Marcion

Hypocrite, that you may prove yourself a Marcionite by starving — that is, a repudiator of the Creator (for this ought to have been affected among you in place of martyrdom, if the world displeased you) — into whatever matter you may dissolve, you use the substance of the Creator.

nonetheless, in teaching that they cannot be equal according to the form of the supreme great One, we have sufficiently confirmed that there cannot be two — although it is certain that Marcion sets up gods unequal:

But there is nothing among the people of Pontus so barbarous and so dismal as that Marcion was born there:

Only, I think it has been shown by us not obscurely that Marcion took the starting-points of his strange doctrines from Plato, both ungratefully and ignorantly.

Now if Plato himself and the Pythagoreans, like the followers of Marcion later, had supposed generation to be evil (though Plato was far from holding women to be common), still the Marcionites suppose nature to be evil, made of evil matter and by a just Demiurge.

Of those who are led by heresy, we have mentioned Marcion of Pontus, who, because of his opposition to the Demiurge, refuses the use of worldly things.

By these chapters alone, on which Marcion and Apelles think themselves chiefly equipped, interpreted according to the truth of the entire and uncorrupted gospel, there should have been enough to prove the human flesh in Christ through the defence of the birth.

" We have come, then, as the saying is, "from the lime-kiln into the charcoal-pit," from Marcion to Apelles, who, after he had been brought low in the flesh by a woman, lapsing from Marcion's discipline, and then was overturned in spirit by the virgin Philumene, took up from her the proclamation that Christ's body was solid, but without birth.

" Let Apelles, then, also hear what was already answered by us to Marcion in that little book in which we challenged his gospel — that the substance of this utterance must be considered.

And therefore, compelled to dispose of Christ in another way lest He be reckoned the Creator's, they first went astray about His very flesh, contending either that it is no true flesh at all (as Marcion and Basilides hold) or that it is of a peculiar quality (as the heresies of Valentinus and Apelles hold).

But with Marcion you will learn more fully whether this be the whole of God.

Marcion to be raised up for Valentinus?

Thence Marcion's better god, out of his tranquillity:

With Marcion?

Where then was Marcion, the shipmaster of Pontus, the student of the Stoics?

For since their heresy is, as it were, an offshoot of the Marcionists, who abhor marriage and turn away from wine, and say that the creation of God is defiled, we do not receive them into the Church unless they are baptized into our baptism.

when another god is set up against the Creator, as with Marcion, and the many gods of the followers of Valentinus and Prodicus — then there is an overthrow of the monarchy, when there is a destruction of the Creator.

For so Marcion too chose to believe Him a phantom, scorning the truth of His whole body in Him.

This will be the power of divine grace, more powerful assuredly than nature, having in us the free power of the will subject to itself, which is called ‘autexousion’;

He reprobates also those who command to abstain from foods—but out of the providence of the Holy Spirit, condemning beforehand the heretics who would enjoin a perpetual abstinence to destroy and despise the works of the Creator: