the matter of shame is fitting except for my Christ: whose condition is more shameful, so as to lie open even to the reproaches of heretics, all the foulness of birth and upbringing, and the unworthiness of the flesh itself, with as much bitterness as they can muster in their declamations. Otherwise, how will that one be liable to shame, who cannot receive it?

Not curdled in a womb, though of a virgin, yet of a woman; and if not from seed, yet by the law of bodily substance, from a woman's fluid: not flesh held before form: not called a beast after shape: not deliberated upon through ten months of torment: not poured out upon the ground through the body's sewer with the filth of so long a time at the sudden shock of pains: nor straightway beginning life with tears, and with the first wound of his bond: nor much washed: nor treated with salt and honey: nor in swaddling-bands long an infant, scarcely a boy, slowly a man: but set forth from heaven, at once full-grown, at once complete, straightway Christ, spirit and power, and God only. Otherwise, as not truly what he did not appear to be, so neither to be ashamed of the curse of the cross, of whose reality he was devoid, being devoid of a body. He could not therefore have said: He who has been ashamed of me.

Our Christ ought to have pronounced this: Made lower by the Father a little below the angels; a worm, and not a man; the reproach of men, and the outcast of the people; inasmuch as he so willed it, that by his bruise we might be healed, that by his disgrace our salvation might stand. And rightly did he lay himself down for his own man, for his own image and likeness, not another's; so that, since man had not been ashamed to worship stone and wood, with the same constancy, not ashamed of Christ, he might make satisfaction to God for the shamelessness of idolatry through the shamelessness of faith. Which of these things befits your christ, Marcion, as a ground for shame? Plainly you ought to be ashamed that you yourself invented him.

For this too especially you ought to have blushed, that you allow him to be seen in the retirement of the mountain together with Moses and Elijah, whose destroyer he had come to be. This, forsooth, is what that voice from heaven wished to be understood: This is my beloved Son, hear him: that is, not Moses and Elijah any longer. Therefore the voice alone would have sufficed without the display of Moses and Elijah. For by defining whom they should hear, it would have forbidden all others to be heard. Or did he permit Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the rest whom he did not show, to be heard, if he forbade those whom he did show to be heard?

Now even if their presence was necessary, they would certainly not have been shown in conversation, which is a sign of intimacy; nor in the fellowship of his brightness, which is an example of condescension and grace; but in some squalor, which would be an argument of destruction, or rather in the darkness of the Creator, to dispel which he had been sent. They would also have been kept far apart from the brightness of Christ, who was about to separate their very words and writings from his Gospel. Does he thus show them to be strangers, while he has them with him? Does he thus teach that they are to be forsaken, whom he joins to himself? Does he thus destroy those whom he builds up from his own rays? What would the Christ of those very men have done? I believe that, in accordance with perversity, he would have revealed them to be such as the Christ of Marcion ought to have shown; or would have had with him some others than his own prophets.

But what is so characteristic of the Christ of the Creator as to show with himself his own preachers? To be seen with those with whom he had been seen in revelations; to speak with those who had spoken with him; to share his glory with those by whom he was called the Lord of glory; to be with his chief ones, of whom one was at one time the shaper of the people, the other at another time their reshaper; one the initiator of the Old Testament, the other the consummator of the New? Therefore Peter also, rightly recognizing the company of his own Christ by his inseparability, offers his counsel: It is good for us to be here. Good indeed, where Moses and Elijah are. And: Let us make here three tabernacles, one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elijah: but not knowing what he said. How not knowing?

Whether by simple error, or by that reason which we defend in the cause of the new prophecy, that ecstasy, that is, a loss of sense, befits grace? For a man placed in the Spirit, especially when he beholds the glory of God, or when God speaks through him, must needs fall away from his senses, being overshadowed, that is, by the divine power; concerning which there is a question between us and the psychics. Meanwhile it is easy to prove the senselessness of Peter. For how would he have recognized Moses and Elijah, unless in the Spirit? For the people would not have had images or statues and likenesses of them, the law forbidding it; unless because he had seen them in the Spirit; and thus what he had said, being placed in the Spirit and not in his senses, he could not know.

Otherwise, if he is thus ignorant as one erring, because he thought that Christ belonged to those men: then it is already established also from what was said above, when Peter was asked by Christ whom they thought him to be, that he spoke of the Creator's Christ when he said, Thou art the Christ; because if he had then recognized him as belonging to another God, he would not have erred here either. But if he erred here also because he erred above; then it is certain that on that day too no new divinity had been revealed by Christ, and that Peter had not erred up to that point, Christ having revealed nothing of the kind up to that point; and that for so long Christ is not to be reckoned as belonging to another, but to the Creator, whose entire order he expressed here also. He takes three from among the disciples as witnesses of the coming vision and voice; and this too is of the Creator: In three, he says, witnesses shall every word stand.

He withdraws to a mountain; I recognize the form of the place. For the Creator had also initiated the former people at a mountain both with vision and with his voice. It was fitting that the New Testament should be sealed on that height on which the Old had been written; under the same encompassing cloud also, which no one doubted was gathered from the air of the Creator, unless he had also brought down his own clouds thither, because he had also broken his way through the heaven of the Creator, or had likewise made use of the Creator's cloud by loan. And so neither was the cloud silent now, but a voice salted from heaven, and the Father's new testimony concerning the Son: and in the second Psalm, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee. Concerning whom also through Isaiah: Who feareth God, let him hear the voice of his Son? And so now presenting him: This is my Son; it is of course understood, whom I promised.

For if he promised at some time, and afterwards says, This is he; it belongs to him who exhibits, to use his voice in the demonstration of the promise, who once promised; not to him to whom it might be answered, "But who art thou thyself, to say, This is my Son, concerning whom thou hast no more given prior announcement than thou hast revealed what thou thyself wast before?" Hear him therefore, whom from the beginning he had proclaimed to be heard in the name of a prophet, since he was also to be regarded as a prophet by the people. A prophet, says Moses, shall God raise up for you from your sons (according to carnal reckoning, that is) like unto me: ye shall hear him. But every soul that will not hear him shall be cut off from his people. So also Isaiah: Who among you feareth, let him hearken to the voice of his Son? Which the Father himself was also about to commend.

For establishing the words of his Son, by saying, that is: This is my beloved Son; hear him, he says. And so even if the transfer of hearing has been made from Moses and Elijah to Christ, yet not as from another god, nor to another christ, but from the Creator to his Christ, according to the departure of the Old and the succession of the New Testament. Not a legate, says Isaiah, nor a messenger, but the Lord himself saved them; himself now preaching and fulfilling the Law and the prophets. The Father therefore delivered to the Son the new disciples, having first shown Moses and Elijah with him in the prerogative of brightness, and then dismissed them, as though their office and honor were now discharged; so that this very thing might be confirmed against Marcion, that there is a fellowship even of Christ's brightness with Moses and Elijah.

But the whole aspect of this vision we have also in Habakkuk, where the Spirit in the person at times of the apostles: Lord, I have heard thy hearing, and was afraid. What more than that heavenly voice, This is my beloved Son, hear him? I considered thy works, and fell away in mind. When more than when, having seen his brightness, Peter knew not what he said? In the midst of two living creatures thou shalt be known, of Moses and Elijah. Concerning whom also Zechariah saw in the figure of two olive trees, and two branches of the olive. For these are they of whom it was said to him: Two sons of fatness stand by the Lord of the whole earth. And again the same Habakkuk: His virtue covered the heavens; by that cloud, of course. And his brightness shall be as the light; by which also his garment shone. And if we call to mind the promise made to Moses, it will be found here fulfilled.

For when Moses had desired the sight of the Lord, saying: If therefore I have found grace before thee, manifest thyself to me, that I may know thee by sight; desiring that sight in which he was to act as a man, which the prophet knew. Otherwise, the face of God (he had already heard) no man shall see and live. And this word, he says, which thou hast spoken, I will do for thee. And again Moses: Show me thy glory. And the Lord likewise concerning the future: I will go before in my glory; and the rest. And at the last: And then thou shalt see my back parts. Not loins, nor calves; but the glory which he had desired, to be revealed in the latter times.

In which he promises himself visible to him face to face, saying also to Aaron: If there shall be a prophet among you, I will be known to him in a vision, and will speak to him in a vision, not as to Moses: mouth to mouth will I speak to him in a form (of a man, of course, which he was about to bear), not in a riddle. For even if Marcion was unwilling that he should be shown conversing with the Lord, but standing; yet even standing he stood mouth to mouth, and face to face with him, he says, not outside him, unto his very glory, let alone into his sight. From which glory he departed from Christ no otherwise illumined than he was wont to depart from the Creator: thereupon then striking the eyes of the children of Israel, just as now those of the blinded Marcion, who did not see that this argument too tells against himself. I take upon myself the person of Israel.

Let Marcion's christ stand forth, and cry out: O faithless generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I endure you? Straightway he ought to hear from me: Whoever you are, O coming one, first declare who you are, and from whom you come, and what right you have over us. Up to this point everything among you belongs to the Creator. Plainly, if you come from him and act on his behalf, we accept the rebuke. But if from another, I would ask you to say what you have ever entrusted to us of your own, which we ought to have believed, that you should reproach us with unbelief, you who have never even revealed yourself to us. How long ago did you begin to act among us, that you should demand time? In what things have you endured us, that you should charge us with your patience? You come like the ass from Aesop's well, just now, and already you cry out.

I take up further the person of the disciples, upon whom he burst: O faithless nation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I endure you? This outburst of his I would most justly repel in this manner: Whoever you are, O coming one, first declare who you are, from whom you come, what right you have over us. Up to this point, I think, you are the Creator's, and therefore we have followed you, recognizing in you all things of his. But if you come from him, we accept the rebuke. If however you act for another, I pray you, say what you have ever entrusted to us, at least of your own, which we ought already to have believed, that you should reproach us with unbelief, you who have not even yet declared your author? And how long ago did you begin to act among us, that you should also urge time against us? And in what things have you endured us, that you should also boast of your patience?

The ass from Aesop's well has appeared here just now, and already cries out. Who would not have thus beaten back the injustice of the rebuke, if he had believed him to be one who ought to complain of something new?—except that neither would he have rebuked them, had he not long since, dwelling among them in the law, in the prophets, in mighty works and benefits, always found them unbelieving. But behold, Christ loves little children, teaching that those who always wish to be greater ought to be such. The Creator, however, sent bears against boys, avenging the prophet Elisha who had suffered insults from them. A sufficiently shameless antithesis, which sets together things so different—little children and boys: an age still innocent, and one already capable of judgment, which was able to revile, not to say blaspheme. In that he is a just God, he spared not even impious boys, requiring honor toward greater age, and certainly all the more from the younger.

In that he is good, he so loves little children that in Egypt he showed kindness to the midwives who protected the Hebrew births endangered by Pharaoh's edict. Thus this affection of Christ also belongs to the Creator. Now then, Marcion's God, who turns away from marriage, how can he appear a lover of little children, whose whole cause is marriage? He who hates the seed must needs also execrate the fruit. Nay, he must be held more savage than the Egyptian king: for Pharaoh did not allow infants to be reared; this one does not allow them even to be born, taking away life from those even ten months in the womb. But how much more credibly is the affection toward little children attributed to him who, by blessing marriage for the propagation of the human race, also promised by blessing its very fruit, which is the first thing from infancy. The Creator brings down a plague of fire at Elijah's request upon that false prophet.

I recognize the severity of the judge; on the other side, the gentleness of Christ rebuking the disciples who were bent on the same punishment against that Samaritan village. Let the heretic also acknowledge that this gentleness of Christ is promised by that same most severe judge. He shall not strive, it says, nor shall his voice be heard in the street. A bruised reed he shall not break, and smoking flax he shall not quench. Such a one would certainly much less have burned men. For even then to Elijah, Not in fire, said the Lord, but in a gentle spirit. But now, this most humane God—why does he refuse him who offers himself as so inseparable a companion to him? If it was because he had spoken proudly or in hypocrisy: I will follow you wherever you go; then by judging either pride or hypocrisy to be refused, he acted as a judge. And certainly he condemned him whom he refused, as one who would not attain salvation.

For just as he calls to salvation him whom he does not refuse, or even him whom he calls of his own accord; so he condemns to perdition him whom he refuses. But to him who made excuse on account of his father's burial, when he answers: Let the dead bury their dead, but go you and announce the kingdom of God; he manifestly confirmed both laws of the Creator—both that in Leviticus forbidding priests to attend even the funerals of parents: Upon every dead soul, it says, the priest shall not enter, and upon his parent he shall not defile himself. And that concerning the vow in Numbers; for there also, he who has vowed himself to God, among other things is commanded not to enter upon any dead soul, not even upon that of father, or mother, or brother. Moreover I think he was destining him both for the vow and for the priesthood, whom he had imbued with the preaching of the kingdom of God.

Or if it is not so, he must be pronounced sufficiently impious, who, with no reason of law intervening, commanded that the burials of parents should be despised by their children. But when he also forbids that third man, who was preparing first to bid farewell to his own, to look back, he is carrying out the practice of the Creator. This also the Creator had not wished those whom he had delivered from Sodom to do.

He also chose another seventy apostles in addition to the twelve. For to what end the twelve, corresponding to as many springs at Elim, if not also the seventy, corresponding to as many palm trees? The antitheses were largely made by a diversity of causes, not of powers. But he who did not regard the diversity of causes easily supposed it to be a diversity of power. The Creator led forth the children of Israel from Egypt, laden even with the spoils of golden and silver vessels and garments, besides the burdens of the provisions packed up: but Christ prescribed that the disciples should not even carry a staff on the way. For those were advancing into a wilderness; but these were being sent into cities. Consider the difference of circumstances, and you will understand one and the same power, which arranged the expedition of its own according to scarcity and abundance; accordingly cutting short for those going through cities where there would be plenty, just as it had equipped those who would travel through the wilderness.

He also forbade them to carry sandals. For he himself it was under whom even in the wilderness the people had not worn out their sandals through so many years. Let no one, he says, be greeted along the way. O Christ, destroyer of the Prophets—from whom he received even this! When Elisha sent his servant Gehazi on the way to the son of the Shunammite to raise him from death, I think he gave him this command: Gird up your loins, and take my staff in your hand, and go: whomsoever you meet on the way, do not greet him; that is, do not salute him: and whoever greets you, do not answer him, that is, do not return the salutation. For what is the greeting along the roads, but the mutual salutation at meeting? So also the Lord's command, that they should say peace to whatever house they entered, follows the same example.

For Elisha also commanded this, that when he entered to the Shunammite, he should say to her: Peace to your husband, peace to your son. These will rather be our antitheses, which compare Christ, not those which separate him. But the laborer is worthy of his hire—who would pronounce this more fittingly than God the judge? Because this very thing is to judge—to make the laborer worthy of his hire. No recompense has ever been established except from a judicial act. Now here also the law of the Creator is confirmed, who judges even oxen at work to be laborers worthy of their hire; You shall not, it says, muzzle the ox when it treads out the grain. Who is so excellent toward men, except he who is so even toward cattle? But if Christ also pronounces laborers worthy of their hire, he has justified that precept of the Creator concerning the taking away of the golden and silver vessels of the Egyptians.

For those who had labored in fields and cities for the Egyptians, being certainly worthy laborers of their hire, were not instructed to commit fraud, but to obtain compensation for their wages, which they could not otherwise exact from their masters. The kingdom of God, neither new nor unheard of, he confirmed in this way also, when he commanded it to be announced as having drawn near. For that which was once far off can be said to have drawn near. But if it had never previously existed before it drew near, it could not even have been said to have drawn near, since it had never been far off. Everything that is new and unknown is sudden. Everything that is sudden, when it is announced, then first taking on its appearance, then first receives its time. Otherwise, it could not have been delayed, so long as it was not announced; nor, from the time it began to be announced, could it have drawn near.

He also adds, that to those who had not received them, they should say: Know nevertheless that the kingdom of God has drawn near. If he does not command this also for the sake of a threat, he commands it most vainly. For what would it matter to them if it drew near, unless because it draws near with judgment?—unto salvation, that is, of those who had received its announcement. How so? If a threat cannot exist without execution, you have God as executor in him who threatens, and as judge in both? So also he commands the dust to be shaken off against them, in testimony, and as a clinging of their land, not even leaving the remnants of fellowship. For if inhumanity and inhospitality are to receive no vengeance from him, to what end does he send before a testimony, portending threats at any rate?

Furthermore, since the Creator also in Deuteronomy, forbids Ammonites and Moabites to be received into the Church, because they had inhumanely and inhospitably defrauded the people going out from Egypt of provisions: therefore it will be established that the prohibition of fellowship flowed thence into Christ; where he has the formula: He who spurns you, spurns me. This also the Creator said to Moses: They have not despised you, but me. For Moses is as much an apostle as the Apostles are prophets. The authority of both offices must be made equal, from one and the same Lord of Apostles and Prophets. Who now will give the power of treading upon serpents and scorpions? Either the Lord of all animals, or one who is not even God of a single lizard? But it is well that the Creator promised this power to little children through Isaiah—to thrust the hand into the den of asps, and into the nest of young asps, and not to be harmed at all.

And certainly we know (saving the simplicity of Scripture; for neither indeed will even the beasts themselves be able to harm, where there is faith) that scorpions and serpents are figuratively portended as spiritual forces of wickedness, whose very prince also is reckoned among the Creator's own under the name of serpent, and dragon, and of whatever most monstrous beast, he having granted this power to his former Christ; as the ninetieth Psalm says to him: Upon the asp and the basilisk you shall tread, and you shall trample the lion and the dragon; as also Isaiah: In that day the Lord God shall bring upon that dragon, the great and tortuous serpent, his holy, great, and strong sword—his Christ, that is—and shall slay him in that day.

But when the same prophet says: The way shall be called clean and holy, and no unclean thing shall pass along it, nor shall there be an unclean way there: but those who are scattered shall walk in it, and shall not go astray; and there shall no longer be a lion there, nor shall any of the worst beasts come up into it, nor be found there. Since the way demonstrates faith, by which we shall come to God, already then to that same way, that is to faith, he promises this bestowal and subjection of beasts. Finally you will find also the times of the promise to agree, if you read what precedes: Be strong, you drooping hands, and you feeble knees. Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall hear. Then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall be clear.

Therefore where he published the benefits of healings, then also he subjected scorpions and serpents to his holy ones—he, that is, who had first received this power from the Father, that he might also bestow it on others, and displayed it according to the order of his preaching.

Who shall be called Lord of heaven, who is not first shown to be its maker? For he says: I give thanks and confess, O Lord of heaven, that the things which were hidden from the wise and prudent thou hast revealed to the little ones. What things are these? And whose? And hidden by whom? And revealed by whom? If hidden and revealed by the God of Marcion, who had sent nothing before in which anything could have been hidden—no prophecies, no parables, no visions, no arguments of things, or words, or names, overshadowed through allegories and figures, or the mists of riddles—but had hidden his own greatness itself, which he was now chiefly revealing through Christ: this is sufficiently unjust. For what had the wise and prudent done wrong, that God should be hidden from them? For the knowing of whom their wisdom and prudence had not sufficed, no way having been given by him through any proclamation of his works; nor any traces by which the wise and prudent might be led.

Although even if they had in some respect sinned against an unknown God—suppose him then known—yet they ought not to have experienced him as a jealous God, who is introduced as unlike the Creator. Therefore if he had sent before no materials from which he might have concealed something; and had no guilty parties from whom he might have concealed it; and ought not to have concealed it, even if he had had them: then neither will he himself be a revealer, who was not a concealer: and so neither Lord of heaven, nor Father of Christ; but that one to whom all things belong. For he both concealed, by sending before the instrument of prophetic obscurity, the understanding of which faith would merit: For unless ye believe, ye shall not understand; and he had guilty parties in the wise and prudent, who from his own works, so many and so great, did not seek God who could be understood, or philosophized perversely concerning him, and furnished materials to heretics; and finally, he is jealous.

Indeed, long ago he proclaimed this through Isaiah, which Christ gives thanks for: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the prudence of the prudent will I hide. As also elsewhere he signifies both that he had hidden and that revelation had taken place: And I will give them hidden treasures, I will open to them things invisible. And again: Who else shall scatter the signs of ventriloquists, and divinations from the heart; turning the wise backward, and making their thoughts foolish? But if he also designated his Christ as the enlightener of the nations: I have set thee as a light to the nations; which we interpret under the name of little ones—small in understanding, that is, and infants in imprudence; but now also little in the humility of faith—we shall far more readily believe that the same one also revealed to the little ones through Christ, who had also previously concealed, and through Christ made known what the Creator had previously concealed; therefore he now transacted the Creator's business, expounding his affairs.

But for their destruction, you say, so as to lead them away: therefore he ought to have led away those from whom the Creator had hidden, and to whom he had promised revelation. Or if the God of Marcion did this regarding the things hidden from the wise and prudent. For if he did it out of kindness, the knowledge ought to have been granted to those to whom it had been denied; not to the little ones, to whom the Creator had begrudged nothing. And yet up to this point, I think, we are proving that the establishment rather than the destruction of the Law and the Prophets is found in Christ. He says that all things have been delivered to him by the Father.

You would believe it if Christ is the Creator's, whose are all things; who as Creator delivered to the Son no less than all things which he had founded through him, through his Word, that is. But if he is that the coming one, the coming one, what are all the things that have been delivered to him by the Father? What things are the Creator's? Therefore the things which the Father delivered to the Son are good; and the Creator is now good, whose all things are good; and he is now not good, who invaded the good things of another in order to deliver them to the Son, teaching to abstain from what belongs to another. Certainly most beggarly, who had nothing wherewith to enrich his son, except from another's goods. Or if nothing of the Creator's was delivered to him by the Father, how does he claim for himself the man of the Creator? Or if man alone was delivered to him, man is not all things.

But the Scripture declares the delivery of all things to the Son. But even if you interpret all things as referring to the races of men, that is, to all nations, even these the Creator delivered to the Son: I will give thee the nations for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Or if he also has some things of his own, which as all things he would deliver to the Son, equally with the man of the Creator, show one single thing out of all, for credence, for example; lest I should as justly disbelieve that all things belong to him of whom I see nothing, as I justly believe that even what I do not see belongs to him whose are all the things I do see. But: No one knoweth who the Father is but the Son; and who the Son is, but the Father, and he to whomsoever the Son shall reveal him. And so Christ proclaimed an unknown God.

For from this point other heretics also are propped up, opposing the Creator as known to all—to Israel according to familiarity, and to the nations according to nature. And how does he himself testify that he was not known even to Israel: But Israel hath not known me, and the people hath not understood me? Nor to the nations: For behold, of the nations also, he says, is there none? On account of which he also reckoned them as a drop of a bucket, and left Zion as a watchtower in a vineyard: See therefore whether it be a confirmation of the prophetic voice, reproaching human ignorance toward God, which had continued until the Son. For he also subjoined that the Father is known by him to whom the Son shall reveal him: because he himself was the one who, placed by the Father as the enlightenment of the Nations, was announced—of nations to be enlightened even of Israel, certainly through a fuller knowledge of God.

Thus the arguments will not avail toward belief in another God, which can belong to the Creator; because those which will not belong to the Creator, these will be able to avail toward belief in another God. If you also look at what follows: Blessed are the eyes which see what ye see: for I say unto you, that prophets did not see what ye see; these descend from the higher sense; so that no one, as was fitting, had known God: since not even the prophets had seen what was seen under Christ. For if Christ were not mine, he would not have placed mention of the prophets in this passage either. For what wonder if they had not seen the things of an unknown God, revealed so many ages later?

But what would have been the blessedness of those who then saw what others could justly not have seen, if they had not attained the presentation of those things which they had never proclaimed—unless it was because those could have seen, who had also proclaimed the things of their God, yet had not seen them? But this blessedness will belong to others, who saw what others had only proclaimed. Finally we shall show, and have already shown, that those things were seen in Christ which had been proclaimed; yet hidden even from the prophets themselves, so that they might be hidden also from the wise and prudent of the world. In the Gospel of truth, a doctor of the law approached the Lord: What shall I do, he said, to obtain eternal life?

In the heretic's version only life is set down, without mention of eternal, so that the doctor may seem to have consulted him about that life which is promised in the law by the Creator as long-lived; and the Lord therefore to have given him an answer according to the law: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength; because he was asking about the life of the law. But the doctor of the law certainly knew in what manner he could obtain the legal life, so that he would not have asked about it, whose rules he also taught. But because the dead were already being raised by Christ, roused to hope of eternal life by examples of restored life, lest a loftier hope should require some additional observance, he therefore consulted about the obtaining of eternal life.

And so the Lord, as being himself neither another nor introducing any new commandment other than that which principally pertains to all salvation and to both lives, sets before him the very head of the law—the all-embracing love of the Lord his God. Finally, if both he consulted about long life and Christ answered concerning it, which is in the power of the Creator; not about eternal life, which is in the power of Marcion's God, how does he obtain eternal life? Not certainly in the same way as long life. For in accordance with the difference of rewards, a difference of works also must be believed. Therefore the Marcionite will not obtain eternal life by love of his God, as the lover of the Creator obtains long life. But what kind of thing is it, that he who promises eternal life should not rather be loved, if he who promises long life is to be loved? Therefore both lives will belong to the same one, since the same discipline is to be pursued for both lives.

What the Creator teaches, that also Christ needs to be loved in order to bestow—this prescription intervening here also, by which greater things ought more readily to be believed with him with whom lesser things come first; than with him for whom no lesser things have prepared any credibility regarding greater things. Let him now see whether our people added eternal. This is enough for me, that that Christ, the inviter to eternal and not to long life, when consulted about long life which he was destroying, did not rather exhort the man to eternal life, which he was introducing.

What, I ask thee, would the Christ of the Creator have done, if he who had built man up for loving the Creator was not the Creator's? I believe he would have denied that the Creator was to be loved.

When in a certain place he had prayed to that superior Father, gazing up with sufficiently shameless and reckless eyes toward the heaven of the Creator, by whom, so harsh and savage as he is, with hail and thunderbolt he might have been struck down, just as he could also have fled from him at Jerusalem; a certain one of the disciples approached him: Lord, he said, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples; evidently because he would think another God must be prayed to in another manner. Let him who had presumed this first prove that another God was set forth by Christ. For no one would have wished to know how to pray before he had learned whom he was praying to. Therefore if he had learned, prove it. If you nowhere prove it thus far, know that he asked for a form of prayer directed to the Creator, to whom also the disciples of John were praying.

But because John too had introduced some new order of prayer, therefore a disciple of his had not unreasonably presumed to ask the same also of Christ, so that they too, from the particular institution of their master, might pray not to another God, but to God in another manner. Accordingly neither would Christ have conferred knowledge of prayer upon the disciple before knowledge of God himself. Thus he too taught him prayer directed to the one whom the disciple had known all along. Finally, recognize what God the sense of the prayer savors of. To whom shall I say, Father? To him who made me not at all? From whom I draw no origin? Or to him who by making and forming me begat me? From whom shall I ask the Holy Spirit? From him by whom not even worldly spirit is supplied? Or from him by whom even angels are made spirits? Whose Spirit also in the beginning was borne over the waters?

Whose kingdom shall I pray to come, him whom I have never heard called the King of glory? Or him in whose hand even the hearts of kings are? Who will give me my daily bread; he who does not even store up millet for me, or he who also supplied from heaven the daily bread of angels to his people? Who will forgive me my offences; he who by not judging does not retain them, or he who, if he shall not have forgiven, will retain them in order to judge? Who will not allow us to be led into temptation; he whom the tempter can have no fear of, or he who from the beginning condemned beforehand the angel who is the tempter? By this order, whoever supplicates another God and not the Creator, does not pray to him but slanders him. Accordingly, from whom shall I ask, that I may receive? With whom shall I seek, that I may find? At whose door shall I knock, that it may be opened to me?

Who has it to give to one who asks, except him whose are all things, whose I myself also am who ask? But what have I lost with that God, that I should seek and find it with him? If wisdom and prudence, these the Creator hid away; with him therefore let me seek. If salvation and life, these too are with the Creator. Nothing will be sought elsewhere to be found, except where it lay hidden to appear. So neither will I knock in any other direction than whence I have received. Finally, if to receive and to find and to be admitted is the fruit of the labor and persistence of him who asked and sought and knocked, understand that these things are enjoined and promised by the Creator. For that supremely good God, coming of his own accord to supply to a man not his own, would have imposed upon him no labor, no persistence.

For he would not be supremely good if he did not of his own accord give to one who does not ask, and grant finding to one who does not seek, and open to one who does not knock. But the Creator was able to enjoin these things through Christ, so that because by sinning man had offended his God, he should labor, and by persistence in asking should receive, and by seeking should find, and by knocking should enter. So also the parable set before this makes the nocturnal asker of bread a friend, not a stranger; and the one knocking is at a friend's door, not at an unknown person's. Now a friend, even if he has given offence, is man belonging to the Creator rather than to Marcion's God. And so he knocks at the door of him to whom he had a right, whose door he knew, whom he knew to have bread, who was already lying down with the children whom he had willed to be born.

Even the fact that the knocking is late belongs to the Creator's time. Late too belongs to him whose is the age and the close of the age. But at the new God, no one would have knocked late, only just now that the Creator is dawning, who had also once shut the door upon the Nations, which was once being knocked at by the Jews; it is he who rises and gives, and even if no longer as to a friend, yet not as to a stranger, but as to one who is troublesome, he says. But a brand-new God could have endured no one as troublesome so quickly. Recognize therefore also the Father whom you call even the Creator. He it is who knows what his sons ask. For to those asking bread from heaven he gave manna, and to those desiring flesh he sent the quail, not a serpent instead of fish, nor a scorpion instead of an egg. And it will belong to him not to give evil for good, whose both are.

Otherwise, Marcion's God, not having a scorpion, could not say that he would not give what he did not have; but it is he who, having even a scorpion, does not give it. And so the Holy Spirit too will be given by him with whom the unholy also exists. When he had cast out a deaf demon (so that in this kind of cure also he might have met Isaiah's prophecy), he was said to cast out demons by Beelzebul: If I, he said, cast out demons by Beelzebul, your sons, by whom do they cast them out? What does this portend more than that he casts them out by the same one by whom their sons also do? That is, by the power of the Creator. For if you think it must be taken thus, If I cast out demons by Beelzebul, your sons, by whom? As though he were taunting those who cast out by Beelzebul, the prior sense will resist you, that Satan cannot be divided against himself.

So neither were those casting out by Beelzebul; but, as we said, by the power of the Creator: which, to make it understood, he subjoins: But if I by the finger of God expel demons, has therefore the kingdom of God drawn near upon you? For before Pharaoh those sorcerers brought against Moses called the power of the Creator the finger of God: This is the finger of God; which was to signify something small, yet most powerful. This Christ also showing, a recorder, not an obliterator, of antiquities—his own, of course—called the power of God the finger of God, to be understood as belonging to none other than him with whom it had been so named. Therefore it was also his kingdom that had drawn near, whose power was also called the finger.

Rightly therefore he applied to the parable of that strong armed man whom another stronger overcame, meaning the prince of demons, whom he had above called Beelzebul and Satan, signifying that he was overcome by the finger of God, not that the Creator was subdued by another God. Otherwise, how would his kingdom still stand in its own boundaries and laws and functions—he whom, even with the world still intact, that stronger God of Marcion might have seemed in some sense to have overcome—if even Marcionites did not die according to his law, flowing down into the earth, often taught even by a scorpion that the Creator has not been overcome. A woman from the crowd cried out, Blessed is the womb that bore him, and the breasts that nursed him. And the Lord: Nay rather, blessed are they who hear the word of God and do it. Because also previously he had in like manner set aside his mother or brothers, while preferring those who hear and obey God.

For neither here was his mother standing by him. So far was he from having denied her previously, that not even then when he hears it again; again accordingly he transferred blessedness from the womb and breasts of his mother to his disciples; from which he would not have transferred it, if he did not have it.

Elsewhere I prefer to clear away what the Marcionites find fault with in the Creator. For here it suffices if those same things are found in Christ. Behold, he himself is unequal, himself inconsistent, fickle, teaching one thing and doing another: he commands giving to every one who asks, and himself gives no sign to those who ask for one. For so great an age he hid his light from men, and denies that a lamp should be covered; but affirms it should be set upon a lampstand, to give light to all. He forbids returning evil speech, much more certainly speaking evil outright: and he heaps woes upon the Pharisees and teachers of the law. Who is so like my God as this Christ, unless he is his own? We have already established many times that he could in no way be marked out as a destroyer of the law, if he had proclaimed another God.

Therefore also then the Pharisee who had invited him to dinner was reconsidering within himself why he had not first been washed before reclining, according to the law, seeing that he carried about the God of the law. But Jesus also interpreted the law to him, saying that they cleansed the outside of the cup and dish, but their insides were full of plunder and iniquity: so as to signify that the cleanliness of vessels is to be understood as referring to men before God: because the Pharisee also had been deliberating within himself about the man, not about an unwashed cup. Therefore, he says, you wash the outside of the cup, that is the flesh, but you do not cleanse your insides, that is the soul, adding: Did not he who made the outside, that is the flesh, also make the inside, that is the soul?

By which saying he plainly showed that the cleanliness of the outer and inner man pertains to the same God, whose both are, who prefers mercy not only to the washing of a man but even to sacrifice. For he subjoins: Give what you have as alms, and all things will be clean for you. But even if another God could have commanded mercy, not however before he was known. Furthermore here too it appears that they were rebuked not concerning God, but concerning his discipline, by whom both the figurative cleanliness of vessels and the manifest works of mercies were enjoined upon them. So also he rebukes them for tithing little herbs, but passing over the calling and love of God. Whose God's calling and love, if not his whose rue and mint also they were offering from the form of the Law regarding tithes?

For the whole of this reproach was that they attended to small matters; to him, of course, to whom they were not rendering the greater things, who says: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength, who called you out of Egypt. Otherwise, neither would the time have admitted of Christ demanding so premature, nay so still unripe, a love for a new and recent God, not to say one not yet openly manifested. Also when he rebukes those who seek the chief places and the honor of salutations, he administers the sect of the Creator, who calls such princes the archons of Sodom, who also forbids trusting in rulers, nay even pronounces utterly wretched the man who has his hope in man. But if anyone seeks a chief place in order to glory in the services of others, because he forbade such services of hoping and trusting in man, the same one also rebuked those who seek chief places.

He also inveighs against the teachers of the law themselves, because they loaded others with unbearable burdens which they themselves dared not touch even with a finger: not censuring the burdens of the Law as one who detests it; for how could he be a detester, who was at that very moment rebuking those who passed over the weightier matters of the law, almsgiving and the calling and love of God—these not even being heavy, let alone tithes of rue and cleansings of dishes? Otherwise he would have judged them rather to be excused, if they could not bear unbearable things. But what burdens does he tax? Those which they themselves were piling up out of their own devising, teaching precepts, doctrines of men, for the sake of their own advantages, joining house to house, so as to take away what belonged to neighbors, crying out against the people, loving gifts, pursuing reward, plundering the judgments of the poor; so that the widow was prey to them, and the orphan was spoil.

Concerning whom the same Isaiah: Woe to those who are mighty in Jerusalem, and again: Those who demand of you lord it over you. Who more than the teachers of the law? If these also displeased Christ, it was as his own that they displeased him. For he would not have attacked at all the teachers of an alien law. But why do they also hear woe, because they built monuments to the prophets slain by their fathers, who were rather worthy of praise, who by that very work of piety testified that they did not consent to the deeds of their fathers; unless he were a zealot, such as the Marcionites charge, exacting the offences of fathers from sons unto the fourth generation? But what key did the teachers of the law have, except the interpretation of the law? To the understanding of which neither did they themselves come, not believing of course: For unless you believe, you will not understand; nor did they admit others, teaching of course precepts and doctrines of men rather.

He therefore who rebuked both those not entering themselves and those not granting access to others, is he to be held a detractor of the law, or a supporter? If a detractor, those who shut out the law ought also to have pleased him: if a supporter, then he is no longer also a rival of the law. But all these things he was bringing forward to blacken the Creator as savage, against whom those who sinned were going to have woe. And who would not rather fear to provoke the savage one, by falling away from him? So much the more therefore he was teaching that he must be propitiated, whom he was urging as one to be feared. Thus it was fitting for Christ to be the Creator's.

Rightly, therefore, did the hypocrisy of the Pharisees displease him, who love God with their lips, not with their heart: Beware, he says to his disciples, of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy—not the preaching of the Creator. The Son hates those who are contumacious toward the Father; he does not wish his own to be such toward him: not toward another, against whom hypocrisy would have been admitted, whose example would be warned against by the disciples. Thus he forbids the example of the Pharisees: he was forbidding it to be admitted against him, against whom the Pharisees admitted it.

Therefore, since he had censured their hypocrisy—which was certainly concealing the secrets of the heart, and overshadowing the hidden things of unbelief with outward observances; which, holding the key of knowledge, neither entered itself nor allowed others to enter—he accordingly adds: But nothing is covered that shall not be made manifest; and nothing hidden that shall not be known; lest anyone suppose that he is threatening the revelation and recognition of the previously unknown and hidden God, when he also subjoins that what they were muttering or discussing among themselves—namely, saying of him: This man does not cast out demons except by Beelzebub—would come out into the open and be in the mouths of men, through the proclamation of the Gospel. Then turning to his disciples: But I say, he says, to you my friends, be not afraid of those who can only kill you, and after this have no further power over you. But for them Isaiah will be prophesying: See how the just man is taken away, and no one takes notice.

But I will show you whom you should fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has power to cast into gehenna; meaning the Creator, of course. And so I say to you, fear him. And in this place it would suffice me, if he whom he commands to be feared, he forbids to be offended; and he whom he forbids to be offended, he commands to be propitiated; and he who enjoins these things belongs to him, for whose sake he provides by fearing, and not offending, and propitiating. But I have also to draw from what follows: For I say to you, Everyone who shall confess me before men, I will confess him before God. Those who confess Christ will have to be killed before men, destined to suffer nothing further after being killed by them.

These therefore will be those whom he warns above not to fear being merely killed; and so, having first stated that killing is not to be feared, he subjoins that confession is to be built upon: And everyone who shall deny me before men, shall be denied before God; by him, of course, who would have confessed him confessing. For if he will confess the confessor, he will be a denier to whom one must fear even after death. Therefore, since what is to be feared after death belongs to the Creator—namely, the punishment of gehenna—the denier is therefore also the Creator's. But if both the denier and the confessor, who after being killed will suffer nothing from man but will plainly suffer from God if he denied, and thus Christ belongs to the Creator, who showed that his deniers ought to fear the Creator's gehenna.

After the deterrence of denial, there follows also the warning of blasphemy to be feared: Whoever shall speak against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him. Now if remission and retention of sin already imply God as judge, his will be the Holy Spirit not to be blasphemed—one who will not remit the blasphemy; just as above he is not to be denied, one who will also kill into gehenna. But if Christ also turns blasphemy away from the Creator, I do not know how he could have come as his adversary. Or if through these things also he darkens his severity—not remitting blasphemy, and killing even into gehenna—it remains that the Spirit of that other God too may be blasphemed with impunity, and Christ denied, and it makes no difference whether one worships him or despises him; and just as there is no punishment for contempt, so also no reward is to be hoped for from worship.

When they are brought before the authorities, he forbids them to think about their answer when questioned: For the Holy Spirit, he says, will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say. If such a lesson belongs to the Creator, the precept will also belong to him whose example preceded it. Balaam the prophet in Numbers, summoned by king Balak to curse Israel, with whom he was entering into battle, was at the same time filled with the Spirit; not the curse for which he had come, but the blessing which the Spirit suggested to him in that very hour, he pronounced, having first declared to the royal messengers, and soon also to the king himself, that he would pronounce what God had put in his mouth. These are the new teachings of the new Christ, which the servants of the Creator initiated long ago. Behold, a plainly different example of Moses and Christ. Moses, when brothers were quarreling, intervenes of his own accord, rebukes the wrongdoer: Why do you strike your neighbor?

And he is rejected by him: Who appointed you a master or judge over us? But Christ, when asked by a certain man to settle the matter between him and his brother concerning the division of an inheritance, refused his assistance, and that in so worthy a cause. Already, then, my Moses is better than your Christ, seeking the peace of brothers, opposing injury. But Christ, as of the best and non-judging God: Who, he says, appointed me a judge over you? He could find no other word of excuse, lest he use that by which a wicked man and impious brother had shaken off the asserter of probity and piety. In the end he proved the word to be bad by using it, and the deed bad by declining to compose peace between brothers. Or did he perhaps take it ill that Moses had been driven away by this saying? And therefore, in a parallel case of brothers in dispute, did he wish to confound them by recalling the same saying? Plainly so.

For he himself had then been in Moses, who had heard such things—namely, the spirit of the Creator. I think that elsewhere we have sufficiently shown that the glory of riches is condemned by our God, who himself brings down the mighty from their throne and raises the poor from the dunghill. From him therefore will also come the parable of the rich man flattering himself about the produce of his fields, to whom God says: Fool, this night they will demand your soul back: and the things you have prepared, whose shall they be? So likewise the king who boasted among the Persians of his treasuries and storehouses of delights was ill spoken of through Isaiah.

Who would not want us to take care of the soul regarding food, and of the body regarding clothing, except he who provided these things for man beforehand, and thenceforth supplying them, rightly forbids care for them, as something rivaling his own generosity; who also fashioned the very substance of the soul as more excellent than food, and shaped the very matter of the body as more excellent than a garment; whose ravens neither sow nor reap nor store in storehouses, and yet are fed by him; whose lilies and grass neither weave nor spin, and yet are clothed by him; whose Solomon, most glorious, is yet not more adorned than any little flower? Otherwise nothing is so abrupt as that one should provide, and another should command that one live securely regarding his provision, and that too as his detractor.

In the end, if, as a detractor of the Creator, he does not want thought to be given to such trifles, about which neither ravens nor lilies labor, being of course subject to him by their own lowliness, this will become clear shortly. Meanwhile, why does he reproach them for little faith—that is, faith of what kind? Is it that faith which they could not yet exhibit perfectly to God, being only just then learning of him with a veil still upon them, or that which by this very title they owed to the Creator, so as to believe that he would supply these things freely to the human race, and that they should not be anxious about them? For also when he adds, for these things the nations of the world seek, not believing, of course, in God the maker and provider of all things—those whom he did not want to be the equals of the Gentiles—he was reproaching them for little faith toward the same God, against whom he was noting the Gentiles as unbelieving.

Furthermore, when he also adds, but the Father knows that you have need of these things; first I shall ask which Father Christ wishes to be understood. If he points to their own Creator, he also confirms him as good, who knows what his children need. But if another God: how does he know that food and clothing are necessary for man, none of which he has provided? For if he had known, he would have provided. Otherwise, if he knows what is necessary for man, and yet has not provided it, he has not provided it either through malice or through weakness. But having declared these things necessary for man, he has of course confirmed them as good. For nothing evil is necessary. And he will no longer be a disparager of the works and bounties of the Creator, so that I may dispose of what I deferred above. Furthermore, if another both foresaw and provides what he knows to be necessary for man, how does he himself promise these things? Is he generous with another's goods?

For seek, he says, the kingdom of God, and these things shall be added to you. By him, of course. But if by him, what sort of person is he who will provide another's goods? If by the Creator, whose they are, who is he that promises another's goods? If these things will accede to the kingdom, to be restored in the second degree; the second degree belongs to him whose the first also is; food and clothing belong to him whose the kingdom also is. Thus the whole promise belongs to the Creator—the substance of the parables, the equalization of the similitudes—if they look toward no other than him to whom they have been made equal in all things. We are servants, for we have God as Lord. We ought to gird our loins, that is, to be free from the encumbrances of a trailing and entangled life; likewise, to have burning lamps, that is, minds kindled by faith and shining forth in works of truth; and so to await the Lord, that is, Christ.

Returning from where? If from a wedding: he belongs to the Creator, whose are the weddings. If not the Creator's: not even Marcion himself would have been invited to the wedding, seeing his God as a detester of weddings. The parable therefore fails in the person of the Lord, if there were no one to whom weddings are fitting. In the following parable also, he greatly errs who assigns that thief—whose hour, if the householder had known it, he would not have allowed his house to be broken into—to the person of the Creator. For how can the Lord of the whole man be seen as a thief? No one steals from or breaks into his own property, but rather he who descends into another's and alienates man from his Lord.

Furthermore, since he shows us the devil as the thief, whose hour even from the beginning, if man had known it, he would never have been broken into by him; therefore he commands that we be ready, because at an hour we do not expect, the Son of man will come; not as if he himself were the thief, but the judge—namely, of those who have not prepared themselves nor guarded against the thief. Therefore if he himself is the Son of man, I hold a judge, and in the judge I defend the Creator. But if he points to Christ of the Creator under the name of Son of man in this place, so as to portray him as the thief, whose coming we do not know when it will be, you have written above that no one is a thief of his own property: with that also preserved, that insofar as he presses the Creator to be feared, insofar as he is acting on his behalf, he belongs to the Creator.

And so, to Peter asking whether he had spoken the parable for those men or for all; he sets forth for them and for all who would be set over the Churches the likeness of stewards, of whom whoever shall have treated his fellow-servants well during the Lord's absence, when he returns will be set over all good things; but whoever shall have acted otherwise, when the Lord returns on a day he did not expect, at an hour he did not know—that Son of man, Christ of the Creator, not a thief but a judge—he will be separated, and his portion will be placed with the unbelievers. Accordingly therefore, either here too he sets a judging Lord against them and instructs them; or if the best God, he now also affirms him as judge, even if the heretic is unwilling.

For they attempt to temper this meaning, when it is vindicated to his God: as if it were a matter of tranquility and mildness, merely to separate and place his portion with the unbelievers, as though it were not called, as restored to its proper condition, as though even this itself does not happen by way of judgment. Foolishness! What will be the end of those separated? Is it not the loss of salvation? Since they will be separated from those who will obtain salvation. What therefore is the state of the unbelievers? Is it not damnation? Or if those separated and unbelieving will suffer nothing, equally on the other side those retained and faithful will obtain nothing. But if those retained and faithful will obtain salvation, those separated and unbelieving must of necessity lose it on the other side. This will be the judgment, and he who intends it belongs to the Creator.

Whom else should I understand as him who strikes servants with few or many stripes, and exacts from them according to what was entrusted to them, than the God of retribution? Whom is it fitting for me to obey, if not the rewarder?

Your Christ proclaims: I came to cast fire upon the earth; that most good one, lord of no gehenna; who a little before had restrained his disciples from calling down fire upon a most inhospitable village. When did he burn Sodom and Gomorrah with a fiery storm? When was it sung: Fire shall go before him, and shall burn up his enemies? When also did he threaten through Hosea: I will send fire into the cities of Judah? Or through Isaiah: A fire is kindled in my anger? Let him not lie. If he is not the one who also sent forth his voice from the burning bush, let him see what fire he contends should be understood. Even if it is a figure, by the very fact that he borrows arguments for his meaning from my element, he belongs to me, who makes use of my things. The likeness of fire will belong to him whose is also the reality.

He himself will better interpret the nature of this fire, adding: Do you think that I came to send peace on earth? No, I tell you, but separation. Indeed it is written sword; but Marcion emends it, as though separation too does not require a sword. Therefore he also intends a fire of overthrow, who denied peace. Such as the battle is, such also is the conflagration. Such as the sword is, such also is the flame, neither one befitting the Lord. Finally he says: The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; and the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; and the daughter-in-law against the mother-in-law, and the mother-in-law against the daughter-in-law. This battle between parents, if the trumpet of the prophet sounded it in those very words, I fear that Micah proclaimed it to the Christ of Marcion.

And therefore he was pronouncing them hypocrites, who indeed could discern the face of heaven and earth, but could not discern that time; namely, in which, fulfilling all things that had been foretold concerning them, and teaching nothing otherwise, he ought to have been recognized. Otherwise, who could know the times of one whose credentials he had none to prove? He rightly reproaches them also for not judging of themselves what is right. Long ago he commanded this through Zechariah: Judge with righteous and peaceable judgment. Through Jeremiah: Execute judgment and justice. Through Isaiah: Judge for the fatherless, and justify the widow; imputing also to the vineyard of Sorek that it had not produced judgment, but a cry. He therefore who had taught them to do this by precept, demanded that they do it also of their own accord. He who had sown the precept, he also pressed for its abundance. But how absurd that he should command to judge justly, who was destroying God as a righteous judge!

For they also argue, under the guise of disparagement, about the judge who sends to prison and does not bring one out thence unless even the last farthing is paid, as referring to the Creator. To which I am obliged to respond in kind. For as often as the severity of the Creator is set against him, so often is Christ his, who by fear compels obedience.

Therefore, acting in accordance with the condition of the Law, he confirmed the Law, he did not dissolve it, which commands that no work be done except what is done for every soul, how much more for a human soul? I acknowledge that I everywhere require the consistency of the parables. The kingdom of God, he says, is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his garden. Who is to be understood in the person of the man? Surely Christ: because, though he be Marcion's, he was called the Son of Man, who received from the Father the seed of the kingdom, namely the word of the Gospel, and sowed it in his garden, that is, in the world, now understood as in man. But since he said in his own garden, and neither the world nor man belongs to him but to the Creator; therefore he who sowed in his own is shown to be the Creator.

Or if, to escape this snare, they turn the person of the man away from Christ, taking it as the man who receives the seed of the kingdom and sows it in the garden of his heart; not even this subject matter will suit any other than the Creator. For how is it fitting that the kingdom of the most gentle God should be signified by a seed, which is also followed by the heat of judgment with tearful severity? Concerning the following parable I am indeed afraid, lest it perhaps portend the kingdom of another God. For he compared it to leaven, not to unleavened bread, which is more familiar to the Creator. This conjecture also suits those who beg for arguments. And so I too will drive out vanity with vanity, saying that fermentation also befits the kingdom of the Creator, because after it the oven or furnace of gehenna follows. How many times more does he show himself as judge, and in the judge the Creator!

How many times does he cast out, and condemn by casting out! As here also: When the master of the house shall rise up, he says. Whither, if not whither Isaiah said: When he shall rise up to crush the earth? And shall shut the door; surely to exclude the wicked, to whom when they knock he will answer: I know not whence you are. And again to those who enumerate that they ate and drank before him, and that he taught in their streets, he will add: Depart from me, all you workers of iniquity: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Where? Outside, of course, where they will be excluded, the door having been shut by him; therefore there will be punishment from him by whom exclusion into punishment is made, when they shall see the righteous entering into the kingdom of God, but themselves being kept outside. By whom? If by the Creator, who then will be inside receiving the righteous into the kingdom? The good God.

What business then has the Creator there, to keep outside in punishment those whom his adversary excluded, to be received by himself, surely rather to the greater vexation of the adversary? But also that one who is to exclude the wicked, let him know that the Creator will keep them in punishment, or he must not know it. Therefore, either they will be kept against his will, and he is lesser than the one who keeps them, yielding to him against his will; or if he wills it to be so, he himself judged that it should be so done, and he will not be better than the Creator, himself the author of the Creator's infamy. If these things are consistent on no rational basis, that one should be believed to punish and another to liberate, the judgment as well as the kingdom will belong to one; and since both belong to one, who also judges, it belongs to the Creator.

What sort of persons does he command to be invited to lunch or to dinner? Such as he had shown through Isaiah: Break your bread to the hungry, and bring the homeless and those without shelter into your house; namely those who cannot repay the kindness in kind. If Christ forbids this to be sought after, promising it in the resurrection, it is the pattern of the Creator, to whom those who love gifts and seek recompense are displeasing. Weigh also to which side the parable of the host more properly applies. A certain man made a supper and invited many. Surely the preparation of the supper figures the fullness of eternal life. I say first, that strangers and those of no legal kinship are not usually invited to a supper; certainly those of the household and intimates are more readily invited.

Therefore it is the Creator's to have invited, to whom those who were invited belonged, both through Adam as men, and through the Fathers as Jews, not his to whom they belonged neither by nature nor by privilege. Next, if he who prepared the supper sends to the guests; so also he who had already called them before through the Fathers, but needed to remind them through the Prophets: not one who had sent no one to give warning, nor who had done nothing previously toward calling, but who had himself descended suddenly: only making himself known, now inviting; only inviting, now compelling to the feast; making the same hour both the hour of dining and of inviting to dinner. They make excuses to the one inviting. If from another God, rightly so, because invited suddenly. If not rightly, then not suddenly either. If not suddenly invited; therefore from the Creator, by whom long ago.

Those whose calling they had declined, first saying to Aaron: Make us gods to go before us; and thenceforth: Hearing with the ear and not hearing, namely the calling of God; who most aptly for this parable through Jeremiah: Hearken, he says, to my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people; and you shall walk in all the ways that I shall command you. Behold the invitation of God. And they did not hearken, he says, and did not incline their ear. Behold the refusal of the people. But they went after the things which their evil heart desired. I have bought a field, and I have purchased oxen, and I have taken a wife. And he further adds: And I sent to you all my servants the Prophets. Here will be the Holy Spirit as the reminder of the guests, day and before dawn. And my people did not hearken, and did not give ear, and hardened their neck.

When this was reported to the master of the house, he was moved—rightly that he was also moved; for Marcion denies that his God is moved, so this one too is mine—he commands that a gathering be made from the streets and lanes of the city. Let us see whether in the same sense as again through Jeremiah: Have I been a wilderness to the house of Israel? Or a land left uncultivated? That is, Have I not those whom I may gather, or from where I may gather? Because my people said, We will not come to you. And so he sent to call others, still from the same city.

Then, the place being still abundant, he commanded also to gather from the roads and hedges, that is, us now from the foreign nations; by that emulation, namely, of which in Deuteronomy: I will turn my face from them, and will show what shall befall them in the last days, that is, that others would possess their place: because it is a perverse generation, children in whom there is no faith. They provoked me to jealousy with that which is not God, and stirred me to anger with their idols; and I will provoke them to jealousy with those who are not a nation, with a foolish nation I will stir them to anger; in us, namely, of whose hope the Jews are jealous, of which the Lord says they shall not taste: Zion being left like a watchtower in a vineyard and a hut in a cucumber field, after it had refused even the last invitation in Christ.

What from this sequence, reviewed according to the arrangements and predictions of the Creator, can fit him who has neither the sequence nor the arrangement for the correspondence of the parable, who did everything all at once? Or what will be his first calling, and what the reminder in a second act? Others must first make excuses, and then others must have come together. But now he comes to invite both parties at the same time, from the city, from the hedges, against the mirror of the parable. Nor can he now judge as disdainful those whom he never previously invited, whom he is approaching for the first time. Or if he judges that they will in the future despise the calling; then he also portends for the future the gathering in their place from the nations. Plainly for this purpose he is to come a second time to preach to the nations. And if he is to come, I think not as one still about to call guests, but as one already about to seat them.

Meanwhile, you who interpret the calling to this supper as a heavenly banquet of spiritual fullness and joy, remember also that the earthly promises of wine and oil and grain, and of the city itself, are equally figured in spiritual terms by the Creator.

Who seeks the lost sheep and the lost coin? Is it not he who lost them? But who lost them? Is it not he who had them? But who had them? Is it not he whose they were? If therefore man is the property of none other than the Creator; he had him whose he was. He lost him who had him. He sought him who lost him. He found him who sought him. He rejoiced who found him. Thus the argument of both parables is void with respect to him whose is neither the sheep nor the coin, that is, man. For he did not lose, because he did not have; nor did he seek, because he did not lose; nor did he find, because he did not seek; nor did he rejoice, because he did not find. And so to rejoice over the repentance of a sinner, that is, over the recovery of the lost one, belongs to him who long ago declared that he preferred the repentance of a sinner to his death.

That no one can serve two masters, because one must needs be offended while the other is defended, he himself declares, setting forth God and mammon. Then what he wishes to be understood by mammon, if you have no interpreter, you can learn from himself. For admonishing us to secure for ourselves from worldly men the support of friendships, after the example of that servant who, removed from his stewardship, relieves his master's debtors by reducing their bonds for his own benefit. And I, he says, say to you, make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; of money, that is, of which that servant also spoke. For we all know that money is the author and lord of all the unrighteousness of this age. Seeing the covetousness of the Pharisees enslaved to it, he appended this saying: Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

The Pharisees, being lovers of money, then mocked, because they had understood that mammon was said of money, lest anyone should suppose that the Creator is to be understood by mammon, and that Christ had called them back from the Creator's servitude. What then? Learn now rather from this, that one God is shown by Christ. For he named two masters, God and mammon, the Creator and money. Then, ye cannot serve God: assuredly him whom they seemed to serve; and mammon, to whom they were more devoted. But if he himself were acting as another, he would have shown not two masters but three. For the Creator also is Lord, because he is God. And assuredly more a lord than mammon; and more to be regarded, as being more a lord. Why then is it, that he who had called mammon a lord and had joined him with God, should be silent about their very own lord, that is, the Creator?

Or by being silent about him, did he concede that he was to be served, if he denied only that he himself and mammon could be served? Thus, when he sets down one God, about to name also the Creator, if he were another, he named the Creator, whom he did not set down as lord alongside another God. And that also will shine forth, how it was said: If ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will trust you with that which is true? In unrighteous money, that is, not in the Creator, whom even Marcion makes just. And if ye have not been found faithful in that which is another's, who will give you that which is mine? For that which is unrighteous ought to be alien to the servants of God. But how was the Creator alien to the Pharisees, he who was the proper God of the Jewish nation? If therefore these things do not apply to the Creator but to mammon, who will trust you with what is more true?

And who will give you what is mine? He could not, as though another, have spoken thus of another God's grace. For he would seem to have spoken thus only if, by marking them as unfaithful toward the Creator rather than toward mammon, he had through mention of the Creator made distinctions of another God, one who would not entrust his own truth to those unfaithful to the Creator. How then can he seem to be another, if he is not set forth for the purpose of being separated from him of whom the matter treats? But if also the Pharisees, justifying themselves before men, placed their hope of reward in man, he rebuked them in that sense in which the prophet Jeremiah also spoke: Cursed is the man who putteth his hope in man. If he also adds: But God knoweth your hearts; he was calling to mind the power of that God who declared himself a lamp, searching the reins and hearts.

If he touches on pride: That which is exalted among men is an abomination to God, he sets Isaiah before their eyes: For the day of the Lord of hosts is upon every proud and lofty one, upon every one that is lifted up and high; and they shall be brought low. I can now gather why for so long an age the God of Marcion was in hiding. He was waiting, I suppose, until he had learned all these things from the Creator. He learned, therefore, up to the times of John, and so from that point proceeded to announce the kingdom of God, saying: The Law and the Prophets were until John, from which time the kingdom of God is announced.

As though we too did not acknowledge John as a certain boundary set between the old and the new, at which Judaism should cease and Christianity begin: yet not so that by some other power the setting aside of the Law and the Prophets and the inauguration of the Gospel, in which is the kingdom of God, Christ himself, was brought about.

For even if we have proved that the old things were foretold by the Creator as passing away and new things as succeeding; if also John is shown to be the forerunner and preparer of the ways of the Lord, who was to bring in the Gospel and promulgate the kingdom of God; and from this very fact that John came, he himself will be the Christ who was to follow John as his forerunner; and if the old things ceased and the new began with John as the boundary, it will be no wonder that it is by the Creator's dispensation, so that it may be proved all the more from elsewhere, than from the setting of the Law and the Prophets at John and the rising thence of the kingdom of God. Let heaven and earth pass away sooner, as also the Law and the Prophets, than one tittle of the words of the Lord. For the word, says Isaiah, of our God endureth for ever.

For since in Isaiah Christ already at that time, namely the Word and Spirit of the Creator, had foretold John, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, to prepare the way of the Lord, coming for this purpose that the order of the Law and the Prophets should thenceforth cease, through fulfilment, not through destruction, and that the kingdom of God should be announced by Christ; therefore he subjoined that the elements would pass away more easily than his words; confirming also this, that what he had said concerning John had not passed away.

"But Christ forbids divorce, saying: Whoever dismisses his wife and takes another commits adultery; and whoever takes one dismissed by her husband is likewise an adulterer. So that he may forbid divorce in this way too, he makes the marriage of a repudiated woman unlawful. But Moses permits repudiation in Deuteronomy: If a man shall take a wife, and dwell with her, and it come to pass that she find no favour in his sight, because some unseemly matter has been found in her, he shall write a bill of divorcement, and give it into her hand, and send her out of his house. Do you see the difference between the Law and the Gospel, between Moses and Christ?" Plainly.

For you have not received that passage of the same Gospel of the same truth and the same Christ, in which, while forbidding divorce, he resolves the very question about it: Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, commanded the bill of divorcement to be given; but from the beginning it was not so, because he who had made male and female had said, They two shall be in one flesh; and what God therefore has joined, shall man put asunder? For by this answer he both protected Moses' ordinance as his own, and directed the Creator's institution as Christ himself belonging to him. But inasmuch as you must be refuted from those things which you have received, I will meet you thus, as if from my Christ. Does not he himself, while forbidding divorce, yet bearing as father him who joined male and female, rather excuse than destroy Moses' ordinance?

But behold, let that Christ of yours be one who teaches contrary to Moses and the Creator, so that if I do not show the contrary, he shall be mine. For I say that he made the prohibition of divorce conditionally, namely if one dismisses a wife in order to take another: Whoever, he says, dismisses his wife and takes another has committed adultery, and whoever takes one dismissed by her husband is likewise an adulterer; on the same ground, of course, on which it is not lawful to dismiss her in order to take another: for he who takes one unlawfully dismissed, treating her as if not dismissed, is an adulterer. For the marriage which has not been rightly dissolved remains. To marry while a marriage remains is adultery. Thus if he conditionally forbade dismissing a wife, he did not forbid it absolutely; and what he did not forbid absolutely, he permitted in other cases, where the cause for which he forbade it is absent.

He also does not teach contrary to Moses, whose precept he preserves in some respects—I do not yet say confirms. Or if you altogether deny that divorce is permitted by Christ, how is it that you dissolve marriages, neither joining male and female yourself, nor admitting elsewhere those already joined to the sacrament of baptism and the Eucharist, unless they have conspired together against the fruit of marriage, as against the Creator himself? Certainly what becomes of the husband with you, if his wife has committed adultery? Will he keep her? But you know that not even your apostle allows the members of Christ to be joined to a harlot. Therefore Christ too is an asserter of the justice of divorce. From this point Moses is confirmed by him, forbidding repudiation on the same ground as Christ also, if an unseemly matter has been found in the woman.

For also in the Gospel of Matthew: Whoever, he says, dismisses his wife except for the cause of adultery, makes her to commit adultery; and so he too is counted an adulterer who takes one dismissed by her husband. Otherwise, except for the cause of adultery, not even the Creator separates what he himself has joined, Moses elsewhere likewise ordaining that he who had made a marriage by force could not dismiss his wife at any time. But if a marriage contracted under compulsion of violence shall stand, how much more one that is voluntary by mutual consent? As also by the authority of prophecy: Do not dismiss the wife of your youth. You have therefore Christ everywhere voluntarily following in the footsteps of the Creator, both in permitting divorce and in forbidding it. You have him also as a watchful guardian of marriages too, which he wills neither to be separated—by forbidding divorce—nor to be held with stain—by then permitting divorce. Blush, you who do not join those whom your Christ also has joined.

Blush also at separating without that merit for which your Christ too willed separation. I must now also show from what source the Lord derived this ruling, and to what end he directed it. For thus it will more fully be established that he did not look to destroying Moses by the proposition of repudiation suddenly interposed; because it was not suddenly interposed, having its root in the same mention of John. For John, rebuking Herod because he had taken his deceased brother's wife contrary to the law—she having a daughter by him—(the law permitting this in no other case, nay even commanding it, than if the brother had died without children, so that seed might be raised up to him by his own brother and from his own rib)—had been cast into prison by that same Herod and afterwards killed by him.

Therefore, mention of John having been made, the Lord, following up the outcome of his end, hurled figures of unlawful marriages and adultery at Herod; pronouncing him also an adulterer who takes one dismissed by her husband; so as the more to burden the impiety of Herod, who had taken one dismissed by her husband not less by death than by repudiation; and this while her brother had a daughter by her, and unlawful even on that account; out of lust, not out of the impulse of the law; and for this reason he had also killed the prophet, the asserter of the law. It will profit me to have discussed this, even for the argument that follows, of the rich man grieving in hell and the poor man resting in Abraham's bosom.

For that too, as far as the surface of Scripture goes, is suddenly proposed, but as to the intention of its meaning, it likewise coheres with the mention of John ill-treated and the reproach of Herod ill-deserving, depicting the end of each—the torments of Herod and the refreshment of John—so that Herod might now hear: They have Moses and the Prophets there; let them hear them. But Marcion forces it in another direction, namely determining both rewards of the Creator—whether of torment or of refreshment in hell—as appointed for those who have obeyed the Law and the Prophets, while he defines the heavenly bosom and haven of his Christ and his God for those who have obeyed Christ. We shall reply, with this very scripture confounding his eyes, which distinguishes Abraham's bosom from hell for the poor man. For hell is one thing, as I think, and Abraham's bosom is another. For he says that a great deep intervenes between these regions and prevents passage from either side.

But neither would the rich man have lifted up his eyes, and that from afar, except upward, and from the far distance of height, across that immense distance of height and depth. From this it is apparent to every wise person who has ever heard of the Elysian fields, that there is some local determination which is called Abraham's bosom, for receiving the souls of his children, even from among the nations—those, that is, to be reckoned to Abraham's account as father of many nations, and on the basis of the same faith by which Abraham also believed God, under no yoke of the law, nor in the sign of circumcision.

That region therefore—I mean Abraham's bosom—though not heavenly, yet higher than hell, is to provide refreshment in the meantime for the souls of the righteous, until the consummation of all things discharges the resurrection of all with the fullness of reward; then to appear in the heavenly promise which Marcion claims for his own, as though it had not been proclaimed by the Creator. Toward which Christ builds his ascent into heaven, according to Amos; for his own, of course, where also is the eternal place, of which Isaiah speaks: Who shall announce to you the eternal place, except of course Christ walking in righteousness, speaking the straight way, hating injustice and iniquity?

But if an eternal place is promised, and an ascent into heaven is built by the Creator, who also promises that the seed of Abraham shall be as the stars of heaven—on account of the heavenly promise, of course—that promise being secure, why should it not be possible to understand Abraham's bosom as some temporary receptacle of faithful souls, in which the image of the future is already sketched, and a certain bright prospect of both judgments is discerned? Also admonishing you heretics, while you are in life, that Moses and the prophets proclaim one God the Creator, and proclaim one Christ as his, and that both judgments—of punishment and of eternal salvation—are placed with the one God, who kills and makes alive. Nay, he says, the voice of our God from heaven commanded not Moses and the prophets to be heard, but Christ: Hear him. Rightly so. For then the apostles had already heard Moses and the prophets sufficiently—those who had followed Christ by believing Moses and the prophets.

For Peter could not have received the ability to say: You are the Christ, before he had heard and believed Moses and the prophets, by whom alone Christ was still being announced. This faith of theirs had therefore deserved to be confirmed also by a heavenly voice, commanding him to be heard whom they had therefore already recognized—him who proclaims peace, who proclaims good things, who announces the eternal place, who builds for them his ascent into heaven. But in hell it was said of those: They have Moses and the prophets there; let them hear them; who did not believe, or who did not at all believe in this way, that after death the punishments of the pride of riches and the glory of pleasures, announced by Moses and the prophets, existed; but decreed by that God who casts down rulers from their thrones and raises up the needy from dunghills. Thus, since the diversity of pronouncement on both sides befits the Creator, no distance of divinities is to be established, but only of the subject matters themselves.

Turning there to his disciples, he pronounces woe upon the author of scandals: that it would have been better for him if he had not been born, or if he had been cast into the deep with a millstone tied about his neck, than that he should have caused one of those little ones—that is, his disciples—to stumble. Consider what punishment he threatens against that man. For no other will avenge the scandal done to his disciples. Recognize therefore both the judge, and one pronouncing with that same feeling of concern for his own which the Creator also showed of old: He that toucheth you toucheth as it were the apple of mine eye.

The same sense belongs to the same one: he commands that a sinning brother be rebuked; and whoever does not do this has himself sinned, either from hatred, wishing the brother to persist in his fault, or from respect of persons, sparing him; having Leviticus: Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart, rebuking thy neighbour with rebuke—and certainly thy brother also—and thou shalt not take upon thyself sin on his account. Nor is it any wonder that he so teaches, who also forbids thee to despise thy brother's straying cattle if thou find them on the road, so that thou shouldest not bring them back to thy brother—much less leave the man himself to himself. But he also commands that thou forgive a brother who sins against thee, even seven times. That is plainly too little.

For with the Creator it is more, who sets no limit at all, declaring without end: Be not mindful of thy brother's malice; and he does not command that thou grant forgiveness only to one who asks for it, but even to one who does not ask. For he does not want thee to pardon the offence, but to forget it.

The law of lepers—how great its significance with respect to the very kinds of that disease, and the inspection of the high priest—it will be ours to know; it will be Marcion's to set the harshness of the law in opposition, so as to affirm here also that Christ is its rival, anticipating the ordinances of the law even in the healing of the ten lepers, whom he merely commanded to go and show themselves to the priests, and cleansed them on the way, already without touch and without word, by silent power and will alone; as though, once Christ had been proclaimed as the healer of infirmities and faults and proved by his effects, it were necessary to go back and dispute the manner of his cures; or as though the Creator were being challenged in Christ to conform to the law: if he distinguished anything otherwise than the law, he himself fulfilled it; since the Lord assuredly works in one way through himself, in another way through his prophets as his servants—the greatest demonstrations of virtue and power; which, as being clearer and stronger because they are his own, it is right should differ from those done by deputies.

But things of this kind have already been said elsewhere, in the preceding book. Now, although he had previously stated that there were many lepers in Israel in the days of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian: the number will certainly not serve to establish a difference of gods, to the destruction of the Creator who healed one, and to the exaltation of him who cleansed ten. For who will doubt that more could have been healed by one who had healed a single person, than by another who healed ten but had never before healed even one? But with this very pronouncement he strikes at the unbelief or pride of Israel; because, though there were many lepers there and prophets were not lacking, even after a manifest demonstration, no one had run to God working in the prophets.

Therefore, since he himself was the authentic high priest of God the Father, he inspected them according to the hidden meaning of the law, which signified that Christ is the true discerner and remover of human defilements. But he also commanded what was manifest in the law: Go, show yourselves to the priests. Why, if he was going to cleanse them beforehand? Or was it as a mocker of the law, so that by healing them on the way he might show, in the very presence of the priests, that the law was nothing? And let him see to it, if Christ shall seem so perverse to anyone. Nay, worthier interpretations are to be made, and more just to faith. He therefore healed them because, having been commanded according to the law to go to the priests, they had obeyed: for it is not credible that observers of the law should have obtained healing from a destroyer of the law. But why did he give no such command to the former leper?

Because neither did Elisha to Naaman the Syrian; and yet for that reason he was not the less of the Creator. I have answered sufficiently; but one who has believed understands something deeper as well. Learn therefore the reasons also. The matter was taking place in the regions of Samaria, from which also one of the lepers meanwhile came. Now Samaria had revolted from Israel, having that schism of the ten tribes which Jeroboam, through the prophet Ahijah, had torn away and settled at Samaria. But the Samaritans were also always otherwise pleased with themselves on account of the mountains and wells of the fathers; as in the Gospel of John that Samaritan woman in conversation with the Lord at the well: Art thou greater than—and the rest. And again: Our fathers worshipped in this mountain, and ye say that in Jerusalem men ought to worship.

And so he who had also through Amos said, Woe to them that trust in the mountain of Samaria; now deigning to restore even her, deliberately commands them to show themselves to the priests—that is, to those who were nowhere but where the temple also was; subjecting the Samaritan to the Jew, because from the Jews comes salvation for the Israelite and the Samaritan. For the whole promise to the tribe of Judah was Christ; so that they might know that in Jerusalem were both the priests and the temple, and the mother of religion, and the fountain—not a well—of salvation. And therefore, when he saw that they had acknowledged the law to be fulfilled at Jerusalem, he healed them, now to be justified by faith apart from the order of the law.

Hence also, marvelling at that one who was loosed from the ten, the Samaritan mindful of divine grace, he does not command him to offer a gift according to the Law; because he had already offered enough, rendering glory to God—this being also what the Lord wished to interpret as the law. And yet to what God did the Samaritan render thanks, seeing that not even an Israelite had yet learned of any other God? To what other than to him to whom all those healed of old by Christ gave thanks? Therefore he hears, Thy faith hath made thee whole; because he had understood that the true offering to God Almighty—namely, the giving of thanks—ought to be made at the true temple and before its true high priest, Christ.

But neither can the Pharisees be thought to have consulted the Lord about the kingdom of another God, asking when it would come, since no God other than the one proclaimed by Christ had yet appeared, nor could he have answered about the kingdom of any other than the one about whom he was consulted. The kingdom of God, he says, cometh not with observation; neither shall they say, Lo here, or lo there; for behold, the kingdom of God is within you. Who will not interpret thus: it is within you, that is, in your hand, in your power, if you hear, if you do the commandment of God? But if the kingdom of God consists in the commandment, set over against it therefore, according to our antitheses, Moses, and the meaning is one. The commandment, he says, is not too high, nor far from thee. It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say: Who shall go up to heaven, and bring it down to us, and we will hear it and do it?

Nor is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say: Who shall cross over and take it for us, and we will hear it and do it? The word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, and in thy hands to do it. This will be: Not here, nor there; for behold, the kingdom of God is within you. And lest heretical boldness argue that the Lord answered them not about his own kingdom but about the Creator's kingdom, about which he was consulted, the following words stand in the way. For by saying that the Son of man must first suffer many things and be rejected, before his coming in which the kingdom will also be revealed in substance, he shows that the kingdom about which he had answered is also his own, which was awaiting his sufferings and rejections.

Moreover, in having to be rejected and afterwards to be acknowledged and received and exalted, he drew even the very word rejected from the place where both revelations of him were sung by David in the figure of a stone; the first a matter of refusal, the second of honour: The stone, he says, which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner. This was done by the Lord. For it would be vain if we believed that God foretold the insult or glory of some person merely, so as not to be pointing to him whom he would also portend in the figure of a stone, and of a rock, and of a mountain. But if he speaks of his own coming, why does God—gentle and mild—compare it to the dark and dreadful days of Noah and Lot? Why does he admonish them to remember the wife of Lot, who did not with impunity despise the commandment of the Creator, if he does not come with judgment to avenge his own commandments?

Even if he avenges as that one does, even if he judges me, he ought not to have formed the one he destroys through that one's examples, lest that one seem to be forming me. But if here also he speaks not of his own coming but of the Jewish Christ's, let us wait even now lest he predict anything about his own, believing him meanwhile to be the one whom he proclaims in every place.

For when commanding perseverance and urgency in prayer, he sets forth the parable of a judge compelled to hear a widow, by the urgency and perseverance of her entreaties. He shows therefore that God the judge is to be prayed to, not himself, if he himself is not the judge. But he added that God would execute vengeance for his elect. If therefore he himself will be the judge, he is also the avenger. He proved therefore the Creator to be the better God, whom he shows as the avenger of his elect who cry to him day and night. And yet, when he introduces the temple of the Creator and describes two worshippers of different mind—the Pharisee in pride, the Publican in humility—and that therefore the one went down rejected, the other justified; by teaching in what manner prayer ought to be offered, since here too he established that prayer should be made, they would have received from him that discipline of prayer, whether as rejecting pride or as justifying humility.

Of another God I find neither temple, nor worshippers, nor judgment in Christ, save those of the Creator. He commands that he be worshipped in humility, as the lifter up of the humble; not in pride, as the destroyer of the proud. What other does he show me to be worshipped? With what discipline? With what hope? None, I think. For even the prayer which he taught we have proved to be fitting for the Creator. It is another matter if he also does not wish to be worshipped as the best and spontaneously good God. But who is good, save one, he says, God? Not as though he had shown one of two gods to be the best; but that there is one God alone who is best, who is so uniquely best in that he alone is God. And assuredly the best, who rains upon the just and the unjust, and makes his sun rise upon the good and the evil, sustaining and nourishing and helping even the Marcionites.

Then when a certain man asked him: Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? He inquired whether he knew the precepts of the Creator—that is, whether he did them—in order to testify that eternal life is acquired by the precepts of the Creator. And when that man had affirmed that he had observed all the more important ones from his youth: One thing, he said, is lacking to you. Sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me. Come now, Marcion, and all his fellow-pitiers and fellow-haters among the heretics, what will you dare to say? Did Christ rescind the former precepts—not to kill, not to commit adultery, not to steal, not to bear false witness, to love father and mother? Or did he both preserve those and add what was lacking?

Although even this precept of liberality toward the needy is spread everywhere throughout the Law and the Prophets, so that that most glorious observer of the precepts might be shown up as one who would hold money far dearer. Safe therefore is this also in the Gospel: I came not to dissolve the Law and the Prophets, but rather to fulfil them. At the same time he freed the rest from doubt as well, by making manifest that the name of God and of the best, and eternal life, and treasure in heaven, and himself, belong to one; whose precepts, by supplementing them, he both preserved and increased: to be recognized in this place also according to Micah, who says: If man has declared to you what is good, or what the Lord requires of you, but to do judgment, to love mercy, and to be ready to follow the Lord your God?

For Christ too as man announces what is good; the knowledge of the law: The precepts, he says, you know; to do judgment: Sell, he says, what you have; to love mercy: And give, he says, to the needy; to be ready to go with God: And come, he says, follow me. So distinctly was the Jewish nation from the beginning marked out by tribes and peoples and families and households, that no one could easily be unknown as to his lineage, whether from the recent Augustan censuses perhaps still then in force. But Jesus of Marcion would not have been doubted to have been born, who appeared to be a man; assuredly since, as one not born, he could have had no public record of his lineage, but would have had to be reckoned as one of those who were in some way unknown.

When therefore a blind man heard him passing by, why did he cry out: Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me, unless because he was not rashly reckoned to be the son of David, that is, of the family of David, through his mother and brothers, who had at some time been announced to him from common knowledge? But those who went before rebuked the blind man to be silent. Rightly so, since indeed he was crying out—not because he was lying about the son of David. Or show that those who rebuked him knew that Jesus was not the son of David, so that they may be believed to have imposed silence on the blind man for that reason. But even if you were to show this, it would more readily be presumed that they were ignorant, than that the Lord could have endured a false proclamation about himself.

But the Lord was patient; yet not a confirmer of error, nay even a revealer of the Creator; so that he would not first have dispelled that blindness of the man, lest he should no longer think Jesus to be the son of David. But indeed, lest you should defame his patience, and attach to him some reason for dissembling, and deny that he was the son of David, he most manifestly confirmed the blind man's proclamation, both by the very reward of the healing and by the testimony of faith. Your faith, he said, has saved you. What do you suppose the blind man believed? That Jesus had come down from another God to the overthrow of the Creator? To the destruction of the Law and the Prophets? That he was not the one destined from the root of Jesse and from the fruit of the loins of David, the rewarder also of the blind?

But I think that at that time the blind were not yet of such a kind as Marcion, so that this should have been the faith of that blind man, by which he believed in the voice, Jesus, son of David. He who both acknowledged this of himself and wished to be acknowledged by all, rewarded the faith of the man—even if better sighted, even if possessed of the true light—with outward vision also, so that we too might learn both the rule and at the same time the reward of faith. He who wishes to see Jesus, let him believe David's son through the virgin's census. He who does not so believe will not hear from him: Your faith has saved you. And so he will remain blind, rushing into the antithesis, which itself also rushes headlong. For so a blind man is wont to lead a blind man.

"For if at some time the blind who resisted had offended David in the recovery of Zion, so that he was not admitted" (as a figure of the people likewise blind, who would one day not receive Christ the son of David), "therefore Christ from the opposite side came to the aid of the blind man, so as to show from this that he was not the son of David, and from the contrariety of disposition being good to the blind, whom that one had commanded to be slain. And why did he say that he had bestowed this upon faith, and indeed upon a perverse faith?" But this too belongs to the son of David, to blunt the antithesis from his own case.

For those also who had offended David were blind: but now a man of the same flesh had presented himself as a suppliant to the son of David, and therefore the son of David, appeased in some measure by his satisfaction, restored his sight together with the testimony of the faith by which he had believed that the son of David was to be entreated by him. And yet I think it was the boldness of men, not their infirmity, that had offended David.

There follows also the salvation of the house of Zacchaeus. On what merit? Had even he believed that Christ had come from Marcion? But still in the ears of all was that voice of the blind man, Have mercy on me, Jesus, son of David; and all the people were rendering praises to God—not Marcion's, but David's. Indeed Zacchaeus, even if perhaps a foreigner, yet breathed in by some knowledge of the Scriptures from his commerce with Jews; and moreover, though you know it not, he had fulfilled the precepts of Isaiah.

Break your bread, he says, for the hungry; and those who have no roof, bring into your house; this he was at that very moment doing, receiving the Lord into his house and feeding him. And if you see the naked, cover him; this he was at that very moment promising, offering half his substance for all works of mercy; loosing the bonds of more burdensome contracts, and releasing those in distress to relief, and dissolving every unjust bond, by saying: And if I have extorted anything from anyone by false accusation, I restore it fourfold. And so the Lord said: Today salvation has come to this house. He bore testimony that the things which the prophet of the Creator had commanded are saving.

But when he says: For the Son of man came to save that which was lost, I no longer contend that he came to save that which had been lost, belonging to him whose it was, and to whom that which he came to save had been lost; but I direct the argument to another level of inquiry. That man is in question there is no doubt. Since man consists of two substances, body and soul, it must be asked from which kind of substance he appears to have been lost. If from the body, then the body had been lost, the soul had not. What was lost, the Son of man saves: therefore the flesh also has salvation. If the soul also had been lost, the perdition of the soul is destined for salvation: the flesh which had not been lost is safe. If the whole man had been lost from both substances, the whole man must needs be saved; and the opinion of the heretics who deny the salvation of the flesh is crushed.

And now Christ of the Creator is confirmed as well, who according to the Creator promised the salvation of the whole man. The parable of the servants also, who are judged according to the reckoning of the money entrusted to them by their master, shows God as judge, even in respect of severity, not only honoring but also taking away from him who appears to have had something. Or if here too he has depicted the Creator as harsh, taking what he did not deposit and reaping what he did not sow: here too that one instructs me, whose money he teaches me to put out at interest.

Christ knew whence the baptism of John was, and why did he ask as though ignorant. He knew that the Pharisees would not answer him, and why did he ask to no purpose. Was it so that he might judge them out of their own mouth, or out of their heart? Refer these things also, then, to the excuse of the Creator, and to the comparison of Christ; and consider now what would have followed, if the Pharisees had made any reply to the question. Suppose they had replied that the baptism of John was human, they would immediately have been crushed with stones. Some Marcion would have arisen against Marcion, who would have said: O most good God! O God different from the examples of the Creator! Knowing that men were about to rush headlong, he himself set them on the precipice. For so also is the Creator dealt with, in the matter of the law of the tree. But the baptism of John was from heaven. And why, says Christ, did ye not believe him?

Therefore he who had wished John to be believed, being about to rebuke them for not having believed, belonged to him whose sacrament John administered. Certainly, since they were unwilling to declare what they thought, he likewise opposes them in kind. And I also do not tell you by what authority I do these things; he renders evil for evil. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's. What things will be God's? Those things which are like Caesar's coin, namely his image and likeness. He commands man, therefore, to be rendered back to the Creator, in whose image and likeness and name and substance he has been fashioned. Let the god of Marcion seek his own coin. Christ commands the coin of man to be rendered back to his own Caesar, not to another's; unless indeed it is necessary for one who has no coin of his own.

It is a just and worthy rule that in every question the sense of the answer ought to pertain to the purpose of the question. Otherwise, to answer one thing to one who asks another is the act of a madman. So much the more let that be far from Christ, which does not even befit a man. The Sadducees, deniers of the resurrection, having a question about it, had set before the Lord from the law the case of a woman who had married seven brothers in succession as they died one after another according to the legal precept, and whose husband she should be reckoned in the resurrection. This was the substance of the question, this the matter of the consultation. To this Christ was bound to have replied. He feared no one, so as to appear either to have evaded questions, or to have hinted, by occasion of them, at what he did not openly teach elsewhere. He replied therefore: The sons of this age marry. You see how pertinently to the case.

Because the question was about the age to come, in which he was about to determine that no one marries, he first established that here indeed there is marriage, where there is also death; but that those whom God has deemed worthy of the possession of that age and of the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage; because they shall no longer die, since they are like the angels, having become sons of God and of the resurrection. Since therefore the sense of the answer is not to be directed to anything other than the purpose of the question; if by this sense of the answer he resolves the purpose of the question, the Lord's answer means nothing other than that by which the question is resolved. You have both the times of permitted and of denied marriages, not from his own proper teaching, but from the question about the resurrection.

You have also the confirmation of the resurrection itself, and the whole of what the Sadducees were inquiring about, asking not about another God, nor seeking about the proper right of marriages. But if you make Christ answer concerning things about which he was not consulted, you deny that he was able to answer concerning those about which he was questioned, namely that he was caught by the cleverness of the Sadducees. Now abundantly, and after the rule already laid down, I will re-examine the arguments that follow. For having seized upon the text of Scripture, they ran through it in reading thus: But those whom God has deemed worthy, of that age—they attach of that age to God, so as to make another God of that age; whereas it ought to be read thus: But those whom God has deemed worthy—so that, a distinction being made here after God, of that age belongs to what follows, that is, those whom God has deemed worthy of the possession and resurrection of that age.

For the question was not about God, but about the state of that age, whose wife she would be after the resurrection in that age. So also they subvert the answer about marriages themselves: As the sons of this age marry and are given in marriage—this, they say, was spoken of the men of the Creator, who permits marriages; but those whom the God of that age, namely another, has deemed worthy of the resurrection, even now do not marry here, because they are not sons of this age: when, being consulted about the marriages of that age, not of this, he had denied those about which he was consulted. And so those who had received the very force and expression and pronunciation and distinction, understood nothing other than what pertained to the substance of the consultation. And accordingly the scribes: Master, they say, thou hast spoken well. For he had confirmed the resurrection, by setting forth its form against the opinion of the Sadducees.

Finally, he did not reject the testimony of those who had thus presumed he had answered. But if the scribes supposed Christ to be the son of David, while David himself calls him Lord; what has this to do with Christ? David was not rebuking the error of the scribes, but was procuring honour for Christ, confirming him to be Christ the Lord rather than the son of David; which would not be fitting for the destroyer of the Creator. But on our side, how fitting the interpretation!

For he who had formerly been invoked by that blind man as the son of David, which he then kept silent about, having no scribes present at the time, now of his own accord and deliberately brought it forward before them: so that he might show himself, whom the blind man according to the teaching of the scribes had proclaimed as only the son of David, to be also his Lord; rewarding indeed the faith of the blind man, by which he had believed him to be the son of David; but challenging the tradition of the scribes, by which they did not know him also as Lord. Whatever tended to the glory of Christ the Creator's, thus none other would defend it than the Christ of the Creator.

It was established long ago concerning the propriety of names, that those names belong to him who first both announced his Christ to men and renamed him Jesus. It will therefore also be established concerning his impudence, who says that many will come in his name; which would not be his name, if Christ and Jesus do not belong to the Creator, to whom the propriety of those names pertains; moreover, he also forbids those to be received whose equal he himself is, as one who likewise comes in another's name, if it was not his own—so as to forestall by the falsehood of the name those disciples who, through the propriety of the name, possessed its truth. Those will come at last, saying: I am the Christ. You will receive them, since you received one like them. For he too came in his own name. What now of the fact that the Lord Christ and Jesus of the Creator will himself also come? Will you reject him?

And how unjust, how iniquitous, and how unworthy of the best God, that you should not receive him coming in his own name, when you received another in his name! Let us also see what signs he assigns to those times. Wars, I suppose, and kingdom against kingdom, and nation against nation, and pestilence, and famines, and earthquakes, and terrors, and portents from heaven: all of which are fitting for a stern and terrible God. When he adds that all these things must come to pass, what does he show himself to be—a destroyer or a confirmer of the Creator? He confirms that the Creator's dispensations must be fulfilled, which, as the best God, he would rather have abolished than established, so sad and so terrible are they, if they had not been his own. But before these things he foretells persecutions and sufferings coming upon them, for martyrdom certainly and for salvation.

Receive what is foretold in Zechariah: The Lord, he says, almighty will protect them; and they shall consume them, and shall stone them with sling-stones, and shall drink their blood as wine, and shall fill the bowls as the altar; and the Lord shall save them in that day, as the sheep of his people, because holy stones are rolled. And lest you suppose these things are foretold concerning the sufferings which awaited them from the foreigners under the name of so many wars, look at the specific details. No one, in a prediction of wars to be fought with lawful arms, enumerates stoning, which is more familiar to popular assemblies and an unarmed mob. No one measures such rivers of blood in war by the capacity of bowls, or equates it to the bloodying of a single altar. No one calls sheep those who fall in battle armed, themselves also contending with the same ferocity; but those who, surrendering themselves in their own proper character and patience, are slaughtered rather than avenging themselves.

Finally, he says, because holy stones are rolled—not because soldiers fight. For they are also stones and foundations, upon which we are built: built up, according to Paul, upon the foundation of the Apostles, who as holy stones set against the stumbling of all were rolled about. And here likewise he himself forbids them to think beforehand what they ought to answer before tribunals—he who also suggested to Balaam what he had not thought, nay, the contrary of what he had thought, and to Moses, who pleaded slowness of tongue, promised a mouth; and through Isaiah demonstrated that very wisdom which none could resist: This one shall say: I am God's, and shall cry out in the name of Jacob, and another shall be enrolled in the name of Israel. For what is wiser and more beyond the capacity of books than the simple and open confession, prevailing with God in the name of a martyr?—which is the interpretation of Israel.

Nor is it surprising if he restrained forethought, who himself also received from the Father the supply of timely utterance: The Lord gives me the tongue of instruction, when I ought to bring forth speech. Unless Marcion introduces a Christ not subject to the Father. That persecutions also were foretold from those nearest to them, and blasphemy by name out of hatred, I need not show again. But through endurance, he says, you shall save your own souls; concerning which the Psalm says: The endurance of the righteous shall not perish in the end. Because also elsewhere: Precious is the death of the righteous; from endurance, without doubt, because also Zechariah: And the crown shall be for those who have endured. But do not dare to argue that the apostles, as heralds of another God, were harassed by the Jews; remember that the prophets also suffered the same things from the Jews, yet were not apostles of another God than the Creator.

But having then pointed out the time of the destruction, when Jerusalem had begun to be surrounded by armies, he narrates the signs of the final end: portents of sun and moon and stars, and upon earth distress of nations bewildered as at the sound of the surging sea, in expectation of the evils threatening the world. That even the powers of the heavens are to be shaken, receive from Joel: And I will give portents in heaven and on earth, blood and fire, and vapour of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and glorious day of the Lord comes. You have also Habakkuk: The earth shall be broken asunder by rivers; the peoples shall see thee and be in travail; thou shalt scatter the waters in thy march.

The deep uttered its voice; the height of its fear was lifted up; the sun and moon stood in their order, they shall go in the light of thy brightness, into the splendour; thy lightning is thy shield, in thy communication thou shalt diminish the earth, and in thine indignation thou shalt cast down the nations. The pronouncements of the Lord and of the prophets agree, I think, concerning the shakings of the world and the earth, of the elements and the nations. After these things, what does the Lord say? And then they shall see the Son of man coming from heaven with great power. But when these things come to pass, raise yourselves up, and lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near. In the time of the kingdom, that is, which the parable itself had subjoined. So also when you see all these things come to pass, know that the kingdom of God is at hand.

This will be the great and glorious day of the Lord, of the Son of man coming from heaven according to Daniel: Behold, with the clouds of heaven as it were a Son of man coming. And royal power was given to him, which in the parable he had gone out to receive, having left money to his servants to be put out at interest. And all the nations, which the Father had promised him in the Psalm: Ask of me, and I will give thee the nations for thine inheritance. And all glory serving him and his power eternal, which shall not be taken away, and his kingdom which shall not be corrupted: because neither shall they die in it, nor marry, but shall be as angels. Concerning the same coming of the Son of man and its fruit, in Habakkuk: Thou wentest forth for the salvation of thy people, to save thine anointed ones; who are to raise themselves up and lift their heads in the time of the kingdom, being redeemed.

Therefore, since these things also, which belong to the promises, agree in like manner as those which belong to the shakings, from the consonance of the prophetic and dominical pronouncements, you will be able to establish no distinction here, so as to refer the shakings to the Creator, as the God of cruelty—which the best God ought not even to permit, let alone await—and to assign the promises to the best God, which the Creator, being ignorant of him, would not have prophesied. Or if he prophesied his own things, not differing from the promises of Christ, the best God will be on an equal footing in freedom; nor will more appear to be promised by your Christ than by my Son of man.

The very course of the evangelical Scripture, from the question of the disciples to the parable of the fig tree, you will find so bound by the thread of meaning to the Son of man on this side and on that, that it fastens upon him both the sad and the glad things, both the shakings and the promises, and you cannot separate one part from him.

For since the coming of one Son of man is established between two outcomes—of the shakings and of the promises—it is necessary that both the calamities of the nations and the desires of the saints belong to one Son of man: because he is so placed in the middle, as one common to both outcomes, to close one by his coming, that is, the calamities of the nations, and to begin the other, that is, the desires of the saints; so that whether you grant the coming of my Christ as Son of man, by which you assign to him the evils that precede his coming, you are compelled also to ascribe to him the good things that arise from his coming; or whether you prefer your own, by which you ascribe to him the good things that arise from his coming, you are compelled also to assign to him the evils that precede his coming.

For the evils cling to the coming of the Son of man by preceding it, just as the good things do by following it. Seek therefore which of the two Christs you establish in the person of the one Son of man, to whom both dispensations are referred. Either you have made the Creator also the best God, or you have made your God harsh by nature. Consider finally the example of the parable itself: Look at the fig tree, and all the trees; when they have put forth fruit, men know that summer is at hand. So also you, when you see these things come to pass, know that the kingdom of God is near. For if the fruitings of the little trees furnish a sign to the summer season by preceding it, so likewise the conflicts of the world give advance notice of the kingdom by preceding it.

But every sign belongs to him whose thing it is, whose sign it is. And upon every thing a sign is placed by him whose thing it is. Thus if the conflicts are signs of the kingdom, as the fruitings are of summer; then the kingdom also belongs to the Creator, to whom the conflicts are assigned, which are signs of the kingdom. The best God had declared beforehand that these things, so terrible, so dreadful, must come to pass—certainly foretold by the Prophets and the Law; so far was he from destroying the Law and the Prophets, since he confirms that what they had foretold must be fulfilled. He further insists: Heaven and earth shall not pass away until all things are accomplished. What things are these? If they are things of the Creator, the elements will rightly endure the order of their Lord to be carried out. If they are things of the best God, I do not know whether heaven and earth will endure the fulfilment of what a rival has decreed.

If the Creator will suffer this, he is not a jealous God. Let heaven and earth pass away then—for so their Lord has determined—while his Word remains for ever: for so also Isaiah foretold. The disciples also are admonished lest at any time their hearts be weighed down with surfeiting and drunkenness and worldly cares; and lest that day come upon them suddenly as a snare; upon those, that is, who have forgotten God through fullness and thought of the world; this will be the admonition of Moses. So he who formerly introduced this admonition will deliver from the snare of that day. There were also other places near Jerusalem for teaching, and there were places outside Jerusalem to withdraw to; but indeed through the day he taught in the temple, as one who had foretold through Hosea: In my temple they found me, and there it was disputed with them. But at night he withdrew to the mount of Olives: for so Zechariah shows: And his feet shall stand upon the mount of Olives.

There were also hours fitting for an audience: they had to assemble at dawn, because through Isaiah, when he had said: The Lord gives me the tongue of instruction; he added: He appointed for me in the morning an ear to hear.

If this is to dissolve the prophecies, what will it be to fulfil them?

Likewise he knows also when it was necessary for him to suffer, whose passion the law prefigures. For out of so many feasts of the Jews he chose the day of the Passover. For concerning this sacrament Moses had declared: It is the Passover of the Lord. Therefore he also showed his own desire: With desire I have desired to eat the Passover with you before I suffer. O destroyer of the law, who had desired even to keep the Passover! Was it indeed the Jewish mutton that delighted him? Or was he not himself the one who, being about to be led as a sheep to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearer so not about to open his mouth, was longing to fulfil the figure of his own saving blood? He could also have been betrayed by any stranger whatsoever; lest I should say that even in this the Psalm was fulfilled: He who ate bread with me shall lift up his heel against me.

He could also have been betrayed without a reward: for how great was the work of a betrayer concerning him who, offending the people openly, could no more have been betrayed than attacked? But this would have suited another Christ, not one who was fulfilling the prophecies. For it is written: Because they sold the righteous man. For both the amount and the outcome of the price, afterwards recalled when Judas repented, and given for the purchase of the potter's field, as is contained in the Gospel of Matthew, Jeremiah foretold: And they took thirty pieces of silver, the price of him who was valued or honoured, and gave them for the potter's field. Having therefore declared that he had desired with desire to eat the Passover as his own for it would be unworthy for God to desire something alien, he took the bread, and having distributed it to the disciples, made it his own body, by saying, This is my body, that is, a figure of my body.

But it would not have been a figure, unless there were a body of truth. Otherwise, an empty thing, which is a phantom, could not take on a figure. Or if for this reason he fashioned bread as his body, because he lacked the truth of a body, then he ought to have delivered bread for us. It would have served Marcion's vanity, that bread should be crucified. But why does he call bread his body, and not rather a melon, which Marcion had in place of a heart? Not understanding that this was an ancient figure of the body of Christ, who said through Jeremiah: They devised a device against me, saying, Come, let us cast wood into his bread; that is, the cross into his body. And so the illuminator of ancient things sufficiently declared what he then wished to signify by bread, calling his body bread. So also in the mention of the cup, establishing a testament sealed with his blood, he confirmed the substance of the body.

For blood can belong to no body except flesh. For even if some quality of body that is not fleshly be urged against us, it certainly will not have blood unless it be fleshly. And so the proof of the body stands by the testimony of flesh; the proof of flesh, by the testimony of blood. But that you may also recognise the ancient figure of blood in wine, Isaiah will be at hand: Who, he says, is this that comes from Edom? The redness of his garments from Bozrah. Thus glorious in his wine-stained robe with strength? Why are your garments red? And your raiment as from the press of a full winepress that has been trodden?

For the prophetic Spirit, as if already beholding the Lord coming to his passion, clothed of course in flesh, so that he suffered in it, designates the blood-stained garment of the flesh in the redness of the raiment, by the force of the passion trodden and pressed out, as from the press of a winepress; because thence men, as it were blood-stained, descend from the redness of wine. Far more plainly does Genesis, in the blessing of Judah, from whose tribe the fleshly lineage of Christ was to proceed, even then delineate Christ in Judah. He shall wash, it says, his robe in wine, and his garment in the blood of the grape; showing by robe and garment the flesh, and by wine the blood. So also now he consecrated his blood in wine, who then figured wine in blood.

Woe, he says, to him through whom the Son of man is betrayed. Therefore it is already established that Woe is to be understood as the cry of imprecation and threatening, and to be attributed to one who is angry and offended: unless Judas was going to bear so great a crime with impunity. Or if with impunity, the Woe is empty. If not with impunity, then certainly to be punished by him against whom he committed the crime of betrayal.

Furthermore, if he knowingly allowed the man whom he himself had admitted to his company to rush into so great a crime, do not now bring up again concerning the Creator in regard to Adam what is turned back against your God as well, either that he was ignorant who did not by providence prevent the one about to sin, or that he was unable to prevent it if he was ignorant; or that he was unwilling, if he both knew and was able; and so is to be judged malicious, who allowed his own man to perish through sin. I advise you therefore rather to recognise the Creator in this also, than to make the good God equal to him, against your own opinion. For also Peter, having spoken something presumptuously, being destined rather for denial, shows you the jealous God. He had also to be betrayed with a kiss—a prophetic Christ of course, as the son of him who was loved by the people with their lips.

When brought before the assembly, he is asked whether he was the Christ. About which Christ would the Jews have inquired, if not about their own? Why then did he not even then reveal another to them? So that he might suffer, you say. That is, so that the good God might plunge those still ignorant into crime. And yet even if he had spoken, he would have suffered. For if I tell you, he says, you will not believe. But not believing, they would have persisted in his destruction. And why would he not have suffered all the more, if he had revealed himself as of another God, and thereby as the adversary of the Creator?

Therefore he refrained from showing himself to be another even then, lest he should suffer: but because they were eager to extort a confession from his own mouth, and yet would not believe even when he confessed, who ought to have recognised him from his works fulfilling the Scriptures; thus it was fitting for him to conceal himself, to whom recognition was owed of his own accord. And yet still stretching out his hand to them: Henceforth, he says, the Son of man shall be seated at the right hand of the power of God. For he was suggesting himself from the prophecy of Daniel as the Son of man, and from the psalm of David, as seated at the right hand of God. And so from this saying and the comparison with Scripture, enlightened as to whom he wished to be understood: Therefore, they say, are you the Son of God? Of which God, if not of him whom alone they knew?

Of which God, if not of him whom they recalled as having said in the psalm to his son: Sit at my right hand? But he answered: You say that I am. And yet he confirmed that he was what they had said, since they ask again. But how will you prove that they spoke interrogatively, and not that they themselves pronounced it confirmatively: Therefore you are the Son of God? So that because he had obliquely shown through the Scriptures that he was to be understood as the Son of God, they understood thus, Therefore you are the Son of God, which you are unwilling to say openly; and equally so he also answered confirmatively, You say it; and so indeed was his pronouncement, that they persisted in what the pronouncement implied.

For when he had been brought before Pilate, they began to burden him with the charge that he called himself a king; Christ without doubt the Son of God, who was to sit at the right hand of God. Otherwise they would have pressed him with another title, uncertain whether he had called himself the Son of God, unless You say it had been so pronounced, that he was what they said. To Pilate also asking, Are you the Christ? Likewise, You say it; lest he should seem to have answered more fully out of fear of authority. The Lord therefore was set in judgment. And he set his people in judgment. The Lord himself comes into judgment with the elders and princes of the people, according to Isaiah. And thence he fulfilled every scripture of his passion. The nations were in tumult there, and the peoples meditated vain things.

The kings of the earth stood by, and the princes were gathered together as one against the Lord, and against his Christ: the nations, the Romans who had been with Pilate; the peoples, the tribes of Israel; the kings, in Herod; the princes, in the chief priests. For also when sent to Herod as a gift by Pilate, he gave credence to the words of Hosea; for he had prophesied concerning Christ: And they shall lead him bound as a gift to the king. Herod was delighted at last at seeing Jesus, and heard no word from him. For as a sheep before its shearer, so he opened not his mouth; because the Lord had given him the tongue of instruction, that he might know how it was fitting for him to bring forth speech. That tongue, namely, which in the Psalm he was then proving to be cleaved to his throat, by not speaking. And Barabbas indeed, most guilty, is granted life as a good man; but Christ, most just, is demanded for death as a murderer.

But also two criminals are crucified alongside him, so that he might be reckoned among the wicked. His clothing divided among the soldiers, partly assigned by lot, Marcion took away, looking away from the prophecy of the Psalm, They divided my garments among themselves, and upon my vesture they cast lots. Take away therefore the cross itself as well. Yet the same psalm is not silent concerning him: They pierced my hands and my feet. The whole outcome is read in it: Dogs have surrounded me, the assembly of evildoers has encompassed me. All who looked upon me mocked me with their nose. They spoke with their lips, and moved their heads. He trusted in God, let him deliver him. Now therefore have the testimony of the garments as the spoil of your false one—the whole psalm is the garments of Christ. But behold, the elements also are shaken. For the Lord of them was suffering.

Otherwise, if an adversary had been harmed, the sky would have blazed with lights, the sun would rather have blazed with rays, the day would rather have stood still, gladly beholding Christ of Marcion hanging on the gibbet. These arguments also would be fitting for me, even if they had not been foretold. The sky, says Isaiah, I will clothe with darkness. This will be the day, of which also Amos: And it shall come to pass in that day, says the Lord, the sun shall go down at noon (you have also the indication of the sixth hour), and it shall grow dark over the earth. The veil of the temple also was rent, by the eruption of an angel, forsaking the daughter of Zion as a watchtower in a vineyard, and as a hut in a cucumber field. O how greatly did he persist in rendering Christ himself even in the thirtieth psalm! He cries out to the Father, so that even dying with his last voice he might fulfil the prophets. Having said this he expired. Who?

Did the spirit expire itself, or did the flesh expire the spirit? But the spirit could not expire itself. One thing is that which expires, another that which is expired. If the spirit is expired, it must be expired by another. But if it had been spirit alone, it would rather be said to have departed than to have expired. Who therefore expires the spirit, if not the flesh? Which both breathes when it has it; and so expires it when it loses it. Finally, if there was no flesh, but a phantom of flesh, and the spirit was a phantom, and the spirit expired itself, and by expiring departed, without doubt the phantom departed when the spirit, which was a phantom, departed, and the phantom appeared nowhere together with the spirit. Did nothing therefore remain on the wood? Did nothing hang even after the expiration? Was nothing demanded from Pilate? Was nothing taken down from the gibbet? Was nothing wrapped in a linen cloth? Was nothing laid in a new tomb? And yet not nothing. What therefore was that?

If a phantom, then Christ was still present there. If Christ had departed, then he had taken the phantom away. It remains for heretical shamelessness to say that a phantom of a phantom remained there. But thus also Joseph knew it to have been a body, which he handled with all reverence, that Joseph who had not consented in the crime with the Jews: Blessed is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, and has not stood in the way of sinners, and has not sat in the seat of pestilence; it was fitting that even the burier of the Lord should be prophesied, and should even then deservedly be blessed.

So neither does the prophecy pass over the service of those women who gathered at the sepulchre before dawn with a preparation of spices. For concerning this, through Hosea: They shall seek, he says, my face; before the light they shall watch for me, saying, Come, and let us return to the Lord, for he himself has snatched away, and will heal us; he has struck, and will have mercy on us; he will heal us after two days, on the third day we shall rise again. For who would not believe that these words were turned over in the minds of those women, amid the grief of their present desolation by which they seemed to themselves to have been struck by the Lord, and the hope of his resurrection by which they rightly supposed they would be restored? Moreover, since the body was not found, his burial had been taken away from the midst, according to Isaiah. But also two angels appeared there.

He was accustomed to use so many attendants on either side, the Word of God standing firm in two witnesses. Isaiah also foresaw the women returning from the sepulchre, and from that vision of the angels: Women, he says, coming from a vision, come to announce, namely, the resurrection of the Lord. It is well, moreover, that the unbelief of the disciples persisted, so that our defence might hold firm to the very end—that Christ Jesus had shown himself to the disciples as none other than the one who had been prophesied. For when two of them were on a journey and the Lord had joined himself to them, not appearing as who he was, and even feigning ignorance of what had happened: But we had hoped, they say, that he was the redeemer of Israel—their own Christ, that is, the Creator's. So much so that he had not shown himself to them as another.

Otherwise, they would not have supposed him to be the Creator's; and when he was supposed to be the Creator's, he would not have endured this supposition about himself, if he were not the one who was supposed; or else he himself will be the author of error and a transgressor of truth, contrary to the title of the most good God. But neither after the resurrection did he show himself to them as other than the one whom they had said they had supposed him to be. He did indeed rebuke them: O foolish ones and slow of heart, to believe all that has been spoken to you! That these things were spoken not by another God but by the same God he proves. For the angels said the same things to the women: Remember what he spoke to you in Galilee, saying that the Son of Man must be delivered up, and crucified, and rise again on the third day. And why must it be, unless because it was so written by God the Creator?

Therefore he rebuked them, as those who had been scandalized by the passion alone, and as those who were doubtful about the faith of the resurrection announced to them by the women, on account of which they had not believed that he was the one they had supposed. And so, wishing to be believed as what they had supposed, when he confirmed himself to be the one they had supposed—namely, the Creator's Christ, the redeemer of Israel—he confirmed what they had supposed. But concerning the reality of the body, what can be clearer? When they were hesitating lest he be a phantom, or rather believing him to be a phantom: Why are you troubled, he says, and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; for a spirit has not bones, as you see me having.

And Marcion was unwilling to erase certain things contrary to himself from his Gospel—by design, I believe—so that from those things which he could have erased and did not, those things which he did erase might either be denied to have been erased, or be said to have been erased with good reason. Nor does he spare anything except what he subverts not by deleting but by interpreting otherwise. He wishes, therefore, that the saying, A spirit has not bones, as you see me having, should be referred to the spirit, as you see me having—that is, not having bones, just as a spirit also has not. And what is the logic of this tortuous interpretation? When he could have stated simply: For a spirit has not bones, as you see me not having. But why does he offer his hands and feet to their inspection—members which consist of bones—if he had no bones? Why does he add: And know that it, namely the one whom they had previously known as bodily?

Or if he was a phantom in every respect, why did he rebuke those who believed him to be a phantom? Indeed, when they still did not believe, he therefore desired food, in order to show himself as having teeth as well. I have fulfilled, I think, my undertaking. I have shown Jesus Christ, by the teachings, sentences, emotions, thoughts, powers, sufferings, and even the resurrection of the Prophets, to be none other than the Creator's. Since indeed, sending the apostles to preach to all nations, he commanded, fulfilling the Psalm, that their sound should go out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the earth. I pity you, Marcion; you have laboured in vain. For Christ Jesus in your Gospel is mine.

Nothing exists without an origin, except God alone: and as origin precedes all things in their state of being, so must it necessarily precede in the examination of them, so that their state may be established. For you cannot discern what a thing is like unless you are certain that it exists, when you have come to know whence it is. And therefore, having arrived at this subject in the course of my work, I also require from Marcion the origin of the apostle Paul—as some new disciple, and a hearer of no other, who in the meantime will believe nothing, since I believe nothing should be rashly believed. Now, whatever is believed without knowledge of its origin is rashly believed; and I most justly reduce this inquiry to a matter of concern, since he is affirmed to me to be an apostle whom I do not find in the register of apostles in the Gospel.

Then, hearing afterwards that he was called by the Lord already resting in the heavens, I think it a kind of improvidence, if Christ did not know beforehand that he would be necessary to him; but when the office of apostleship had already been arranged and sent forth to its work, he thought him to be added by chance encounter, not by foresight; by necessity, so to speak, not by will. Wherefore, Pontic shipmaster, if you have never received stolen or illicit cargo into your vessels; if you have never diverted or adulterated any freight at all—being all the more cautious and trustworthy in the things of God—I would like you to tell us by what token you received the apostle Paul; who stamped him with the mark of his title; who transmitted him to you; who imposed him upon you, so that you may confidently set him forth; lest he be proved to belong to the one who has produced all the credentials of his apostleship.

He himself, it is said, professed himself an apostle, and indeed not from men, nor through man, but through Jesus Christ. Plainly anyone can profess himself. But his profession is completed by the authority of another: one person writes, another subscribes, another seals, another records in the acts. No one is both his own witness and his own professing party. Besides this, you have surely read that many will come saying: I am Christ. If there is one who falsely claims to be Christ, how much more one who proclaims himself an apostle of Christ? Still I remain in the person of a disciple and inquirer, so that from this point I may both blunt your faith—since you have no means of proving whence it comes—and suffuse you with shame, since you defend what you have no means of defending. Let there be a Christ, let there be an Apostle, as belonging to another—so long as they are not proved except from the documents of the Creator. For Genesis long ago promised me Paul as well.

For among those figures and prophetic blessings upon his sons, when Jacob had directed his words to Benjamin: Benjamin, he says, is a ravening wolf; in the morning he shall still devour, and in the evening he shall give food. For he foresaw that Paul would arise from the tribe of Benjamin—a ravening wolf, devouring in the morning, that is, in his early age laying waste the flocks of the Lord as a persecutor of the Churches; then in the evening giving food, that is, in his declining years feeding the sheep of Christ as a teacher of the nations. For also the initial harshness of Saul's persecution of David, and then his repentance and satisfaction, receiving good things in return for evil, portended nothing other than Paul in Saul, according to tribe; and Jesus in David, according to the lineage of the virgin. If these sacraments of figures displease you, certainly the Acts of the Apostles have handed down to me this account of Paul, which cannot be denied even by you.

From thence I show the apostle to be a persecutor, not from men, nor through man; from thence I am also led to believe in him myself; from thence I drive you from his defence; and I do not fear one who says: Do you then deny the apostle Paul? I do not blaspheme the one I defend. I deny, in order to compel you to prove. I deny, in order to prove that he is mine. Or if you look to our faith, receive the things that establish it. If you appeal to your own, set forth the things that build it up. Either prove what you believe; or if you do not prove it, how do you believe it? Or what sort of person are you, believing against the one by whom alone what you believe is proved to exist?

Take now the apostle also from me, just as you take Christ; the apostle as much mine as Christ also is. With the same lines we shall fight here too; we shall challenge at the very threshold of the prescription—namely, that an apostle who is denied to belong to the Creator, or rather who is brought forward against the Creator, ought to teach nothing, know nothing, will nothing according to the Creator, and above all ought to proclaim another God with as great consistency as he broke away from the law of the Creator. For it is not plausible that, turning men away from Judaism, he would not at the same time show into faith in which God he was turning them: because no one could pass away from the Creator without knowing to whom he must pass.

For if Christ had already revealed another God, the testimony of the apostle followed as well; lest he not be regarded as the apostle of that God whom Christ had revealed; and because it was not lawful for one to be hidden from the apostle who had already been revealed by Christ. Or if Christ had revealed nothing of the sort concerning God, so much the more ought it to have been revealed by the apostle, who could no longer be revealed by another; undoubtedly not to be believed, if not revealed even by the apostle. This we have set forth in advance, so that from this point we may declare that we shall prove in like manner that no other God was carried about by the apostle, just as we proved that none was by Christ; from the very Epistles of Paul themselves, which, mutilated likewise in number, the form of the heretical Gospel ought already to have prejudged.

The principal epistle against Judaism is one we also acknowledge, which instructs the Galatians. For we embrace the entire abolition of the old law, as coming also from the Creator's own dispensation, as we have already treated many times in this order, from the proclaimed renewal by the prophets of our God. But if the Creator promised that the old things would cease, with new things of course arising; and Christ, setting the boundary of that distinction (The Law and the Prophets until John) in John, placed it between the two orders—the old things thenceforth ceasing and the new things beginning—then necessarily the Apostle also, in Christ revealed after John, invalidates the old things and confirms the new, and thus tends the faith of no other God than the Creator, with whom also the passing away of the old things was foretold.

Therefore both the destruction of the Law and the building up of the Gospel work in my favor in this Epistle as well, pertaining to that presumption of the Galatians, by which they presumed that Christ, as being the Creator's, was to be believed in with the Creator's law kept intact: which would still seem incredible, that the law should be laid aside by its own author. Moreover, if they had heard of an altogether different God from the Apostle, they would of course have known of their own accord that they must depart from the law of that God whom they had forsaken, having followed another. For who would wait to learn further that he ought to pursue a new discipline, who had received a new God?

Nay, because the same divinity was proclaimed in the Gospel that had always been known in the Law, but the discipline was not the same, this was the entire state of the question: whether the law of the Creator ought to be excluded from the Gospel in Christ the Creator's. In short, remove this state of the question, and the question is empty. But with the question empty, since all would of their own accord acknowledge that they must depart from the Creator's order through faith in another God, no subject matter would have been available to the Apostle for teaching so pressingly what faith itself would have dictated of its own accord. Therefore the entire intent of this Epistle teaches nothing other than that the departure of the Law comes from the Creator's dispensation, as we shall further suggest.

If likewise it makes no mention of any new God—which it would have done nowhere more than in this subject matter, so as to set forth the reason for dismissing the Law by this one most sufficient definition of a new divinity—it is apparent in what sense he writes: I marvel that you are so quickly transferred from him who called you in grace to another gospel: another in manner of life, not in religion; in discipline, not in divinity. Since indeed the Gospel of Christ ought to call 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, as though they were being transferred to the Creator. For also when he adds that there is no other Gospel at all, he confirms that of the Creator, which he defends as existing.

For if the Creator also promises a Gospel, saying through Isaiah: Ascend to the high mountain, you who bring good tidings to Zion; lift up your voice with strength, you who bring good tidings to Jerusalem. Likewise in the person of the apostles: How timely are the feet of those who bring good tidings of peace, who bring good tidings of good things; of course bringing good tidings also to the nations; since also: In his name, he says, shall the nations hope—that is, in Christ's name; to whom he says: I have set you as a light to the nations. But there is also a Gospel of your new God, which you wish, then defended by the Apostle. Now therefore there are two Gospels with two Gods, and the Apostle will have lied, saying that there is no other at all, when there is also another; when he could have defended his own Gospel by rather demonstrating it, not by defining it as the only one.

But perhaps to escape from this point; and therefore, you will say, he subjoins: Though an angel from heaven should preach otherwise, let him be accursed; because he knew that the Creator also would preach a gospel. Again therefore you entangle yourself. For this is what constrains you. To confirm two Gospels does not belong to one who has already denied another. Nevertheless the meaning of him who put forward his own person is clear. But also: If even we or an angel from heaven should preach otherwise; for it was said by way of example. Otherwise, if he himself was not going to preach otherwise, then certainly neither was an angel. Thus he named the angel for this purpose, that men were much less to be believed, since not even an angel, nor an apostle, was to be believed; he would not refer the angel to the Gospel of the Creator.

Thereupon, running through the order of his own conversion from persecutor to apostle, he confirms the scripture of the Acts of the Apostles, in which the very subject matter of this Epistle is also recognized: that certain persons had intervened, who said that circumcision was necessary and that the law of Moses must be observed; then that the apostles, consulted on this question, had declared by the authority of the Spirit that burdens were not to be imposed on men which the fathers themselves had not been able to bear.

But if the Acts of the Apostles agree with Paul also on this point, why you reject them is now apparent—namely, because they preach no other God than the Creator, nor a Christ of any other than the Creator, since not even the promise of the Holy Spirit is proved to have been fulfilled from any other source than from the instrument of the Acts. Which it is altogether unlikely, on the one hand, agrees with the Apostle in part, when they show his order according to his own testimony; but on the other hand disagrees in part, when they announce the divinity of the Creator in Christ; so that Paul had altogether followed the preaching of the apostles, who received from them the pattern of unteaching the law.

Finally, he writes that he went up to Jerusalem after fourteen years for the defense of Peter and the other apostles, to confer with them about the rule of his Gospel, lest he had run or was running in vain for so many years; that is, if he were preaching anything apart from their pattern. So greatly had he desired to be approved and confirmed by them. But if at any time you wish those more akin to Judaism to be understood, since he says that not even Titus was circumcised; he now begins to show that the question of circumcision alone was shaken by those who were still defending the Law—those whom he therefore calls false and surreptitiously introduced brethren, pressing on to establish nothing other than the continuance of the Law, from faith in the Creator undoubtedly intact; and thus perverting the Gospel, not by interpolation of Scripture, by which they might fashion Christ as the Creator's, but by retention of the old discipline, lest they exclude the law of the Creator.

Therefore, he says: Because of surreptitiously introduced false brethren, who had crept in to spy out our freedom which we have in Christ, that they might bring us into bondage, we did not yield to subjection even for an hour. For let us attend both to the meaning itself and to its cause, and the corruption of the scripture will appear, since he premits: But not even Titus, who was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised: then he subjoins: because of the surreptitiously introduced false brethren, and the rest: he begins to render the reason for the contrary act, showing on account of what he did it; which he would neither have done nor shown, if that on account of which he did it had not occurred. In short, I would ask you to say: if those false brethren had crept in to spy out their freedom, would they have yielded to subjection? I think not.

Therefore they yielded, because there were those on account of whom yielding was appropriate—for this was fitting for a faith still raw and still suspended over the observance of the law, with even the apostle himself under suspicion lest he had run in vain. And so the false brethren who were spying out Christian freedom had to be frustrated, lest they lead it into the bondage of Judaism before Paul knew that he had not run in vain, before his predecessors gave him the right hand of fellowship, before he undertook from their assessment the charge of preaching to the nations. He yielded therefore of necessity for a time.

Thus the account is consistent for him of circumcising Timothy and bringing in those who had shaved their heads into the temple, which things are stated in the Acts, so true as to be in harmony with the Apostle professing: that he had become to the Jews a Jew, that he might gain the Jews, and to those under the Law as one under the Law, for the sake of those who were under the Law: so also for the sake of those surreptitiously introduced brethren, and finally made all things to all men, that he might gain all. If these things also require to be understood from this, no one has doubted that Paul was a preacher of that God and Christ whose law, though excluding it, he had meanwhile admitted for the times—to be immediately removed had he brought forward a new God.

Well therefore that Peter and James and John also gave Paul the right hand of fellowship; and they agreed on the distribution of office, that Paul should go to the nations, they to the circumcision; only that they should remember the poor, and this according to the law of the Creator, who cherishes the poor and needy, as has been proved in the review of your Gospel. So it is established that the question was about the Law alone, while it is shown what from the Law it was agreed should be kept. But he rebukes Peter, not walking with a straight foot toward the truth of the Gospel. Plainly he rebukes him; yet for no other reason than for inconsistency in diet, which he varied according to the quality of persons, fearing those who were of the circumcision; not for any perversity of divinity, concerning which he would also have resisted others to their face, who for a lesser cause of ambiguous conduct did not spare even Peter himself. But how do the Marcionites wish this to be believed?

For the rest, let the Apostle proceed, denying that a man is justified by works of the Law, but by faith—of the same God, however, whose Law also is. For he would not have labored to distinguish faith from law, which the diversity of the very divinity would have distinguished of its own accord, if there had been such diversity. Rightly he did not rebuild what he had destroyed. But the destruction of the Law took place from the time when the voice of John cried in the wilderness: Prepare the ways of the Lord; that valleys and hills and mountains might be filled and humbled, and the crooked and rough made straight and level—that is, the difficulties of the Law into the facilities of the Gospel.

He had already remembered also the Psalm and the time: Let us break their bonds from us, and cast away their yoke from us: From the time that the nations raged, and the peoples meditated vain things, the kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ; so that now man is justified from the freedom of faith, not from the bondage of law: Because the just shall live by faith. But if the prophet Habakkuk foretold this, you have the apostle also confirming the Prophets, just as Christ also did. Therefore the faith in which the just shall live will belong to that God whose law also is, in which the worker is not justified. Likewise, if in the law there is a curse, but in faith a blessing; you have both set forth by the Creator: Behold, he says, I have set before you curse and blessing.

He cannot claim the distinction; which, even if it is of things, is not therefore of authors; since it is set forth by one author. But why Christ was made a curse for us is made clear by the Apostle himself teaching, how much he is on our side, that is, according to the faith of the Creator. For it is not because the Creator pronounced: Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree; that Christ will therefore seem to belong to another God, and to have been cursed by the Creator already then in the law. And how could the Creator have pre-cursed him whom he does not know? But why should it not rather befit the Creator to have given his own Son to his own curse, than for your God to have subjected him to a curse, and indeed on behalf of a man who is not his own? In short, if this seems atrocious in the Creator with regard to the Son, it is equally so in your God.

But if it is rational in yours, it is equally so in mine, and more so in mine. For it would more easily be believed that it was he who provided blessing for man through the curse of Christ, who had also at some time set both curse and blessing before man, than he who has never professed either of these things with you. We have received therefore spiritual blessing through faith, he says, from which of course the just shall live according to the Creator. This therefore is what I say, that the faith belongs to that God whose is the form of the grace of faith. But also when he adds: For you are all sons of faith, it is shown what the heretical industry has erased above; namely, the mention of Abraham, by which the Apostle affirms us to be sons of Abraham through faith, according to which mention he has here also noted us as sons of faith. Otherwise, how sons of faith? And of whose faith, if not of Abraham's?

For if Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness, and thence he merited to be called father of many nations; but we, by believing God more fully, are likewise justified, as Abraham was; and likewise attain life, as the just man lives by faith; so it comes about that above also he pronounced us sons of Abraham, as of the father's faith, and here sons of faith, through which Abraham had been promised as father of the nations. The very fact that he was calling faith back from circumcision—was he not seeking to constitute us sons of Abraham, who had believed in the integrity of the flesh? In short, the faith of another God cannot be admitted to the pattern of another God, so as to count believers for righteousness, to make the just live, to call the nations sons of faith: all this belongs to him with whom it was already known beforehand under the same mention of Abraham, while he is refuted by that very meaning.

Furthermore, he says, I speak after the manner of men: when we were children, we were placed in bondage under the elements of the world, to serve them. But this is not said in a merely human sense: for it is not an illustration, but a truth. For what child—in understanding, at least, as the nations are—is not subject to the elements of the world, which he looks up to in place of God? But he does this: although he had said "after the manner of men," yet no one sets aside or supersedes a man's testament. For by the example of a human testament that remains in force, he was defending the divine one. To Abraham were the promises spoken, and to his seed. He did not say, "to seeds," as of many; but "to seed," as of one, which is Christ. Let the sponge of Marcion blush—except that I retract in abundance what it has taken away, since it is more powerfully refuted by those things which it has preserved.

Now when the fullness of time came to be fulfilled, God sent His Son; namely He who is also the God of those very times by which the age consists; who also ordained the signs of the seasons, suns and moons and constellations and stars; who finally both arranged and foretold the revelation of His Son at the end of the ages: In the last days the mountain of the Lord shall be manifest, and: In the last days I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh, according to Joel. It belonged to Him to have awaited the fullness of time, to whom also the end of time belonged just as the beginning. But that idle God, with no work, no proclamation of any kind, and thus no time of any kind—what did He do at all to bring it about that the time should be fulfilled, or even that the fulfillment should be awaited? If nothing, it is quite vain that He should have awaited the times of the Creator, serving the Creator.

But 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 old things might pass away and new things arise; a new Law from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem: and that we might receive the adoption of sons—namely the nations, who were not sons. For He Himself shall be a light to the nations, and in His name shall the nations hope. And so, that it might be certain that we are sons of God, He sent His Spirit into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. For in the last days, he says, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh. Whose grace, if not His whose is also the promise of grace? Who is the Father, if not He who is also the maker? After these riches, therefore, there was no returning to the weak and beggarly elements.

Now among the Romans too, "elements" is also the usual term for the first letters of the alphabet. He did not therefore wish to turn them away from the God of those elements by disparaging the elements of the world; even though by saying above: If therefore you serve those who are not by nature gods; he was rebuking the error of physical, that is, natural superstition, which holds the elements in place of God, yet not even so taxing the God of the elements. But what he wishes to be understood by "elements"—namely the first letters of the law—he himself declares: You observe days, and months, and seasons, and years, and sabbaths, I suppose, and clean meals, and fasts, and great days.

For it was necessary to cease from these things also, just as from circumcision, by the decrees of the Creator, who both through Isaiah: Your new moons and sabbaths and great day I will not endure; your fasting and feasts and ceremonies my soul hates; and through Amos: I have hated, I have rejected your ceremonies, and I will not smell your assemblies. Likewise through Hosea: I will turn away all her joys, and her ceremonies, and her sabbaths, and her new moons, and all her assemblies. What He Himself had established, you say, He erased? More so than another could: or if another, then he assisted the judgment of the Creator, removing what the Creator also had condemned. But it is not the question of this place why the Creator broke His own laws. It suffices that we have proved He would break them, so that it may be confirmed that the Apostle determined nothing against the Creator, since even the abrogation of the Law is from the Creator.

But as it is usual for thieves to let something fall from their plunder as evidence, so I believe Marcion also left behind the final mention of Abraham, which above all others should have been removed, even though he partly altered it. For if Abraham had two sons, one by a slave-woman and another by a free woman: but he who was born of the slave-woman was born carnally; but he who was born of the free woman, through promise; which things are allegorical, that is, signifying something other: for these are the two testaments, or two manifestations, as we find it interpreted: one from Mount Sinai, unto the synagogue of the Jews, according to the law, generating into bondage; the other above every principality, generating power, dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but in the age to come; which is our mother, unto whom we have been promised—the holy Church; and therefore he adds: Wherefore, brethren, we are not children of the slave-woman, but of the free.

He plainly showed that the nobility of Christianity has its sacrament allegorically in the son of Abraham born of the free woman, just as the legal bondage of Judaism has it in the son of the slave-woman; and thus that both dispensations belong to that God in whom we find the outline of both dispensations. The very words, With the freedom wherewith Christ has set us free—does this not, in establishing the manumitter, show who was the Lord? For not even Galba manumitted the slaves of others, being more likely to free those who were free-born. Freedom therefore will be granted by Him with whom the bondage of the law existed. And rightly so. It was not fitting that those who had been manumitted should again be bound by the yoke of bondage, that is, of the law, now that the Psalm had been fulfilled: Let us break their bonds asunder, and cast away their yoke from us; after the rulers had gathered together as one against the Lord and against His Christ.

From bondage therefore being freed, he persisted in erasing the very mark of bondage—circumcision; by the authority, namely, of prophetic proclamation; mindful of what was said through Jeremiah: Circumcise the foreskins of your heart. Because also Moses: Circumcise the hardness of your heart, that is, not the flesh. Finally, if by circumcision he was excluding one coming from another God, why does he also deny that uncircumcision avails anything in Christ, just as circumcision? For he ought to have preferred the rival of what he was attacking, if he were from a God who was the rival of the God of circumcision. But since both circumcision and uncircumcision were assigned to one God, therefore both were void in Christ, on account of the preeminence of faith; that faith of which it was written: And in His name shall the nations believe; that faith which, by saying it is perfected through love, he shows also to be the Creator's.

For whether he speaks of love 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 of love toward one's neighbor: and your neighbor as yourself—this is the Creator's. But he who troubles you shall bear judgment. From which God? From the Good One? But he does not judge. From the Creator? But neither will He condemn a defender of circumcision. But if there will be no other to judge except the Creator, then He will not condemn the defenders of the Law, except He who Himself decreed that it should cease. What now, if He also confirms it in the part where He ought? For the whole Law, he says, is fulfilled in you: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Or if he wishes it to be understood thus—"It is fulfilled," as though it need no longer be fulfilled—then he does not wish me to love my neighbor as myself, so that this too may have ceased with the law; but it will be necessary to persevere always in this precept. Therefore the law of the Creator has been approved even by an adversary; and it has received not a loss but a gain from him, being reduced in sum to one precept. But neither does this belong more fittingly to any other than to 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 apparent that You shall love your neighbor as yourself—through which is heard: Bear one another's burdens—is the law of Christ, which is the Creator's: and thus Christ is the Creator's, since the law of Christ is the Creator's.

You are deceived; God is not mocked. But the God of Marcion can be mocked, who knows neither how to be angry nor how to take vengeance. For whatsoever a man shall have sown, that also shall he reap. He therefore threatens with retribution and judgment as God. But let us not grow weary in doing good; and: While we have time, let us do good. Deny that the Creator commanded good to be done, and let the different doctrine belong to a different divinity. Furthermore, if he proclaims retribution, from the same source will come both the harvest of corruption and of life. But in due time we shall reap; because also Ecclesiastes says, There will be a time for every matter. But also to me, a servant of the Creator, the world is crucified; not however the God of the world; and I to the world, not however to the God of the world.

For he uses "world" to mean, as regards its manner of life, that to which by mutual renunciation we are transfixed and to which we mutually die; he calls persecutors of Christ; but when he adds, that he bears the marks of Christ in his body—and bodily marks certainly are appropriate—he has now professed not a phantom but a true and solid flesh of Christ, whose bodily marks he displays.

The preface of the preceding Epistle so led me that I did not re-examine its title, being certain that it could be re-examined elsewhere as well; namely, the one common to all the Epistles: that he prescribes to those to whom he writes not simply a greeting, but grace and peace. I will not say what he has to do with the still Jewish custom, he who is the destroyer of Judaism; for even today the Jews address one another in the name of peace, and in former times they greeted thus in the Scriptures. But I understand that he defended by his office the proclamation of the Creator: How timely are the feet of those who preach good things, who preach peace! For the preacher of good things, that is, of the grace of God, knew that it was to be set before peace.

When he announces these things from God our Father and the Lord Jesus, using common names fitting also to our own sacrament, I do not think it possible to discern which God the Father and which Lord Jesus is proclaimed, except from the circumstances, to which they more properly belong. First, I lay down that the Lord Father is to be acknowledged as none other than the Creator and founder both of man and of the universe. Furthermore, that the name of Lord also belongs to the Father by reason of authority, which the Son also receives through the Father. Next, that grace and peace belong not only to him by whom they were proclaimed, but to him who had been offended. For grace does not arise except from offence, nor peace except from war: and the people, through transgression of the law, and the whole human race, through disregard of nature, had both sinned and rebelled against the Creator.

But the God of Marcion, both because he was unknown, could not be offended, and because he does not know how to be angry. What grace, then, from one who has not been offended? What peace from one against whom there has been no rebellion? He says that the cross of Christ is foolishness to those who are perishing, but the power and wisdom of God to those who attain salvation. And to show whence this comes about, he adds: For it is written: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the prudence of the prudent. If these things belong to the Creator, and those things which pertain to the cause of the cross are reckoned as foolishness; then both the cross, and through the cross Christ, will belong to the Creator, by whom was foretold what pertains to the cross.

Or if the Creator, as a rival, therefore took away wisdom, so that the cross of Christ, that is, of his adversary, might be reckoned as foolishness; how could the Creator have pronounced anything concerning the cross of a Christ who was not his own, whom he did not know when he was making the proclamation? But also why, with the supremely good God of boundless mercy, do some obtain salvation, believing the cross to be the power and wisdom of God, while others obtain perdition, to whom the cross of Christ is reckoned as foolishness, unless it belongs to the Creator to have punished some offence both of the people and of the human race by the loss of wisdom and prudence? The following words will confirm this, when he says: Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? And when he also adds here the reason: Because in the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom, God was pleased through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe.

But first I will dispute about the world, inasmuch as the most subtle heretics here above all interpret the world as meaning the lord of the world; whereas we understand by it the man who is in the world, from the plain form of human speech, by which we commonly put that which contains in place of that which is contained. The circus shouted and the Forum spoke and the Basilica roared; that is, those who transacted business in those places. Therefore, because man, not the god of the world, did not know God in wisdom—whom he ought to have known—and the Jew in the wisdom of the Scriptures, and every nation in the wisdom of works: therefore the same God, who had not been acknowledged in his wisdom, resolved to strike back at the wisdom of men with foolishness, by saving all believers in the foolish preaching of the cross. Because the Jews demand signs, who ought already to have been certain about God; and the Greeks seek wisdom, their own wisdom, that is, not God's.

Moreover, if a new God were being proclaimed, wherein had the Jews sinned by desiring signs by which to believe? Or the Greeks by pursuing wisdom, by which they might the more readily believe? And so the very recompense itself, directed against both Jews and Greeks, confirms both the jealous God and the judge, who by a retribution that is both rival and judicial has made foolish the wisdom of the world. But if both the causes and the Scriptures employed belong to the same one, then the Apostle, treating of God as not understood, is teaching that the Creator is to be understood; and this also, that he proclaims Christ as a stumbling-block to the Jews, he seals with a prophecy of the Creator concerning him, who says through Isaiah: Behold, I lay in Sion a stone of offence and a rock of stumbling: but the rock was Christ, as even Marcion preserves. Now what is the foolishness of God that is wiser than men, if not the cross and death of Christ?

What is the weakness of God that is stronger than man, if not the birth and flesh of God? But if Christ was neither born of a virgin, nor constituted in flesh, and therefore neither truly suffered the cross nor death, there is nothing in him that is foolish and weak; nor did God choose the foolish things of the world to confound wisdom; nor did God choose the weak things of the world to confound the strong; nor the dishonourable and base and contemptible things, which are not, that is, which are not truly, to confound the things that are, that is, which truly are. For nothing is appointed by God that is truly small and ignoble and contemptible, but only what is so by man: whereas with the Creator even the old things can be reckoned as foolishness, and weakness, and dishonour, and smallness, and contempt. What is more foolish, what more weak, than the exaction by God of bloody sacrifices and of reeking burnt offerings? What more weak than the purification of vessels and pallets?

What more dishonourable than yet another disgrace of flesh already ashamed? What so lowly as the prescription of retaliation? What so contemptible as the distinction of foods? The whole of the Old Testament, as I know, every heretic mocks. For God chose the foolish things of the world to confound wisdom. The God of Marcion has nothing of the sort. Because he is not a rival who refutes contraries by contraries, lest all flesh should glory; so that, as it is written, he who glories should glory in the Lord. In whom? Surely in him who gave this command: unless the Creator gave the command, that one should glory in the God of Marcion.

Therefore through all these things he shows of which God's wisdom he speaks among the perfect: namely, of him who took away the wisdom of the wise, and made void the prudence of the prudent; who made foolish the wisdom of the world, choosing its foolish things, and ordaining them unto salvation. This wisdom he says was in secret, which had been among the foolish and the small and the dishonourable; which lay hidden even under figures, allegories, and enigmas, to be revealed afterwards in Christ, who was set as a light to the nations by the Creator promising through the voice of Isaiah that he would lay open invisible and hidden treasures. For that anything should be hidden by that God who did nothing at all in which he could be thought to have hidden anything, is sufficiently incredible. If he himself existed, he could not be hidden, much less any of his mysteries.

But the Creator is as well known himself as his mysteries are; running openly, of course, among Israel; but overshadowed in their significations, in which the wisdom of God lay concealed among the perfect, to be declared in its own time, yet set forth in the purpose of God before the ages. Whose ages, if not the Creator's? For if ages are built up of times, and times are compacted of days and months and years, and days moreover and months and years are marked by the suns and moons and stars of the Creator, placed by him for this purpose: For they shall be, he says, for signs of months and years: it is plain that the ages also belong to the Creator; and that whatever is said to have been purposed before the ages belongs to none other than him whose the ages also are.

Or let Marcion prove the ages of his god, let him show also the world itself, in which ages are reckoned, as a kind of vessel of times, and some signs, or their rising. If he demonstrates nothing, I return to say this also. But why did he purpose our glory before the ages of the Creator? He might seem to have purposed it before the ages, since he would have revealed it with the introduction of the age. But since he does this when almost all the ages of the Creator have already run out, he purposed it in vain before the ages, and not rather within the ages, since he was going to reveal it almost after the ages. For it does not belong to the same one to have hastened in purposing, and to have delayed in revealing.

But both befit the Creator: both to have purposed before the ages, and to have revealed at the end of the ages; because what he both purposed and revealed, he foreshadowed in the middle space of the ages through figures and enigmas and allegories. But because he subjoins concerning our glory, that none of the princes of this age knew it: for had they known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory; the heretic argues that the princes of this age nailed to the cross the Lord, namely the Christ of another God, so that this too may recoil upon the Creator himself.

Now, to him to whom we showed above in what ways our glory is to be reckoned as belonging to the Creator, it ought to be established as a prejudgment that what was in secret with the Creator was deservedly unknown also to all the virtues and powers of the Creator; because it is not permitted even to servants to know the counsels of their lords, much less to those apostate angels, and to the very prince of transgression the devil, by which I would the more contend that they were estranged from all knowledge of the Creator's dispensations on account of their guilt. But now it does not even suit me to interpret the princes of this age as the virtues and powers of the Creator, because the Apostle ascribes ignorance to them: for Jesus, even according to our Gospel, the devil also in the temptation recognized; and according to the common instrument, the evil spirit knew that he was the Holy One of God, and was called Jesus, and had come for their destruction.

Also the parable of that strong armed man, whom another mightier one overpowered and seized his goods, if it is taken against the Creator in Marcion's view, then the Creator could no longer have been ignorant of the God of glory, since he is overpowered by him; nor could he have nailed him to the cross, against whom he had no power; and it remains that according to me it is credible that the virtues and powers of the Creator, knowing the God of glory, crucified his Christ, with that desperation and overflow of malice with which even the most wicked servants do not hesitate to kill their masters. For it is written in my text, that Satan entered into Judas. But according to Marcion, not even in this place does the Apostle allow ignorance to be ascribed to the virtues of the Creator with respect to the Lord of glory, because he evidently does not wish those to be understood as the princes of this age.

But if he does not seem to have spoken of spiritual princes, then he spoke of secular ones; of the chief people certainly not among the nations, of their very rulers, of king Herod, also of Pilate, and of the Roman dignity which presided with the greater principate of this age. Thus also when the arguments of the opposing party are destroyed, our expositions are built up. But do you still wish our glory to belong to your god, and to have been in secret with him, and why does he still rely on the same instrument, both God and the Apostle? What has he to do with the sentences of the Prophets everywhere? For who hath known the mind of the Lord? And who hath been his counsellor? It is Isaiah. What has he also to do with the examples of our God?

For what he affirms of himself, that he is a wise architect, we find this to be signified as the one who strips away divine discipline by the Creator, through Isaiah: For I will take away, he says, from Judah among other things also the wise architect. And was not Paul himself then destined to be taken away from Judah, that is, from Judaism, to build up Christianity, about to lay the one foundation, which is Christ? Because also concerning this the Creator through the same prophet: Behold I, he says, lay in the foundations of Zion a precious stone, honourable; and he that believeth in him shall not be confounded.

Unless God was professing himself the builder of an earthly work, so as not to signify his own Christ, who was to be the foundation of those believing in him, upon which, according as each one has built upon it, namely worthy or unworthy doctrine, if his work shall be proved through fire, if his reward shall be repaid through fire, it belongs to the Creator; because your superstructure upon his foundation, that is upon his Christ, is judged through fire: know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If man, and substance, and work, and image, and likeness, and flesh through the earth, and soul through the breath of the Creator are his; then the God of Marcion dwells entirely in another's property, if we are not the temple of the Creator. But if any man defile the temple of God, he shall be defiled, namely by the God of the temple. Threatening an avenger, he will be threatening the Creator.

Be ye foolish, that ye may be wise. Why? For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. With which God? If the former prejudgments of our senses have not yet availed us at all, it is well that here too he adds: For it is written: He taketh the wise in their own craftiness. And again: The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain. For it will be established as a general rule by us, that he could have used no sentence of that God whom he ought to be destroying, if he were not teaching for him. Therefore, he says, let no man glory in man. And this too is according to the Creator's discipline, Cursed is the man that putteth his trust in man; and, It is good to trust in God, rather than to trust in man: so also to glory.

And the hidden things of darkness he himself shall illuminate, assuredly through Christ, who promised Christ as illumination; and who also declared himself a lamp, searching the hearts and reins. From him also shall come the praise of each one, from whom also comes the opposite of praise, as from a judge. Certainly, you say, at least here he interprets the world as the God of the world, by saying: We have been made a spectacle to the world, and to angels, and to men. Because if by "world" he had meant the men of the world, he would not have named men again afterwards. Nay, lest you should argue thus, the providence of the Holy Spirit showed what he had meant by saying, We have been made a spectacle to the world; namely, to the angels who minister the world, and to the men to whom they minister.

That man of such great constancy—not to say the Holy Spirit—feared, no doubt, especially when writing to sons whom he had begotten in the Gospel, to name the God of the world freely, against whom, unless openly, he could not be seen to preach. I do not defend the fact that, according to the law of the Creator, he was displeased with the one who had his father's wife, following the discipline of a common and public religion. But when he condemns him to be delivered to Satan, he is a herald of the condemning God. Let him also consider how he said, for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord, since he judged both concerning the destruction of the flesh and the salvation of the spirit; and by commanding the evil to be put away from the midst, he recalled the most frequent sentence of the Creator. Purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, as you are unleavened.

Therefore the unleavened things were figures of ours before the Creator. So also our passover, Christ, has been sacrificed. Why is Christ the passover, if the passover was not a figure of Christ, by reason of the likeness of the saving blood and of the flock of Christ? Why does he clothe us with Christ in the images of the Creator's solemnities, if they were not ours? Moreover, turning us away from fornication, he makes manifest the resurrection of the flesh. The body, he says, is not for fornication, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body; as a temple for God, and God for the temple. Therefore the temple shall perish for God, and God for the temple. But you see that he who raised up the Lord shall also raise us up, and shall raise us up in the body as well; because the body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And it is well that he presses further: Know you not that your bodies are members of Christ?

What will the heretic say? The members of Christ shall not rise again, which are now no longer ours? For we have been bought with a great price. Plainly with none at all, if Christ was a phantom and had no substance of body which he might pay for our bodies. Therefore Christ had that by which he might redeem us; and if he redeemed these bodies at some great price, into which the same fornication shall not be committed, as into members now of Christ and not our own: assuredly he will preserve safe for himself what he purchased at a great price. Now in what manner shall we honor? In what manner shall we bear God in a body that is to perish? There follows the matter of coming together in marriage, which Marcion, more resolute than the Apostle, forbids. For the Apostle, even if he prefers the good of continence, yet permits marriage both to be contracted and to be used, and advises it to be retained rather than dissolved.

Plainly Christ forbids divorce, but Moses permits it. Marcion, taking away all intercourse from the faithful (for let his catechumens look to themselves) and commanding divorce before marriage, whose sentence does he follow—Moses's or Christ's? And yet the Apostle of Christ also, when he commands that a woman should not depart from her husband, or if she has departed, should remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband; both permitted divorce, which he did not altogether forbid, and confirmed marriage, which he first forbade to be dissolved, and if by chance dissolved, wished to be restored. But also what reasons does he give for continence? Because the time is short. I had supposed it was because there is another God in Christ; and yet from whom the shortness of time comes, from him also shall come what is fitting for the shortness of time. No one takes thought for another's time. You affirm your god to be a petty god, Marcion, whom the time of the Creator constrains in some respect.

Certainly, by prescribing that one should marry only in the Lord, lest any believer contract a pagan marriage, he upholds the law of the Creator, who everywhere forbids marriages with foreigners. But, even if there are those who are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth; it is apparent in what sense he spoke—not as though those who are called gods truly exist, when they do not exist: for he began with idols, about to dispute concerning things offered to idols: We know that an idol is nothing. But the Creator even Marcion does not deny to be God; therefore the Apostle cannot be seen to have placed the Creator also among those who are called gods and yet are not; since even if they had existed, yet 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 whose all things are? What things are these?

You have it in what precedes: 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 thoroughly does he make the Creator the God of all things, from whom are both the world, and life, and death; which cannot belong to another God. From him therefore, among all things, is also Christ. Teaching that each one ought to live from his own labor, he had already set forth sufficient examples of soldiers, shepherds, and farmers; but divine authority was lacking to him. He therefore sets against the ungrateful the law of the Creator, which he was destroying: for of his own God he had no such law. You shall not muzzle, he says, the ox that treads out the grain; and he adds: Does the Lord have no care for oxen? And even kind toward oxen for the sake of men? For it was written for our sake, he says.

Therefore he both approved the law as allegorical according to us, and as pleading for those who live by the Gospel; and for this reason, that the preachers of the Gospel belong to none other than him whose law made provision for them, when it says, For our sake it was written. But he did not wish to use the power of the law, because he preferred to labor freely. This he referred to his own glory, which he denied that anyone would make void—not to the destruction of the Law, by which he proved another would make use of it. But behold, the blind Marcion stumbles also upon the rock from which our fathers drank in the wilderness. For if that rock was Christ, it was assuredly the Christ of the Creator, whose people they also were. For what purpose does he interpret it as a figure of a foreign sacrament? Or was it in order to teach this very thing—that the old things had been figured in Christ, to be reckoned from among them?

For also, about to run through the remaining fate of the people, he sets forth beforehand: But these things were made examples for us. Tell me, were examples made for men by the Creator of another and indeed unknown God? Or does one God borrow examples from another, and indeed from a rival? Does he who is transferring my faith from him frighten me with that one? Will an adversary make me better toward him? Now if I shall have committed the same sins as the people, shall I suffer the same things or not? But if not the same, then he sets before me in vain things to be feared which I shall not suffer. But from whom shall I suffer? If from the Creator, what sort of things is it his to inflict? And what manner of thing will it be, that a God who is jealous should punish the sinner of his rival rather than, on the contrary, cherish him? If from that God, but he knows not how to punish.

Thus this entire proposition of the Apostle holds together by no reasoning, if it is not directed toward the discipline of the Creator. Finally, even in the closing clause he answers the preface. But these things happened to them in this manner, and were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages have come. O Creator, both foreknowing and admonishing already the Christians of another! I pass over, when I treat of things equal to those already reviewed, and briefly dispose of certain matters. A great argument for another God—the permission of all foods, against the Law; as though we ourselves did not also confess that the burdens of the Law were removed, but by him who imposed them, who promised a renewal; and so he also restored the foods which he had taken away, which he had also granted from the beginning. But if any other God had been the destroyer of our God, he would have forbidden his own people nothing more than to live off the supplies of his adversary.

Christ is the head of man. Which Christ—one who is not the author of man? For he placed "head" in reference to authority, and authority will belong to none other than the author. Of which man, finally, is he the head? Certainly of the one concerning whom he adds: For a man ought not to veil his head, since he is the image of God. Therefore, 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—not the one whose image I am? For since I am the image of the Creator, there is no place in me for another head. But also why must the woman have power upon her head? If it is because she was made from man and for man according to the institution of the Creator, then the Apostle also attended to his discipline, interpreting the reasons of discipline from his institution.

He adds also, Because of the angels. Which angels? That is, of whom? If they are the Creator's apostates, rightly so, that the face which scandalized them should bear a certain mark of humility in its bearing, and an obscuring of its beauty. But if it is because of the angels of another God, what does she fear, if even the Marcionites themselves do not desire women? We have already shown many times that heresies are placed among evils as an evil by the Apostle, and that those are to be understood as praiseworthy who flee heresies as an evil. Likewise, in the sacrament of the bread and cup, we have already proved in the Gospel the truth of the Lord's body and blood, against the phantom of Marcion. But also that every mention of judgment belongs to the Creator, as to a God who judges, has been treated through nearly the whole work.

Now I speak of spiritual gifts, these also having been promised to Christ by the Creator, under that most just prescription, I think, by which the fulfillment ought not to be believed to belong to another than the one whose promise has been established. Isaiah declared: There shall come forth a rod from the root of Jesse, and a flower shall ascend from the root; the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him. Then he enumerates its kinds: The spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, and the spirit of knowledge and godliness; the spirit of the fear of God shall fill him.

For he shows that Christ was to arise in the figure of a flower from a rod proceeding from the root of Jesse—that is, from a virgin of the lineage of David the son of Jesse—in which Christ the whole substance of the Spirit was to abide; not as though it would come upon him afterward, who had always been the Spirit of God, even before the flesh; lest from this you argue that the prophecy pertains to that Christ who, as merely a man from the lineage of David alone, afterward obtained the Spirit of his God.

But because from the time when he had flowered in the flesh taken from the stock of David, every operation 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 matter itself testifies, since from that time the Spirit of the Creator breathed nothing among them, the wise man and prudent architect and counselor and prophet being taken away from Judea; so that this is what is meant by, The Law and the Prophets until John. Receive now how he also declared that the gifts of grace would 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 bondage; he gave gifts to the sons of men—that is, the bounties which we call gifts of grace. He elegantly says "to the sons of men," not indiscriminately to men; showing us to be sons of men—that is, truly of men, of the Apostles.

For in the Gospel, he says, I have begotten you. And: My children, whom I travail with again. Now also that promise of the Spirit made absolutely through Joel: In the last days I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh, and their sons and daughters shall prophesy; and upon my servants and handmaids I will pour out of my Spirit. And certainly if the Creator promised the grace of the Spirit in the last days, and Christ, the dispenser of spiritual gifts, appeared in the last days—the Apostle saying: But when the time was fulfilled, God sent his Son; and again: Because the time is now gathered in—it appears also from the prediction of the last times that this grace of the Spirit belongs to Christ as its proclaimer. Compare finally the kinds listed by the Apostle and by Isaiah: To one, he says, is given through the Spirit the word of wisdom; and straightway Isaiah also 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 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 discernment of spirits, to another kinds of tongues, to another interpretation of tongues; this will be the spirit of knowledge. You see the Apostle agreeing with the Prophet both in making the distribution of one Spirit and in interpreting spirituality.

I can say that he who equated the unity of the body through its many and diverse members to the structure of the various gifts of grace, is shown to be the Lord both of the human body and of the Holy Spirit—he who did not wish the merit of gifts of grace to reside in the body of the Spirit, just as he did not place them in the human body—he who also instructed the Apostle concerning love, which is to be set before all gifts of grace, by the chief commandment, which Christ also confirmed: You shall love the Lord with all your heart, and with all your strength, and with all your soul, and your neighbor as yourself. And although this was written in the Law, he recalls that the Creator would speak in other tongues and in other lips; with this recollection he confirms the gift of tongues, nor can he here be seen to have confirmed a gift of the Creator by the proclamation of another.

Likewise, in prescribing silence to women in the Church—that they should not speak, at least for the purpose of learning—he already shows that they too have the right of prophesying, since he imposes a veil even upon a woman who prophesies; he takes from the Law the authority for the subjection of woman, which, to say it once, he ought not to have known except for the purpose of destroying it. But that we may now depart from spiritual matters, the facts themselves ought to prove which of us rashly claims these things for his God; and whether it can be objected against our side that, even if the Creator promised these things for his Christ not yet revealed, as destined for the Jews only, they were to have their operations in their own time, in their own Christ, and in their own people.

Let Marcion therefore exhibit the gifts of his God—some prophets, who nevertheless have spoken not from human sense but from the Spirit of God, who have both foretold future things and laid bare the hidden things of the heart. Let him produce some psalm, some vision, some prayer—at least a spiritual one, in ecstasy, that is, in a trance—if any interpretation of tongues has accompanied it. Let him prove to me that even a woman among them has prophesied, from those holier women of his, boastful as they are. If all these things are more readily produced by me, and are certainly in agreement with the rules and arrangements and disciplines of the Creator, then without doubt both Christ and the Spirit and the Apostle will belong to my God. He who wishes to demand it has my declaration.

Meanwhile the Marcionite will exhibit nothing of this kind, who already fears to declare whose Christ has not yet been revealed. Just as mine is to be awaited, who has been proclaimed from the beginning, so his is not, because he was not from the beginning. It is better that we do not believe in a Christ who is yet to come, than that the heretic believes in none. How some at that time denied the resurrection of the dead must first be examined. Certainly in the same way as now. For the resurrection of the flesh is always denied. Otherwise, many even among the wise, vindicating the soul as divine, promise it salvation; and the common people themselves, in that presumption, honor the departed, being confident that their souls endure. Otherwise, it is manifest that bodies, whether immediately given to fires, or to wild beasts, or even most carefully preserved, are nonetheless destroyed in time.

If therefore the Apostle refutes those who deny the resurrection of the dead, he is certainly defending against them what they denied, namely the resurrection of the flesh. You have the answer in brief. The rest is now by way of abundance. For even the very fact that it is called the resurrection of the dead requires that the proper meanings of the words be defended. The word "dead," then, applies to nothing except that which has lost the soul, by whose power it lived. It is the body that loses the soul, and by losing it becomes dead: thus the word "dead" belongs to the body. Furthermore, if the resurrection is of the dead, and the dead is nothing other than the body, the resurrection will be of the body. So also the word "resurrection" claims nothing other than that which has fallen. For that which has not fallen at all, which has always lain prostrate, can be said to rise; but to rise again belongs only to that which has fallen.

For because it rises again by falling, it is said to rise again. For the syllable reis always applied to repetition. We say therefore that the body falls to the earth through death, as the very fact testifies, from the law of God; for it was said to the body: Thou art earth and into earth thou shalt go. Thus that which is of earth shall go into earth. That departs which shall go into earth; that rises again which falls. Because by man came death, and by man the resurrection. There also the body of Christ is shown to me in the name of man, who consists of a body, as we have already taught many times. But if thus in Christ we are all made alive, just as we are made dead in Adam: since in Adam we are made dead in the body, so it is necessary that in Christ also we be made alive in the body.

Otherwise the parallel does not hold, unless the making alive in Christ concurs in the same substance of the making dead in Adam. But he has interposed something further concerning Christ, which must not be omitted on account of the present dispute. For the resurrection of the flesh will be proved all the more, the more I show Christ to belong to that God with whom the resurrection of the flesh is believed. When he says: For he must reign, until he put his enemies under his feet; already from this he declares the God of splendor, and thereupon the very one who promised this to Christ: Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool; The Lord shall send the rod of thy strength out of Sion, and he shall rule in the midst of thine enemies; with thee, and the rest. But it is necessary that I defend those Scriptures as pertaining to my position, which the Jews also attempt to wrest from us.

They say then that this Psalm was sung concerning Hezekiah, because he sat at the right side of the temple, and God turned away and destroyed his enemies; and therefore also, before the morning star I begat thee from the womb, fits Hezekiah, and the birth in Hezekiah. We produce the Gospels, by whose authority we ought already to have confirmed these men somewhat in so great a work, which declare that the Lord was born by night, so that this is before the morning star, and understood from the star by the Magi, and from the testimony of the angel who announced to the shepherds by night that Christ had just then been born; and from the place of the birth: for one comes to an inn for the night. Perhaps also it was done mystically that Christ should be born by night, he who was to be the light of truth amid the darkness of ignorance. But neither would God have said I begat thee, except to a son, a child.

For even if he says of the whole people: I have begotten sons; yet he did not add: From the womb. But why did he add From the womb, so pointlessly, as though anyone born of a human womb could be doubted, unless because he wished it to be understood more carefully in reference to Christ: From the womb I begat thee, that is, from the womb alone, without the seed of a man, assigning to the flesh what is of the Spirit from the womb? Which also is added here in the same place: Thou art a priest for ever. But Hezekiah was neither a priest, nor for ever, even if he had been. According to the order, he says, of Melchisedech. What has Hezekiah to do with Melchisedech, the priest of the Most High, and indeed uncircumcised, who blessed Abraham already circumcised after receiving the offering of tithes?

But the order of Melchisedech will fit Christ, since indeed Christ is the proper and lawful minister of God, the high priest of an uncircumcised priesthood, then established among the nations, by whom he was rather to be looked up to, and will at last deign to be acknowledged by the circumcision, and will honor the race of Abraham with acceptance and blessing when he comes at the last. There is also another Psalm beginning thus: Give thy judgment to the king, O God, that is, to Christ who is to reign: And thy justice to the king's son, that is, to the people of Christ. For they are his sons who are reborn in him. But this Psalm also is said to be sung for Solomon; yet those things which belong to Christ alone—could they not teach that the rest also pertains not to Solomon but to Christ? He shall come down, it says, like rain upon a fleece, and as drops falling upon the earth. Describing his gentle and imperceptible descent from heaven into flesh.

But Solomon, even if he descended from somewhere, did not descend like rain, because not from heaven. But I will set forth the plainer points. He shall have dominion, it says, from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth. This was given to Christ alone. But Solomon ruled over one small Judaea. All kings shall adore him; whom shall all adore, if not Christ? And all nations shall serve him; whom shall all serve, if not Christ? His name shall be for ever; whose name is for eternity, if not Christ's? Before the sun his name shall endure, for before the sun is the Word of God, that is, Christ. And all nations shall be blessed in him; in Solomon no nation is blessed, but in Christ every nation is. What now if this Psalm also demonstrates him to be God? And they shall call him blessed; because blessed is the Lord God of Israel, who alone doeth wonderful things.

Blessed be the name of his glory, and the whole earth shall be filled with his glory. On the contrary, Solomon, I dare say, even lost the glory he had in God, being dragged into idolatry by a woman. And so, since in the middle of the psalm this also is placed: His enemies shall lick the dust, being subjected of course to his feet, this will pertain to that for the sake of which I both introduced this psalm and defended it as belonging to my position, so that I might confirm both the glory of the kingdom and the subjection of enemies, according to the dispensation of the Creator, to be followed, and that none other than the Creator's is to be believed.

Let us now return to the resurrection, to which we have indeed elsewhere given full treatment in a volume of its own, resisting all heretics; but we are not wanting here either, on account of those who are unacquainted with that little work. What, he says, will they do who are baptized for the dead, if the dead do not rise? Let that institution look to itself. The Kalends of February perhaps will answer him, that they petition on behalf of the dead. Do not therefore immediately mark the Apostle as a new author or confirmer of that practice, so that he might all the more firmly establish the resurrection of the flesh, inasmuch as those who were vainly baptized for the dead did so in faith of the resurrection. We have him somewhere as the definer of one baptism. Therefore to be baptized also for the dead is to be baptized for bodies; for we have shown that the dead body is what is meant. What will they do who are baptized for bodies, if bodies do not rise?

And so we rightly plant this step, so that the Apostle also introduced a second disputation equally concerning the body. But some will say: How are the dead raised? And with what body will they come? For when the resurrection which was denied had been defended, it followed that one should treat of the quality of the body, which was not apparent. But it is fitting to contend about this with others. For Marcion, admitting no resurrection of the flesh at all, and promising salvation to the soul alone, makes the question one not of quality but of substance. Moreover, from these very passages it is most plainly shown that what the Apostle treats concerning the quality of the body, on account of those who say, How are the dead raised? And with what body will they come? (for he had already declared that the body would rise) is a treatment of the quality of the body.

Finally, if he sets forth examples of a grain of wheat, or of something of that kind, or of those to which God gives a body as he wills; if he says that each of the seeds has its own body; and that there is one flesh of men, another of beasts and of birds; and celestial and terrestrial bodies; and one glory of the sun, and another of the moon, and another of the stars: does he not portend a carnal and corporeal resurrection, which he commends through carnal and corporeal examples? Does he not also pledge it from that God from whom the examples themselves come? So also, he says, is the resurrection. How? Just as a grain is sown as a body, it rises as a body. He called the dissolution of the body into the earth a sowing, because it is sown in corruption, it rises in honour and power. The order that belongs to it in dissolution belongs also to it here in the resurrection of the body, namely, just as the grain also.

But if you take away the body from the resurrection, which you gave to the dissolution, where will the difference of outcome stand? Likewise, even if it is sown an animal body, it rises a spiritual body. And if the soul or spirit has some body of its own, so that the animal body may be seen to signify the soul, and the spiritual body the spirit; he does not thereby say that the soul in the resurrection will be spirit, but that the body, which in being born with the soul and in living through the soul is called animal, will be spiritual, while through the spirit it rises into eternity. Finally, 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 no longer be the soul, but the flesh, which was the animal body. Since indeed from animal it is made spiritual, just as he also says below: Not first that which is spiritual.

For to this end he also lays the foundation from Christ himself: The first man Adam was made into a living soul; the last Adam into a life-giving spirit; although the most foolish heretic was unwilling that it should be so. For he placed "Lord" as the last, in place of "last Adam"; fearing, no doubt, lest if the Lord also were the last Adam, we should defend Christ as ours in the last Adam, whose also is the first. But the falsehood shines through. For why is there a first Adam, unless there is also a last Adam? Things have order among themselves only when they are pairs, and of the same name, or substance, or author. For even if in different things there can be one first and another last; yet they belong to one author. But if the author also is different, he himself indeed can be called last. Yet what he introduces is first; and last, if it be equal to the first.

But it is not equal to the first, because it is not of the same author. In the same way he will also be refuted in the case of man by man. The first man, he says, is of the earth, earthy; the second, the Lord, is from heaven. Why second, if not a man, as the first also is? Or is the first also Lord, if the second is? But it suffices that if the Gospel applies to Christ the Son of man, both man and in the name of Adam, he will not be able to deny him. The following words also press him hard. For when the Apostle says: As is he who is of the earth, namely man, such also are the earthly, men certainly; therefore also as is he who is from heaven, a man, such also are those who are from heaven, men. For he could not have opposed heavenly men to earthly men, unless to distinguish their condition and hope more carefully in the fellowship of the name.

For he calls men earthly and heavenly in condition and hope; yet on equal terms, who according to their outcome are reckoned either in Adam or in Christ. And therefore now, for the exhortation of heavenly hope: As we have borne, he says, the image of the earthly, let us also bear the image of the heavenly; referring this not to any substance of the resurrection, but to the discipline of the present time. For he says, let us bear, not we shall bear; in the imperative, not the promissory mode, wishing us to walk as he himself walked, and to depart from the image of the earthly, that is, of the old man, which is the working of the flesh. Finally, what does he add?

For this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood shall not possess the kingdom of God; namely, the works of flesh and blood, from which also, writing to the Galatians, he excluded the kingdom of God, being accustomed elsewhere also 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, unless while we are in this flesh? There is no other time of 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, while we are not in the substance of the flesh, but in the fault. But if in the name of flesh we are commanded to put off works, not the substance of flesh; then it is to the works of the flesh, not to the substance of the flesh, that the kingdom of God is denied in the name of flesh.

For that is not condemned in which evil is done, but that which is done. To give poison is a crime; yet the cup in which it is given is not guilty. So also the body is the vessel of fleshly works, but it is the soul that in it tempers the poison of some evil deed. But what sort of thing would it be, that if the soul, as the author of the works of the flesh, should merit the kingdom of God, through expiation of those things which it committed in the body, the body, which was only the minister, should remain in condemnation? When the poisoner is acquitted, shall the cup be punished? And yet we do not by any means defend the kingdom of God for the flesh, but the resurrection of its own substance, as it were the gate of the kingdom through which one enters. For the rest, resurrection is one thing, the kingdom another. For first comes resurrection, then the kingdom.

We say therefore that the flesh rises, but that being changed it attains the kingdom. For the dead shall rise incorruptible; those, namely, who had been corrupted, their bodies having fallen into destruction. And we shall be changed in an atom, in the momentary twinkling of an eye. For this corruptible thing (the Apostle was speaking while holding his own flesh) must put on incorruption, and this mortal thing immortality; so that the substance may be made fit for the kingdom of God. For we shall be as angels. This will be the transformation of the flesh when raised. Or if there will be none, how shall it put on incorruption and immortality? Made therefore into something else through transformation, it will then attain the kingdom of God; no longer flesh and blood, but that body which God shall have given it. And therefore the Apostle rightly says: Flesh and blood shall not attain the kingdom of God; ascribing that to the transformation which comes upon the resurrection.

But if then shall be fulfilled the word which is written in the Creator: Where, O death, is your victory, or your contention? Where, O death, is your sting? Now this word is the Creator's, through the Prophet; his also will be the thing, that is the kingdom, whose word shall be fulfilled in the kingdom. Nor does he give thanks to any other God for having granted us to bear off the victory, namely over death, than to him from whom he received the word of taunting over death and of triumph.

If "God" has become a common word through the fault of human error, inasmuch as many gods are spoken of and believed in throughout the world, yet the blessed God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, will be understood as none other than the Creator, who both blessed all things—you have this in Genesis—and is blessed by all things—you have this in Daniel.

Likewise, if "Father" can be called the name of a barren God, it belongs to none more fittingly than to the Creator; yet "Father of mercies" will be the same one who is called merciful, and compassionate, and most abundant in mercy: you have this in Jonah together with that very example of mercy which he showed to the Ninevites when they prayed, ready also to be moved by the tears of Hezekiah, and to forgive Ahab, the husband of Jezebel, when he entreated, the blood of Naboth, and to grant immediate pardon to David when he acknowledged his sin; preferring, of course, the repentance of the sinner to his death, assuredly out of an affection of mercy. If Marcion's God has published or proclaimed anything of this kind, I will acknowledge him as the Father of mercies.

But if he ascribes this title to him only from the time when he was revealed, as though he became Father of mercies from the moment he undertook to liberate the human race; well, we too deny him from that very time from which he is said to have been revealed: he cannot therefore ascribe anything to one whom he only then displayed, when he ascribes something else to him. For if it were first established that he exists, then something can also be ascribed to him. For what is ascribed is an accident: but accidents are preceded by the manifestation of the very thing to which they happen; especially since what is ascribed already belongs to another, when it is ascribed to one who has not previously been manifested—so much the more will he be denied to exist, in proportion as that by which he is affirmed to exist belongs to one who has already been manifested.

So also the New Testament will belong to none other than him who promised it; even if not in letter, yet in spirit—this will be its newness. Furthermore, he who had inscribed the letter on tablets of stone had also proclaimed concerning the spirit: I will pour out of my spirit upon 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. Long ago we vindicated the twofold power of the Creator, both as judge and as good; the letter killing through the Law, and the spirit giving life through the Gospel. These things cannot make two gods, since, though diverse, they have come to be reckoned together in one. He also mentions the veil of Moses, with which he covered his face, which was too bright to be gazed upon by the children of Israel.

If this was done in order to commend the greater glory of the New Testament, which abides in glory, over the old, which was to be done away; this also agrees with my faith, which sets the Gospel above the Law. And see whether it agrees more with mine. For there will be something placed over only where there is also that over which it is placed. But when he says: But their minds were blunted; not of the Creator, certainly, but of the people who are in the world. For he speaks of Israel: Even unto this day the same veil remaineth upon their heart. He shows that the veil upon Moses' face was a figure of the veil upon the heart of the people, because even now Moses is not perceived among them in heart, just as he was not then perceived in face. What then is still veiled in Moses that pertains to Paul, if Christ, foretold by Moses as the Creator's, has not yet come?

How are the hearts of the Jews already noted as covered and still veiled, when the predictions of Moses—that is, concerning Christ, in whom they ought to understand him—have not yet been fulfilled? What concern is it to the apostle of another Christ, if the Jews did not understand the mysteries of their own God, unless because the veil upon their heart, by which they had not perceived Christ, pertained to Moses? Finally, what follows: But when he shall have turned to God, the veil shall be taken away; this he says properly of the Jew, with whom the veil of Moses also resides: who, when he shall have passed over into faith in Christ, understands that Moses preached of Christ. Otherwise, how shall the veil of the Creator be taken away in the Christ of another God, whose mysteries the Creator could not have veiled—since, being unknown, his mysteries were unknown?

He says therefore that we, with unveiled face—that is, of the heart, which is veiled in the Jews—beholding Christ, are transformed by the same image from glory (namely, that glory by which Moses also was transformed from the glory of the Lord) into glory: thus setting forth the bodily illumination of Moses from his meeting with the Lord, and the bodily veil from the weakness of the people, and superinducing the spiritual brightness in Christ, as it were from the Lord, he says, of spirits, and testifies that the whole order of Moses was a figure of Christ, unknown among the Jews, but known among us. We know that certain meanings can suffer ambiguity, from the sound of pronunciation or from the manner of punctuation, when a double sense intervenes. This Marcion seized upon by reading thus: In whom the God of this age; so as to show the Creator as the God of this age, and to suggest another God of another age.

We on the contrary say that the punctuation should be thus: In whom is God; and then: the god of this age hath blinded the minds of the unbelievers; in whom—that is, in the unbelieving Jews—in whom the Gospel is still veiled to some under the veil of Moses. For to those people God had threatened, who honour him with their lips but whose heart is far from him: Hearing ye shall hear, and shall not hear; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not see; and: If ye will not believe, neither shall ye understand; and: I will take away the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. But these threats were not made with a view to concealing the Gospel of an unknown God. Thus, it is not the God of this age, but the god of the unbelievers of this age, who blinds the heart that has not of its own accord recognized his Christ from the Scriptures.

And having dealt thus far with the ambiguity of the punctuation, lest it should profit the adversary, content with the victory, I can indeed of my own accord pass over this whole contention with a simpler answer. It will readily be at hand to interpret the devil as the lord of this age, who said, as the prophet records: I will be like the Most High, I will set my throne in the clouds; just as also the whole superstition of this age is enslaved to him, who blinds the hearts of unbelievers, and first of all of the apostate Marcion. Finally, he did not see the clause of the sense that meets him: Because God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of him, in the person of Christ. Who said: Let there be light?

And concerning the illumination of the world, who said to Christ: I have set thee as a light to the nations, who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death? To whom the Spirit answers in the psalm, from the foreknowledge of the future: The light of thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us. Now the countenance of God is Christ the Lord. Whence also the apostle above: Who is the image, he says, of God. Therefore if Christ is the countenance of the Creator who said, Let there be light; then both Christ, and the Apostles, and the Gospel, and the veil, and Moses, and the whole series, according to the testimony of the clause, belong to the Creator, the God of this age—certainly not to him who never said: Let there be light. I pass over here also what concerns another Epistle, which we have inscribed to the Ephesians, but the heretics to the Laodiceans.

For he says that the nations should remember that at that time, when they were without Christ, they were aliens from Israel, without citizenship, and covenants, and hope of promise, and also without God in the world—even if as regards the Creator. Therefore if he said the nations were without God, but their god is the devil, not the Creator, it is plain that the lord of this age is to be understood as him whom the nations received as God, not the Creator whom they do not know. But how is it that the treasure in our earthen vessels is not held to belong to the same one whose vessels they also are? For if it is the glory of God that so great a treasure is held in earthen vessels; but the earthen vessels belong to the Creator; then the glory also belongs to the Creator, whose vessels contain the surpassing power of God, and that power itself. Because for this reason they were entrusted to earthen vessels, that his surpassing excellence might be proved.

Otherwise, the glory—and therefore also the power—will no longer belong to another God, but rather his disgrace and weakness, whose surpassing excellence earthen vessels, and those belonging to another, have contained. But if these are the earthen vessels in which he says we suffer so much, in which also we carry about the mortification of the Lord; God is sufficiently ungrateful and unjust, if he is not also going to raise up this substance, in which such great things are endured for faith in him, in which also the death of Christ is carried about, in which also the surpassing power is consecrated. But indeed he proposes: That the life also of Christ may be manifested in our body, even as the death of him is also carried about in the body of what life of Christ then does he speak? Of that by which we now live in him?

And how in what follows does he exhort us not to visible and temporal things, but to invisible and eternal things—that is, not to present but to future things? But if he speaks of the future life of Christ, saying it will appear in the body, he has manifestly proclaimed the resurrection of the flesh, saying that our outer man is indeed being corrupted—and not as though in eternal destruction after death, but through labours and hardships, of which he had spoken before—adding: And we faint not. For in saying also that our inner man is being renewed day by day, he here demonstrates both things: the corruption of the body from the vexation of temptations, and the renewal of the soul from the contemplation of promises.

Of our earthly dwelling: He does not say that we have an eternal house, not made with hands in the heavens, because that which is made with hands by the Creator perishes, wholly dissolved after death. For reviewing these things with a view to consoling the fear of death and the grief of dissolution itself, and making it yet more plain through what follows, when he adds: that we groan in this tabernacle of the earthly body, desiring to be clothed upon with that which is from heaven; since even if stripped we shall not be found naked; that is, we shall receive what we were stripped of, that is, the body. And again: For we who are in this tabernacle of the body do groan, being burdened, not wishing to be unclothed, but clothed upon. For there he expressed what in the first Epistle he touched briefly: And the dead shall rise incorruptible, those who have already died; and we shall be changed, who shall have been found in the flesh by God.

For those too shall rise incorruptible, having received the body again, and indeed whole, so that they may also be incorruptible in this respect: and these, on account of the last moment of time, and on account of the merits of the afflictions of Antichrist, shall attain a shortcut past death; but being changed they shall follow, clothed upon rather with that which is from heaven, than stripped of the body. So if these shall put on over the body that heavenly thing, surely the dead also shall receive the body, over which they too may put on incorruption from heaven: because he also says of them: This corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. Those put it on when they shall have received the body; these put it on over, because they shall not have lost the body.

And therefore he did not say without purpose: Not wishing to be unclothed of the body, but clothed upon; that is, not wishing to experience death, but to be anticipated by life; so that this mortal may be swallowed up by life, while it is snatched from death through the over-garment of transformation. Therefore because he shows this to be better, lest we be grieved if perchance death should come first, he says that we have the earnest of the Spirit from God, as though pledged to the same hope of the over-garment, and that we are absent from the Lord as long as we are in the flesh, and that therefore we ought to count it good rather to be absent from the body and to be with the Lord, so that we may also willingly receive death. And so, he says that we must all appear before the tribunal of Christ, so that each one may receive what he has done through the body, whether good or evil.

For if the recompense of merits is then, how shall some already be reckoned with God? Moreover, by naming a tribunal and the reckoning of good and evil work, he showed him to be the judge of both sentences, and confirmed the presentation of all bodies. For that which has been committed through the body cannot but be avenged through the body. For God would be unjust, if one were not punished or rewarded through that by which he has acted. If therefore any condition is new in Christ, the rest have passed away; behold, all things are made new, the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled. If he also commands that we cleanse ourselves from the defilement of flesh and blood, not that substance can inherit the kingdom of God; if he also destines a holy virgin Church to be presented to Christ, surely as a bride to a bridegroom; an image cannot be joined to the enemy of the truth of the thing itself.

If he also calls false apostles deceitful workers, transformers of themselves, he charges them with hypocrisy in their manner of life, not with adulterating their preaching; so the dispute was about discipline, not about divinity. If Satan transforms himself into an angel of light, this cannot be directed against the Creator. For God, not an angel, is the Creator; he would have been said to transform himself into the God of light, not into an angel, if he did not mean by him that Satan whom both we and Marcion know as an angel. Concerning paradise, his style is his own for every question he suffers. Here I shall perhaps wonder, if a God who has no earthly arrangement of any kind could have had a paradise of his own, unless he also used the Creator's paradise on loan, just as he did the world. And yet to take a man up to the heaven of the Creator is exemplified in Elijah.

But I shall wonder far more that the most good Lord applied to his Apostle, for his chastisement, an angel of Satan belonging to another—not even his own, but the Creator's—and when besought three times by him did not grant it. Therefore the god of Marcion also corrects after the manner of the Creator, emulating him who casts down the proud, as one who brings down rulers from their throne. Or is he not the same one who also gave Satan power over the body of Job, so that virtue might be proved in weakness? Why does the chastiser of the Galatians still maintain the form of the Law, prescribing that every word shall stand in three witnesses? Why does the preacher of the most gentle God threaten that he will not spare sinners? Nay, he even affirms that the very power of acting more harshly in person was given to him by the Lord. Deny now, heretic, that your God is feared, whose Apostle was feared.

As the little work is being brought to a close, those things which recur must now be briefly reviewed; but certain things which have recurred too often must be passed over. I am weary of contending about the Law again, having so often proved that its concession furnishes no argument for a different God, since it was proclaimed in Christ and promised toward Christ in the Creator, inasmuch as the Apostle himself also seems greatly to exclude the law. But we have also already shown many times that God is presented as judge by the Apostle, and as avenger in the judge, and as creator in the avenger.

And so here too, when he says: For I am not ashamed of the Gospel; for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth, to the Jew and to the Greek, because the righteousness of God is revealed therein, from faith to faith; without doubt he attributes both the Gospel and salvation to the just God, not to the good, so to speak, according to the heretic's distinction, transferring from the faith of the Law to the faith of the Gospel; of his own Law, that is, and of his own Gospel. Since he also says that wrath is revealed from heaven against the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness. Whose God's wrath? Surely the Creator's. Therefore the truth also will belong to him whose wrath it is, which wrath is to be revealed in vengeance of the truth.

Adding also: But we know that the judgment of God is according to truth; he both proved the wrath itself, from which comes judgment on behalf of truth, and confirmed again the truth of that same God whose wrath he proved by proving the judgment. It is another matter if the Creator in his wrath avenges the truth of another God held in unrighteousness. But how many pits Marcion has dug in this Epistle above all, by removing what he wished, will be apparent from the integrity of our own text. It is enough for me to take up those things which he did not see fit to erase, as his oversights and blindnesses, so to speak.

For if God shall judge the secret things of men, both of those who have sinned in the law and of those who are without the law, because these too are ignorant of the law and yet by nature do the things of the law; surely that God shall judge whose are both the law and that very nature which stands in place of the law for those ignorant of the law. But how shall he judge? According to the Gospel, he says, through Christ. Therefore both the Gospel and Christ belong to him whose are also the law and nature, which shall be vindicated through the Gospel and Christ, and so by that judgment of God which is also above, according to truth.

Therefore, as wrath is revealed from heaven to defend it, it can only be from the God of wrath; so also this sense, cohering with the former, in which the judgment of the Creator is declared, cannot be referred to another God, who neither judges nor is wrathful; but to him whose these things are—I mean judgment and wrath—those things also must necessarily be his through whom these are to be transacted, the Gospel and Christ, and therefore he bears down upon transgressors of the Law, who teach not to steal and yet steal, as a man of God's law, not touching the Creator himself in these ways, who, while forbidding stealing, commanded fraud against the Egyptians in gold and silver, just as they twist the other things against him. Of course the Apostle feared to make open reproach against God, from whom he did not fear to have departed? So thoroughly had he attacked the Jews that he hurled at them the prophetic rebuke: Because of you the name of God is blasphemed.

How perverse, then, that he himself should blaspheme him, for whose blasphemy he reproaches the wicked as the cause! He also sets the circumcision of the heart above the uncircumcision: before the God of the Law, the circumcision of the heart is made, not of the flesh; in spirit, not in letter. But if this is the circumcision of Jeremiah: Circumcise the foreskins of your heart, as also of Moses: Circumcise the hardness of your heart; the spirit that circumcises the heart will belong to him whose letter also reaps the flesh of it; and the Jew who is one inwardly will belong to him whose is also the Jew who is one outwardly; because the Apostle would not even wish to name a Jew, if he were 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? Did your God serve the arrangement of the Creator, giving him time and his Law: or is it then his whose it is also now?

His the law, whose also the faith. The distinction of Christ is of dispensations, not of gods. He admonishes those justified by faith in Christ, not by the law, to have peace toward God. Toward which God? Him of whom we were nowhere enemies, or him against whose law and nature we rebelled? For if peace is fitting with him with whom there was war, we shall also be justified by him, and Christ will belong to him by faith in whom we are justified, to whose peace it is fitting that his enemies should at some time be brought back. But the law, he says, entered in alongside, that the offence might abound. Why? That grace might superabound, he says. Whose God's grace, if not his whose also is the law?

Unless the Creator inserted the law to manage the business of the grace of another God, and indeed a rival—not to say an unknown one—so that just as sin had reigned in death through him, so also grace might reign in righteousness unto life through Jesus Christ, his adversary. For this reason, the law of the Creator had shut up all things under sin, and had brought the whole world into guilt, and had stopped every mouth, lest anyone should glory through it; so that grace might be preserved for the glory of Christ—not of the Creator, but of Marcion's god. I am able here also to lay a foundation concerning the substance of Christ, from the prospect of the question that follows. For he says that we are dead to the Law. Therefore the body of Christ; and the body can be contended for, not immediately the flesh.

But also whatever the substance may be, when he names the body of him whom he subjoins as having risen from the dead, no other body can be understood than that of flesh, against which the law of death was pronounced. But behold, he also bears witness to the law, and excuses it on the ground of sin. What then shall we say? That the law is sin? God forbid. Blush, Marcion. God forbid. The Apostle abhors the accusation of the law. But I did not know sin except through the law. O the highest commendation of the law from this, through which it was clear that sin lay hidden! Therefore the law did not seduce, but sin through the occasion of the commandment. Why do you impute to the God of the Law what the Apostle does not dare to impute to his Law? Nay, he even heaps up praise: The law is holy, and its commandment just and good.

If he venerates the law of the Creator in such terms, I do not know how he can destroy the Creator himself. Who distinguishes two gods, one just and another good; when he ought to be believed to be both: he whose commandment is both good and just? But if he also confirms the law as spiritual, then also the prophetic, then also the figurative. For I ought also from this to establish that Christ was proclaimed in the law in a figurative manner, whereby he could not even be recognized by all the Jews.

If the Father sent him in the likeness of sinful flesh, the flesh which was seen in him will not on that account be called a phantom. For he ascribed sin to the flesh above, and made it the law of sin dwelling in its members and opposing the law of the mind. For this reason therefore the Son was sent in the likeness of sinful flesh, that he might redeem the flesh of sin by a like substance, that is, a fleshly one, which would be like to sinful flesh, while not being sinful itself; for this also will be the power of God, to accomplish salvation in a substance equal to it.

For it would not be a great thing if the Spirit of God were to heal flesh; but it is great if flesh similar to sinful flesh, while being flesh, yet is not flesh of sin. Thus the likeness will pertain to the designation of sin, not to a falsehood about substance. For he would not have added "of sin" if he had wished a likeness of substance to be understood, so as to deny the reality. For he would have put only "flesh," not also "of sin." But since he then so constructed it—"flesh of sin"—he both confirmed the substance, that is, the flesh, and referred the likeness to the fault of the substance, that is, to sin. Suppose now that a likeness of substance is meant: the truth of the substance is not thereby denied. Why then is it similar yet real? Because it is real indeed, but not from seed; similar in condition, but real in origin, not truly dissimilar. Otherwise, there is no likeness in contraries.

A spirit would not be called a likeness of flesh, because neither could flesh take on a likeness of spirit; but it would be called a phantom, if what was not appeared to be. But likeness is spoken of when that which appears to be, is. For it is, inasmuch as it is the equal of another. But a phantom, in that it is only this, is not a likeness. And here the same Apostle, explaining how he does not wish us to be in the flesh, though we are in the flesh—namely, that we should not be in the works of the flesh—shows by this reasoning that he wrote: Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; condemning not the substance, but its works: which, because they can be not admitted by us while we are still placed in the flesh, will pertain not to the guilt of the substance, but to conduct.

Likewise, if the body indeed is dead on account of sin (so much so that it is the death not of the soul but of the body), but the spirit is life on account of righteousness; then life on account of righteousness will certainly come to that to which death came on account of sin, that is, to the body. For nothing is restored to anyone except what that same one has lost; and so there will be a resurrection of the dead, inasmuch as there is a resurrection of bodies. For he also adds: He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies. So he confirmed also the resurrection of the flesh, without which neither can anything else be called a body, nor can anything else be understood as mortal, and he proved the bodily substance of Christ. For indeed our mortal bodies also will be given life in the same manner as he was raised—not otherwise in the same manner, except because it was in a body.

I leap over here also a very wide chasm of Scripture cut away; but I take hold of 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, being ignorant of God, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, they did not submit themselves to the righteousness of God. For the end of the law is Christ unto righteousness for everyone who believes. Here will be the heretic's argument, as though the Jews were ignorant of the superior God, against whom they established their own righteousness, that is, of their own law, not receiving Christ as the end of the law.

Why then does he also bear witness to their zeal toward their own God, if he does not also reproach them with ignorance toward that same God?—that they were indeed moved by zeal for God, but not according to knowledge; being ignorant of him, that is, while they are ignorant of his dispensations in Christ who was to establish the completion of the law, and so they defend their own righteousness against him. And indeed the Creator himself also attests their ignorance toward himself: Israel has not known me, and my people has not understood me; and that they would rather establish their own righteousness, teaching doctrines that are the commandments of men, and moreover that they had gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ, out of ignorance, of course. Nothing therefore can be expounded as referring to another God which fits the Creator, because otherwise the Apostle would have unjustly reproached the Jews for ignorance toward an unknown God.

For what wrong had they committed, if they established the righteousness of their own God against him whom they did not know? And yet he exclaims: O the depth of the riches and wisdom of God, and his ways are unsearchable! Whence that outburst? From the recollection, of course, of the Scriptures which he had been reviewing, from the contemplation of the mysteries which he had been discussing above concerning faith in Christ coming from the law. If Marcion did not deliberately erase these things, what is his apostle exclaiming about, beholding no riches of a God so poor and needy as one who created nothing, proclaimed nothing, and finally had nothing, as one who descended into what belonged to another? But indeed the Creator had long ago promised that his wealth and riches, hidden until now, would be unsealed: And I will give them hidden treasures, I will open to them invisible things. From that, therefore, the exclamation was made: O the depth of the riches and wisdom of God! Whose treasures were now laid open.

That is from Isaiah, and what follows is from the instrument of the same prophet: For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counsellor? Who has first given to him, and it shall be repaid to him? You who have taken away so much from the Scriptures, why have you preserved these things, as though they too were not the Creator's? Let us plainly see the precepts of the new God. Hating evil, he says, and cleaving to good. But it is otherwise with the Creator: Put away evil from among you, and decline from evil and do good. With brotherly love, affectionate toward one another. For is not this the same as: You shall love your neighbour as yourself? Rejoicing in hope—of God, of course: For it is good to hope in the Lord, rather than to hope in princes. Enduring tribulation: For the Lord will hear you in the day of tribulation.

You have the Psalm. Bless, and curse not; who will teach this, except he who seasoned all things with blessings? Not minding high things, but consenting to the lowly, be not wise in your own conceits; for they hear Woe through Isaiah. Render to no man evil for evil; and: Remember not the wickedness of your brother. Neither avenging yourselves: For vengeance is mine, and I will repay, says the Lord. Have peace with all men; therefore even the legal retaliation did not permit the repayment of injury, but suppressed the initiation of it through fear of repayment. Rightly therefore he summed up the whole discipline of the Creator in his principal precept: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. If this supplement of the Law is from the Law itself, I no longer know who is the God of the Law (I fear it may be Marcion's god); but if the Gospel of Christ is fulfilled by this precept, and yet it is not Christ's but the Creator's, where are we now contending?

Did Christ say, or did he not: I came not to destroy the law, but to fulfil it? In vain has the Pontic laboured to deny that saying. If the Gospel did not fulfil the Law, behold, the Law has fulfilled the Gospel. It is well moreover that in the closing passage he threatens the tribunal of Christ—of Christ who is certainly judge and avenger, certainly the Creator's—constituting him certainly as one to be propitiated, whom he holds out as one to be feared, even if he were preaching another.

It will not be irksome to attend also to the shorter Epistles: there is savour even in a few things. The Jews had killed their own prophets. I can say: What has that to do with the apostle of another God, and indeed the best God, who is said not even to condemn the sins of his own people, and who himself also in some manner slays those same prophets by destroying them? For what wrong had Israel committed against him, if it killed those whom he also repudiated? If he first pronounced a hostile sentence against them? But they sinned against their own God. He reproached the iniquity, to whom the injured party belongs; certainly anyone rather than the adversary of the injured party. But he would not have burdened them by imputing also the murder of the Lord—saying both that they killed the Lord and their own prophets—if the addition of "their own" is the heretic's.

For what is so harsh, if they killed Christ, the preacher of another God, who had slaughtered the prophets of their own God? But the force of the amplification is that they had slain both the Lord and his servants. Finally, if they killed the Christ of one God and the prophets of another, he equated the impieties, he did not amplify them. But they ought not to have been equated; therefore they could not have been amplified, unless committed against the same Lord, under both titles. Therefore Christ and the prophets belong to the same God. Moreover, what holiness he calls the will of God, you would recognise from the contraries which he forbids. To abstain, he says, from fornication, not from marriage. That each one should know how to possess his own vessel in honour. How? While not in lust, as the Gentiles; but lust is not attributed even among the Gentiles to marriage, but to extraordinary and unnatural and monstrous things.

Holiness is contrary also to luxury and to filthiness and uncleanness, which excludes not marriage but lust; which treats our vessel in the honour of marriage. This passage, however, I would treat with the preference of another, that is, of a fuller holiness being maintained, placing continence and virginity before marriage, but not forbidding it; for I am refuting destroyers of God's institution of marriage, not pursuers of chastity. He says that those who remain until the coming of Christ, together with those who have died in Christ and will rise first, will be caught up in the clouds into the air to meet the Lord. I recognise that the heavenly substances, foreseeing these things even then, marvel at Jerusalem herself which is above, and proclaim through Isaiah: Who are these that fly here as clouds, and as doves with their young to me? If Christ has prepared this ascent for us, he will be that Christ of whom Hosea speaks: Who builds his ascent into the heavens—for himself and his own, of course.

From that point, from whom shall I now hope, except from him from whom I heard these things? What spirit does he forbid to be quenched? And what prophecies does he forbid to be held as nothing? Certainly not the spirit of the Creator, nor the prophecies of the Creator, according to Marcion; for what he destroyed, he himself has already quenched, and made nothing, nor can he forbid what he has made nothing. Therefore it falls to Marcion to exhibit today in his church the spirit of his god which is not to be quenched, and prophecies which are not to be held as nothing. And if he has exhibited what he thinks, let him know that we will challenge whatever that is to the standard of spiritual and prophetic grace and power, so that it both foretells future things, and reveals the hidden things of hearts, and expounds mysteries. When he has brought forward and proved nothing of the sort, we will bring forward both the spirit and the prophecies of the Creator, proclaiming according to him.

And so it will be established that the Apostle spoke of those things of which he spoke, namely of those which were to come in the church of that God whose spirit, while he exists, also works, and whose promise is celebrated. Come now, you who deny the salvation of the flesh, and whenever the body is designated in such terms, interpret it as something other than the substance of flesh—I know not what; how did the Apostle distinguish all things in new substances by definite names, and place all in one wish of salvation, praying that our spirit and body and soul may be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord and Saviour Christ?

For he placed both soul and body, as two things as well as different ones: for although the soul also has a body of its own quality, as does the spirit too; yet when both body and soul are named distinctly, the soul has its own proper name, not needing the common name of body; that is left to the flesh, which, not being named by its own name, must use the common one. For indeed I see no other substance in man after spirit and soul, to which the name of body could be fitted, except flesh. Understanding this so many times under the name of body, whenever it is not named by its own name; much more here, when what is called body is called by its own name.

We are compelled to repeat certain things again and again, so as to confirm what coheres with them. We say that the Lord is here also set forth by the Apostle as the recompenser of each man's desert—either the Creator, or (what Marcion would not wish) the equal of the Creator—in whose sight it is just that affliction be repaid to those who afflict us, and rest to us who are afflicted, 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 erasing flame and fire, extinguished them, lest he should make him our God, of course. Yet the vanity of the erasure shines through.

For since the Apostle writes that the Lord is coming to exact vengeance upon those who know not God and who obey not the Gospel—whom he says will suffer destruction, eternal, from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might—it follows that he introduces a flame of fire, coming, that is, to punish; and so in this also, 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 upon those who are ignorant of the Lord, that is, upon the heathen. For he set apart separately those who obey not the Gospel, whether Christian sinners or Jews. But to exact punishment from the heathen, who perhaps know not the Gospel, is not the act of that God who is by nature unknown, and who has been revealed nowhere except in the Gospel, and is not knowable by all.

To the Creator, however, even natural recognition is owed, through understanding him from his works, and thence seeking fuller knowledge of him. It belongs therefore to him also to punish those who are ignorant of God, whom it is not lawful to be ignorant of. The very fact that he says: From the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might—using the words of Isaiah—by that very cause savours of the same Lord rising up to crush the earth. But who is the man of sin, the son of perdition, who must first be revealed before the coming of the Lord, exalting himself above everything that is called God and above all religion; who is to seat himself in the temple of God and boast himself to be God?

According to us, the Antichrist, as both the old and new prophecies teach; as the apostle John, who already says that antichrists have gone out into the world—spirits that are forerunners of Antichrist—denying that Christ has come in the flesh, and dissolving Jesus, namely in God the Creator. But according to Marcion, I know not, lest he be the Christ of the Creator: for he has not yet come, in Marcion's view. Whoever he may be of the two, I ask, why does he come in all power and signs and lying wonders? Because, he says, they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved; and for this cause there shall be sent to them an impulse of delusion, that all may be judged who believed not the truth but consented to iniquity.

If therefore the Antichrist belongs to the Creator, God will be the Creator, who sends him to drive into error those who believed not the truth that they might be saved; the truth and salvation will belong to the same one who takes vengeance by means of the delusion he sends—that is, the Creator's—to whom also that very jealousy befits, of deceiving by error those whom he did not capture by truth. But if he is not the Antichrist according to us, then he is the Christ of the Creator according to Marcion. And what sort of thing will it be that, to avenge his own truth, he should subject Christ to the Creator? But also if he agrees about the Antichrist, I would likewise say: what sort of thing is it that Satan, the angel of the Creator, should be necessary to him, and should be slain by him, having the function of working delusion for the Creator?

In sum, if it is beyond doubt that both the angel and the truth and the salvation belong to him whose also is the wrath and the jealousy and the sending of delusion against despisers and deserters, and even against the ignorant (so that now even Marcion must yield ground, conceding that God too is a jealous God)—who will more worthily be wrathful? I think, he who from the beginning of things prepared nature by works, benefits, plagues, proclamations, witnesses for the recognition of himself, and yet was not recognized; or he who was brought forth once by the single instrument of the Gospel, and that an uncertain one, not openly proclaiming another God? Thus to whom vengeance belongs, to him also will belong the matter of vengeance: I mean the Gospel, and truth, and salvation. Moreover, to command that he who wishes to eat should work, belongs to the discipline of him who commanded that the ox treading out the grain should have its mouth free.

By the truth of the Church we hold that this Epistle was sent to the Ephesians, not to the Laodiceans; but Marcion was eager to tamper with its title at some point, as though he were in this matter too a most diligent investigator. Nothing, however, depends on the titles, since the Apostle wrote to all when he wrote to some; certainly, however, he preaches in it that God in Christ to whom the things that are preached belong.

To whom, then, will they belong—according to the notion of the good which he proposed in the mystery of his will, in the dispensation of the fullness of times (to put it as that word sounds in Greek) to recapitulate (that is, to bring back to the beginning, or to review from the beginning) all things in Christ, both those in the heavens and those on the earth—except to him whose are all things from the beginning, and the very beginning itself, from which also the times and the fullnesses of times, the dispensation on account of which all things are reviewed from the beginning in Christ? But for another God, what beginning—that is, whence—whose work is nothing? What times without a beginning? What fullness without times? What dispensation without a fullness? And finally, what has he done on earth hitherto, that any long dispensation of times to be fulfilled should be reckoned, for reviewing all things in Christ, even those in the heavens?

Nor shall we suppose that the things in the heavens, whatever they are, were accomplished by another than by him by whom also those on earth were accomplished—as is agreed by all. But if it does not admit of all these things being assigned from the beginning to any other than the Creator, who will believe that they are reviewed in Christ by another, and not by their own author, and in his own Christ? If they belong to the Creator, they must needs be different from a different God. If different, certainly contrary. How then are contrary things reviewed in him by whom they are ultimately destroyed? For the following words also—to whom do they point as Christ, when he says: That we should be to the praise of his glory, we who have pre-hoped in Christ? For who could have pre-hoped—that is, hoped beforehand in God before he came—except the Jews, to whom Christ was foretold from the beginning? He therefore who was foretold was also pre-hoped.

And so he refers this to himself, that is, to the Jews, and then, turning to the nations, makes a distinction: In whom also ye, when ye had heard the word of truth, the Gospel, in whom ye believed, and were sealed with the Holy Spirit of his promise. Of whose promise? That made through Joel: In the last days I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh; that is, upon the nations also. Thus both the Spirit and the Gospel will be in that Christ who was pre-hoped, while he was being proclaimed. But also the Father of glory is he whose Christ is sung as king of glory in the Psalm of his ascension: Who is this king of glory? The Lord of hosts, he is the king of glory. From him the spirit of wisdom is sought, with whom also this species of spirits is enumerated among the seven spirits through Isaiah.

He will give the enlightened eyes of the heart, who also enriched the outward eyes with light, to whom the blindness of the people is displeasing: And who is blind, but my servants? And: The servants of God have been blinded. With him also are the riches of the inheritance in the saints, who promised that inheritance from the calling of the nations: Ask of me, and I will give thee the nations for thine inheritance. He wrought in Christ his power, by raising him from the dead, and setting him at his own right hand, and subjecting all things—he who also said: Sit at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool. Because also elsewhere the Spirit says to the Father concerning the Son: Thou hast put all things under his feet. If from these things another god and another christ are inferred—things which are recognized in the Creator—let us now seek the Creator.

I think we plainly find him, when he says: Those dead in trespasses, 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 disobedience. But Marcion cannot here either interpret the world as meaning the God of the world. For the created is not like the creator, the made like the maker, the world like God. Nor will he who is prince of the power of the ages be called prince of the power of the air. For a ruler of higher things is never characterized by lower things, even though the lower things too are assigned to him. Nor can he be seen as the worker of unbelief, which he himself rather suffers from Jews and from nations. It suffices therefore if these things do not fall upon the Creator. But if there is also one to whom they more fittingly belong, the Apostle certainly knew this better. Who is he?

Without doubt he who obstructs the sons of disobedience against the Creator himself, having gained possession of this air, as the prophet reports him to say: I will set my throne in the clouds, I will be like the Most High. This will be the devil, whom we shall also recognize elsewhere (if they will have the Apostle read so) as the god of this age. For he has filled the whole age with the lie of divinity. Who plainly, if he had not existed, then these things could have pointed to the Creator. But also the Apostle, having lived in Judaism—not because he inserted something about the lusts in which we all also lived—does not thereby present the Creator as the lord of sins and the prince of this air; but because in Judaism he had been one of the sons of disobedience, having the devil as his worker, when he was persecuting the Church and Christ of the Creator. On account of which, he says, we also were children of wrath, but by nature.

Lest, because the Creator called the Jews sons, the heretic should argue that the Creator is the lord of wrath. For when he says: We were by nature children of wrath—but the Jews are not by nature children of the Creator, but by the adoption of the fathers—he referred the sons of wrath to nature, not to the Creator. In conclusion, adding: As also the rest; who certainly are not sons of God. It is apparent that he attributes to the common nature of all men both sins and the lusts of the flesh, and unbelief, and wrath, with the devil nevertheless capturing nature, which he himself had already infected by introducing the seed of sin: We are, he says, his workmanship, created in Christ. For it is one thing to make, another to create. But he gave both to one. Now man is the workmanship of the Creator. The same one therefore who made him also created him in Christ. For as regards substance, he made; as regards grace, he created.

Consider also what follows: Remembering that ye were once nations in the flesh, called uncircumcision by that which is called circumcision in the flesh made by hand, that ye were at that time without Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants and their promise, having no hope, and without God in the world. Without which God, then, were the nations, and without which Christ? Surely that one whose was the commonwealth of Israel, and the covenants, and the promise. But now, he says, in Christ, ye who were far off are made nigh by his blood. From what were they formerly far off? From those things which he said above: from the Christ of the Creator, from the commonwealth of Israel, from the covenants, from the hope of the promise, from God himself. If these things are so, then to these things the nations are now made nigh in Christ, from which they had then been far off.

But if we have been made near in Christ to the fellowship of Israel, which is in the religion of God the Creator, and to the covenants, and to the promise, and to their very God, it is quite absurd if the Christ of another God has brought us near to the Creator from a distance. The Apostle had remembered that it was thus foretold concerning the calling of the nations, who were to be called from afar: They who were far from me have drawn near to my righteousness. For both righteousness and peace of the Creator were being proclaimed in Christ, as we have already shown many times. And so, he says, he himself is our peace, who made two one—namely the Jewish people and the Gentile, that which is near and that which is far—having dissolved the middle wall of enmity in his flesh. But Marcion removed his own words, so as to give the flesh to enmity, as though to a fleshly fault, not to Christ who contended against it.

As I have said elsewhere, so also here—not to a Marrucinian, but to a Pontic, whose blood you confessed above—here you deny the flesh. If he made the law of commandments void by its decrees, by fulfilling the law certainly (for now Thou shalt not commit adultery is void, since it is said: Nor shalt thou look with desire; now Thou shalt not kill is void, since it is said: Nor shalt thou curse)—you cannot make an adversary of the law out of one who fulfils it. That he might create the two in himself; he who had made them, the same one creating, in accordance with what was said above also: For we are his workmanship, created in Christ. Making peace into one new man. If truly new, truly also a man, not a phantom.

New moreover, and newly born of a virgin, by the Spirit of God: that he might reconcile both to God; and to God, whom both peoples had offended, both the Jewish and the Gentile; In one body, he says, having slain the enmity in it through the cross. So here too the flesh is the body in Christ, which was able to suffer the cross. And so, with him proclaiming peace to those who are near and to those who are far, having obtained access together to the Father, we are no longer strangers nor sojourners, but fellow-citizens of the saints, but members of the household of God—of that God, assuredly, from whom we showed above that we had been aliens and placed far off. Built upon the foundation of the apostles. The heretic removed also the words and of the prophets, forgetting that the Lord placed in the Church both apostles and prophets alike.

He feared, of course, lest our building in Christ should also rest upon the foundations of the ancient prophets; since the Apostle himself never ceases everywhere to build us up from the prophets. For whence did he take to call Christ the chief cornerstone, except from the meaning of the Psalm: The stone which the builders rejected, the same has become the head of the corner? I do not marvel if, from the hands of the heretic who cuts away, he subtracts syllables, when he commonly removes whole pages.

The Apostle says that grace was given to him, the least of all, to enlighten all; which is the dispensation of the mystery hidden from the ages in God, who created all things. The heretic seized upon it as a preposition, and caused it to be read thus: Hidden from the ages to God, who created all things. But the manifold wisdom of God shines forth. To whose principalities and powers in the heavenly places, through the Church, did that God wish to make known his wisdom, and not to himself?—since not even the powers without their own prince could have known anything. Or if for that reason he did not name God here, as though the prince himself were reckoned among them, then he would have declared the mystery hidden also from the principalities and powers of him who created all things, reckoning him likewise among them.

But if he says it was hidden from them, he ought to have said it was manifest to him; therefore it was not hidden from God, but in God the Creator of all things; yet hidden from the principalities and powers of him: For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counsellor? Here the heretic, caught, perhaps changed the text, so as to say that his God wished to make known to his own powers and principalities the dispensation of his mystery, which the God who created all things had not known. And how was it fitting to put forward the ignorance of the alien Creator, separated by a long distance, when even the domestics of the higher God had not known it? Yet even to the Creator it was known that it would come to pass. Was it not indeed known, what was to be revealed under heaven upon his earth? Therefore from this is confirmed what we built above.

For if the Creator was going to know at some point that hidden mystery of the higher God, and thus the Scripture had it: Hidden from God who created all things; it ought to have inferred thus: That the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to them, then also to the powers and principalities of whatever God, together with whom the Creator was going to know it. So it is established that what is thus also safe for its own truth has been removed. I wish now also myself to weave a controversy with you about the Apostle's allegories. What new forms would he have had in the prophets? He led captivity captive, he says. With what weapons? With what battles? From the devastation of what nation? From the overthrow of what city? What women, what children, what petty kings did he as victor put in chains?

For even when Christ is sung in David girded with a sword upon his thigh, or in Isaiah receiving the spoils of Samaria and the power of Damascus, truly when you also conceal a visible warrior; acknowledge therefore now both his armour and his spiritual warfare, if you have already learned that there is a spiritual captivity, so that you may acknowledge this also as his: or because the Apostle also took the mention of this captivity from the Prophets, from whom also the commandments were taken. Putting away lying, let each one speak truth to his neighbour. And be angry, and sin not, in the very words by which the Psalm would expound its meaning. Let not the sun go down upon your wrath. Have no fellowship with the works of darkness. For with the just you shall be just, and with the perverse you shall be perverted. And, Put away the evil from among you. And, Come out from among them, and touch not the unclean thing. Be separated, you who carry the vessels of the Lord.

So also, to be drunk with wine to dishonour comes from that place where those who make the saints drunk are rebuked: And you gave my saints wine to drink, which Aaron the priest and his sons were forbidden to drink when they approached the holy things. And to teach singing to God in psalms and hymns belongs to him who knew that those who drink wine with timbrels and psalteries were rebuked by God. Thus, whose precepts and seeds of precepts or enlargements of them I find, his apostle I acknowledge. Furthermore, that wives ought to be subject to their husbands—from what does he confirm this? Because, he says, the husband is the head of the wife. Tell me, Marcion, does your God attach authority to his own law from the work of the Creator? This is already plainly too little, since he also takes from it the standing of Christ himself and of his Church: Just as Christ also is the head of the Church.

Likewise also when he says: He who loves his wife loves his own flesh, just as Christ also loves the Church. You see your Christ and your Church being compared to the work of the Creator. How great an honour is given to the flesh in the name of the Church! No one, he says, hates his own flesh—except plainly Marcion alone—but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also the Church. But you alone have hated it, taking away from it the resurrection. You will have to hate the Church also, because it is likewise loved by Christ. But indeed Christ loved the flesh just as the Church. No one will fail to love also the image of his bride, nay he will even preserve it, and honour it, and crown it. The likeness has a share in the honour of the truth.

I will now labour to prove that the same God is the God of the male and of Christ, of the female and of the Church, of the flesh and of the spirit; with the Apostle himself applying the sentence of the Creator, nay even expounding it: For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and the two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery. It suffices among these things, if the mysteries of the Creator are great in the Apostle's eyes, and trivial in the eyes of the heretics. But I, he says, speak in reference to Christ and the Church. It has an interpretation, not a separation of the mystery. He shows the figure of the mystery to have been pre-administered by him whose mystery it assuredly was. What does it seem to Marcion? The Creator could not pre-administer figures for an unknown God; especially because for an adversary.

If for a known one, the higher God ought not to have borrowed anything from the lower, and rather for the purpose of destroying. Let children also obey their parents. For even if Marcion removed the words, This is the first commandment with a promise. The Law speaks: Honour thy father and mother. And: Parents, bring up your children in the discipline and correction of the Lord. For you have heard it said also to the ancients: You shall tell these things in the ears of your children, and your children likewise in the ears of their children. Why then do I need two Gods for me now, if the discipline is one? And if there are two, I will follow him who taught first. But if our wrestling is against the world-rulers, O how many creator-Gods there are already! For why should I not also vindicate this—that one world-ruler ought to have been named, if it signified the Creator, whose would be the powers he set before?

Furthermore, since above he bids us put on the armour in which we stand against the wiles of the devil, he now shows that those things belong to the devil which he subjected to the devil—the powers and world-rulers of these darknesses—which we also assign to the devil. Or if the devil is the creator, who will be the devil in the creator's domain? Or as there are two Gods, so also two devils, and in the plural powers and world-rulers?

But how can the creator be both devil and God at the same time? Since the devil is not both God and devil at the same time. For either both are Gods, if both are now devils; or he who is God here is not also devil, just as neither is the devil God. The very name of devil—I ask from what accusation it fits the Creator? Perhaps he brought some charge against the intention of the higher God, in that he himself suffered from an archangel, and that a lying one—for he had not forbidden the tasting of that little tree for the reason that they might become Gods, but lest they should die through transgression. Nor did the spiritual wickednesses therefore signify the Creator, because he added, in the heavens. For the Apostle also knew that spiritual wickednesses of angels who had gone astray with the daughters of men had operated in the heavens.

And what manner of thing would it be, that by ambiguities and certain enigmas he should censure the Creator—he who, already placed in chains on account of the freedom of his preaching, was there demanding from God the constancy of making the mystery manifest in the opening of his mouth, which he was providing for the Church?

I am accustomed in my prescription against all heresies to fix a summary from the testimony of times, vindicating our rule as prior to all heretical posterity. This the Apostle will now confirm, saying: Of the hope laid up in the heavens, which ye heard in the word of the truth of the Gospel, which came unto you, as also into all the world. For if even then the evangelical tradition had flowed everywhere, how much more now! Furthermore, if ours is that which has flowed everywhere, rather than any heretical one, much less that of Marcion of Antoninus's time, ours will be the apostolic one. But Marcion's, even though it has filled the whole world, will not even then be able to defend itself as apostolic. For it will likewise be established that that is apostolic which first filled the world, namely the Gospel of that God who also sang these things concerning its proclamations: Their sound is gone out into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world.

He says that Christ is the image of the invisible God. But we too call the Father of Christ invisible, knowing that the Son was always seen of old, by those to whom he appeared, in the name of God, as his image: lest anyone should from this point also cut a distinction between a visible and an invisible God, since the definition of our God has long been: No man shall see God, 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 in him all things were not created in the heavens and on the 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 Marcion was bound to dislike), the Apostle would certainly not have set down so baldly: And he is before all. For how before all, if not before all things?

How before all things, if not the firstborn of creation? If not the Word of the Creator? Whence will it be proved that he existed before all things, who appeared after all things? Who knows that he was prior, who does not know that he exists? How likewise did it please the Father that all fullness should dwell in him? For first, what is that fullness, if not from those things which Marcion has subtracted—things created in Christ, in the heavens and on the earth, angels and men—if not from those invisible and visible things? If not from thrones, and dominions, and principalities, and powers? Or if these things were introduced on their own account by our pseudo-apostles and Jewish evangelizers, and to the fullness of his God who created nothing—Marcion's God: otherwise, what manner of thing is it that he, the rival and destroyer of the Creator, should have wished the fullness of the Creator 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 they had offended by that very act, against whom they had rebelled through transgression, whose they had most recently been? For they could be conciliated to a stranger; but reconciled, only to their own. So also us, who were once alienated and enemies in mind through evil works, he restores to the favor of the Creator, whose offense we had incurred by worshipping the creation against the Creator. But wherever he also calls the Church the body of Christ, as here he says, That I fill up what remains of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh, for his body which is the Church; you are not therefore to transfer the mention of body entirely away from the substance of flesh.

For above also he says that we are reconciled in his body through death; assuredly in that body in which he was able to die through flesh; he died, not through the Church, plainly on account of the Church; exchanging body for body, the fleshly for the spiritual. But when he warns to beware of subtle speech and philosophy and vain seduction, which is after the elements of the world; not meaning heaven or earth, but secular letters; and after tradition, namely of subtle-speaking men and philosophers: it is indeed a long matter and the work of another treatise to show that by this sentence all heresies are condemned, because all consist in the powers of subtle speech and the rules of philosophy.

But let Marcion recognize the chief boundary of his faith from the school of Epicurus, introducing a Lord who is dull, so as not to say that he is to be feared, and placing matter alongside the God the Creator, from the porch of the Stoics: denying the resurrection of the flesh, with which likewise no philosophy agrees. From whose devices our truth is so far removed, that it does not even fear to provoke the wrath of God, and is confident that he brought forth all things from nothing, and promises that the same flesh will be restored, and is not ashamed that Christ was born from the womb of a virgin, while philosophers and heretics and even pagans laugh. For God chose the foolish things of the world, to confound the wise: that God, without doubt, who with regard to this his dispensation had forewarned that he would destroy the wisdom of the wise. By this simplicity of truth, contrary to subtle speech and philosophy, we are unable to think anything perverse.

Finally, if God quickens us together with Christ, forgiving us our offenses, we cannot believe that offenses are forgiven by him against whom they were not committed, as one previously unknown. Come now, when he says: Let no man therefore judge you in meat or in drink, or in respect of a feast day, or of a new moon, or of a sabbath, which are a shadow of things to come, but the body is Christ's; what seems right to you, Marcion? We are not now re-examining the Law, except that here too he teaches in what manner it has been set aside, namely while it is transferred from shadow to body, that is, from figures to truth, which is Christ. Therefore the shadow also belongs to him whose body it is; that is, both the Law is his, and Christ. Separate the Law to one God and Christ to another, if you can separate any shadow from that body whose shadow it is. Manifestly Christ belongs to the Law, if the body belongs to the shadow.

But when he also censures certain persons who, on the basis of angelic visions, said that one must abstain from foods—touch not, taste not—wishing to walk in humility of mind, not holding the Head; he is not on that account attacking the Law and Moses, as though Moses had established the prohibition of certain foods from angelic superstition. For it is established that Moses received the Law from God. Finally, this discipline, according to precepts, he says, and doctrines of men, he reckoned against those who did not hold the Head, that is, Christ himself; in whom all things are reviewed, recalled to their beginning in Christ, including also the indifference of foods.

As for the rest of the precepts, since they are the same, let it suffice to have shown elsewhere from what source they flowed from the Creator; who, when he proclaimed that old things would pass away, being about to make all things new, commanding also: Break up for yourselves new ground; was even then teaching to put off the old man and put on the new.

When he enumerates the variety of his preaching—that some, emboldened by his bonds, proclaimed the word more boldly; others through envy and contention; certain ones indeed also through regard for the word, very many out of love, some out of rivalry, and already some even out of ill-will preached Christ—there was certainly even here an opportunity for censuring the preaching itself on account of the diversity of opinion, which produced so great a variety even of minds. But setting forth only the causes of minds, not the rules of the sacraments, in the diversity, he nevertheless confirms one Christ and one God of his, proclaimed by whatever motive, and therefore says: It matters nothing to me, whether by pretense or by truth Christ is announced; because one Christ was announced, whether by pretense or by truth of faith.

For he referred the mention of truth to the faith of the preaching, not to the rule itself: because the rule was indeed one, but the faith of certain preachers was true, that is, simple, of certain others too learned. This being so, it is apparent that the Christ who was always proclaimed was the one preached. For if another were introduced far removed from the Apostle, the novelty of the matter would have produced a diversity. Nor would there have been lacking those who would nonetheless interpret the evangelical preaching as referring to the Christ of the Creator; since even today the greater part in all places holds our opinion rather than the heretical one: wherefore neither here would the Apostle have been silent about noting and rebuking the diversity. Thus since the diversity is not even censured, the novelty is not proved.

Plainly the Marcionites think that the Apostle here also supports them on the substance of Christ, that there was a phantom of flesh in Christ, when he says that he who was constituted in the form of God did not count it robbery to be equal with God; but emptied himself, having taken the form of a servant, not in reality; and in the likeness of man, not in man; and found in fashion as a man, not in substance, that is, not in flesh: as though form, and likeness, and fashion do not also belong to substance. But it is well that elsewhere too he calls Christ the image of the invisible God. Is he therefore also here placing him in the form of God? Equally Christ will not truly be God, if he was not truly man when constituted in the form of man. For in both cases truth will necessarily be shut out, if form and likeness and fashion are claimed for a phantom.

But if in the form and image in which he was proclaimed the true Son of the true Father God, he was also truly found to be man in the form and image of man, as the son of man—for he also set down found by reason, that is, most truly man: for what is found, is established to exist. So also God was found through power, as man through flesh; because he would not have pronounced him subject to death, if he were not constituted in mortal substance. Moreover, what he added is more: And the death of the cross. For he does not exaggerate the atrocity by extolling the virtue of the subjection, which he would have known to be imaginary through a phantom, having rather mocked it than experienced it; and not having exercised virtue in the passion, but in play.

But what things he had formerly counted as gain, which he also enumerates above—the glory of the flesh, the mark of circumcision, the reckoning of Hebrew descent from a Hebrew, the title of the tribe of Benjamin, the dignity of a blameless Pharisee—these he now counts as loss to himself, not God, but the astonishment of the Jews. These things he counts as dung, in comparison with the knowledge of Christ, not in rejection of God the Creator, having a righteousness no longer his own which is of the Law, but that which is through him, namely Christ, from God. Therefore, you say, by this distinction the Law was not from the God of Christ. Subtly enough. Receive therefore something more subtle. For when he says: Not that which is of the Law, but that which is through him; he would not have said, through him, of one other than whose the Law was. Our citizenship, he says, is in the heavens.

I recognize the old promise of the Creator to Abraham: And I will make thy seed as the stars of heaven. Therefore also star differs from star in glory. But if Christ at his coming from the heavens will transform the body of our humility, conformed to the body of his glory; this our body will therefore rise again, which is humbled in sufferings, and cast down to the earth in the very law of death. For how will he transform it, if there will be none? Or if this was said of those who at the coming of God will be found in the flesh and will be reckoned as having it, what will those do who 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 caught up together with them, assuredly also transformed together with them.

To this Epistle alone its brevity was of profit, so that it escaped the falsifying hands of Marcion. I marvel, however, that since he accepted letters written to a single man, he rejected the two to Timothy and the one to Titus, composed on the subject of ecclesiastical order. He aimed, I suppose, at adulterating even the number of the Epistles. Remember, reader, that the things which have been treated, we have also proved above concerning the Apostle: and if any things had been deferred to this work, we have dispatched them; lest you should either here think superfluous the repetition by which we confirmed the former hope, or there hold suspect the deferral by which we drew out these present matters. If you survey the whole little work, you will judge neither redundancy here nor diffidence there.