Book 4

The whole position and the whole apparatus of the impious and sacrilegious Marcion we now summon to his very own gospel, which by interpolating he made his own. And in order to furnish it with credit, he devised a sort of dowry for it, a work entitled Antitheses from the oppositions of contraries, and forced into a separation of law and gospel — by which, dividing two gods, accordingly diverse, the one of one instrument, or, what is more usual to say, of one testament, and the other of the other, he might thereafter give patronage to the gospel too, believed in according to the Antitheses. But these I would have struck down by a direct hand-to-hand engagement, that is, through each separate thrust of the man of Pontus, had they not been far more conveniently beaten back in the gospel itself and along with the gospel for whose sake they are contrived; although it is so easy to meet them with a preliminary objection — and indeed in such a way that I accept them, that I ratify them, that I say they work with us, so that they may the more blush for the blindness of their own author — that now the Antitheses are ours against Marcion. And indeed I confess that one order ran its course in the old arrangement with the Creator, another in the new with Christ. I do not deny that the evidences of utterance differ, the precepts of virtue, the disciplines of the law, provided only that the whole diversity converges upon one and the same God — him, namely, by whom it is established to have been 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, surely, and another word. In short, "He shall judge," he says, "among the nations, and shall convict a numerous people" — namely not of the single nation of the Jews, but of the nations, who through the new law of the gospel and the new word of the apostles are judged and convicted in themselves of their former error, as soon as they have believed, and thereupon "beat their swords into ploughshares, and their pikes" (which is a kind of hunting-spear) "into pruning-hooks" — that is, they convert their once fierce and savage spirits into upright senses and into workers of good fruit. And again: "Hear me, hear me, my people, and you kings, give ear to me; for a law shall go forth from me, and my judgement for a light of the nations" — by which he had judged and decreed that the nations too were to be illumined through the law and the word of the gospel. This will be the law also with David, "blameless," because perfect, "converting the soul" — surely from idols to God. This will be also the word concerning which the same Isaiah says: "For the Lord will make a shortened word upon the earth." For the new testament has been abridged and freed from the burdensome trappings of the law. But why say more, when novation is proclaimed by the Creator through the same prophet more plainly and more clearly than the light itself? "Remember not the former things, and consider not the things of old: the old things have passed away, new things arise: behold, I make new things, which shall now arise." Likewise through Jeremiah: "Make for yourselves a new freshness, and sow not among thorns, and be circumcised in the foreskin of your heart." And elsewhere: "Behold, the days shall come, says the Lord, and I will perfect for the house of Jacob and the house of Judah a new testament, not according to the testament which I arranged for their fathers in the day when I took hold of their arrangement to lead them out of the land of Egypt." So far does he signify the former testament to be temporary, while he shows it to be changeable, even while he promises an eternal one for the future. For through Isaiah, "Hear me and you shall live, and I will arrange for you an everlasting testament," adding "the holy and faithful things of David," that he might show that testament was to run its course in Christ. The same Christ, descended from the stock of David, according to the registration of Mary, he was also foretelling figuratively in the rod to come forth from the root of Jesse. Therefore, if he said that other laws and other words and new arrangements of the testaments were to come to be from the Creator — so that he even appointed other and preferable offices of the very sacrifices, and that indeed among the nations, Malachi saying, "I have no will in you, says the Lord, and your sacrifices I will not receive from your hands; for from the rising of the sun even to its setting my name is glorified among the nations, and in every place a sacrifice is offered to my name, even a clean sacrifice" — namely simple prayer from a pure conscience — it is of necessity that every change coming from innovation should incur a diversity with those things of which it is made, and a contrariety from the diversity. For just as nothing is changed which is not made diverse, so nothing is diverse which is not made contrary. Therefore the contrariety from diversity will be reckoned to belong to the same one whose was the change from innovation. He who arranged the change, the same instituted the diversity too; he who proclaimed the innovation, the same foretold the contrariety too. Why do you interpret the difference of things into a distance of powers? Why do you twist the Antitheses of examples against the Creator, which you can recognize even in his very feelings and affections? "I," he says, "will strike, and I will heal: I," he says, "will kill, and I will make alive" — making evil things, namely, and working peace; by which indeed you are wont to reproach him under the name even of mobility and inconstancy, as forbidding what he commands and commanding what he forbids. Why, then, did you not reckon the Antitheses too among the natural properties of a Creator always contrary to himself? You could not even have considered the world — unless I am mistaken, even among the Pontic peoples — except as built up out of diversities of mutually rival substances. First, then, you ought to have determined one god of light, another of darkness, that so you might be able to assert one of the law, another of the gospel. But it has been judged beforehand from manifest things, that of whom the works and characters are established through the Antitheses, of the same form are established his sacraments too.

You have now the answer we have made ready to the Antitheses. I pass now to the demonstration of the gospel — not, to be sure, a Jewish one, but a Pontic, and for the present adulterated — which is to furnish beforehand the order I am approaching. We lay it down first of all that the evangelic instrument has the apostles for its authors, on whom this charge of promulgating the gospel was imposed by the Lord himself. If it has also apostolic men, yet not them alone, but with the apostles and after the apostles — since the preaching of disciples might be made suspect of a passion for glory, if there did not stand by it the authority of their masters, nay of Christ, who made the apostles masters. In short, John and Matthew instil faith into us from the apostles, Luke and Mark renew it from the apostolic men — beginning from the same rules, so far as concerns the one God the Creator, and his Christ, born of a virgin, the supplement of the law and the prophets. For let it be his own concern if the arrangement of the narratives has varied, provided there is agreement on the head of the faith, on which there is no agreement with Marcion. On the contrary, Marcion ascribes to his gospel, namely, no author — as though it had not been lawful for him to fix on it a title too, for whom it was no wickedness to overturn the very body. And here I might already plant my foot, contending that a work is not to be acknowledged which does not raise its forehead, which presents no constancy, which promises no faith from the fullness of a title and the due profession of an author. But we prefer to engage at every point, nor do we conceal what can be understood from what is ours. For out of those compilers whom we have, Marcion seems to have chosen Luke as the one to mangle. Now Luke was not an apostle but an apostolic man, not a master but a disciple, certainly lesser than his master, surely as much later as the follower of a later apostle, of Paul without doubt — so that, even if Marcion had brought in his gospel under the very name of Paul, that single instrument, destitute of the patronage of predecessors, would not suffice for faith. For there would be demanded that gospel too which Paul found, to which he gave credence, with which he soon strove to make his own agree — seeing that for that very reason he went up to Jerusalem to become acquainted with the apostles and to consult them, lest perchance he had run in vain, that is, lest he should not have believed according to them and should not evangelize according to them. In short, when he conferred with the authors and agreed upon the rule of faith, they joined right hands, and thereupon distinguished their offices of preaching, that they should go to the Jews, Paul to the Jews and to the nations. Therefore if the very illuminator of Luke desired the authority of predecessors for his own faith and preaching, how much more shall I demand for Luke's gospel that authority which was necessary to the gospel of his master?

It is another matter if with Marcion the mystery of the Christian religion took its beginning from the discipleship of Luke. But if it ran its course also from of old, it surely had an authentic apparatus, through which it came down even to Luke, by whose attendant testimony Luke too can be admitted. But Marcion, having got hold of Paul's epistle to the Galatians — in which he rebukes even the apostles themselves for not walking with a straight foot toward the truth of the gospel, and at the same time accuses certain false apostles of perverting the gospel of Christ — strives to demolish the standing of those gospels which are published as their own and under the name of the apostles, or even of apostolic men, so that he may, namely, confer upon his own the credit which he takes from them. Now even if Peter and John and James, who were thought to be pillars, were reprehended, the cause is manifest. For with respect to persons they seemed to vary their conduct. And yet, since Paul himself became all things to all men that he might gain all, Peter too may have had this in his counsel, to act somewhat otherwise than he taught. Likewise, if false apostles too had crept in, their character also is published — claiming circumcision and the Jewish calendar. So far were they marked out by Paul not on account of preaching but of conduct — Paul being equally about to mark them out, had they erred in anything concerning God the Creator or his Christ. Therefore the several points will have to be distinguished. If Marcion complains that the apostles are held suspect of prevarication and dissimulation, even to the depraving of the gospel, he now accuses Christ, by accusing those whom Christ chose. But if the apostles did indeed transmit an entire gospel, reprehended only for an inequality of conduct, while the false apostles interpolated their truth, and our writings are derived thence — which then will be that genuine instrument of the apostles, which has suffered adulterers? the one that illumined Paul, and from him Luke? Or, if it has been so utterly destroyed as to have been obliterated, as by a kind of deluge, so by an inundation of falsifiers, then Marcion too has nothing true. Or if that will be the true one, that is, the apostles', which Marcion alone has — then how does that agree with ours which is referred not to the apostles but to Luke? Or if what Marcion uses is not at once to be assigned to Luke because it agrees with ours — adulterated, namely, even as to the title — but is the apostles': then ours too, which agrees with his, is equally the apostles', but adulterated as to the title also.

The rope of the contention, then, must be drawn, swaying with equal effort on either side. I call mine true, Marcion his. I affirm Marcion's to be adulterated, Marcion mine. Who shall decide between us, except the reasoning of time — assigning authority to that which shall be found the more ancient, and prejudging vitiation against that which shall later be convicted? For inasmuch as the false is a corruption of the true, by so much must the truth precede the false. A thing will be prior to its undergoing, and the matter prior to its rivalry. Otherwise, how absurd it is, that if we prove ours the more ancient, and Marcion's the later, ours should be thought false before it had its matter from the truth, and Marcion's be believed to have suffered rivalry from ours before it was even published, and finally that should be reckoned the truer which is the later — after so many and so great works and evidences of the Christian religion already published to the world, which surely could not have been published without the truth of the gospel, that is, before the truth of the gospel. As regards, then, the gospel of Luke for the present — inasmuch as its communion between us and Marcion is disputed about the truth — so much more ancient than Marcion is that which is according to us, that Marcion himself once believed in it, when in the first heat of faith he contributed money to the catholic Church, money soon flung out along with himself, after he revolted into his heresy from our truth. What now, if the Marcionites should deny his first faith among us, against his own epistle too? What, if they should not even acknowledge his epistle? Certainly the Antitheses they not only confess to be Marcion's, but even put forward. From these the proof suffices me. For if that gospel which is referred to Luke is among us the very one (let us see whether it be among Marcion too) which Marcion through his Antitheses arraigns as interpolated by the protectors of Judaism toward the embodiment of the law and the prophets — by which they fashioned Christ thence too — surely he could not have arraigned but that which he had found. No one reprehends after the fact things which he is ignorant are to come to be. An emendation does not precede the fault. As an emendator of the gospel overturned from the times of Tiberius even to those of the Antonines, Marcion alone and first turned up, awaited so long by Christ, who now repented that he had hastened to send forth the apostles without the aid of Marcion. Save that heresy is the business of human rashness, not of divine authority, which thus always emends the gospels while it vitiates them — since, even if Marcion is a disciple, he is 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 too shall be subject to the prophets: for they are not of subversion, but of peace"; even if Marcion is an angel, he is rather to be called anathema than evangelist, because he evangelized otherwise. And so, while he emends, he confirms both — both ours as the earlier, by emending what he found, and his own as the later, by constituting as new and his own what he established out of the emendation of ours.

In sum, if that is the truer which is the prior, that the prior which is also from the beginning, that from the beginning which is from the apostles — it will likewise be established that that has been handed down from the apostles which has been held sacrosanct among the churches of the apostles. Let us see what milk the Corinthians drew from Paul, to what rule the Galatians were brought back, what the Philippians read, the Thessalonians, the Ephesians, what too the Romans of our neighbourhood resound — to whom both Peter and Paul left the gospel sealed even with their own blood. We have the churches that are John's nurslings too. For even though Marcion rejects his Apocalypse, yet the order of bishops, traced back to its origin, will stand upon John as author. So too the high birth of the rest is recognized. I say therefore that among them — and now not only among the apostolic churches, but among all that are confederated with them by the fellowship of the mystery — that gospel of Luke has stood from the beginning of its publication which we most of all defend, whereas Marcion's is to most unknown, and to none known but that it is, by the same fact, condemned. That gospel too has churches, plainly, but its own — as much later as adulterous; whose lineage if you inquire, you will more easily find it apostatic than apostolic, with Marcion, namely, for founder, or some one of Marcion's swarm. Wasps too make combs; Marcionites too make churches. The same authority of the apostolic churches will give patronage to the other gospels too, which we likewise have through them and according to them — John's, I mean, and Matthew's — although that which Mark published is affirmed to be Peter's, whose interpreter Mark was. For Luke's digest too men are wont to ascribe to Paul. It is allowable that what the disciples have promulgated should be regarded as their masters'. And so for these too Marcion is to be pressed — that, omitting them, he rather fastened upon Luke, as though these too had not been among the churches from the beginning, just as Luke also. Nay, it is more credible that these were from the beginning, as prior, since apostolic, since dedicated together with the churches themselves. For the rest, what kind of thing is it, that if the apostles published nothing, the disciples rather published — who could not even have existed as disciples without any teaching of masters? Therefore, since it is established that these too were among the churches, why did Marcion not touch these too — either to be emended, if adulterated, or to be acknowledged, if entire? For it is also fitting that, if any were perverting the gospel, they should rather take care to pervert those whose authority they knew to be the more received. Hence the false apostles too, in that through falsehood they imitated the apostles. Therefore, in so far as he would have emended things which would have had to be emended, if they had been corrupted, by so much he confirmed that those were not corrupted which he thought needed no emendation. In short, he emended what he reckoned corrupted. But neither this with reason, because it was not corrupted. For if the apostolic writings ran their course entire, while Luke's, which is according to us, agrees so with their rule that it abides with them among the churches, then it is established that Luke's too ran its course entire, even to the sacrilege of Marcion. In short, where Marcion laid hands upon it, then it was made diverse from and rival to the apostolic ones. Therefore I will give counsel to his disciples, that either they convert those writings — though late — to the form of his, that they may seem to agree with the apostolic ones (for they do daily reform it, in proportion as they are daily refuted by us), or that they blush for their master, exposed on both sides, since now from conscience he transmits the truth of the gospel, now from shamelessness overturns it. These compendious methods, more or less, we use when we are extricating ourselves against the heretics concerning the faith of the gospel — pleading both the order of times that prescribes against the lateness of falsifiers, and the authority of the churches that gives patronage to the tradition of the apostles, because the truth must precede the false, and must proceed from those by whom it was handed down.

But we now enter from here upon another step, summoning, as we have professed, Marcion's gospel itself, intending even so to prove it adulterated. For certainly all that he laboured at — even by building up the Antitheses beforehand — he forces to this end: that he may establish a diversity of the old and new testament, accordingly a Christ of his own separated from the Creator, as of another god, as alien to the law and the prophets. Certainly it was for this that he erased whatever was contrary to his opinion and conspiring with the Creator, as if interwoven by his champions; but whatever was suited to his opinion he reserved. These we will examine, these we will embrace, if they be more for us, if they strike at Marcion's presumption. Then those others too will stand established as erased by the same vice of heretical blindness by which these others were reserved. Thus the intention and form of our little work will hold, under that condition surely which has been agreed upon from either side. Marcion lays it down that there is one Christ who, in the times of Tiberius, was revealed by a hitherto unknown god for the salvation of all nations, another who was destined by the Creator-god for the restitution of the Jewish state, one day to come. Between these he splits a great — nay, a total — difference, as great as between the just and the good, as great as between the law and the gospel, as great as between Judaism and Christianity. Hence will be our objection too, by which we fix it that nothing of the Christ of another god ought to be in common with the Creator; but he is to be pronounced the Creator's if he has administered his arrangements, if he has fulfilled his prophecies, if he has assisted his laws, if he has represented his promises, if he has restored his powers, if he has reformed his opinions, his manners, if he has expressed his properties. Of this compact and this objection, I beg you, reader, be everywhere mindful, 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 came down into the city of Galilee, Capernaum — surely out of the Creator's heaven, into which he had before come down out of his own. Was there, then, any order in this, that he should be described as descending first out of his own heaven into the Creator's? For why should I not reprehend even these things, which do not fulfil the faith of an orderly narrative, ever failing in falsehood? Plainly let these be said once for all, by which we have already elsewhere discussed whether one descending through the Creator, and indeed against the Creator himself, could have been admitted by him, and thence transmitted to an earth equally his own. But now I demand also the rest of the order of the descent, holding that he descended. For let it be his concern, if it is anywhere set down that he appeared. To appear savours of a sudden, unexpected sight — of one who has once dashed his eyes upon that which appeared without delay. But to have descended, while it is being done, is both seen and steals upon the eyes. From the fact itself too it makes an order, and so compels one to ask, in what state, with what bearing, with what onset or tempering, even at what time of day or night, he descended. Moreover, who saw him descending, who reported it, who asseverated a thing surely not to be easily believed even to one asseverating it? It is unworthy, in short, that Romulus should have had a Proculus to affirm his ascent into heaven, but that Christ, a god, should have found no announcer of his descent from his own heaven — as though that other did not ascend by the same ladders of falsehood as this one descended. But what had he to do with Galilee, if he were not the Creator's, to whom that region was destined as he entered upon his preaching? — Isaiah saying, "Drink this first, do it quickly, region of Zabulon and land of Nephthalim, and the rest who are by the sea and the Jordan, Galilee of the nations, people who sit in darkness, behold a great light: you who inhabit the land, sitting in the shadow of death, a light has arisen upon you." Well, however, that even the god of Marcion is claimed as the illuminator of the nations — by which he ought the rather to have descended even from heaven, and, if at all, to have descended into Pontus rather than into Galilee. For the rest, by both the place and the work of illumination meeting Christ according to the prophecy, we begin already to acknowledge him foretold — showing that at his first entry he came not to dissolve the law and the prophets, but rather to fulfil them. For this Marcion erased as added. But in vain will he deny that Christ said what he straightway did in part. For the prophecy he meanwhile fulfilled as to place. From heaven straight to the synagogue. As the saying goes, "To the matter we have come for, set thy hand, Marcion": take away also that from the gospel, "I am not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel," and, "It is not to take the bread from the children and give it to the dogs" — namely lest Christ should seem to be Israel's. The deeds suffice me in place of the words. Take away the voices 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 children. Behold he does not yet impart it to others; certainly he passes them by as dogs. But to whom should he have imparted it more than to the strangers of the Creator, if he had not himself first of all been the Creator's? And yet how could he have been admitted into the synagogue, so sudden, so unknown — of whose tribe, people, house, and lastly of whose registration under Augustus no one was as yet certain, that registration which the Roman archives guard as the most faithful witness of the Lord's nativity? They would surely have remembered, unless they knew him circumcised, that he was not to be admitted into the holy of holies. But even if the synagogue were entered at large, yet not to teach, save by one well known and tried and approved, long since commended for this very thing, or from elsewhere, with this function. But they were all astonished at his teaching. Plainly. "Because," it says, "his word was in power" — not because he taught against the law and the prophets. For surely the divine utterance furnished both force and grace, building up rather than destroying the substance of the law and the prophets. Otherwise they would not have been astonished, but would have shuddered. Nor would they have marvelled, but would straightway have turned away from a destroyer of the law and the prophets, and surely above all from a preacher of another god — since he could not even have taught against the law and the prophets, and under this title against the Creator, without a profession sent before of a diverse and rival divinity. Since, then, the Scripture signifies nothing of the kind, but only that the force and power of his word were a marvel, it more easily shows that he taught according to the Creator, because it did not deny it, than against the Creator, because it did not signify it. And so either he is to be acknowledged as belonging to him according to whom he taught, or to be judged a prevaricator, if he taught according to him against whom he had come. In the same place the spirit of a demon cries out: "What is there to us and to thee, Jesus? Thou hast come to destroy us. I know who thou art, the Holy One of God." Here I will not discuss whether this surname too suited him whom it would not have been right to call even Christ, were he not the Creator's. Concerning the names the demand has already been made elsewhere. But now I dispute how the demon came to know him called by this name, no preaching ever having been sent forth before concerning him by a god unknown and at that time mute — of whom he could not even attest that he was holy, as one unknown even to his own Creator. But what had he as yet put forth of a new divinity by which he could be understood to be the Holy One of another god? Only that he had entered the synagogue, and had not even by a word done anything against the Creator? As, then, he in no way could have acknowledged as Jesus and the Holy One of God him whom he did not know, so him whom he knew he acknowledged. For he remembered that the prophet had proclaimed the Holy One of God, and that Jesus was the name of God in the son of Nun. 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 had also surely some sense of the Lord's arrangement (though a demon, yet), rather than of one alien and not yet sufficiently known. For he premised, "What is there to us and to thee?" — not as toward a stranger, this Jesus, to whom the spirits of the Creator pertain. For he did not say, "What is there to thee and to us?" but, "What is there to us and to thee?" — bewailing himself and reproaching himself with his lot; which already seeing he adds, "Thou hast come to destroy us." So far had he acknowledged Jesus to be the Son of a judging and avenging and, so to say, a fierce god, not of that best god who knows neither how to destroy nor to punish. To what end have we premised this passage? That we may teach that Jesus was acknowledged by the demon as none other, and confirmed by himself as none other, than the Creator's. "And yet," you say, "Jesus rebuked him." Plainly, as one invidious, and in his very confession petulant and ill-flattering — as though this were the supreme glory of Christ, if he had come for the destruction of demons and not rather for the salvation of men, who would not have even his disciples glory in the subjection of spirits, but in the white robe of salvation. Or why did he rebuke him? If as one lying altogether, then he was not Jesus, nor the Holy One of God at all; if as one lying in part — in that he had reckoned him indeed Jesus and the Holy One of God, but of the Creator — most unjustly did he rebuke one who thought what he knew ought to be thought, and did not reckon what he was ignorant ought to be reckoned, namely another Jesus and the Holy One of another god. But if the rebuke has no more probable footing than that which we interpret, then the demon too lied in nothing, was not rebuked for a lie; for he himself was Jesus, beside whom the demon could have acknowledged no other, and Jesus confirmed him whom the demon had acknowledged, while he rebukes the demon not for a lie.

He was to be called a Nazarene according to the prophecy, the Christ of the Creator. Hence even by that very name we Jews call them Nazarenes after him. For we too are they of whom it is written: "The Nazarites have been made whiter than snow" — they, namely, who formerly were sallow with the stains of delinquency and blackened with the darkness of ignorance. But the appellation of Nazarene was to befit Christ from the hiding-places of his infancy, to which he came down at Nazareth, avoiding Archelaus, son of Herod. This I have not omitted for this reason, that the Christ of Marcion ought to have foresworn all commerce even with the familiar places of the Christ of the Creator — having so many towns of Judea not so emancipated to the Christ of the Creator through the prophets. For the rest, he will be the Christ of the prophets wherever he is found according to the prophets. And yet at Nazareth too nothing new is noted that he preached, while he is reported to have been cast out elsewhere, deservedly on account of a single proverb. Here, observing the hands first laid upon him, I find it necessary now to determine beforehand concerning his bodily substance — that he cannot be believed a phantom who admitted a touch, and that indeed full of violence, being held and seized and dragged even to a precipice. For even though he escaped through their midst, yet he had first experienced force, and was afterward let go — the tumult, namely, being broken up, as is wont, or even burst through, yet not eluded by means of a mist, which would have given way to no touch at all, had it existed. For to touch and to be touched belongs to nothing but a body — even secular wisdom is worthy of the verdict. In short, he himself soon touched others, on whom laying hands (hands surely to be felt), he conferred the benefits of his medicines, as true and as un-imaginary as were the hands through which he conferred them. He, therefore, is the Christ of Isaiah, the remedier of infirmities. "He," it says, "takes away our weaknesses and bears our languors." Now the Greeks are wont to put "to bear" for what is "to take away." Meanwhile the general promise suffices me. Whatever Jesus has cured is mine. We will come, however, to the species of cures too. For the rest, to free from demons too is a cure of infirmity. And so the wicked spirits, as it were from the form of the former example already, went out with testimony, crying out, "Thou art the Son of God." Of what god, let it appear even here. But they were likewise rebuked and bidden to be silent. For accordingly Christ wished to be acknowledged the Son of God by men, not by unclean spirits — that Christ, at least, to whom this befitted, because he had sent before those by whom he could be acknowledged, and surely worthier preachers. To reject the proclamation of an unclean spirit was the part of him who abounded in holy ones. But he who had never been announced — if indeed he wished to be acknowledged, and had come in vain if he did not — would not have spurned the testimony of an alien and any substance whatever, who had none of his own, who had descended into another's. And even now, in so far as he was the destroyer of the Creator, he would have desired nothing more than to be acknowledged and divulged by the very spirits, out of fear; save that Marcion denies that his god is feared, defending that the good is not feared but the judge, with whom are the matters for fear — anger, savagery, judgements, vengeance, condemnation. But the demons too gave way surely out of fear. Therefore they were confessing the Son of a god to be feared — they who would have had occasion not to give way, had they not had to fear. And he, expelling them by command and rebuke, not by persuasion (as the good), showed himself one to be feared. Or did he perhaps rebuke them for this reason, that he was feared, being unwilling to be feared? And how did he wish them to go out, which they would not do but out of fear? He fell, then, into a necessity by which he behaved unlike his own nature, when he could, as the good, have spared them once for all. He fell also into another mark of prevarication, when he allowed himself to be feared by the demons as the Son of the Creator — so that now not by his own power did he expel the demons, but through the authority of the Creator. He goes forth into the wilderness. Solemn, and of this kind, is the region of the Creator. It behoved the Word to be seen there too in body, where he had once acted even in cloud. The state of the place too suited the gospel, which had pleased the law. Let the wilderness, then, take up joyfulness — this Isaiah had promised. Detained by the crowds, "It behoves me," he says, "to announce the kingdom of God to other cities also." Had he already anywhere shown his god? I think not yet. But was he speaking to those who knew another god too? Neither do I believe this. Therefore, if neither he had published another god nor they knew any besides the Creator, he was portending the kingdom of the same god whom alone he knew to be known to those who heard.

Out of so many kinds of works, why did he look especially to fishing, that from it he should take into the apostolate Simon and the sons of Zebedee (for it cannot seem a simple deed, from which an argument was to proceed), saying to Peter, trembling at the copious haul of fish, "Fear not, for henceforth thou shalt be catching men"? For by this saying he was suggesting to them an understanding of the prophecy fulfilled — that he was the one who had pronounced through Jeremiah, "Behold, I will send many fishers, and they shall fish them," men namely. In short, leaving their little boats they followed him, understanding him to be the very one who had begun to do what he had foretold. It is another matter if he affected to choose out of the guild of boatmen, intending one day to have for his apostle the skipper Marcion. We have indeed shown beforehand, against the Antitheses, that nothing avails to Marcion's design what he thinks a diversity of law and gospel — since this too was arranged by the Creator, and in short foretold in the promise of a new law and a new word and a new testament. But since he argues rather attentively, with that I-know-not-what fellow-sufferer of his and co-hateful one, concerning the cleansing of the leper, it will not irk me 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 commerce — forbade communion with a man stained by sins; with such as these the apostle too forbids even to take food; for the brands of sins are shared, as by contagion, if anyone has mingled himself with a sinner. And so the Lord, wishing the law to be understood more deeply as signifying spiritual things through carnal — and on this account not destroying but rather building up — wishing to be acknowledged in a more pertinent sense, touched the leper, by whom even if a man could have been defiled, God surely would not be defiled, being incontaminable. Thus it will not be objected to him that he ought to have observed the law and not touched the unclean, whom the touch of the unclean was not going to defile. That this rather suits my Christ I teach thus, while I demonstrate that it does not suit yours. For if as the rival of the law he touched the leper, making nothing of the precept of the law through contempt of defilement, how could he be defiled who had no body to be defiled? For a phantom could not be defiled. He therefore who could not be defiled, as a phantom, will now be incontaminable not by divine power, but by the emptiness of a phantom; nor can he seem to have despised defilement, of which he had no matter; nor so to have destroyed the law, who had escaped defilement from the occasion of being a phantom, not from the display of power. But if Elisha, the prophet of the Creator, cleansed the single leper Naaman the Syrian out of so many Israelite lepers, neither does this make for a diversity of Christ, as though in this way the better — in that a stranger cleanses an Israelite leper whom his own lord could not cleanse — the Syrian the more easily cleansed signifying, through the nations, of those who bristled with the seven stains of capital delinquencies — idolatry, blasphemy, homicide, adultery, fornication, false testimony, fraud — the cleansing in Christ, the light of those nations. Wherefore seven times, as though through each several head, he washed in the Jordan — at once that he might sing the expiation of the whole week, and because the force and fullness of a single washing was consecrated to Christ alone, who was to make on earth, as a shortened word, so a shortened washing. For this too Marcion objects, that Elisha needed matter, employed water, and that seven times, whereas Christ, by a word alone, and that once, performed and represented the cure forthwith. As though I should not dare to claim the very word too for the substance of the Creator. Of no thing is he not the more powerful author who is the prior. It is plainly incredible that the power of the Creator should have wrought by a word the remedy of a single defect, who by a word brought forth at once so great a mass of the world. Whence is the Christ of the Creator the more discerned than from the power of his word? But for this reason another Christ, because otherwise than Elisha, because more powerful than his own servant! What do you establish, Marcion — that things are done in the same way by servants as by the very masters? Are you not afraid lest it turn to your disgrace, if you deny Christ to be the Creator's because he was more powerful than the Creator's servant — who is acknowledged greater compared to the littleness of Elisha, if indeed greater? For the cure is equal, though the operation differ. What more did your Christ furnish than my Elisha? Nay, what great thing did the word of your Christ furnish, when it furnished what the river of the Creator did? According to these, the rest too occur. For inasmuch as it pertained to the aversion of human glory, he forbade him to divulge it; but inasmuch as it pertained to the safeguarding of the law, he bade the order be fulfilled. "Go, show thyself to the priest, and offer the gift which Moses commanded." For the figurative arguments, as of the prophesied law, he still protected in their own images — which signified that a man once a sinner, presently cleansed by the word of God, ought to offer a gift to God at the temple, namely prayer and thanksgiving at the church through Christ Jesus, the catholic priest of the Father. And so he added, "That it may be to you for a testimony" — without doubt that by which he testified that he did not dissolve the law but fulfil it; by which he testified that he himself was the one announced as about to take up their diseases and infirmities. This so congruent and due interpretation of the testimony, the flatterer of his own Christ, Marcion, under pretext of mildness and gentleness, seeks to exclude. For "as good too," he says, "knowing besides that everyone freed from leprosy would carry out the solemnities of the law, for that reason he so commanded." What then? Did he persevere in goodness, that is, in the permission of the law, or not? For if he persevered as good, he will never be the destroyer of the law, nor be held to be of another god, the destruction of the law ceasing through which he is claimed for another god. If he did not persevere as good, by destroying the law afterward, then he placed a false testimony afterward among them in the cure of the leper; for he deserted goodness while he destroys the law. He is now evil, when overturner of the law, if good, when indulger of the law. But also, in that he indulged obedience to the law, he confirmed the law to be good. For no one suffers obedience to be paid to an evil thing. Therefore even so he is evil, if he indulged obedience to an evil law, and so worse, if he came as the destroyer of a good law. Accordingly, if he commanded the gift to be offered because he knew everyone freed from leprosy would so do, he could also not have commanded what he knew would be done spontaneously. In vain, then, did he come down, as though to destroy the law, when he yields to the obeyers of the law. And yet, as knowing their disposition, he ought rather to have anticipated, to avert them the more from it, if for this he had come. Why, then, did he not keep silent, that a man should obey the law by his own choice alone? — for then at least he might somewhat seem to have stood by his patience. But he even adds his own authority, magnified by the weight of testimony. Of what testimony now, except of the law asserted? Certainly it makes no difference in what way he confirmed the law — whether as good, or as superfluous, or as patient, or as inconstant — provided I drive you, Marcion, from your footing. Behold, he commanded the law to be fulfilled. In whatever way he commanded, in the same he could also have premised that opinion, "I came not to dissolve the law, but to fulfil." What, then, was it to you to have erased from the gospel what is safe? For you confessed that he did out of goodness what you deny he said. It is established, then, that he said it, because he also did it, and that you rather have erased the Lord's voice from the gospel than that our people have inserted it.

The paralytic too is cured, and that in a gathering, the people looking on. "For the people," says Isaiah, "shall see the loftiness of the Lord and the glory of God." What loftiness, and what glory? "Be strong, you hands let down, and you knees dissolved" — this will be the paralysis. "Be strong, and fear not." Not idly repeating "Be strong," nor in vain subjoining "Fear not," since with the reintegration of the limbs he was also promising a representation of strength: "Arise, and take up thy bed" — at once a vigour of mind too, toward not fearing those who were to say, "Who shall forgive sins but God alone?" You have, then, already both the discharged prophecy of a special medicine, and of the things which followed the medicine. Likewise recognize Christ the remitter of delinquencies in the same prophet. "For," it says, "in many he shall remit their delinquencies, and our delinquencies he himself takes away." For also in the former passage, from the person of the Lord himself: "Though your delinquencies be as scarlet, I will whiten them as snow; though as crimson, I will whiten them as wool" — in the scarlet showing the blood of the prophets, in the crimson that of the Lord, as the brighter. Micah too concerning the pardon of delinquencies: "What god is like thee, taking away iniquities and passing over injustices to the remnant of thine inheritance? And he held not his anger for a testimony, because he willed to be merciful; he will turn, and have mercy upon us; he will sink our delinquencies, and he will sink our sins into the depth of the sea." But even if nothing of the kind had been foretold concerning Christ, I should have examples of this benignity in the Creator, promising me the Father's affections in the Son too. I see the Ninevites obtain pardon of their crimes from the Creator — not to say, then too from Christ, because from the beginning he acted in the Father's name. I read too that Nathan the prophet said to David, acknowledging his delinquency in the matter of Uriah, "And the Lord has put away thy delinquency, and thou shalt not die"; likewise that king Ahab, the husband of Jezebel, guilty of idolatry and of the blood of Naboth, earned pardon under the name of penitence; that Jonathan, son of Saul, by entreaty blotted out the fault of an unsealed fast. Why should I weave again about the people itself, so often restored by indulgence of delinquencies? — by that god, namely, who prefers mercy to sacrifice, and the penitence of the sinner to his death. It is prior, then, that you deny that the Creator ever indulged delinquencies; the consequence is that you show that he foretold no such thing concerning his Christ either; and so you will prove this new benignity of the new Christ, if you have proved it neither equal to the Creator's nor foretold by the Creator. But whether to remit sins can belong to him who is denied to retain them, and whether it belongs to him to absolve whose it is not also to condemn, and whether it suits one to forgive against whom nothing has been committed — having engaged elsewhere already, we preferred to admonish rather than to discuss. Concerning "Son of man" our objection is twofold: that Christ could not lie, so as to pronounce himself Son of man if he were not truly so; nor be constituted Son of man who was not born of a man, either father or mother; and so it must be discussed of what man he ought to be taken as son, of father or of mother. If he is of God the Father, surely he is not of man; if not also of man, it remains that he is of a man for mother; if of a man, it now appears that he is of a virgin. For to whom a man is not given as father, neither will a husband be reckoned to his mother; and to whose mother a husband is not reckoned, she is a virgin. For the rest, two fathers will now be reckoned, God and man, if the mother be not a virgin. For she will have a husband, so as not to be a virgin, and by having a husband she will make two fathers, God and man, for him who should be the son both of God and of man. Such a nativity, if at all, the fables ascribe to Castor or Hercules. If these things are thus distinguished — that is, if he is the son of man from his mother because he is not from a father, but from a virgin mother because not from a human father — this will be the Christ of Isaiah, whom he proclaims a virgin should conceive. By what reasoning, then, you can admit "Son of man," Marcion, I cannot see all around. If of a human father, you deny him the Son of God; if of God too, you make Christ a Hercules out of the fable; if only of a human mother, you grant me mine; if neither of a human father, then he is the son of no man, and of necessity he must have admitted a lie, who said himself to be what he was not. One thing can come to the aid of your straits: if you dare either to surname even your god, the Father of Christ, a man too — which Valentinus did of his Aeon — or to deny the virgin a human being, which not even Valentinus did. What now, if by the very title of Son of man Christ is reckoned in Daniel? Does it not suffice for proof of the prophetic Christ? For when he calls himself that which was proclaimed concerning the Christ of the Creator, without doubt he offers himself to be understood as the very one concerning whom it was proclaimed. A community of names may, if at all, seem simple — and yet we maintain that he ought to be called neither Christ nor Jesus, holding the condition of diversity. But the appellation which is "Son of man," in so far as it comes by accident, by so much is it difficult that it too should concur over and above the community of name. For it is from a proper accident — especially since the same cause does not agree by which it comes into community. And indeed if Marcion's Christ too were said to be born of a man, then he too would take up a community of appellation, and there would be two sons of man, just as also two Christs and two Jesuses. Therefore, since the appellation is proper to him in whom it has its cause, if it be claimed also for another in whom there is a community of the name, not also of the appellation — the community of name too now becomes suspect in him for whom a community of appellation is claimed without a cause; and it follows that he is believed one and the same who is found more capable both of the name and of the appellation, while the other is excluded who has no community of appellation, lacking the cause. Nor will another be more capable of both than he who is prior, and both obtained the name of Christ and the appellation of Son of man — Jesus, namely, the Creator's. This was the one seen by the Babylonian king in the furnace with his martyrs, the fourth, as the Son of man. The same was revealed directly to Daniel himself, the Son of man coming with the clouds of heaven, a judge, as the Scripture also demonstrates. This I have said could have sufficed concerning the prophetic naming touching the Son of man. But the Scripture confers more upon me — by the interpretation, namely, of the Lord himself. For when the Jews, looking only at his manhood, and not yet certain of his Godhead, in that he was the Son of God too, rightly debated that a man could not remit delinquencies, but God alone — why did he not, according to their intention, answer them of a man, that he had power to remit delinquencies, since by naming Son of man he would name a man? — unless because by the very appellation of Son of man, from the instrument of Daniel, he willed to strike them back, that he might show a God and a man who remits delinquencies; namely that sole Son of man in the prophecy of Daniel, who obtained the power of judging, and through it surely of remitting delinquencies too (for he who judges, also absolves) — so that, this scandal being discussed through the recollection of Scripture, they might the more easily acknowledge him to be the very Son of man from the very remission of sins. In short, nowhere yet had he professed himself the Son of man before that passage, the first in which he first remitted sins, that is, in which he first judged, while he absolved. To these, whatever the opposite party shall have argued, consider what it is. For of necessity it tends to that madness, that it both defends the Son of man, lest it make him a liar, and denies that he was born of man, lest it grant the Son of a virgin. But if both divine authority and the nature of things and common wisdom do not admit the heretical insanity, there is occasion here too of interposing most briefly concerning the substance of the body, against the phantoms of Marcion. If he is born of a man, as Son of man, his body is from a body. Plainly you may more easily find a man born without a heart or brain, like Marcion himself, than without a body, like Marcion's Christ. And so look into the heart, or brain, of the man of Pontus.

He brings forward into argument the publican chosen by the Lord, as though chosen by an adversary of the law, a stranger to the law and profane to Judaism. It escaped him even concerning Peter, a man of the law, and yet not only chosen but having attained the testimony of an acknowledgement bestowed by the Father. Nowhere had he read that Christ was proclaimed the light and hope and expectation of the nations. And yet he rather approved the Jews by saying that a physician is not necessary for the sound, but for the sick. For if he wished the ethnics and publicans, whom he chose, to be understood as the sick, he was confirming the Jews to be sound, for whom he denied a physician necessary. If this is so, ill did he come down to destroy the law, as if to remedy bad health, in which those who walked were in good health, for whom a physician was not necessary. But what kind of thing is it that he should set forth the likeness of a physician and not fulfil it? For just as no one applies a physician to the sound, so neither to men so estranged as a man is from the god of Marcion, having both his author and his protector, and from him rather Christ for a physician. The likeness prejudges this — that a physician is rather furnished by him to whom belong those who languish. But whence did John too come into the midst? Suddenly Christ, suddenly John too. Such are all things with Marcion, which have their own and full order with the Creator. But of John the rest elsewhere. For we must answer each several joint as it presents itself. Now I will maintain this, to demonstrate that both John suits Christ and Christ John — both surely the prophet of the Creator, since the Christ of the Creator — and so let the heretic blush, having frustrated in vain the order of John. For if John had administered nothing at all — the crier, according to Isaiah, in the wilderness and the preparer of the Lord's ways through the denunciation and the laudation of penitence — if he had not also dipped him among the rest, no one would have provoked the disciples of Christ, eating and drinking, to the form of the disciples of John, assiduously fasting and praying; because, if any diversity stood between Christ and John and the flock of each, there would be no force in the comparison, the intention of the challenge would be void. For no one would marvel and no one would be tormented, if the preachings of a diverse and rival divinity did not agree with one another in their disciplines too, not first agreeing about the authorities of their disciplines. So far was Christ John's and John Christ's — both the Creator's, and both of the law and the prophets, preachers and masters. But Christ would also have rejected John's discipline, as of another god, and would have defended the disciples, as rightly walking otherwise — initiated, namely, into another and contrary divinity. But as it is, humbly rendering the reason that the sons of the bridegroom could not fast so long as the bridegroom was with them, but afterward promising that they would fast when the bridegroom should be taken from them, he neither defended the disciples but rather excused them, as reprehended not without reason, nor rejected John's discipline, but rather conceded it — assigning it to John's time, as destining it for his own time — though he would otherwise have rejected it and defended its rivals, had not what already was not already been his own. I hold my Christ even in the name of bridegroom, concerning whom the psalm: "He, like a bridegroom going forth from his chamber: from the height of heaven his going forth, and his return to the very height of it." Who also, through Isaiah, rejoicing toward the Father, says, "Let my soul exult in the Lord, for he has clothed me with the garment of salvation, and with the tunic of joyfulness as a bridegroom; he has set a mitre about me as about a bride." For in himself he reckons the Church too, concerning which the same spirit to him: "And thou shalt set them all about thee as the ornament of a bride." This bride Christ fetches for himself, even through Solomon, from the calling of the nations. Indeed you have read, "Come, bride, from Lebanon" — the mention of mount Lebanon being elegantly thrown in, which by the word for frankincense is among the Greeks; for out of idolatry he was espousing the Church to himself. Deny now that you are most insane, Marcion. Behold, you assail the law of your own god too. He does not join marriages, the joined he does not admit; he dips no one but the celibate or the eunuch; he reserves baptism for death or for divorce. Why, then, do you make his Christ a bridegroom? This is the name of him who joined male and female, not of him who separated. You have erred also in that pronouncement of the Lord by which he seems to discern new and old. You have been puffed up with the old skins and made brainless with the new wine, and so to the old, that is, the former gospel, you have sewed a patch of heretical novelty. In which point another Creator — I would learn — when through Jeremiah he commanded, "Make for yourselves a new freshness," did he not turn them away from the old? When through Isaiah he declares, "The old things have passed, and behold the new which I make," did he not convert them to the new? Long ago we laid it down that this destination of the former things, promised rather by the Creator, is exhibited by Christ, under the authority of one and the same god, whose are both the old and the new. For neither does he commit new wine into old skins who has not also had old skins, and no one puts a new addition upon an old garment but he to whom an old garment too is not wanting. He does not do a thing, if it is not to be done, who has whence to do it, if it were to be done. And so if in this he was directing the likeness, to show that he separated the novelty of the gospel from the oldness of the law, he was demonstrating that even that which he separated was his own, and was not to be marked off by the separation of things alien — because no one adds his own things to alien, that he may be able to separate them from the alien. Separation takes place through a conjunction from which it is made. Thus the things which he separated he also showed to have been in one, just as they would have been, had he not separated. And yet even so we grant this separation through reformation, through amplitude, through advance — just as fruit is separated from the seed, when it is yet fruit from the seed: so the gospel too is separated from the law, while it is brought forward out of the law, other than it, but not alien — diverse, but not contrary. Nor is the form of speech in Christ new. When he sets forth likenesses, when he refutes questions, it comes from the seventy-seventh psalm: "I will open," it 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 him a man of another nation, surely you would prove it from a property of speech.

Concerning the sabbath too I premise this, that this question could not have arisen if Christ did not carry about the Lord of the sabbath. For it would not be debated why he destroyed the sabbath, if he ought to destroy it. Now he ought to destroy it, if he were of another god, and no one would marvel at him doing what befitted that other. They marvelled, then, because it did not befit him to carry about the Creator-god and to assail his sabbath. And, that we may settle each first point — lest we everywhere renew the same against every argumentation of the adversary that rests on some new institution of Christ — this definition shall now stand: that there was debate about the novelty of any institution because about the novelty of divinity nothing had as yet been published, just as neither debated; nor can it be retorted from the very novelty of any institution that another divinity than the Creator's was sufficiently demonstrated by Christ, since the very novelty too, foretold by the Creator, has been established not to be marvelled at in Christ. And surely another god ought first to have been set forth, afterward his discipline brought in — because a god furnishes authority to a discipline, not a discipline to a god; unless indeed Marcion plainly did not learn letters so perverse through a master, but a master through letters. The rest concerning the sabbath I direct thus. If Christ broke into the sabbath, he did it according to the example of the Creator — seeing that, in the siege of the city of Jericho, the ark of the testament being carried about the walls for eight days, even on the sabbath, by the precept of the Creator, the sabbath was destroyed by working, as those think who reckon this even of Christ, being ignorant that neither Christ destroyed the sabbath nor the Creator, as we shall presently teach. And yet through Joshua then too the sabbath was shaken, that this also might be reported of Christ; even if he pursued with hatred the most solemn day of the Jews — that Christ, not of the Jews, professing the Creator even by his hatred of the sabbath, as the Christ of him, was following him who cries out by the mouth of Isaiah, "Your new moons and your sabbaths my soul hates." But however these things may be said, we know that even in this species an abrupt defence must be applied against an abrupt provocation. Now I will dispute even to the very matter, in which the discipline of Christ seemed to destroy the sabbath. The disciples had hungered; on that day they had rubbed out ears plucked with their hands; having worked a food, they had broken the holy-days. Christ excuses them, and is liable for the sabbath violated; the Pharisees accuse him; Marcion catches at the state of the controversy (that I may play a little with the truth of my Lord) of the letter and of the will. For from the Scripture of the Creator there is taken — and from the will of Christ a colour, as from the example of David entering the temple on the sabbath and boldly working a food, the loaves of proposition being broken. For he too remembered that this privilege had been granted to the sabbath from the beginning, from which the day itself was discovered — pardon of fasting, I mean. For when the Creator had forbidden the manna to be gathered for two days, he permitted it only on the preparation-day, that the previous provision of food might free the holy-days of the following sabbath from fasting. Well, then, that the Lord too followed the same cause in the destruction (if they wish it so called) of the sabbath; well that he expressed the affection of the Creator too in the honour of not fasting on the sabbath. In short, then at last would he have destroyed the sabbath — and the Creator himself — if he had commanded the disciples to fast on the sabbath against the standing of the letter and will of the Creator. But since he did not constantly protect the disciples, but excuses them; since he opposes human necessity as a kind of intercessor; since he keeps a preferable honour of the sabbath, of not saddening rather than of being idle; since he equates David and his companions with his own disciples in fault and in pardon; since it pleases him that the Creator indulged; since out of his example he too is so good — is he therefore alien to the Creator? Thereupon the Pharisees observed whether he would work cures on the sabbath, that they might accuse him — certainly as the destroyer of the sabbath, not as the professor of a new god; for perhaps I shall everywhere drive in this one point, that another Christ was nowhere proclaimed. But the Pharisees erred altogether about the law of the sabbath, not noticing that it indicated conditionally the holy-days of works, under a certain species of them. For when he says of the sabbath day, "Thou shalt not do in it any work of thine," by saying "thine" he defined it of human work, which each performs from his craft or business, not of the divine. But the work of salvation and of soundness is not man's but God's own. Just as again in the law, "Thou shalt not," it says, "do any work in it, except what shall be done for every soul" — that is, in the cause of freeing a soul: because the work of God can be done even through a man unto the salvation of a soul, yet from God; which Christ too, a man, was to do, because also God. Into this sense of the law, then, wishing to bring them through the restoration of the withered hand, he asks, "Is it lawful on the sabbaths to do well, or not? to free a soul, or to destroy it?" — that by permitting that work which he was to do for a soul, he might admonish them what works of the sabbath the law forbade, namely human, and what it enjoined, namely divine, which should be done for every soul. He is called Lord of the sabbath, because he protected the sabbath as his own thing. And even if he had destroyed it, with reason, 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 about of the ark at Jericho, was the sabbath destroyed by the Creator. For that too was a work of God which he himself had commanded, and which he had arranged for the souls of his own men set in the crisis of war. But even if he somewhere professed hatred of the sabbaths — by saying "Your sabbaths," reckoning them men's, not his, which a people full of delinquencies celebrates without fear of God, loving God with the lips, not the heart — for their sabbaths, that is, whatever was done by his discipline, he made another state, which through the same prophet he afterward pronounces true and dainty and not to be profaned. Thus neither does Christ rescind the sabbath at all, whose law he held both above in the cause of the disciples, working for a soul (for he indulged the comfort of food to the hungry), and now in curing the withered hand — everywhere driving in by his deeds, "I came not to dissolve the law, but to fulfil," if Marcion with this voice has stopped his mouth. For here too he fulfilled the law, while he interprets its condition, illumines the difference of works, while he does what the law excepts concerning the holy-days of the sabbath, while he makes the very sabbath day, holy from the beginning by the Father's blessing, holier by his own benefaction — on which, namely, he ministered divine helps, which an adversary would have furnished on other days, that he might not adorn the sabbath of the Creator, that he might not render to the sabbath its due works. On which day, if Elisha the prophet too restored to life the dead son of the Shunammite, you see, Pharisee, and you, Marcion, that it was of old the Creator's to do well on the sabbaths, to free a soul, not to destroy it — that Christ brought in nothing new which is not of the form, the gentleness, the mercy, the proclamation too of the Creator. For here too he represents the prophecy of a special medicine. The dissolved hands grow strong, just as the dissolved knees in the paralytic.

Certainly he evangelizes to Zion and Jerusalem peace and all good things; certainly he ascends into the mountain and there passes the night in prayer, and surely is heard by the Father. Unroll, then, the prophets, and recognize the whole order. "Ascend into a high mountain," says Isaiah, "thou who evangelizest Zion; lift up thy voice with vigour, thou who evangelizest Jerusalem." Still in vigour they were astounded at his teaching; for he was teaching as one having power. And again: "Therefore the people shall know my name in that day." What name, but Christ's? "Because I am the very one who speaks." For then he himself it was who spoke in the prophets — the Word, the Son of the Creator. "I am present, while it is the hour, in the mountains, as one evangelizing the hearing of peace, as one evangelizing good things." Likewise Nahum of the twelve: "For behold, swift feet upon the mountain of one evangelizing peace." But of the voice of nocturnal prayer to the Father, manifestly the psalm: "My God, I will cry by day, and thou wilt hear, and by night, and not unto vanity for me." And elsewhere, of the same place and voice, the psalm: "With my voice I cried out to the Lord, and he heard me from his holy mountain." You have the representation of the name, you have the act of one evangelizing, you have the place of the mountain, and the time of night, and the sound of the voice, and the hearing of the Father; you have the Christ of the prophets. But why did he choose twelve apostles, and not some other number? Nay, from this too I could interpret my Christ, foretold not only by the voices of the prophets, but by the arguments of facts. For I detect figures of this number with the Creator: the twelve springs of Elim, and the twelve gems in the priestly tunic of Aaron, and the twelve stones chosen by Joshua out of the Jordan and laid up in the ark of the testament. For just so many apostles were portended — to water, like springs and rivers, the orb of the nations once arid and deserted of knowledge (as also through Isaiah: "I will set rivers in a waterless land"); like gems, to illumine the sacred vestment of the Church, which Christ the priest of the Father has put on; like stones too, solid in faith, whom the true Joshua chose out of the washing of the Jordan and received into the sanctuary of his testament. What of the kind suits Marcion's Christ, as concerns the defence of the number? A thing cannot seem done simply by him which can be seen not done simply by mine. The thing will belong to him with whom the preparation of the thing is found. He changes Peter's name too from Simon — because the Creator too reformed the names of Abraham and Sarah and Hoshea, calling this one Jesus, to those adding syllables. But why Peter? If on account of vigour of faith, many materials of solidity would have lent their name from their own. Or because Christ too is both a rock and a stone? Seeing that we also read him set as a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence. I pass over the rest. And so he affected to communicate to his dearest disciple a name peculiarly from his own figures — I think more nearly than from things not his own. There meet him from Tyre and from other regions a multitude, even from beyond the sea. To this the psalm looked: "And behold, foreigners and Tyre and the people of the Ethiopians, these were there. 'Mother Zion,' a man shall say, and a man was made in her" (since God was born a man), "and he built her by the will of the Father" — that you may know that the Gentiles then came together to him, because God was born a man, about to build the Church by the will of the Father, out of foreigners too. So too Isaiah: "Behold, these come from afar, and these from the north and the sea, and others from the land of the Persians." Concerning whom again: "Lift up thine eyes round about, and see, all are gathered together." Concerning whom too below: "Thou seest the unknown and the strangers, and thou shalt say to thy heart, Who has begotten these to me? and who has reared these for me? but where were these for me?" This will be the Christ not of the prophets? And who will be the Christ of the Marcionites? If perversity pleases — he who was not the prophets'.

I come now to his ordinary opinions, through which he introduces the property of his teaching unto an edict, so to 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 God." Now this very thing, that he began from benedictions, is the Creator's, who dedicated the universe, as he produced it, by no other voice than that of benediction. "For my heart," he says, "has belched forth an excellent word." This will be the excellent word, of benediction namely, which is acknowledged also as the initiator of the new testament from the old example. What wonder, then, if he entered also upon the affections of the Creator — through utterance of this kind ever loving the beggars and poor and lowly and widows and orphans, consoling, asserting, avenging them? — so that you may believe this as it were private benignity of Christ a rivulet from the fountains of the Saviour. In truth, where to direct myself I know not, in so great a frequency of utterances of this kind, as in a wood or in a meadow or in an orchard of apples. The thing must be sought at random, as it falls. The psalm cries out: "Judge the orphan and the beggar, and deal justly with the lowly and the poor; free 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 make safe the sons of the poor." And in what follows, concerning Christ: "All nations shall serve him." But David ruled over the one Jewish nation — lest anyone think it said of David, because he too had taken up the lowly and those labouring under necessities. "Because," it says, "he shall free the beggar from the strong, he shall spare the beggar and the poor, and the souls of the poor he shall make safe; from usury and injustice he shall redeem their souls, and honoured shall be their name in his sight." Likewise: "Let sinners be turned into the underworld, all the nations that forget God; because the beggar shall not be held in forgetfulness unto the end, the endurance of the poor shall not perish unto the end." Likewise: "Who is like our God, who dwells on high, and beholds lowly things in heaven and on earth, who raises up the beggar from the earth, and exalts the poor from the dung-heap, that he may make him sit with the princes of the people" — surely in his kingdom. So too of old in Kingdoms, Hannah, the mother of Samuel, rendering glory to God in spirit, "Who," she says, "raises the poor from the earth and the beggar, that he may make him sit with the chiefs of the people" — surely in his kingdom — "and on thrones of glory" — surely royal ones. But through Isaiah, how he inveighs against the harassers of the needy: "But you, to what end do you set fire to my vineyard, and the spoil of the beggar in your houses? Why do you injure my people, and confound the face of the beggars?" And again: "Woe to those who write wickedness, for in writing they write wickedness, avoiding the judgements of the beggars and seizing the things judged for the poor of my people." Which judgements he demands for orphans and widows too, as for the needy of comfort. "Judge the orphan, and deal justly with the widow, and come, let us be reconciled, says the Lord." Whose so great affection toward every condition of lowliness is the Creator's, his too will be the kingdom which is promised by Christ, to whose affection those have long since belonged to whom it is promised. For even if you think the Creator's promises were earthly, but Christ's heavenly — well that heaven appears, as yet, of no other god than him whose the earth too is; well that the Creator promised at least the lesser things, that I may the more easily believe him about the greater too, than him who never first built up the faith of his liberality concerning the lesser. "Blessed are they that hunger, for they shall be filled." I might have transmitted this title to the former, since the hungry are none other than the poor and beggars, were it not that the Creator had destined this promise too specially toward the prebuilding, namely, of his own gospel — seeing that through Isaiah, concerning those whom he was to call from the height of the earth, surely the nations: "Behold," he says, "swiftly, lightly they shall come" — swiftly, as hastening under the ends of the times; lightly, because without the burdens of the former law. "They shall not hunger, nor thirst." Therefore they shall be filled — which surely is not promised but to the hungry and thirsty. 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 see these contraries too, whether they are pre-ministered to Christ. Meanwhile, that he promises fullness to the hungry is the Creator-god's. "Blessed are they that weep, for they shall laugh." Run through the opinion of Isaiah: "Behold, those who serve me shall exult in joyfulness, but you shall be confounded: behold, those who serve me shall be delighted, but you shall cry out for sorrow of heart." Recognize these contraries too with Christ. Certainly delight and exultation in joyfulness are promised to those who are in the diverse condition, the sad and gloomy and anxious. And the psalm too, the 125th: "Those who sow," it says, "in tears, shall reap in exultation." Now to those exulting and taking joyfulness laughter accrues, as to the mourning and grieving weeping. Thus the Creator, proclaiming the matters of laughter and of weeping, said first that the weeping shall laugh. Therefore he who began from the consolation of the poor and lowly and hungry and weeping, straightway desired to represent that one whom he had demonstrated through Isaiah: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to evangelize to the poor" — "Blessed are the beggars, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven"; "he has sent me to heal the broken in heart" — "Blessed are they that hunger, for they shall be filled"; "to call the languishing" — "Blessed are they that weep, for they shall laugh"; "to give to the mourners of Zion glory, and for ashes the joyfulness of ointment, and the garment of glory for the spirit of weariness." If Christ, admitted at once, administered these things, either he himself is the one who proclaimed that he would come to these things, or, if he has not yet come who proclaimed, ridiculously, but of necessity I might perhaps say, he commanded the Christ of Marcion: "Blessed shall you be, when men shall hold you in hatred, and shall reproach you, and shall cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake." By this pronouncement, without doubt, he exhorts to endurance. What less does the Creator through Isaiah? "Fear not the ignominy from men, and by their nullification be not diminished." What ignominy, what nullification? That which was to be for the Son of man's sake. Who is this? He who is according to the Creator. Whence shall we prove it? By the destruction proclaimed against him too; as through Isaiah, to the Jews, the authors of the hatred: "Because of you my name is blasphemed among the nations"; and elsewhere: "Sanctify him who circumscribes his own soul, who is held in spurning by the nations, by their servants and magistrates." For if the hatred was proclaimed against that Son of man who is according to the Creator, and the gospel attests that the name of Christians, surely derived from Christ, shall be hated for the Son of man's sake, which is Christ — then he constitutes as the cause of the hatred that Son of man who was according to the Creator, against whom the hatred was proclaimed. And surely if he had not yet come, the hatred of the name, which is carried on today, could not have preceded the person of the name. For both there is sanctifying among us, and one circumscribes his own soul, laying it down for us, and is held in spurning by the nations. And he who is born, he will be the Son of man, for whom our name too is refused.

"After these things," it says, "did their fathers to the prophets." O versatile Christ — now the destroyer, now the asserter of the prophets! He destroyed as their rival, converting their disciples; he asserted them for himself as a friend, censuring their persecutors. Now in so far as the asserting of the prophets, to whose destruction he had come, would not suit the Christ of Marcion, by so much the censuring of the persecutors of the prophets, whom he fulfilled in all things, suits the Christ of the Creator — or because it is rather the Creator's to reproach the fathers' delinquencies to their sons than that god's who castigates not even each one's own. "But not at once," you say, "did he protect the prophets, if he wished the iniquity of the Jews to be affirmed, that they had not even dealt piously with their prophets." And yet no iniquity here was to be reproached to the Jews — rather they were to be praised and approved, if they censured those to whose destruction, after so great an age, the best god was moved. But, I think, now no longer best, now somewhat lingering even with the Creator, nor altogether the god of Epicurus. For behold he changes into a malediction, and shows himself one who knows how to be offended and to grow angry. For he says "Woe." But a question arises for us concerning the quality of that word, as though it were not so much of malediction as of admonition. And what is the difference, when even an admonition is not made without the sting of a threat, made especially the more bitter through the "Woe"? Both an admonition and a threat too will belong to him who knows how to be angry. For no one admonishes and no one threatens, that one may not do something, but he who will avenge it when done. No one would avenge but he who knows how to be angry. Others indeed acknowledge a word of malediction, but they would have Christ pronounce "Woe" thus, not as it were properly from his own opinion, but because the "Woe" is from the Creator, and that he wished to oppose to them the harshness of the Creator, that he might commend his own forbearance above in the benedictions. As though it did not befit the Creator, as furnishing both — both a good god and a judge — to subjoin in maledictions also severity, since he had premised benignity in benedictions, for the amplitude of either discipline to be furnished, both for following the benediction and for forestalling the malediction. For so too he had premised: "Behold, I have set before you a blessing and a curse." Which he portended also into this arrangement of the gospel. Otherwise, what kind of one is he who, to insinuate his own goodness, opposed the harshness of the Creator? Weak is the commendation which is propped on the destruction of another. And yet by opposing the harshness of the Creator he confirmed him one to be feared. If to be feared, surely the rather to be obeyed than neglected; and Marcion's Christ now begins to teach men toward the Creator. Then, if the "Woe" is the Creator's, which looks toward the rich, then Christ is not offended at the rich, but the Creator, and Christ holds ratified the cases of the rich — pride I mean, and glory, and worldly pursuits, and carelessness of God, through which they deserve a "Woe" from the Creator. But how should it not belong to the same one to reprobate the rich who above approved the beggars? Everyone reprobates the contrary of that which he has approved. And so if a malediction against the rich is to be reckoned to the Creator, the benediction of the same upon the beggars will be defended, and the whole work is now the Christ of the Creator's. If the benediction upon the beggars is ascribed to the god of Marcion, the malediction upon the rich too will be imposed upon the same, and he will now be the equal of the Creator, as good as he is judge; nor will there now be room for the distinction by which two gods are made, and, the distinction removed, it will remain to announce one god the Creator. Therefore, if "Woe" is the voice either of malediction or of some sterner outcry, and is directed by Christ against the rich, I must prove the Creator the spurner of the rich too, just as I have proved him the advocate of the beggars, so that I may show Christ in this opinion too the Creator's — who enriched Solomon. But because, leave being given him to choose, he rather asked for those things which he knew pleasing to God, wisdom, he had deserved to obtain riches too, which he willed no more than that. Although it is not unbefitting for God to furnish riches too, by which both the rich are helped with comfort and many works of justice and love are administered thence. But the accidental vices of riches assign that "Woe" upon the rich in your gospel too, "Because," it says, "you have received your consolation" — surely out of riches, from their glory and their secular fruits. And so in Deuteronomy Moses says, "Lest, when thou hast eaten and been filled and built great houses, thy cattle and oxen multiplied and thy money and gold, thy heart be lifted up, and thou forget the Lord thy God." Just as he assails Hezekiah too, a king puffed up with treasures and glorying in them rather than in God, before those who had come from Persia, through Isaiah: "Behold, days come, and all that is in thy house shall be taken away, and what thy fathers laid up shall be transferred to Babylon." So too through Jeremiah he published, "Let not the rich glory in his riches, and let him who glories" — namely in God — "glory." So too he inveighs against the daughters of Zion through Isaiah, puffed up with adornment and abundance of riches, threatening also elsewhere against the noble and 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" — surely exalted by riches — "and a man shall be dishonoured" — surely honourable on account of his substance. Concerning whom again: "Behold, the Lord of powers shall confound the glorious with might, and the lifted up shall be brought low, and the lofty shall fall by the sword." Who more than the rich? — because they have received their consolation, glory and honour, loftiness out of riches. From whom turning us away, in the 48th psalm too, "Fear not," he says, "when a man has been made rich, and when his glory abounds; because when he dies, he shall take nothing, nor shall his glory descend with him." Likewise in the 61st: "Desire not riches, and if they shine, set not your heart." This very word "Woe," lastly, was of old destined through Amos against the rich flowing in delights. "For woe," he says, "to those who sleep in ivory beds and flow in delights on their couches, who eat kids from the flocks of she-goats and suckling calves from the herds of oxen, applauding to the sound of instruments — they have reckoned these as things abiding and not as things fleeting — who drink strained wine and are anointed with the choicest ointments." Therefore, even if I should show the Creator only dehorting from riches, not also pre-condemning the rich — even by the very word with which Christ does — no one would doubt that the threatening upon the rich through Christ's "Woe" was added by the same one from whom the dehortation from the very matters, that is, from riches, had run before. For threatening is an accession to dehortation. He drives in a "Woe" upon the filled too, because they shall hunger; upon those who laugh now too, because they shall mourn. To these will answer those things which above were opposed to the benedictions with the Creator: "Behold, those who serve me shall be filled, but you shall hunger" — surely because you are filled; "and behold, those who serve me shall be delighted, but you shall be confounded" — surely about to weep, who now laugh. For just as in the psalm, "Those who sow in tears shall reap in gladness," so in the gospel, "Those who sow in laughter" — namely out of gladness — "shall reap in tears." These things the Creator of old set together; Christ, only by distinguishing, not by changing, renewed them. "Woe, when men shall bless you. For after these things did their fathers to the false prophets too." Equally the Creator accuses the followers of human benediction and praise through Isaiah: "My people, those who call you blessed seduce you and disturb the ways of your feet." He forbids elsewhere to trust at all in man, so also in the praise of man, as through Jeremiah: "Cursed is the man who has hope in man." For also in the 117th psalm: "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 forswore all that is caught from man, much more benediction. But to reproach false prophets praised or blessed by their fathers is as much his as to reproach prophets harassed and refused: just as the injuries of the prophets would not have pertained to their god, so neither would the favours toward the false prophets have displeased any but the god of the prophets.

"But I say to you," he says, "who hear" (showing this 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 calumniate you." These the Creator shut up in one pronouncement through Isaiah: "Say, You are our brothers, to those who hate you." For if those who are enemies and hate and curse and calumniate are to be called brothers, surely he too commanded the haters to be blessed and the calumniators to be prayed for, who enjoined that they be reckoned brothers. Plainly Christ teaches a new patience, restraining even the requital of injury permitted by the Creator, who demands an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; on the contrary he himself bids the other cheek besides be offered, and that the cloak too be yielded over the tunic. Plainly these things Christ added as supplements consonant with the discipline of the Creator. And so this is at once to be reported — whether the discipline of patience is proclaimed with the Creator. He commanded through Zechariah that no one should remember the malice of his brother, but not even of his neighbour. For again, "The malice of his neighbour," it says, "let no one reconsider." Much more did he indict patience under injury who indicted forgetfulness. But also when he says, "Vengeance is mine, and I will repay," he accordingly teaches a patience that awaits vengeance. Inasmuch, then, as it does not gain credit that the same one should seem both to demand a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye, in requital of injury, who not only forbids requital but even vengeance, even the recollection and reconsideration of injury — by so much is it opened to us how he ordained an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, not to permit a second injury of retaliation, which he had forbidden by interdicting vengeance, but to coerce the first, which he had forbidden by the retaliation set against it — so that each one, regarding the licence of a second injury, might contain himself from the first. For he knows that violence is more easily compressed by the representation of retaliation than by the promise of vengeance. But both had to be appointed for the nature and the faith of men, that he who believed God might await vengeance from God, while he who had less faith might fear the laws of retaliation. This will of the law, labouring under the understanding, the Lord both of the sabbath and of the law and of all the paternal arrangements, Christ, both revealed and made effective, commanding the offering of the other cheek too, that he might the more extinguish the requital of injury which the law too had wished to impede through retaliation — certainly which prophecy had manifestly coerced, both forbidding the memory of injury and reducing vengeance to God. Thus if Christ brought in anything, not by an adversary's but by a helper's precept, he did not destroy the disciplines of the Creator. In short, if I consider the very reason of this patience to be enjoined — and that so full and perfect — it will not stand, if he is not the Creator's who promises vengeance, who furnishes a judge. Otherwise, if so great a weight of patience — of not only not striking back but even offering the other cheek, and not only not cursing back but even blessing, and not only not retaining the tunic but even granting the cloak besides — is imposed on me by one who is not to defend me, he commanded patience to no purpose, not exhibiting to me the reward of the precept, the fruit of patience I mean, which is vengeance, which he ought to have permitted me, if he furnishes it not himself, or, if he did not permit it me, to furnish it himself; since it concerns discipline too that injury be avenged. For by fear of vengeance all iniquity is bridled. But, licence being sent forth at large, it will domineer, gouging out both eyes and rousing every tooth in the security of impunity. But this belongs to a best and only good god — to suffer injury to patience, to set open the door to violence, not to defend the upright, not to coerce the wicked. "Give to everyone that asks thee" — surely to the needy, or so much the more to the needy, even though to the abounding too. Lest, then, anyone be needy, you have for the giver a form commanded in Deuteronomy by the Creator. "There shall not be," it says, "in thee a needy man, that blessing he may bless thee, the Lord thy God" — the giver, namely, who shall have caused that there be no needy one. And more here. For he does not bid give to the asker. But "let there not be," he says, "a needy man in thee," that is, take care beforehand that there be not; whereby he the more prejudges that it must be given to the asker, even in what follows. "But if there be a needy man among thy brothers, thou shalt not turn away thy heart, nor close thy hand from a needy brother. Opening thou shalt open thy hand to him, lending thou shalt lend to him as much as he desires." For a loan is not wont to be given but to one who asks. But concerning the loan afterward. Now if anyone wish to argue that the Creator indeed bade give to brothers, but Christ to all who ask, so that this is new and diverse — nay, it will be one of those things through which the law of the Creator will be in Christ. For Christ commanded toward all no other thing than what the Creator did toward brothers. For even though the goodness is greater which works toward strangers, yet it is not prior to that which ought first toward neighbours. For who shall be able to love strangers? But if the second degree of goodness is toward strangers, which toward neighbours is the first, the second degree will belong to the same one whose is the first too, more easily than that the second should be his whose the first did not exist. Thus the Creator both, according to the order of nature, taught benignity first toward neighbours, intending to send it forth afterward toward strangers, and, according to the reason of his arrangement, first toward the Jews, afterward toward all the human race too. And therefore, so long as the mystery was within Israel, with reason he commanded mercy upon brothers alone; but when to Christ he gave the nations for an inheritance and the ends of the earth for a possession, and that began to be discharged which was said through Hosea, "Not my people, my people, and she that has not obtained mercy, having obtained mercy" — namely the nation — then Christ extended toward all the law of the paternal benignity, excepting no one in commiseration, as none in vocation. Thus even if he taught anything more, this too he received into the inheritance of the nations. "And as you wish men to do to you, so do you also to them." In this precept surely the other part of it is understood: "And as you do not wish men to do to you, so do you also not do to them." If a new and hitherto unknown god and not yet plainly published commanded this, who had formed me by no prior institution, by which I might first know what I ought to wish or not wish for myself, and so do to others what I should wish for myself, and not do what I should not wish for myself — he permitted my opinion to be promiscuous, and did not bind me to a conformity of will and deed, so that I should do to others what I should wish for myself and should not do to others what I should not wish for myself. For he did not define what I ought to wish or not wish for myself and for others, so that, to a law of will I might match my deed, and might both not furnish to another what I should wish furnished to me by another — love, obedience, comfort, protection, and such goods — and likewise do to another what I should not wish done to me by another — violence, injury, contumely, fraud, and such evils. In short, by this inconformity of will and deed act the ethnics, not yet instructed by God. For even if good and evil are known by nature, yet not the discipline of God, by which known, then at last a conformity of will and deed out of faith, as under the fear of God, is enacted. And so the god of Marcion, though most fully revealed, yet, revealed, could not have sent forth a compendium of this precept of which we treat, so strict and obscure and still blind and the more easily to be interpreted according to my own choice rather — of which he had built up beforehand no distinction. But my Creator both of old and everywhere commanded the needy, the poor and orphans and widows, to be protected, helped, refreshed; as also through Isaiah: "Break thy bread to the beggars, and those who are without a roof bring into thy house, and if thou see one naked, cover him." Likewise through Ezekiel, of the just man: "His bread he shall give to the hungry, and shall cover the naked." Sufficiently, then, even then he taught me to do to others those things which I should wish done to me. Accordingly, denouncing, "Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness," he taught me not to do to others what I should not wish done to me; and therefore the precept in the gospel will belong to him who both built it up beforehand and distinguished it and arranged it according to the choice of his discipline, and now with reason has bound it up in a compendium — since in other respects too the Lord, that is Christ, was proclaimed as one who would make a curtailed word upon the earth.

Here now, when he interposes concerning the loan, "And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what grace is it to you?" run through what follows in Ezekiel concerning the same just man: "His money," it says, "he has not given for usury, and what abounds he will not take" — the redundancy of the loan, namely, which is interest. First, then, it was that he should root out the fruit of the loan, that he might the more easily accustom a man to lose even the very loan, if at all, whose fruit he had learned to forgo. For this we say was the work of the law, providing for the gospel. The faith of certain men then, little by little, toward the perfect lustre of Christian discipline, it was forming by those first precepts of a benignity still stammering. For above too, "And the pledge," it says, "thou shalt restore to the giver" — surely if he be not able to pay, since to a payer the pledge would in any case be restored without his writing it. Much more manifestly in Deuteronomy: "Thou shalt not sleep upon his pledge; restoring thou shalt restore to him his cloak about the setting of the sun, and he shall sleep in his cloak." More clearly still above: "Thou shalt remit every debt which thy neighbour owes thee, and thy brother thou shalt not demand back, because the remission of the Lord thy God has been invoked." Now when he bids the debt be remitted, surely to one not about to pay (for it is more, even if he be about to pay, when he forbids it to be demanded back), what else does he teach than that we should lend to one not about to pay, who indicted so great a loss upon the loan? "And you shall be sons of God." Nothing more shameless, if he shall make us sons to himself who did not permit us to make sons by taking away marriage. How will he draw his own into that name which he has already erased? I cannot be the son of a eunuch, especially when I have the same Father whom even the universe has. For he is as much the Father of all, being the founder of the universe, as a eunuch is the founder of no substance. And even if the Creator had not mingled male and female, even if he had not granted sons to all the animals too, this I was of his before paradise, before delinquency, before exile, before the two were one. Anew I was made a son, straightway when he brought me forth with his hands, when he moved me with his breath. He now again names me son, begetting me now not into a soul, but into a spirit. "Because he," it says, "is sweet toward the ungrateful and evil." Well done, Marcion; ingeniously enough you took from him the rains and suns, lest the Creator should appear. But who is this sweet one, who has not even hitherto been known? How sweet, from whom no benefits of this kind of sweetness, of suns and rains, had preceded, who had lent them? — one not about to receive again from the human race, like the Creator, who, for so great a liberality of the elements, still bears with men rendering the debt of gratitude more readily to idols than to himself. Truly sweet even in spiritual commodities. For "the utterances of the Lord are sweeter than honey and the honeycombs." He, then, censured the ungrateful too who deserved to find men grateful, whose sun and rains even you, Marcion, held in ingratitude. But yours could not now complain of the ungrateful, who had not prepared grateful ones. Commanding mercy too, "Be," he says, "merciful, as your Father has had mercy on you." This will be, "Break thy bread to the hungry, and those without a roof bring into thy house, and if thou see one naked, cover him," and, "Judge the orphan, and justify the widow." I acknowledge his old teaching, who prefers mercy to sacrifice. Or if another has now commanded mercy, because he himself too is merciful, why was he not merciful to me for so great an age? "Do not judge, lest you be judged. Do not condemn, lest you be condemned. Forgive, and you shall be forgiven. Give, and it shall be given to you — a good measure, pressed down and overflowing, they shall give into your bosom. With the same measure with which you have measured, it shall be measured back to you." As I think, these things sound a retribution provoked according to merits. From whom, then, the retribution? If from men only, then he teaches a human discipline and reward, and we shall obey men altogether: if from the Creator, as from a judge and assessor of merits, then he impels our obedience toward him with whom he has appointed the retribution to be caught at or feared, according as each shall have judged or condemned or forgiven or measured: if from himself, then he too now judges, which Marcion denies. Let the Marcionites therefore choose whether it be worth so much to fall away from the rule of their master as it is worth to have a 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 Apelles ought to have remembered, the emendator of the disciple Marcion. Let the heretic too take the beam out of his own eye, then let him censure, if any, the straw he thinks in the eye of the Christian. Accordingly the good tree too does not bring forth evil fruit, because neither does truth heresy, nor the evil good, because neither does heresy truth. So neither did Marcion bring forth anything good out of the evil treasure of Cerdo, nor Apelles out of Marcion's. For much more congruently shall we interpret of these men those things which Christ allegorized of men, not of two gods according to the scandal of Marcion. I think I am not rashly insisting thus far still upon this line, by which I define that nowhere at all was another god revealed by Christ. In this one adultery I marvel that the hand of Marcion grew numb. Unless that even robbers are afraid. No misdeed is without dread, because neither without consciousness of itself. So long, then, did the Jews too know no other god than him besides whom they knew none as yet, nor call any other god than him whom alone they knew. If it is so, who will seem to have said, "Why do you call me, Lord, Lord?" Either he who had never been so called, as one nowhere as yet published, or he who was always held to be Lord, as known from the beginning, the god of the Jews, namely? Who likewise could have added, "And do not do what I say?" Either he who at that moment was trying to teach, or he who from the beginning had committed to them the utterances both of the law and the prophets? Who could also reproach them with disobedience, even if he had never reproached them otherwise? Now he who before Christ harangued, "This people loves me with their lips, but their heart stands far off from me," surely imputed to them an old contumacy. Otherwise, how absurd, that a new god, a new Christ, the illuminator of a new and so great a religion, should pronounce contumacious and disobedient those whom he could not have tried.

Likewise, the faith of the centurion being extolled, it is incredible if he professed that he had found no such faith even in Israel, to whom the faith of Israel did not pertain. But neither thence could it have pertained, still raw to be proved or compared, not to say still none. But why should it not have been lawful for him to use the example of an alien faith? Because, if it were so, he would have said that such faith had never even been in Israel; but in saying that such faith he ought to have found in Israel — he indeed who had come for this, that he might find it, namely the god and the Christ of Israel — he would not have censured it but as the exactor and follower of it. But a rival would even have preferred it found such, for the weakening and destroying of which he had rather come, not for the approving. He raised up too the dead son of the widow. No new evidence. This even the prophets of the Creator had put forth; how much more the Son? But so far up to that moment had the Lord Christ brought in no other god, that they all there rendered glory to the Creator, saying, "A great prophet has come forth among us, and God has regarded his people." What god? Surely whose the people was, and from whom the prophets. But if they indeed glorified the Creator, while Christ both hearing and knowing did not correct them — and that in so great an evidence of a dead man raised up, still praying to the Creator — without doubt either he carried about no other god than him whom he suffered to be honoured in his own benefits and powers, or what kind of thing is it that he suffered them so long to err, having come for this, that he might heal their error? But John is scandalized at hearing of the powers of Christ, as of another's. But I will first explain the reason of the scandal, that I may the more easily explode the heretic's scandal. The Lord of powers being now himself, the Word and the Spirit of the Father working on earth and preaching, it was necessary that the portion of the Holy Spirit — which, after the form of a prophetic measure, had wrought in John the preparation of the Lord's ways — should now withdraw from John, reduced, namely, into the Lord, as into its own mass-sum. And so John, now a common man, and now one of the crowd, was scandalized indeed as a man, but not as one hoping for or understanding another Christ, who would neither hope for the same one as teaching or working nothing new. No one will hesitate concerning someone whom, while he knows him not to exist, he neither hopes for nor understands; but John was certain of no god besides the Creator, both as a Jew and as a prophet. Plainly he hesitated, as it were, about one whom, though he knew him to exist, whether he himself were he he knew not. By this fear, then, John too: "Art thou," he says, "he that cometh, or do we look for another?" — simply inquiring whether he himself had come whom he was awaiting. "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 look for as to come? For he hoped, as all supposed, that from a likeness of the evidences a prophet too might meanwhile have been sent, from whom another should be, that is, greater — the very Lord, namely, who was awaited as to come. And this then was John's scandal, that he doubted whether he himself had come whom they awaited, whom they ought to have acknowledged also by the proclaimed operations — so that the Lord announced to John that he was to be acknowledged through those same operations. And since these are established to have been proclaimed concerning the Christ of the Creator, as we have shown at each point, it is perverse enough that by those things he should have announced that a Christ not of the Creator was to be understood, through which he the rather compelled the Christ of the Creator to be acknowledged. Much more perverse, if the Christ who was not John's bears testimony to John, confirming him a prophet — nay, even above as an angel — driving in too what was written concerning him: "Behold, I send my angel before thy face, who shall prepare thy way" — elegantly, toward the former sense of the scandalized John, commemorating the prophecy, that, confirming the forerunner John already to have come, he might extinguish the scruple of that interrogation, "Art thou he that cometh, or do we look for another?" For, the forerunner having now discharged his office, the way of the Lord prepared, he himself was to be understood, to whom the forerunner had ministered — greater indeed than all born of women, but not therefore subject to him who should be lesser in the kingdom of God; as though the kingdom were of one god in which someone modest shall be greater than John, and John, who is greater than all born of women, of another. For whether he speaks, through humility, of someone modest, or of himself, because he was held lesser than John — all, namely, running together into the wilderness to John rather than to Christ ("What did you go out into the wilderness to see?") — equally it both befits the Creator both that John is greater than all born of women, and that Christ, or any modest one, should be greater than John in the kingdom equally of the Creator, and that he who was not scandalized at Christ — which then made John less — should be greater than so great a prophet. We have spoken concerning remission of sins. But the argument of that sinful woman will tend hither: that, when she fastened with kisses the feet of the Lord, inundated them with tears, wiped them with her hair, smeared them with ointment, she handled the truth of a solid body, not an empty phantom; and that the penitence of the sinner deserved pardon according to the Creator, accustomed to prefer it to sacrifice. But also, if the goad of penitence had come by faith, through penitence justified by faith she heard from him, "Thy faith has made thee safe," who through Habakkuk had pronounced, "The just shall live by his faith."

That rich women clung to Christ, who ministered to him out of their faculties, among whom too the wife of the king's procurator — this is from prophecy. For these Isaiah called rich women: "Arise and hear my voice," that he might show them first as disciples, then as workers and ministers: "Daughters in hope, hear my words: in the day of the year remember with labour in hope"; for with labour, by which they followed, and on account of hope, they ministered. Equally, concerning parables, let it suffice once for all to have proved this kind of speech promised by the Creator. But now that pronouncement of his too to the people, "With the ear you shall hear, and shall not hear," gave Christ occasion frequently to inculcate, "He that has ears, let him hear." Not as though, out of diversity, Christ permitted a hearing which the Creator had taken away, but because exhortation followed the threat. First, "With the ear you shall hear, and shall not hear"; then, "He that has ears, let him hear." For they did not hear spontaneously who had ears, but he showed the ears of the heart necessary, with which the Creator had denied they would hear. And therefore through Christ he adds: "See how you hear, and do not hear" — not hearing, namely, with the heart, but with the ear. If you accommodate a worthy sense to the pronouncement, in place of the sense of him who roused them to a hearing, even by saying, "See how you hear," he was threatening those who would not hear. To be sure, the most mild god threatens, since he neither judges nor grows angry! This the underlying sense too proves. "To him who has it shall be given, but from him who has not, even what he thinks he has shall be taken from him." What shall be given? An increase of faith, or of understanding, or salvation itself. What shall be taken? Surely what is given. By whom is it given and taken? If by the Creator it is taken, by him it is also given. If by the god of Marcion it is given, by him it is also taken. By whatever name, however, he threatens a taking-away, it will not belong to that god who knows not how to threaten, because he knows not how to be angry. I marvel, however, when he denies that a lamp is wont to be hidden, who hid himself for so great an age — a greater and more necessary light; when he promises all things from the hidden to the open, who darkens his god even to this point, awaiting, I suppose, the birth of Marcion. We come to the most constant argument of all who bring the Lord's nativity into controversy. "He himself," they say, "attests that he was not born, by saying, 'Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?'" Thus the heretics always either snatch bare and simple voices by conjecture whither they will, or again dissolve conditional and rational ones by the condition of simplicity, as in this place. We on the contrary say, first, that it could not have been announced to him that his mother and his brothers stood outside seeking to see him, if there were no mother to him and no brothers — whom surely he knew who announced them, either formerly known or then and there ascertained, while they desire to see him, or while they themselves send the message. To this our first proposition it is wont to be answered from the opposite side: "What, if it was announced to him for the sake of tempting him?" But this the Scripture does not say, which, in so far as it is wont to signify that something was done out of temptation ("Behold, a doctor of the law rose up tempting him," and concerning the consultation about tribute, "And the Pharisees came to him tempting him"), in so far, where it does not make mention of temptation, it does not admit the interpretation of temptation. And yet, over and above, I demand the reasons of the temptation — for what they tempted him by the naming of mother and brothers. If that they might know whether he had been born or not — when was there a question of this which from that temptation they should discuss? And who would doubt to have been born one whom he saw a man? whom he had heard profess himself the Son of man? whom from the aspect of all human quality he would doubt to believe God or the Son of God? — esteeming him more easily a prophet, even some great one, yet surely born? Even if in the exploration of his nativity he had been to be tempted, any other argument would have suited the temptation than through the mention of those persons whom even one born might not have. Tell me, does the mother survive for all the born? are brothers begotten besides for all the born? Is it not rather lawful to have fathers and sisters, or even no one? But also it is established that censuses were taken under Augustus then in Judea by Sentius Saturninus, among whom they could have inquired his lineage. So in no way did the reason of that temptation stand, and truly his mother and brothers stood outside. It remains also to inspect the sense of one not pronouncing simply, "Who is my mother or brothers?" as toward a denial of his lineage and nativity, but both out of the necessity of the case and from a rational condition. For that persons so near should stand outside, while strangers were fixed within upon his discourse, and besides seeking to call him away from his solemn work — with reason was he indignant. He did not so much abnegate as disavow. And so, when he had premised, "Who is my mother and who are my brothers?" subjoining, "Except those who hear my words and do them," he transferred the names of blood to others, whom he would judge nearer for their faith. But no one transfers a thing except from him who has that which he transfers. If, then, he made his mother and brothers those who were not such, how did he deny those who were? — on the condition, namely, of merits, not out of a denial of his near ones — teaching in himself that he who should prefer father or mother or brothers to the word of God is not a worthy disciple. For the rest, from this he the rather confessed his mother and brothers, in that he was unwilling to acknowledge them. In that he adopted others, he confirmed those whom out of offence he denied — for whom he substituted not truer ones, but worthier. In short, it is nothing great, if he preferred faith to blood, which he did not have.

But who is this who commands both the winds and the sea? Surely a new commander and possessor of the elements, the Creator being already subdued and shut out? It is not so. But the substances acknowledged their author, who had been wont to obey his servants too. Look into Exodus, Marcion; behold the rod of Moses commanding the Red Sea — vaster beyond all the pools of Judea — that, cleft to the bottom and fixed with equal astonishment of the parting on either side, it should let the people across with dry foot by a path through its midst; and again, nature returning at the nod of the same rod, that it should overwhelm the Egyptian army by the concord of the waters — to which work the south winds too gave service. Read that to the exiled family, when it was to be parted, in its crossing, the Jordan was a sword, whose impetus and current Joshua too had plainly taught to stand still as the prophets passed over. What of these? If your Christ is meant, he will not be more powerful than the servants of the Creator. But I should have used these examples alone, had not the proclamation of this marine expedition too preceded Christ. For when he crosses, the psalm is discharged. "The Lord," it says, "upon many waters." When he shakes the waves of the strait, Habakkuk is fulfilled. "Scattering," it says, "the waters by his journey." When at his threats the sea is dashed away, Nahum too is performed. "Threatening," it says, "the sea and drying it up" — surely with the winds, by which it was disquieted. Whence do you wish my Christ to be vindicated — from the examples, or from the prophets of the Creator? Come now, you who think that a soldierly and armed warrior is foretold, not figuratively nor allegorically — one who was to wage a spiritual war against spiritual enemies with spiritual soldiery and spiritual arms, spiritually — when you find in one man a multitude of demons, professing itself a legion, surely a spiritual one, learn too that Christ is to be understood the expugner of spiritual enemies, spiritually armed and spiritually warlike, and so that he himself it is who was to fight with a legion of demons too; so that of this war too the psalm may seem to have pronounced, "The Lord strong, the Lord mighty in war." For when he fought with the last enemy, death, through the trophy of the cross he triumphed. But whose god's son did the legion attest Jesus to be? Without doubt his whose torments and abyss they knew and feared. For neither do they seem to have been able as yet to be ignorant that a power of a new and unknown god was working on earth, because it is not likely that the Creator was ignorant. For if he had once been ignorant of another god above himself, yet now surely he had discovered one acting beneath his own heaven. But what the Lord had discovered would now have become known to the whole household too, in the same world and within the same circuit of heaven in which a foreign divinity was conversing. Inasmuch, then, as the Creator too would have known it, and the substance of it, if it had existed — by so much, because there was none, the demons knew no other than the Christ of their own god. For they do not seek from another what they would remember should be sought by them from the Creator, namely pardon of the abyss of the Creator. In short, they obtained it. By what desert? Because they had lied, because they had made him the son of a fierce god? And what kind of one will he be who helped liars, who suffered defamers? But because they had not lied, because they had known the god of the abyss and their own, so he too confirmed himself the one whom the demons had known, Jesus the judge and the son of the avenging god. Behold something too concerning those littlenesses and infirmities of the Creator in Christ. For I too wish to ascribe ignorance to him. Permit me, against a heretic. He is touched by a woman who flowed with blood, and he knew not by whom. "Who," he says, "touched me?" Even when the disciples make excuse, he persists in the voice of ignorance. "Someone touched me," and this he affirms from argument. "For I felt power gone out from me." What says the heretic? Did he know the person? And why did he speak as one ignorant? To provoke confession, certainly; to prove fear. So too Adam once was sought, as one ignorant, "Adam, where art thou?" You have both the Creator excused along with Christ, and Christ equated with the Creator. But also that, as an adversary of the law — that, because the law removes from the touch of a bleeding woman, therefore he desired not only to admit her touch but even to grant soundness. O a god beneficent not by nature, but by rivalry! But indeed, if we find the woman's faith to have so deserved, when he says, "Thy faith has made thee safe," who are you, to interpret a rivalry of the law in that deed which the Lord himself showed to have been put forth out of the reward of faith? But you wish to constitute this the woman's faith, by which she had despised the law. And to whom is it credible that a woman, conscious as yet of no god, initiated as yet into no new law, should burst into that law by which she was still held? By what faith, in short, did she burst in? believing in what god? despising whom? The Creator? Certainly out of faith she touched. If out of faith in the Creator, who knew no other god, how did she burst into his law? For she burst in, if she burst in, as much out of faith in the Creator. For how shall both agree, both that she burst in, and that out of faith she burst into that on account of which she ought not to have burst in? I will tell. This faith was first that by which she trusted that her own god preferred mercy to sacrifice itself, by which she was certain that he wrought in Christ, by which she so touched him, not as a holy man, nor as a prophet, whom she knew contaminable by reason of human substance, but as the very god, whom she had presumed no filth could pollute. And so she did not rashly interpret the law for herself, signifying that those things were contaminated which were contaminable, not the god, whom she trusted in Christ. But she reconsidered this too, that the ordinary and solemn flux of menstrual or natal blood is taxed in the law, which comes from an office of nature, not from a defect of health. But she was redundant from a defect of health, for whom she knew necessary not the measure of time, but the help of the divine mercy. And so she can seem not to have burst into the law, but to have distinguished it. This will be the faith which had conferred understanding too. "Unless you believe," it says, "you shall not understand." This faith of that woman, who believed only the Creator, Christ approving, answered himself to be the god of that faith which he approved. Nor will I omit that, while his garment is touched — surely a garment put upon a body, not a phantom — a body too was demonstrated; not as though we should now treat of this, but because it conspires to the present question. For if there was no truth of body, surely the phantom, as an empty thing, could not be contaminated. He, then, who cannot be contaminated by reason of the emptiness of substance, how could he have wished to be? As an adversary of the law he was lying, who was not truly polluted.

He sends the disciples to preach the kingdom of God. Did he even here publish whose? He forbids them to carry anything for food or clothing on the way. Who would have commanded this but he who both feeds the ravens and clothes the flowers of the field, who before granted to the ox too treading out the grain freedom of mouth for the pardon of fodder, in removing it from the work, because the worker is worthy of his hire? Let Marcion delete these, provided the sense be safe. But when he bids the dust be shaken off the feet upon those by whom they had not been received, and commands this too to be done for a testimony — no one testifies what is not destined for judgement; he who bids inhumanity be reduced to a testimony threatens a judge. That no new god was approved by Christ that opinion too of all declared, because some asserted to Herod that Christ Jesus was John, others Elias, others some one of the old prophets. Of whom whichever it had been, surely not for this was he raised up, that after the resurrection he should preach another god. He feeds the people in the wilderness, namely after the former manner. Or if it is not the same majesty, then he is already lesser than the Creator, who not in one day, but in forty years, nor out of the inferior matters of bread and fish, but out of heavenly manna, nor about five, but six hundred thousand men supported. And so far was it majesty, that he willed even a scantiness of food not only to suffice but even to overflow, from the former example. For so too in the time of famine under Elias the scanty and last food of the Sareptan widow, out of the prophet's blessing, had abounded through the whole time of famine. You have the third book of Kingdoms. If you unfold the fourth too, you will find this whole order of Christ about that man of God who, when ten barley loaves had been offered him, bade them be distributed with the people, and his minister, accordingly considering the multitude and the smallness of the food, had answered, "What should I give of this in the sight of a hundred men?" "Give," he says, "and they shall eat, because thus says the Lord, They shall eat and shall leave remnants, according to the word of the Lord." O Christ, old even in the new! These things, then, Peter, who had seen them and had compared them with the former, and had recognized not only things formerly done, but things even then prophesying for the future — when, the Lord inquiring who he seemed to them to be, he answered for all, "Thou art the Christ" — could not but have understood him Christ, none other than the one he had known in the Scriptures, whom he was now recounting in deeds. This he himself too confirms, still patient — nay, even enjoining silence. For if Peter indeed could confess him no other than the Creator's, while he commanded them to tell this to no one, surely he was unwilling that to be divulged which Peter had perceived. "Nay," you say, "because he had not perceived rightly, he was unwilling a lie to be disseminated." But he declared another cause of the silence, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be reprobated by elders and scribes and priests, and be killed, and after the third day rise again. Which things, since they too are proclaimed concerning the Christ of the Creator — as we shall fulfil in their places — even thus he showed himself to be the very one concerning whom they were proclaimed. Certainly, even if they had not been proclaimed, he brought forth as the cause of the enjoined silence one which should demonstrate not Peter's error, but the necessity of the passions to be undergone. "Whoever," he says, "shall wish to make his soul safe, shall lose it; and whoever shall lose it for my sake, shall make it safe." Certainly the Son of man uttered this opinion. Look, then, you too, with the king of Babylon, into his burning furnace, and you will find there, as it were the Son of man (for he was not yet truly so, namely not yet born of man), even then constituting these issues. He makes safe the souls of the three brothers, who had conspired to lose them for God, but lost those of the Chaldeans, which they had preferred to make safe through idolatry. What is this new teaching, of which the evidences are old? Although the proclamations of martyrdoms too, both as to come and as to bring a reward from God, ran 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." When more is this done than in the persecution of his saints? Surely not a simple loss, nor a common one by the law of nature, but that signal and warlike-for-faith one, in which he who loses his soul for God saves it — that here too you may acknowledge a judge, who recompenses the evil gain of the soul by its loss, and the good loss of the soul by its salvation. But he exhibits to me a jealous god too, repaying evil with evil. "Whoever," he says, "shall have been confounded at me, I too will be confounded at him." Since the matter of confusion would suit none but my Christ, whose order is the more to be blushed at — so that it lies open even to the revilings of heretics, who harangue with all the bitterness they can about the whole foulness of his nativity and rearing and even the very indignity of his flesh — for the rest, how shall he be liable to confusion who does not admit it? — coagulated not, indeed, in a virgin's womb, yet in a woman's, and even if not of seed, yet by the law of corporeal substance, out of the humour of a woman; not held flesh before its shaping, not called a beast after its figuring, not deliberated through ten months' torment, not poured out to the earth in a sudden shaking of pangs along with the mire of so long a time through the sewer of the body, nor at once auspicating the light with tears and the first wound of his own swaddling, nor much washed, nor medicated with salt and honey, nor first wrapped in the cerements that are already a burial-cloth, nor thence rolled through filth among the bosoms, troublesome to the breasts, long an infant, scarcely a boy, slowly a man — but set forth from heaven, at once grown, at once whole, straightway Christ, only spirit and power and god. For the rest, as not true, who was not seen, so neither to be blushed at for the curse of the cross, of which he lacked the truth, lacking the body. He could not therefore have said, "Whoever shall have been confounded at me." Ours ought to have pronounced this — diminished by the Father a little below the angels, a worm and not a man, the shame of man and the outcast of the people — inasmuch as he so willed it, that by his bruise we should be healed, that by his dishonour our salvation should stand. And with reason he laid himself down for his own man, for his own image and likeness, not another's; that, since man had not blushed to adore stone and wood, with the same constancy, not confounded at Christ, he might make satisfaction to God for the shamelessness of idolatry through the shamelessness of faith. Which of these suits your Christ, Marcion, to the desert of confusion? Plainly you ought to be ashamed that you yourself fashioned him.

For this too you ought to have blushed at most of all, that you allow him to be seen with Moses and Elias on the retirement of the mountain, whose destroyer he had come. This, namely, that voice from heaven willed to be understood, "This is my beloved Son, hear him" — that is, no longer Moses and Elias. Therefore the voice alone sufficed, without the showing of Moses and Elias. For by defining whom they should hear, he would have forbidden any others to be heard. Or perhaps did he permit Isaiah and Jeremiah and the rest, whom he did not show, to be heard, if he forbade those whom he showed? Now even if their presence was necessary, surely they would not be shown in colloquy, which is a sign of familiarity, nor in a fellowship of brightness, which is an example of esteem and grace, but in some foulness, which is an argument of destruction — nay, in the darkness of the Creator, for the dispelling of which he had been sent — far removed too from the brightness of Christ, who was to separate even their voices and letters from his gospel. Thus he demonstrates them aliens while he has them with him. Thus he teaches that they are to be left whom he joins to himself. Thus he destroys those whom he builds up out of his own rays. What would the Christ of those men do? I believe, according to the perversity, he would have revealed them such as Marcion's Christ ought to have been, or any others with him than his own prophets. But what is so the Christ of the Creator's as to show his own preachers with himself? to be seen with those to whom in revelations he had been seen? to speak with those who had spoken him? to share his glory with those by whom he was named the Lord of glory? — with his own chief men, of whom the one was once the informer of the people, the other one day the reformer, the one the initiator of the old testament, the other the consummator of the new. And so Peter too, with reason acknowledging the comradeship of his own Christ by the individuality of his presence, suggests counsel: "It is good for us to be here" (good plainly where Moses, namely, and Elias are), and, "Let us make here three tabernacles, one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias"; but not knowing what he said. How not knowing? Either through simple error, or by that reason by which we defend, in the cause of the new prophecy, that ecstasy — that is, a being out of one's mind — befits grace? For a man set in the spirit, especially when he beholds the glory of God, or when God speaks through him, must of necessity fall from his senses, overshadowed, namely, by the divine power — concerning which there is a question between us and the psychics. Meanwhile it is easy to prove the ecstasy of Peter. For how would he have known Moses and Elias, except in the spirit? (for the people could not have had their images or statues and likenesses, the law forbidding) — except that he had seen them in the spirit? And so what he had said in the spirit, not set in his senses, he could not know. For the rest, if he so knows not as one erring — in that he thought Christ to belong to them — then it is now established that above too, when Peter was interrogated by Christ whom they esteemed him to be, he said, of the Creator's, "Thou art the Christ"; because, if he had then acknowledged him to be of another god, here too he would not have erred. But if here too he therefore erred because above too, then you are certain that on that day too no new divinity was revealed by Christ, and that Peter had not yet erred, Christ hitherto revealing nothing of the kind, and that Christ was so long not to be reckoned of another than the Creator, whose whole order he here too expressed. Three of the learners he takes as witnesses of the coming vision and voice. And this is the Creator's. "In three witnesses," it says, "shall every word stand." He retires into the mountain. I acknowledge the form of the place. For the former people too the Creator had initiated at the mountain both by vision and by his voice. It behoved that upon that platform the new testament should be sealed where the old had been written, under the same circuit too of the cloud, which no one will doubt to be massed out of the Creator's air. Unless he had led even his own clouds thither, because he too had broken his way through the Creator's heaven; or else he used the Creator's cloud-cover by leave. And so neither now was the cloud mute, but the wonted voice from heaven, and the Father's new testimony over the Son, as in the first psalm: "Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee." Concerning whom also through Isaiah: "Who fearing God shall hear the voice of his Son?" And so, now representing him, "This is my Son" — surely it is understood, "whom I promised." For if he promised at some time, and afterward says, "This is he," it is the part of one exhibiting to use a voice in the demonstration of the promise who at some time promised, not of one to whom it can be answered, "Who indeed art thou who sayest, This is my Son, concerning whom thou hast no more premised than that thou hast revealed thyself, which thou wast before?" Hear him therefore whom he had from the beginning declared was to be heard in the name of a prophet, since he was to be esteemed a prophet too by the people. "A prophet," says Moses, "shall God raise up to you from your sons," namely according to carnal descent, "as me; him shall you hear. But everyone who shall not hear him, his soul shall be exterminated from his people." So too Isaiah: "Who among you fearing shall hear the voice of his Son?" — which the Father himself too was to commend. For "establishing," it says, "the words of his Son," by saying, namely, "This is my beloved Son, hear him." And so, even if a transference of hearing has been made from Moses and Elias to Christ, yet not as from another god, nor to another Christ, but from the Creator to his Christ, according to the decession of the old and the succession of the new testament. "Not a legate," says Isaiah, "nor a messenger, but he himself, God, shall save them" — he himself now preaching and fulfilling the law and the prophets. The Father, then, handed over new disciples to the Son, Moses and Elias being first shown with him in the prerogative of brightness, and so dismissed, as already discharged both in office and in honour — that this very thing might be confirmed against Marcion, that there is a fellowship even of Christ's brightness with Moses and Elias. But the whole bearing of that vision we have also with Habakkuk, where the spirit, sometimes in the person of the apostles: "Lord, I have heard thy hearing, and was afraid." What rather than that of the heavenly voice: "This is my beloved Son, hear him"? "I considered thy works, and was astonished." When more than when, the brightness of him being seen, Peter knew not what he said? "In the midst of two living creatures thou shalt be known" — Moses and Elias. Concerning whom Zechariah too saw in the figure of two olives and two olive-branches. 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: "A power covered the heavens" — surely with that cloud-cover; "and his splendour shall be as the light" — surely by which his garment too shone. And if we be reminded of the promise of Moses, here it will be found discharged. For when Moses had desired the sight of the Lord, saying, "If, then, I have found grace before thee, manifest thyself to me, that knowing I may see thee" — desiring that sight in which he was to act a man, which the prophet knew — for the rest, concerning the face of God he had already heard, "No man shall see me and live." "And this word too which thou hast said I will do for thee." And again Moses: "Show me thy glory." And the Lord likewise of the future: "I will go before in my glory," and the rest. And at the last: "And then thou shalt see my hinder parts." Not loins nor calves, but the glory which he had desired, to be revealed in later times. In which face, face to face visible, he had promised himself to him, saying to Aaron too, "And if there be a prophet among you, in a vision I will be known to him, and in a vision I will speak to him, not as to Moses: mouth to mouth I will speak to him in appearance" (surely of a man, which he was to bear), "not in a riddle." For even though Marcion was unwilling that he should be shown speaking with the Lord, but standing, yet even standing he stood mouth to mouth and face to face with him, "with him," it says, not outside him, into his glory, not to say in his sight. From which glory, illumined no otherwise, he departed from Christ than he was wont from the Creator — and so then to smite the eyes of the sons of Israel, just as now those of the blinded Marcion, who did not see that this argument too works against himself.

I take upon myself the person of Israel. Let the Christ of Marcion stand and cry out: "O unbelieving generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I bear with you?" Straightway he ought to hear from me: "Whoever thou art, thou newcomer, first publish who thou art, and from whom thou comest, and what right thou hast in us. Hitherto with thee all is the Creator's. Plainly if thou comest from him, and for him thou actest, we admit the reproach. But if from another, say, I pray, what hast thou ever committed to us of thine own, which we ought to have believed, that thou shouldst reproach unbelief — thou who hast never even revealed thyself to us? How long since didst thou begin to act among us, that thou shouldst complain of the time? In what didst thou bear with us, that thou shouldst impute patience? An ass from Aesop's well, thou comest only now, and already criest out." I take up also the person of the disciples, on whom he leapt: "O unbelieving nation, how long shall I be with you, how long shall I bear with you?" This outburst of his I should most justly strike back, surely in this manner: "Whoever thou art, thou newcomer, first publish who thou art, from whom thou comest, what right thou hast in us. Hitherto, I think, thou art the Creator's, and therefore we have followed thee, recognizing in thee all that is his. But if thou comest from him, we admit the reproach. But if for another thou actest, I pray thee, say, what hast thou ever committed to us, at least of thine own, which we ought already to have believed, that thou shouldst reproach unbelief — thou who dost not even hitherto publish thine author? How long since didst thou begin to act among us, that thou shouldst oppose the time too? In what didst thou bear with us, that thou shouldst boast patience too? An ass from Aesop's well, thou hast only now appeared here, and already criest out." Who would not so have beaten back the injustice of the reproach, if he had believed him to belong to one who ought not yet to complain? Save that not even that other would have leapt upon them, had he not, long since dwelling among them in the law, in the prophets, in powers and benefits, ever found them unbelieving. But behold, Christ loves the little ones, teaching that such ought they to be who always wish to be greater. But the Creator sent bears upon the boys, avenging Elisha the prophet, who had suffered insults from them. A shameless enough Antithesis, when it commits things so diverse — little ones and boys, an age yet innocent and one already capable of judgement, which could insult, not to say blaspheme. By which, then, as just god, he spared not even impious boys, exacting honour for the greater age, and surely the more from the lesser; but by which, as good, he so loves the little ones that in Egypt he did good to the midwives, who protected the Hebrew births endangered by the edict of Pharaoh. Thus this affection too of Christ is with the Creator. Even now, the god of Marcion, who opposes marriage, how can he seem a lover of little ones, whose whole cause is marriage? He who hates the seed must of necessity execrate the fruit too. Nay, that one is to be held more savage than the king of Egypt. For Pharaoh did not suffer the infants to be reared, this one not even to be born — taking life from them even of ten months in the womb. But how much more credible that the affection toward little ones be reckoned to him who, in blessing marriage for the propagation of the human race, blessed and promised the very fruit of marriage, of which infancy is the first part. The Creator represents a plague of fire at Elias' demand upon that false prophet. I acknowledge the severity of a judge. On the contrary, the disciples destining the same animadversion against Christ upon that little village of the Samaritans. Let the heretic acknowledge too that this gentleness of Christ was promised by the same most severe judge. "He shall not contend," it says, "nor shall his voice be heard in the street: the bruised reed he shall not break, and the smoking flax he shall not quench." Such a one, surely, was much more not about to burn men. For then too to Elias, "Not in fire," says the Lord, "but in a mild spirit." But why does the most humane god refuse him who offers himself so inseparable a companion to him? If because he had said proudly or out of hypocrisy, "I will follow thee wherever thou goest," then either pride or hypocrisy he acted as a judge in judging it to be refused. And surely he condemned whom he refused, namely not about to follow unto salvation. For as he calls to salvation whom he does not refuse, or even whom he calls spontaneously, so to perdition he condemns whom he refuses. But to that man pleading the burial of his father, when he answers, "Let the dead bury their dead, but go thou and announce the kingdom of God," he manifestly confirmed both laws of the Creator: both that in Leviticus, forbidding the priests to be present even at the last rites of parents ("Over every dead soul," it says, "the priest shall not enter, and over his own father he shall not be defiled"), and that of consecration in Numbers; for there too he who vows himself to God bids, among the rest, that he enter not over any dead soul, not even over a father's or mother's or brother's. But I think he was destining for both consecration and priesthood him whom he had imbued with preaching the kingdom of God. Or if it is not so, he must be pronounced impious enough who, with no reason of law intervening, commanded the burials of parents to be despised by their sons. But when he forbids that third one, preparing first to bid farewell to his own, to look back, he follows out the sect of the Creator. This too that other one had been unwilling to have done by those whom he had freed from Sodom.

He chooses too another seventy apostles over and above the twelve. For to what end twelve, after just so many springs in Elim, if not also seventy after just so many palm-trees? The diversity of cases, not of powers, made most of the Antitheses. But he who did not regard the diversity of cases, easily esteemed it one of powers. The Creator brings out the departure of the sons of Israel from Egypt, stuffed and packed with those spoils of golden and silver vessels and garments besides the burdens of their dough; but Christ prescribed that the disciples should not carry even a staff on the way. For the former were being advanced into the wilderness, but these were sent into cities. Consider the bringing-forward of the cases, and you will understand one and the same power which arranged the expedition of its own according to penury and plenty — cutting short, as it was to abound through the cities, just as it had provided furnishing for one about to journey through the wilderness. He forbade them also to carry shoes. For he it was under whom the people, even in the wilderness through so many years, had not worn out its shoes. "Salute no one," he says, "on the way." O Christ the destroyer of the prophets, from whom he received even this! Elisha, when he sent his servant Gehazi on the way to the son of the Shunammite, to be raised from death, I think thus commanded him: "Gird thy loins and take my staff in thy hand and go: whomever thou meetest on the way, do not bless him" — that is, do not salute him — "and whoever blesses thee, do not answer him" — that is, do not salute him back. For what is the blessing on the ways but a mutual salutation from meeting? So too the Lord, that into whatever house they should enter, they should say peace to it. The example is the same. For this too Elisha commanded — that, when he had entered to the Shunammite, he should say to her, "Peace to thy husband, peace to thy son." These will rather be our Antitheses, which compare, not which separate Christ. But "the worker is worthy of his hire" — who could more have pronounced this than a god a judge? — for this very thing is to judge, to make the worker worthy of his hire. No retribution stands without judgement. Even now here the law of the Creator is sealed, who judges even the working oxen worthy workers of their hire. "An ox," it says, "treading out, thou shalt not bind the mouth." Who so generous toward men but he who is so toward cattle too? But if Christ too pronounces the workers worthy of their hire, he excused that precept of the Creator about the golden and silver vessels of the Egyptians to be carried off. For those who had worked villas and cities for the Egyptians, surely workers worthy of their hire, were not equipped for fraud, but for the compensation of a hire which otherwise they could not have exacted from their masters. The kingdom of God, neither new nor unheard-of, he thus too confirmed, while he bids it be announced to have drawn near. For what at some time had been far off, that can be said to have drawn near. But if it had never before existed before it drew near, neither could that be said to have drawn near which had never been far off. Everything that is new and unknown is sudden. Everything that is sudden, when it is announced, then for the first time, bringing in its appearance, then for the first time receives its time. For the rest, it could not have delayed before, so long as it was not announced, nor have drawn near from the time it began to be announced. He even adds, that to those who had not received them they should say, "Know, however, that the kingdom of God has drawn near." If he commands this not for the sake of threatening too, he commands it most vainly. For what is it to them if the kingdom draw near, except because it draws near with judgement? — unto the salvation, namely, of those who shall have received its announcement. How, if a threat can be without execution, have you a god an executor in the threatener and a judge in both? So too he bids the dust be shaken off upon them, for a testification, even what cleaves to their land — far less anything of the remaining communion. For if inhumanity and inhospitality are to bring back from him no vengeance, to what purpose does he prefix a testification, surely portending threats? Now, since the Creator too in Deuteronomy forbids the Ammonites and Moabites to be received into the church, because they had inhumanly and inhospitably defrauded of supplies the people departing from Egypt, then it will be established that the interdict of communion flowed thence into Christ, where he has the form, "Whoever despises you, despises me." This too the Creator to Moses: "They have not despised thee, but me." For Moses is as much an apostle as the prophets too are apostles. The authority of either office will have to be matched, from one and the same lord of apostles and of prophets. Who now will give power to tread upon serpents and scorpions? Whether the lord of all animals, or the god not even of one lizard? But well that the Creator promised this power even to little boys through Isaiah — to thrust their hand into the den of asps and into the bed of the young of asps, and not at all be hurt. And surely we know (saving the simplicity of the Scripture — for not even could the beasts themselves harm where faith was) that figuratively scorpions and serpents portend spiritual things of wickedness, of which their very prince too is reckoned under the name of serpent and dragon and of each most eminent beast with the Creator, who granted this power to his former Christ, as the ninetieth psalm to him: "Upon the asp and the basilisk thou shalt tread, and thou shalt trample the lion and the dragon." As also Isaiah: "In that day the Lord God shall bring on a sword, holy, great, and strong" — namely his Christ — "upon that dragon, the great and crooked serpent, and he shall slay him in that day." But when the same says, "It shall be called a clean way and a holy way, and the unclean shall not pass there, nor shall there be there an unclean way; but those who shall be dispersed shall go in it, and shall not err, and there shall no longer be a lion there, nor shall any of the worst beasts go up upon it, nor shall it be found there" — since the way demonstrates faith, through which we come to God, even then to the same way, that is, to faith, he promises this evacuation and subjection of the beasts. In short, you may find too the times of the promise to agree, if you read what goes before: "Be strong, you hands let down, and you knees dissolved: then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall hear: then the lame shall leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall be clear." Therefore where he published the benefits of medicines, then too he subjected both scorpions and serpents to his holy ones — he, namely, who had received this power, that he might furnish it to others too, first from the Father, and exhibited it according to the order of the proclamation.

Who shall be invoked as Lord of heaven who is not first shown to be its maker? "For I give thanks," he says, "and confess to thee, Lord of heaven, that what was hidden from the wise and prudent thou hast revealed to babes." What things are these? and whose? and by whom hidden? and by whom revealed? If hidden by the god of Marcion and revealed, who had sent forth absolutely nothing before in which anything could have been hidden — no prophecies, no parables, no visions, no arguments at all of things or words or names overshadowed through allegories and figures or the mists of riddles, but had hidden his very magnitude, which he was now most of all revealing through Christ — unjustly enough. For what had the wise and prudent delinquished, that god should be hidden from them, to the knowing of whom their wisdom and prudence had not sufficed? No way being given by him through any proclamation of works, or any footprints, by which the wise and prudent might be led on. Although too even if they had delinquished in something toward an unknown god — suppose now a known one — yet they ought not to have experienced him a jealous one, who is brought in as unlike the Creator. Therefore if he had neither sent forth materials in which to have hidden anything, nor had had guilty parties from whom to hide it, nor ought to have hidden it, even if he had had them — then neither will he himself be the revealer, who was not the hider; thus neither the Lord of heaven nor the Father of Christ, but he in whom all these things suit. For he both hid, the instrument of prophetic obscurity being sent before, whose understanding faith should deserve ("Unless you believe, you shall not understand"), and had as guilty the wise and prudent, who from his works so many and so great did not seek out an intelligible god, or philosophized perversely concerning him, and supplied wits to the heretics, and lastly is jealous. In short, of old he harangued through Isaiah what Christ rejoices at: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the prudence of the prudent I will hide." As also elsewhere he signifies both to have hidden and to be about to reveal: "And I will give them hidden treasures, the invisible I will open to them." And again: "Who else shall scatter the signs of ventriloquists and the divinations from the heart, turning back the wise and infatuating their thoughts?" But if he designated his own Christ too the illuminator of the nations — "I have set thee for a light of the nations," which we interpret in the name of the babes, namely those once small in sense and infants in imprudence, but now too small through the humility of faith — surely we shall the more easily believe that the same one revealed too to the babes through Christ who both formerly hid and through Christ promised the revelation. Or if the god of Marcion has laid open those things which had formerly been hidden by the Creator, then now he has done business for the Creator, expounding his things. "But for destruction," you say, "that he might traduce them." Then he ought to have traduced them to those from whom the Creator hid them — the wise and prudent. For if he did it out of benignity, acknowledgement was to be furnished to those to whom it had been denied, not to babes, to whom the Creator had begrudged nothing. And yet hitherto, I think, we prove that rather a building-up of the law and the prophets is found in Christ than a destruction. He says all things were handed over to him by the Father. You might believe it if Christ is the Creator's, whose all things are, because the Creator handed over all things to a Son not lesser than himself — the things he founded through him, namely through his Word. But if that newcomer is meant, what are the "all things" which were handed over to him by the Father? Which are the Creator's? Therefore good are the things which the Father handed to the Son, and the Creator now good, whose all things are good, and that other now not good, who invaded another's goods, that he might hand them to a Son, teaching to abstain from another's. Certainly a most beggarly one, who had not whence to enrich even his Son but out of another's. Or if nothing of the Creator's was handed to him by the Father, how does he claim the Creator's man for himself? Or if the man alone was handed to him, "all things" is not the man. But the Scripture declares a handing over of all things made to the Son. But even if you interpret "all things" of the kinds of men, that is, of all the nations, even to have handed these over to the Son is the Creator's: "I will give thee the nations for thine inheritance, and the ends of the earth for thy possession." Or if that other too has some things of his own, all of which he handed to the Son, equally with the man of the Creator, show some one out of all for credence, for an example, lest I as deservedly not believe that all things are his of whom I see nothing, as deservedly believe even the things I do not see to be his whose are all the things I do see. "But no one knows who the Father is, save the Son, and who the Son is, save the Father, and to whomever the Son shall reveal him." And so Christ preached an unknown god. For hence too the other heretics are propped, opposing the Creator as known to all, both to Israel by familiarity and to the nations by nature. And how does he himself attest that he was not known even to Israel? "But Israel has not known me, and the people has not understood me"; nor to the nations: "For behold, of the nations," he says, "there is no one." Wherefore he reckoned them a drop of a bucket, and Zion he left as a watch-tower in a vineyard. See, then, whether it be a confirmation of the prophetic voice reproaching the merely human ignorance, which was up to the Son. For therefore he subjoined that the Father is known by him to whom the Son shall have revealed him, since he himself was the one who, set by the Father, was announced as the illumination of the nations — of God, namely, the nations to be illumined, even Israel — surely through a fuller acknowledgement of God. Thus the arguments will not avail for the faith of another god which can suit the Creator, because those which do not suit the Creator, these will be able to avail for the faith of another god. If you inspect what follows too — "Blessed are the eyes which see what you see: for I say to you, that prophets did not see what you see" — they descend from the higher sense, so that no one, as was fitting, had known God, since not even the prophets had seen what was being seen under Christ. For if Christ were not mine, he would not have placed mention of the prophets in this passage. For what wonder if they had not seen the things of an unknown god, and one revealed after so long an age? But what would have been the happiness of those who then saw what others could not with reason have seen, if they had not obtained the representation of those things which they had never proclaimed — except that those who could equally have seen the things of their own god, which they had even proclaimed, yet had not seen them? But this will be the happiness of others who saw what others had only proclaimed. In short, we will show — and have already shown — that the things were seen in Christ which had been proclaimed, yet hidden even from the prophets themselves, that they might be hidden too from the wise and prudent of the world. In the gospel of truth a doctor of the law, assailing the Lord, "What doing," he says, "shall I obtain eternal life?" In the heretical one, only "life" is set, without mention of "eternal," so that the doctor may seem to have consulted about that life which is promised in the law by the Creator as long-lasting, and the Lord therefore to have given him an answer according to the law, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and with thy whole soul and with all thy strength," because it was about the law of life he was inquiring. But the doctor of the law surely knew by what manner he could obtain the legal life, so that he would not have asked about that whose rules he even taught. But because the dead too were now being raised by Christ, roused to the hope of eternal life through the examples of return, lest he should demand something more of observance, loftier in hope, he therefore consulted about the obtaining of eternal life. And so the Lord, as himself neither another, nor bringing in any new precept other than that which principally makes for all salvation and either life, sets the very head of the law against him — of loving in all ways the Lord his God. In short, if the doctor too consulted about long-lasting life, and Christ answered, which is with the Creator, not about eternal, which is with the god of Marcion, how does he obtain the eternal? Surely not in the same way as the long-lasting too. For according to a difference of rewards, a distance of works too must be believed. Therefore not out of love of your god will the Marcionite obtain eternal life, as the lover of the Creator the long-lasting. But what kind of thing is it that he should not the more be loved who promises the eternal, if he is to be loved who promises the long-lasting? Therefore both lives will belong to the same one, since the same discipline is to be caught at for either life. What the Creator teaches, that it needs Christ too to be loved that he may furnish — that objection too intervening here, by which the greater ought the more easily to be believed with him with whom the lesser go before, than with him for whom no lesser things prepared any faith concerning the greater. Let it now be his concern whether our people added "eternal." This is enough for me, that that Christ, the inviter to eternal, not to long, life, consulted about the long, which he was destroying, exhorted a man rather to the eternal, which he was bringing in. What, I ask you, would the Christ of the Creator have done, if he who had built up a man toward loving the Creator were not the Creator's? I believe he would have denied the Creator to be loved.

When in a certain place he had prayed to that higher Father, with eyes shameless enough and rash looking up to the heaven of the Creator — by whom, so harsh and savage, he could have been struck with hail and lightning, just as Jerusalem too could be fastened down by him — one of the disciples accosting him, "Lord," he says, "teach us to pray, as John too taught his disciples" — namely because he esteemed that another god should be prayed to otherwise. He who had presumed this, let him first prove another god published by Christ. For no one would have wished to know how to pray before he had learned whom he should pray to. Therefore if he had learned, prove it. If nowhere yet do you prove it, know that he asked of him a form of prayer toward the Creator, to whom the disciples of John too prayed. But because John too had brought in some new order of prayer, therefore his disciple had not without reason presumed that this too should be demanded of Christ — that they too, after the proper institution of their own master, should pray, not another, but otherwise, to God; accordingly neither would Christ have conferred the knowledge of prayer on a disciple before that of the god himself. Thus he himself too taught prayer toward him whom the disciple hitherto had known. In short, recognize what god the sense of the prayer savours. To whom shall I say, "Father"? to him who did not make me at all, from whom I draw no origin, or to him who by making and instructing me begat me? From whom shall I ask the Holy Spirit? from whom not even the worldly spirit is furnished, or from whom even the angels are made spirits, whose spirit too in the beginning was borne over the waters? Whose kingdom shall I wish to come — whom I never heard king of glory, or in whose hand are even the hearts of kings? Who shall give me daily bread? — he who founds me not even a millet-grain, or he who furnished even from heaven the daily bread of angels to his people? Who shall remit my delinquencies? — he who by not judging them does not retain them, or he who, if he shall not remit them, will retain them, that he may judge? Who shall not suffer us to be led into temptation? — whom shall the tempter be able not to fear, or he who from the beginning pre-condemned the tempting angel? In this order, he who supplicates another god and not the Creator does not pray him, but defames him. Accordingly, from whom shall I ask, that I may receive? with whom seek, that I may find? at whom knock, that it may be opened to me? Who has it to give to the asker, save he whose all things are, whose even I am who ask? But what have I lost with that other god, that with him I should seek and find? If wisdom and prudence, the Creator hid these. With him, then, shall I seek? If salvation and life, these too with the Creator? Nothing shall be sought elsewhere to be found than where it lay hidden to appear. So neither shall I knock elsewhere than whence I have departed. In short, if to receive and to find and to be admitted is the fruit of labour and instance to him who asked and sought and knocked, understand that these things are commanded and promised by the Creator. For that best god, coming spontaneously to furnish to a man not his own, would have indicted no labour nor instance on him. For he would now be no longer best, if he did not spontaneously give to one not asking, and furnish finding to one not seeking, and open to one not knocking. But the Creator could indict these things through Christ, that, because by delinquency man had offended his god, he should labour and by instance of asking receive, and by seeking find, and by knocking enter in. So too the foregoing likeness makes the nocturnal asker of bread a friend, not a stranger, and one knocking at a friend's, not a stranger's. But a friend, even if he has offended, is rather the Creator's man than the god of Marcion's. And so he knocks at him to whom he had a right, whose door he knew, whom he knew to have loaves, lying now with his infants, whom he had willed to be born. Even that he is knocked at late is the Creator's time. His too is the late, whose is the age and the setting of the age. But at a new god no one would have knocked late, only just as he was dawning. It is the Creator who both shut the door once to the nations, which was once knocked at by the Jews; he both rises and gives, and, even if now not as to a friend, yet not as to a stranger man, but, as he says, as to a troublesome one. But so newly a god could suffer no one to be troublesome to him. Acknowledge therefore the Father too whom you even call 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 forth the quail; not a serpent for a fish, nor a scorpion for an egg. But it will belong to him not to give evil for good whose both are. For the rest, the god of Marcion, not having a scorpion, could not say that he would not give what he did not have; but he who, having a scorpion too, does not give. And so the Holy Spirit too will be given by him with whom the not-holy too is. When he had cast out a deaf demon (that in this species of cure too he might meet Isaiah), said to cast out demons in Beelzebub, "If I," he says, "in Beelzebub cast out demons, in whom do your sons cast them out?" — by this voice what does he portend rather than that he casts out in him in whom their sons too do? In the power, namely, of the Creator. For if you think it is to be taken thus, "If I in Beelzebub, in whom your sons?" as though he were censuring them as casting out in Beelzebub, the former sense will resist you, that Satan cannot be divided against himself. So far neither did they cast out in Beelzebub, but, as we have said, in the power of the Creator, which, that he might make understood, he subjoins: "But if I in the finger of God expel demons, then has the kingdom of God drawn near unto you?" For with Pharaoh those sorcerers, employed against Moses, called the power of the Creator the finger of God. The finger of God is this, that it should signify even what is small, yet most strong. This too Christ showing — a reminder, not an obliterator, namely, of his own antiquities — called the power of God the finger of God, to be understood of none other than him with whom this had been so named. Therefore his kingdom too had drawn near whose power too was called a finger. With reason, then, he applied to the parable of that strong armed man, whom another stronger overpowered — the prince of demons, whom he had above called Beelzebub and Satan — signifying him overpowered by the finger of God, not the Creator subdued by another god. For the rest, how should his kingdom still stand within its boundaries and laws and offices, whom, though with the world entire, that stronger god of Marcion could even thus have seemed to overcome, if the Marcionites too did not even die according to his law, flowing down into the earth, often taught even by a scorpion that the Creator is not overcome? A woman out of the crowd cried out, "Blessed the womb that bore him, and the breasts that nourished him." And the Lord, "Nay, blessed are they who hear the word of God and do it." For before too he had thus rejected his mother or brothers, while he prefers the hearers and obeyers of God. For neither here did a mother stand by him. So far had he not before denied him born. When he hears this again, again accordingly he transferred the felicity from the womb and breasts of his mother to the disciples — from her from whom he would not have transferred it if he had her not.

Elsewhere I prefer to purge the things which the Marcionites reprehend in the Creator. For here it suffices if these are found in Christ. Behold, unequal himself, inconstant, light, teaching one thing, doing another; he bids give to everyone that asks, and himself gives no sign to those who ask. For so great an age he hid his light from men, and denies that a lamp is to be hidden away, but confirms that it is to be set forth upon a candlestick, that it may shine for all. He forbids to curse back, much more surely to curse, and drives in a "Woe" upon the Pharisees and doctors of the law. Who is so like my god's Christ as his own? Often already we have fixed it that he could in no way be noted a destroyer of the law if he had promulgated another god. And therefore then too the Pharisee, who had called him to dinner, debated within himself why he had not first washed before he reclined, according to the law — since he carried about the god of the law. But Jesus even interpreted the law for him, saying that they cleansed the outside of the cup and platter, but their own inward parts were full of rapine and iniquity — to signify that the cleanness of vessels was to be understood, with God, of men; because the Pharisee too had debated within himself about the man, not about the unwashed cup. Therefore, "You wash the outside," he says, "of the cup," that is, the flesh, "but your inward parts you cleanse not," that is, the soul; adding, "Is it not he who made the outside" — that is, the flesh — "who made the inward parts too" — that is, the soul? By which saying he openly demonstrated that the cleanness of the outer and inner man pertains to the same God, whose both are, who prefers mercy not only to the washing of the man, but even to sacrifice. For he subjoins, "Give what you have as alms, and all things shall be clean to you." But if another god too could have commanded mercy — yet not before he was known. And here too it appears that they were rebuked not concerning a god, but concerning his discipline, by whom both figuratively the cleansing of the vessels and manifestly the works of mercies were enjoined upon them. So too he chides those who tithe their little herbs but pass over the calling and the love of God. Of what god the calling and love, if not of him whose rue and mint too, after the form of the law, they offered out of tithes? For the whole of the reproach was this, that they cared for the modest things, surely toward him to whom they did not exhibit the greater things — to him who says, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with all thy strength," who called thee out of Egypt. For the rest, neither would the time have allowed that Christ should demand so precocious — nay, so unripe a love as yet — for a new and recent god, not to say one not yet made manifest. When he accuses too those who catch at the chief places and the honour of salutations, he administers the sect of the Creator, who calls such princes rulers of the Sodomites, who forbids even trust in superiors — nay, pronounces altogether most wretched the man who has hope in man. But if for this reason anyone affects a princedom, that he may glory in the offices of others, since he forbade offices of this kind of hoping and trusting in man, the same rebuked too the affecters of princedoms. He inveighs too against the doctors of the law themselves, that they loaded others with unbearable burdens, which they themselves dared not attempt even with a finger — not censuring the burdens of the law as if its detester. For how a detester, who, while he was most of all accusing those who passed over the more weighty things of the law — alms and the calling and the love of God — did not even hold these heavy, far less the tithes of rue and the cleanness of platters? For the rest, he would rather have judged them to be excused if they could not bear unbearable things. But what burdens does he tax? Those which they themselves heaped up out of their own, teaching precepts, the doctrines of men, for the cause of their own conveniences, joining house to house, that they might carry off what was their neighbours', crying down the people, loving gifts, following after retribution, plundering the things judged for the poor, that there might be to them the widow for spoil and the orphan for prey. Concerning whom the same Isaiah: "Woe to those who are strong in Jerusalem"; and again: "Those who demand of you, lord it over you." Who more than the doctors of the law? These, if they displeased Christ too, displeased as his own. For of an alien law he would not at all have assailed the doctors. But why do they hear a "Woe" too because they built monuments to the prophets slain by their fathers — they rather worthy of praise, who by that work of piety testified that they did not consent to the deeds of their fathers — if he were not a jealous one, such as the Marcionites arraign him, exacting the delinquencies of the fathers from the sons even to the fourth nativity? But what key had the doctors of the law except the interpretation of the law? to the understanding of which neither did they themselves approach, not believing, namely (for "Unless you believe, you shall not understand"), nor did they admit others, teaching rather precepts and the doctrines of men. He, then, who rebuked those who neither entered themselves nor furnished entry to others — is he to be held a disparager of the law or a fautor? If a disparager, then the closers of the law too ought to have pleased him; if a fautor, then he is no longer the rival of the law either. But all these things he drove in to blacken the Creator, as savage, toward whom delinquents should have a "Woe." And who would not rather fear to provoke a savage one by falling away from him? So much the more, then, he taught one to be deserved well of whom he drove in as one to be feared. So it behoved the Christ of the Creator.

With reason, therefore, the hypocrisy of the Pharisees did not please him — those, namely, who loved God with their lips, not with their heart. "Beware," he says to the disciples, "of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy" — not the preaching of the Creator. The Son hates those contumacious toward the Father; he does not wish his own to be such toward him, not toward another, toward whom hypocrisy might be committed, of which the example should be guarded against by the disciples. Thus he forbids the example of the Pharisees. He was forbidding it to be committed against him against whom the Pharisees committed it. Therefore, since he had taxed their hypocrisy — concealing the hidden things of the heart, namely, and overshadowing the secrets of unbelief with superficial offices, which, having the key of acknowledgement, neither entered itself nor suffered others — therefore he adds, "But nothing is covered which shall not be laid open, and nothing hidden which shall not be discerned"; lest anyone esteem that he intends the revelation and re-acknowledgement of a god formerly unknown and hidden, when he subjoins even the things which they muttered or treated among themselves — namely, saying about himself, "This man does not expel demons but in Beelzebub" — as about to proceed into the open, and to be in the mouth of men, from the promulgation of the gospel. Thereupon, turning to the disciples, "But I say to you, my friends," he says, "be not terrified by those who can only kill you, and after this have no further power over you." But to these Isaiah will be foretelling: "See how the just is taken away, and no one notices." "But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after he has killed, has power to send into Gehenna" — surely signifying the Creator: "Therefore, I say to you, fear him." And in this passage it would suffice me, if he whom he bids be feared he forbids to be offended, and whom he forbids to be offended he bids be deserved well of, and he who commands these things is his own to whom by fearing and not offending and deserving well of he procures it. But I have also to take from what follows. For "I say to you, everyone who shall confess in me before men, I too will confess in him before God." But those who shall confess in Christ shall have to be killed before men, surely about to suffer nothing more after the killing by them. These, then, will be those whom above he forewarns not to fear that they only be killed; therefore premising that the killing is not to be feared, that he might subjoin that the confession is to be sustained: "And everyone who shall deny me before men shall be denied before God" — by him, surely, who was to confess one confessing him. For if he shall confess the confessor, he himself it is who will also deny the denier. Now, if the confessor is one who has nothing to fear after the killing, the denier will be one who has to fear even after death. And so, since that which is to be feared after death is the Creator's — namely the penalty of Gehenna — then the denier too is the Creator's. But if the denier, then the confessor too, who after the killing is to suffer nothing from man, but plainly something from God if he denied. And thus Christ is the Creator's, who shows that his deniers ought to fear the Gehenna of the Creator. After the deterring of denial, therefore, follows too the admonition of a blasphemy to be dreaded: "He who shall speak against the Son of man, it shall be remitted to him, but he who shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be remitted to him." But if now both the remission and the retention of delinquency savour of a god a judge, his will be the Holy Spirit not to be blasphemed — not about to remit blasphemy, namely — just as above not to be denied — about to kill even into Gehenna, namely. But if Christ averts blasphemy too from the Creator, how he has come as his adversary I do not know. Or if by these things too he blackens his severity — not about to remit blasphemy and about to kill even into Gehenna — it remains that that diverse god's spirit too may be blasphemed with impunity, and that Christ may be denied, and that there be no difference about his worship or contempt; and, just as from contempt no penalty, so from worship no reward is to be hoped. Those brought before powers he forbids to think for the interrogation about an answer. "For the Holy Spirit," he says, "shall teach you in that very hour what you ought to speak." If an evidence of this kind is the Creator's, his too will be the precept whose the example went before. Balaam the prophet in Numbers, summoned by king Balak to curse Israel, with which he was entering battle, while he was being filled with the spirit, pronounced not the malediction to which he had come, but the benediction which the spirit suggested to him in that very hour — having professed before, among the king's messengers, and presently before the king himself, that he would pronounce what God should put in his mouth. These are the new doctrines of the new Christ, which of old the servants of the Creator initiated. Behold, a plainly diverse example of Moses and of Christ. Moses spontaneously intervenes among quarrelling brothers and rebukes the injurious one: "Why dost thou strike thy neighbour?" And he is rejected by him: "Who set thee a master or a judge over us?" But Christ, when he was asked by a certain man to settle between him and his brother concerning the dividing of an inheritance, denied his service, and that indeed to so honest a cause. Already then my Moses is better than your Christ, studying the peace of brothers, meeting injury. But indeed the Christ of a best and not a judging god says, "Who set me a judge over you?" He could find no other voice of excuse but that one with which a wicked man and impious brother had shaken off the asserter of probity and piety. In short, he approved the evil voice by using it, and the evil deed, by the declining of composing peace between brothers. Or did he perhaps take it ill that Moses had been put to flight by that saying, and therefore in the like cause of the brothers debating willed to have confounded them by the recollection of the same saying? Plainly so. For he himself it was then who had been in Moses, who had heard such things — the Spirit, namely, of the Creator. I think I have already sufficiently elsewhere shown that the glory of riches is condemned by our god, who pulls the very magnates down from their throne and lifts up the poor from the dung-heap. From him, then, will be the parable of the rich man flattering himself on the produce of his fields, to whom God says, "Fool, this night they shall demand back thy soul; but the things thou hast prepared, whose shall they be?" So too, in short, the king who gloried among the Persians over the storehouses and granaries of his delights heard ill through Isaiah.

Who would not wish us to take care for the soul about food and for the body about clothing, but he who provided these things for man beforehand, and who, furnishing them thence, with reason forbids care of them as a rival of his own liberality? — who both fitted the very substance of the soul as superior to food, and figured the very matter of the body as superior to a tunic; whose ravens too neither sow nor reap nor lay up in storehouses, and yet are fed by him; whose lilies and grass neither weave nor spin, and yet are clothed by him; whose Solomon too, most glorious, yet was adorned with no flowerlet more elaborate. For the rest, nothing is so abrupt as that one should furnish, and another bid the furnishing to be securely managed — and that indeed a disparager of him. In short, whether as a disparager of the Creator he will not have it thought of such frivolities, about which neither ravens nor lilies labour, subjected spontaneously, namely, by reason of their worthlessness — will presently appear. Meanwhile, why does he accuse them of small faith, that is, of what faith? Of that which they could not yet exhibit perfect to a god whom they were as yet, at the moment of his being revealed, just learning? or of that which by this very title they owed to the Creator — to believe, namely, that he furnishes these things spontaneously to the human race, and not to be anxious about them? For also, when he subjoins, "For these things do the nations of the world seek" — not believing, namely, in a god the founder and supplier of all — whom he wished not to be like the Gentiles, those he reproached of small faith toward the same god toward whom he marked the Gentiles unbelieving. For the rest, when he adds too, "But your Father knows that you have need of these things," first I will ask whom Christ wishes to be understood as Father. If he demonstrates their Creator, he confirms him good too, who knows what his sons need; but if that other god, how does he know food and clothing to be necessary to man, of whom he furnished none? For if he had known, he would have furnished. For the rest, if he knows what is necessary to man, and yet did not furnish, it was either from malignity or from infirmity that he did not furnish. But by professing these things necessary to man, surely he confirmed them good. For nothing evil is necessary. And he will now no longer be a depreciator of the works and indulgences of the Creator — so that I may discharge what I deferred above. Now if another both foresaw and furnishes the things which he knows necessary to man, how does he himself promise them? Or is he good out of another's goods? "For seek," he says, "the kingdom of God, and these things shall be added to you." Surely by himself. But if by himself, what kind of one is he who shall furnish another's goods? If by the Creator, whose they are too, who is it that promises another's? If they accrue to the kingdom, to be restored in the second degree, his is the second degree whose is the first too, his food and clothing whose the kingdom too is. Thus the whole promise is the Creator's — the state of the parables, the levelling of the likenesses, if they look to no other than him to whom they have through all things matched. We are servants, for we have for lord the god. We ought to gird our loins, that is, to be expedited from the impediments of an entangled and complicated life. Likewise to have lamps burning, that is, minds kindled from faith and shining with the works of truth, and so to await the lord, that is, Christ. Returning whence? If from a wedding, it is the Creator's, whose the wedding is; if not the Creator's, neither would Marcion himself, invited to the wedding, have gone, regarding his god as a detester of weddings. The parable, then, would have failed in the person of the lord, if there were not one to whom weddings suit. In the following parable too he errs enough who arranges that thief, whose hour if the householder knew, he would not suffer his house to be undermined, into the person of the Creator. For how can the Creator seem a thief, lord of the whole man? No one steals or undermines his own goods, but rather he who descends into another's, and estranges the man from his lord. Now since he demonstrates the devil to us as the thief — whose hour too, had man known in the beginning, he would never have been undermined by him — therefore he bids that we be prepared, because at what hour we do not think the Son of man shall come, not as though he himself were a thief, but as the judge, namely, of those who shall not have prepared themselves, nor guarded against the thief. Therefore, if he himself is the Son of man, I hold the judge, and in the judge I defend the Creator; but if in the name of Son of man in this place he shows the Christ of the Creator, that he may portend him a thief whose coming we know not when — you have above the prescription that no one is a thief of his own goods, with that too safe, that in so far as he drives in the Creator to be feared, in so far doing his business he is the Creator's. And so, to Peter asking whether he had told the parable against them or against all, against them and against all who should preside over the churches he sets forth a likeness of stewards, of whom he who shall well have treated his fellow-servants, the lord being absent, shall, on his return, be set over all his goods; but he who shall act otherwise, the lord returning on the day he thought not, at the hour he knew not — namely that Son of man, the Christ of the Creator, not a thief, but a judge — shall be set apart, and his part shall be placed with the unbelievers. Accordingly, then, either here too he opposes a lord a judge and catechizes them toward him, or, if a best god, then he affirms even him a judge, though the heretic be unwilling. For they attempt to temper this sense, when it is claimed for his god. As though it were a thing of tranquillity and mildness only to set apart and to place his part with the unbelievers — as if he were not summoned, so as to be restored to his own state. As if this very thing were not done by judgement. Folly! What will be the issue of the set-apart? Surely the loss of salvation? — seeing that they shall be set apart from those who shall obtain salvation. What, then, the state of the unbelievers? Surely condemnation? Or if the set-apart and the unbelievers shall suffer nothing, equally on the other side the retained and the faithful shall obtain nothing. But if the retained and the faithful shall obtain salvation, the set-apart and the unbelievers must of necessity lose it on the other side. This will be judgement, which he who intends is the Creator's. What other shall I understand cutting the servants with few or many stripes, and according as each has committed against them, so exacting too of them, but a god a recompenser? Whom does it befit me to obey but a remunerator? Your Christ proclaims, "I have come to send fire upon the earth." That best one, lord of no Gehenna, who a little before had coerced the disciples, lest they should demand fire upon a most inhuman little village — when this one burnt up Sodom and Gomorrah with a fiery storm, when it was sung, "Fire shall go forth before him and shall consume his enemies," when too through Hosea he threatened, "I will send fire upon the cities of Judea," or through Isaiah, "A fire is kindled out of my indignation." Let him not lie. If he is not he who sent forth his voice even from the burning bush, let it be his to see what fire he contends is to be understood. Even if it is a figure, by this very thing, that he takes arguments for his sense from my element, he is mine who uses my things. His will be the likeness of the fire whose is the truth too. He himself will better interpret the quality of that fire, adding, "Do you think I have come to send peace upon the earth? No, I say to you, but separation." Indeed "a sword" is written. But Marcion emends it; as though separation too were not the work of a sword. Therefore he intends a fire too of subversion, who has denied peace. As the battle, such too the burning. As the sword, such too the flame, neither suiting the lord. In short, "There shall be divided," he says, "father against son, and son against father, and mother against daughter, and daughter against mother, and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law, and mother-in-law against daughter-in-law." If this battle among parents was sung in the very words by the trumpet of the prophet, I fear lest Micah foretold it to the Christ of Marcion. And therefore he pronounced them hypocrites, who indeed approved the face of heaven and earth, but did not discern that time, namely, in which, fulfilling all the things which had been foretold concerning him, and teaching not otherwise, he ought to have been acknowledged. For the rest, who could know the times of him for whom he had nothing by which he might prove them? With reason he reproaches too that they did not judge what is just out of themselves. Of old he commands this through Zechariah: "Judge a just judgement and one of peace"; through Jeremiah: "Do judgement and justice"; through Isaiah: "Judge the orphan and justify the widow" — imputing too to the vineyard Sorek that it had made not judgement but an outcry. He, then, who had taught them to do it by precept, demanded that they do it also by their own choice. He who had sown the precept urged also its overflow. But indeed how absurd that he should command to judge justly who was destroying the just god a judge! For even the judge who sends into prison nor brings out thence until even the last farthing be paid, in the person of the Creator they discuss under the name of disparagement. To which I must of necessity meet at the same step. For as often as the severity of the Creator is opposed, so often is Christ his to whom by fear he compels obedience.

The question again about a cure made on the sabbath, how did he discuss it? "Does not each of you on the sabbaths loose his ass or ox from the stall and lead it to drink?" Therefore, working according to the condition of the law, he confirmed the law, did not dissolve it — the law that bids no work be done except what shall be done for every soul; how much rather for a human one? Everywhere I am acknowledged to demand the congruence of the parables. "The kingdom of God," he says, "is like to a grain of mustard, which a man took and sowed in his garden." Who is to be understood in the person of the man? Surely Christ, because, though Marcion's, he is 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, surely in the world, say now in man. But since he said "in his garden," and yet the world is not his, nor man, but the Creator's, then he who sowed in his own is shown to be the Creator. Or if, to escape this snare, they shall turn the person of the man from Christ to the man receiving the seed of the kingdom and sowing it in the garden of his heart, not even this matter will suit any but the Creator. For what kind of thing is it that the kingdom of a most gentle god should be that which even the heat of judgement follows with a tearful austerity? But concerning the following likeness I fear, perhaps, lest it portend further the kingdom of God. For he compared it to leaven, not to unleavened bread, which is more familiar to the Creator. This conjecture too suits those who beg for arguments. And so I too will drive out vanity with vanity, saying that the leavening too suits the kingdom of the Creator, because after it the oven or furnace of Gehenna follows. How often besides does he show himself a judge, and in the judge the Creator? As often surely as he casts out and condemns by rejecting. As here too, "When the householder," he says, "shall have risen and shut the door" — surely for cutting off the iniquitous. To whom, knocking, he will answer, "I know not whence you are," and again, to those enumerating that they had eaten and drunk before him and that he had 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, namely, where they shall be shut out, the door shut by him. Therefore there will be punishment whence comes the exclusion unto punishment, when they shall see the just entering into the kingdom of God, but themselves detained outside. By whom? If by the Creator, who then will be within receiving the just into the kingdom? The good god. What, then, is there for the Creator to do there, to detain outside unto punishment those whom his adversary shut out, to be received by himself, if at all, the more to his adversary's spite? But that other too, about to shut out the iniquitous, must surely either know that the Creator will detain them unto punishment, or not know. Therefore either they will be detained against his will, and he who detains is lesser than the other, yielding to him unwillingly; or, if he wills it so to be done, he himself judged it should so be done, and the author of the Creator's infamy will not himself be better than the Creator. If these things stand by no reasoning — that one be believed to punish, another to free — then to one will belong both the judgement and the kingdom, and, while both belong to one, he who also judges is the Creator's.

To a dinner or to a supper what kind of men does he bid be invited? Such as he had shown through Isaiah: "Break thy bread to the hungry, and the beggars, and those who are without a roof, bring into thy house" — those, namely, who could not requite the return of this humanity. If Christ forbids this to be caught at, promising it again at the resurrection, it is the Creator's form, who is not pleased with those who love gifts, who follow after retribution. The parable too of the inviter — to which party it the rather meets, weigh. "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 connected by no right are not wont to be invited to a supper; certainly the domestic and familiar are more readily wont. It is the Creator's, then, to have invited those to whom belonged the invited — both through Adam, as men, and through the fathers, as Jews — not his to whom they belonged neither by nature nor by prerogative. Next, if he who prepared the supper sends to the guests, even thus the supper is the Creator's, who sent to admonish the guests, already invited before through the fathers, but to be admonished through the prophets — not he who sent no one to admonish, nor who did anything beforehand toward inviting, but himself descended suddenly, just as he became known, already inviting, just as he invited, already forcing them into the banquet, making the same hour of supping and of inviting to supper. The invited excuse themselves. If by another god, with reason, because suddenly invited; if not with reason, then not suddenly. But if not suddenly invited, then by the Creator, by whom of old; whose vocation, in short, they had declined, first saying to Aaron, "Make us gods to go before us"; and thereafter hearing with the ear and not hearing, namely the vocation of God, who most pertinently to this parable through Jeremiah, "Hear," he says, "my voice, and I will be to you a lord and you to me a people, and you shall walk in all my ways, whatsoever I shall command you." Behold the invitation of God. "And they heard not," it says, "and turned not their ear." Behold the refusal of the people. "But they went away in the things which they desired in their evil heart. I bought a field, and I bought you a yoke of oxen, and I married a wife." And further he drives in: "And I sent to you all my servants the prophets." This will be the Holy Spirit, the admonisher of the guests, by day and before light. "And my people heard not, and inclined not their ears, and hardened their neck." This, when it had been reported to the householder, then moved (well that he is moved too, for Marcion denies his god is moved, so this too is mine), he bids a gathering be made from the streets and lanes of the city. Let us see whether in that sense by which again through Jeremiah: "Have I become a wilderness to the house of Israel? or a land left untilled?" — that is, "Have I not those whom I may choose, or whence I may choose? since my people said, We come not to thee." And so he sent to call others from the same city still. Then, the place abounding, he commanded a gathering too from the ways and hedges, that is, us now from the foreign nations — by that emulation, namely, by which in Deuteronomy: "I will turn my face away from them, and I will show what shall be to them in the last things" — that is, others to possess their place — "because they are a perverse generation, sons in whom there is no faith. They have provoked me to emulation with a no-god, and have moved me to anger with their idols; and I too will provoke them to emulation with a no-nation, with a foolish nation I will move them to anger" — namely with us, whose hope the Jews bear, of which the Lord denies they shall taste, Zion being forsaken, like a watch-tower in a vineyard and a hut in a cucumber-field, after they refused even the last invitation in Christ. What out of this order, to be recounted according to the arrangement and proclamations of the Creator, can suit him who has neither the order nor the arrangement for the conspiration of the parable, who did his whole work at once? Or what will be his first vocation, and what the admonition in the second act? — to invite both parties at once, from the city, from the hedges, against the mirror of the parable. Nor can he now judge as disdainful those whom he never before invited, whom he most of all accosts at the moment. Or if he judges them, as for the future, about to despise the vocation, then for the future too he portends a gathering in their place from the nations. Plainly for this he is to come a second time, to preach to the nations. And if he is to come — yet, I think, not as if to invite the guests still, but already to place them. Meanwhile, you who interpret the vocation of this supper into a heavenly banquet of spiritual fullness and joyfulness, remember that the earthly promises too of wine and oil and corn and the very city are equally figured by the Creator as spiritual.

Who seeks the lost sheep and the lost drachma but he who lost it? Who lost it but he who had it? Who had it but he whose it was? If, then, the man is the thing of no other than the Creator, he had him whose he was, he lost what he had, he sought what he lost, he found who sought, he exulted who found. Thus the argument of either parable is void in regard to him whose neither the sheep nor the drachma is, that is, man. For neither did he lose, because he did not have; nor seek, because he did not lose; nor find, because he did not seek; nor exult, because he did not find. And so it is his to exult over the penitence of a sinner — that is, over the recovery of the lost — who professed of old that he preferred the penitence of the sinner to his death.

Whom two masters one cannot serve, because the one must of necessity be offended and the other defended, he himself declares, setting forth God and mammon. Then, whom he would have mammon understood to be, if you have no interpreter, you can learn from himself. For admonishing us, concerning worldly things, to provide for ourselves the supports of friendships, after the example of that servant who, removed from his office, relieves his master's debtors by diminishing their bonds, for a help to himself, "And I," he says, "say to you, make for yourselves friends out of the mammon of injustice" — out of money, namely, like that servant. For we all know money to be the author and lord of all the world's injustice. Seeing the cupidity of the Pharisees enslaved to it, he loosed off this opinion: "You cannot serve God and mammon." In short, the Pharisees, greedy of money, derided him, because they understood, namely, mammon said of money. Lest anyone esteem that in mammon the Creator is to be understood, and that Christ called them back from the servitude of the Creator — what? rather from this learn one god shown by Christ. For he named two masters, God and mammon, the Creator and money. In short, "You cannot serve God" — surely him whom they seemed to serve — "and mammon" — to whom they were rather destined. But if he were himself acting as another, he would have demonstrated not two masters but three. For the Creator too is a master, because he is a god, and surely the more a master than mammon, and the more to be regarded, as the more a master. For what kind of thing is it that he who had called mammon a master, and had joined it with God, should be silent about their true master, that is, the Creator? Or did he by being silent concede that he is to be served, if he denied only that himself and mammon could be served? Thus, when he sets one god — about to name the Creator too, if he himself were another — he named the Creator, whom without another god he did not set as master. And so this too will shine out, how it was said, "If in unjust mammon you have not been faithful, what is true who will entrust to you?" — in money, namely, unjustly, not in the Creator, whom even Marcion makes just. "And if in another's you have not been found faithful, mine who will give to you?" For what is unjust ought to be alien to the servants of God. But how was the Creator alien to the Pharisees, the proper god of the Jewish nation? If, then, these things fall not upon the Creator but upon mammon, "Who will believe to you what is truer?" and "Who will give you what is mine?" cannot have been said as by another concerning the grace of another god. For then he would seem to have so said, if, marking them unbelievers toward the Creator, not toward mammon, he had through the mention of the Creator made distinctions of another god, not about to commit his own truth to the unbelievers of the Creator. How then can he be seen as another, if he be not set forth for this, that he be separated from the matter in hand? But if the Pharisees too, justifying themselves before men, were placing the hope of reward in man, he rebuked them in that sense in which the prophet Jeremiah too: "Wretched the man who has hope in man." If he adds too, "But God knows your hearts," he was commemorating the force of that god who pronounced himself a lamp, searching the reins and hearts. If he touches pride, "What is exalted among men is detestable to God," he sets Isaiah before the eyes: "For the day of the Lord of Sabaoth is upon every contumelious and proud one, upon every lofty and exalted one, and they shall be humbled." I can now gather why for so great an age the god of Marcion was in hiding. He was waiting, I suppose, until he should learn all these things from the Creator. He learned, then, up to the times of John, and so thereafter proceeded to announce the kingdom of God, saying, "The law and the prophets unto John, from whom the kingdom of God is announced." As though we too do not acknowledge a certain boundary, John, set between the old and the new, at whom Judaism should cease and from whom Christianity should begin — yet not so that the settling of the law and the prophets and the initiation of the gospel, in which is the kingdom of God, Christ himself, should have been made by another power. For even if we have proved both that the old things were proclaimed to pass and the new to succeed by the Creator, if John is shown to be the forerunner and preparer of the ways of the Lord about to bring on the gospel and promulgate the kingdom of God — even from this, that John came, he himself will be the Christ who was to follow John as forerunner; and if the old things ceased and the new began, John intervening, it will be no wonder that this is from the arrangement of the Creator — so that it may be the more proved whence soever than from the setting of the law and prophets at John, and from there the rising of the kingdom of God. Let heaven and earth pass, then, sooner, just as the law and the prophets, than one apex of the words of the Lord. For "the word," says Isaiah, "of our God abides for ever." For since in Isaiah even then Christ — the Word, namely, and the Spirit of the Creator — had proclaimed John, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, "Prepare the way of the Lord" — for this, that he should come that the order of the law and 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 should sooner pass than his words, confirming this too, that what he had said of John had not passed away.

But Christ forbids divorce, saying, "He who shall dismiss his wife and shall marry another, commits adultery; he who shall marry one dismissed by a husband, is equally an adulterer." That even thus he may forbid divorce, he makes the marriage of a repudiated woman unlawful. But Moses permits repudiation in Deuteronomy: "If anyone take a wife and dwell with her, and it come to pass that she find no grace with him, because something unseemly is found in her, he shall write a bill of repudiation and shall give it into her hand, and shall dismiss her from his house." You see a diversity of law and gospel, of Moses and Christ? Plainly. For you have not received that other gospel too, of the same truth and the same Christ, in which, forbidding divorce, he solves the proper question of it: "Moses, for the hardness of your heart, commanded to give a bill of repudiation; but from the beginning it was not so" — because, namely, he who made male and female had said, "They shall be two in one flesh: what therefore God has joined, let not man put asunder." For by this answer he both protected the constitution of Moses, as his own, and directed the institution of the Creator, as Christ his own. But inasmuch as you must be refuted from those things which you have received, so I will meet you as though my Christ. Does not he too, while he forbids divorce, yet, bearing as Father him who joined male and female, rather excuse than destroy the constitution of Moses? But behold, suppose this Christ of yours be teaching contrary to Moses and the Creator, so that, if I shall not show it not contrary, he is mine. For I say that he now made a prohibition of divorce conditionally — if anyone for this reason dismiss his wife, that he may marry another. "He who shall dismiss," he says, "his wife, and shall marry another, has committed adultery; and he who shall marry one dismissed by a husband, is equally an adulterer" — one dismissed, surely, from the same cause from which it is not lawful to be dismissed, that another may be married; for he who marries one unlawfully dismissed, as though undismissed, is an adulterer. For the marriage abides which has not been rightly dissolved; the marriage abiding, to marry is adultery. Thus if he conditionally forbade dismissing a wife, he did not forbid it altogether; and what he did not forbid altogether, he permitted in other cases, where the cause ceases on account of which he forbade it. He even teaches nothing contrary to Moses, whose precept he somewhere preserves — not yet, I say, confirms. Or if you altogether deny that divorce is permitted by Christ, how do you yourself dissolve marriages, neither joining male and female, nor admitting those elsewhere joined to the sacrament of baptism and the eucharist, unless they have conspired between themselves against the fruit of marriage, as against the Creator himself? Certainly, what does a husband do with you, if his wife shall commit adultery? Shall he keep her? But not even your apostle suffers the members of Christ to be joined to a harlot. And so justice of divorce has even Christ as its asserter. From this point too Moses is confirmed by him, forbidding repudiation under the same title under which Christ does, if something unseemly be found in the woman. For also in the gospel of Matthew, "He who shall dismiss," he says, "his wife, except for the cause of adultery, makes her commit adultery." He too is equally reckoned an adulterer who shall marry one dismissed by a husband. For the rest, save for the cause of adultery, not even the Creator puts asunder what he himself joined — Moses elsewhere constituting that he who by violence had made a marriage cannot dismiss his wife for all time. But if a marriage compelled by violence shall stand, how much more a voluntary one out of agreement? — just as by the authority of prophecy too, "The wife of thy youth thou shalt not dismiss." You have therefore Christ spontaneously entering everywhere upon the footsteps of the Creator, both in permitting repudiation and in forbidding it. You have him too, however he wishes to lie hid, the foreseer of marriages, which he wishes neither to be separated by forbidding repudiation, nor to be held with a stain by then permitting divorce. Blush, who do not join those whom your Christ too joined. Blush, who put asunder without that desert by which your Christ too willed it put asunder. Now I must also show whence the Lord deduced this opinion, or whither he directed it. For so it will more fully be established that he did not look toward the destroying of Moses through a sudden proposal interposed concerning repudiation — because it was not suddenly interposed, having its root from the same mention of John. For John, censuring Herod because, against the law, he had married the wife of his deceased brother, who had a daughter by her (the law not permitting this otherwise — nay, even commanding it — except when a brother had died childless, that seed should be raised up to him by his own brother and from his rib), had been cast into prison, and afterward also slain by the same Herod. Mention being made, then, of John, and surely of the issue of his end, the Lord shot the figure of unlawful marriages and of adultery against Herod, pronouncing him too an adulterer who should marry one dismissed by her husband — the more to load the impiety of Herod, who had married one dismissed from her husband no less by death than by repudiation, and that while a brother had a daughter by her, and even on that account unlawfully, by the instinct of lust, not of law, and therefore had slain too the prophet, the asserter of the law. This to have discussed will profit me also toward the following argument of the rich man grieving in the underworld and the poor man resting in the bosom of Abraham. For that too, as to the surface of the Scripture, is suddenly set forth; as to the intention of the sense, this too coheres to the mention of John ill treated and of Herod ill married, deforming the issue of each — Herod's torments and John's refreshings — so that Herod might now hear, "They have there Moses and the prophets, let them hear them." But Marcion forces it elsewhere — namely, that he may determine that both rewards of the Creator, whether of torment or of refreshment, are placed in the underworld for those who shall have obeyed the law and the prophets, but may define that the bosom and harbour of Christ and his god is heavenly. We will answer to these things, the very Scripture refuting his eyes, which distinguishes the bosom of Abraham from the underworld for the poor man. For one thing, as I think, is the underworld, another too the bosom of Abraham. For he says that a great deep intervenes between those regions and prohibits passage from either side. But neither would the rich man have lifted up his eyes, and that from afar, but into the higher region, and from the distance of a height, through that immense interval of loftiness and of depth. Whence it appears to any wise man, who has at some time heard of the Elysian fields, that there is some local determination, which has been called the bosom of Abraham, for receiving the souls of his sons, even from the nations — of him, namely, the father of many nations to be reckoned into the census of Abraham, and out of the same faith by which Abraham too believed God, under no yoke of the law nor in the sign of circumcision. This region, then, I call the bosom of Abraham, though not heavenly, yet loftier than the underworld, which shall meanwhile furnish refreshment to the souls of the just, until the consummation of things discharge the resurrection of all with the fullness of reward — then to appear by the heavenly promise, which Marcion claims for his own, as though not promulgated by the Creator. To which Christ builds his ascent into heaven, according to Amos, surely for his own, where is also the eternal place, of which Isaiah: "Who shall announce to you the eternal place," save, namely, Christ, walking in justice, speaking the right way, holding in hatred injustice and iniquity? But if an eternal place is promised, and an ascent into heaven is built by the Creator, promising too that the seed of Abraham should be as the stars of heaven, surely on account of a heavenly promise — that promise being safe, why should it not admit that the bosom of Abraham be called some temporal receptacle of faithful souls, in which already the image of the future is delineated, and a certain white preview of either judgement is foreseen? — admonishing you heretics too, while you are in life, that Moses and the prophets preach one god the Creator, and one Christ his, and that either judgement, of penalty and of eternal salvation, is placed with the one god who kills and makes alive. "Nay," he says, "the decree of our god from heaven bade not Moses and the prophets be heard, but Christ: hear him." With reason. For then the apostles had already sufficiently heard Moses and the prophets, who had followed Christ by believing Moses and the prophets. For neither would Peter have received to say, "Thou art the Christ," before he had heard and believed Moses and the prophets, by whom alone as yet Christ was announced. This faith of theirs, then, had deserved that it should be confirmed even by the heavenly voice, bidding him be heard whom they had acknowledged evangelizing peace, evangelizing good things, announcing the eternal place, building for them his ascent into heaven. But in the underworld it is said of those: "They have there Moses and the prophets, let them hear them" — those who did not believe, or who did not so at all believe, that after death there are torments of the pride of riches and of the glory of delights, announced by Moses and the prophets, but decreed by that god who deposes magnates from thrones, and lifts up the needy from dung-heaps. Thus, since on either side the diversity of the pronouncement suits the Creator, no distance of divinities is to be established, but of the very matters.

Turning in the same place to the disciples, he says "Woe" to the author of scandals — that it would have been better for him if he had not been born, or if a millstone fastened to his neck he had been thrown into the deep, than that he should scandalize one of those little ones, namely his disciples. Estimate what kind of punishment he threatens him. For no other shall avenge the scandal of his disciples. Acknowledge, therefore, both a judge, and one pronouncing with that affection concerning the care of his own with which the Creator too of old: "He who touches you touches as it were the pupil of my eye." The same sense is of the same one. He bids a sinning brother be corrected; and he who shall not do this surely delinquishes, either out of hatred wishing his brother to persevere in his delinquency, or out of acceptance of persons sparing him — having Leviticus: "Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy mind; with a traducing thou shalt traduce thy neighbour" — surely thy brother too — "and thou shalt not take a delinquency on account of him." Nor is it wonderful if he so teaches who forbids you to despise even your brother's cattle, if you find them straying on the way, but to lead them back to your brother — far less the man himself to himself. But he bids you also give pardon to a brother delinquent against you, even seven times. Plainly little. For it is more with the Creator, who set no measure, pronouncing infinitely, "Be not mindful of thy brother's malice"; nor does he command that it be furnished to one asking, but even to one not asking. For he wishes the offence not to be forgiven but to be forgotten. Of how great interpretation the law of lepers is, touching the species of that very defect and the inspection of the high priest, is for us to know, for Marcion to oppose the tediousness of the law, that here too he may affirm Christ its rival, anticipating the solemnities of the law even in the cure of the ten lepers, whom, bidden only to go to show themselves to the priests, he cleansed on the way, without touch now and without a word, by a silent power and by his will alone — as though it were necessary, Christ being once announced the remedier of languors and defects and proved by his effects, that the qualities of the cures should be discussed, or that the Creator in Christ should be provoked to the law; if he did anything otherwise than the law distinguished, he himself perfected it, since surely the Lord works otherwise through himself or through his Son, otherwise through the prophets his servants — especially the evidences of his power and might, which, as clearer and stronger, since proper, it is right should differ from the vicarious. But of this kind things have already been said elsewhere in the former evidence. Now, even though he premised that there were then many lepers in Israel in the days of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was cleansed but Naaman the Syrian — surely the number too will not make for a difference of gods, toward the destruction of the Creator remedying one, and the preference of him who cleansed ten. For who will doubt that more could have been cured by him who had cured one, than by that one ten who had never before one? But by this pronouncement most of all he strikes the diffidence or pride of Israel, that, when there were many lepers there, and a prophet was not wanting, even when an evidence was put forth, no one ran to the god working in the prophets. Therefore, since he himself was the authentic pontiff of God the Father, he inspected them according to the secret of the law, signifying that Christ is the true discerner and disposer of human stains. But also what was in the manifest of the law he commanded, "Go, show yourselves to the priests." Why, if he was about to cleanse them before? Or as a mocker of the law, that, the cured being on the way, he might show that the law with its very priests was nothing? And let it surely be his concern, if to anyone Christ shall seem so opinionated. Nay, worthier things are to be interpreted, and juster as to faith. Therefore were they remedied, in that, bidden according to the law to go to the priests, they had obeyed; for it is not credible that observers of the law should have deserved medicine from a destroyer of the law. But why to the former leper did he command no such thing? Because neither did Elisha to Naaman the Syrian; and yet not on that account was he not the Creator's. I have answered enough; but he who has believed understands also something deeper. Learn, then, the causes too. The thing was being done in the regions of Samaria, whence too was meanwhile one of the lepers. But Samaria had revolted from Israel, having that schism out of the nine tribes, which, torn away through the prophet Ahijah, Jeroboam had placed at Samaria. But also otherwise the Samaritans were always self-pleasing concerning the mountains and wells of their fathers — as in the gospel of John that Samaritan woman in colloquy with the Lord at the well: "Art thou greater?" and the rest; and again: "Our fathers adored in this mountain, and you say that at Jerusalem one ought to adore." Therefore he who through Amos too had said "Woe" to those who trust in the mountain of Samaria, deigning now of set purpose to restore even her, bids them show themselves to the priests — surely who were nowhere but where the temple too was — subjecting the Samaritan to the Jew, since salvation is of the Jews, although both were Israelites and Samaritans. For the whole promise was Christ to the tribe of Judah; that they might know that at Jerusalem were both the priests and the temple and the mother of religion and the fountain, not the well, of salvation. And therefore, as he saw that they acknowledged the law to be discharged at Jerusalem, he remedied them, now to be justified out of faith without the order of the law. Whence too that one of the ten, loosed, mindful of the divine grace, the Samaritan whom he wonders at, he does not bid offer the gift out of the law, because he had already offered enough, rendering glory to God — this too at the Lord's wish, that the law might be interpreted. And yet to what god did the Samaritan render grace, when not even the Israelite had as yet learned of another god? To what other than him to whom all formerly remedied by Christ had? And therefore, "Thy faith has made thee safe," he heard, because he had understood that he ought to make a true oblation, namely the act of thanksgiving, to the omnipotent God, at the true temple and to his true high priest, Christ. But neither can the Pharisees seem to have consulted the Lord about the kingdom of another god, when it would come, so long as no god other than Christ had been published, nor he to have answered about another's kingdom than about whose he was consulted. "The kingdom of God comes not with observation," he says, "nor do they say, Behold here, behold there: for behold, the kingdom of God is within you." Who will not so interpret it: "Within you is," that is, in your hand, in your power, if you hear, if you do the precept of God? But if the kingdom of God is in the precept, then set against it, according to our antitheses, Moses, and it is one opinion. "The precept," he says, "is not lofty, nor far from thee. It is not in heaven, that thou shouldst say, Who shall ascend into heaven and bring it down to us, and we shall hear it and do it? Nor is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldst say, Who shall cross over and take it for us, and we shall hear it and do it? The word is near 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 audacity argue that the Lord answered them about the kingdom of the Creator, concerning which he was consulted, not about his own, the sequel resists. For saying that the Son of man must first suffer many things and be reprobated, before his coming, in which the kingdom too shall be substantially revealed, he showed his own the kingdom too concerning which he had answered, which was awaiting his passions and reprobations. But being about to be reprobated, and afterward acknowledged and assumed and exalted, he plucked the very word "reprobated" thence where, in the riddle of the stone, either revelation of him was sung with David — the first refusable, the second honourable. "The stone," it says, "which the builders reprobated, the same is made into the head of the corner. By the Lord was this done." For it is idle, if we have believed God to have proclaimed concerning the contumely or glory, namely, of someone, that he should not portend him whom he had portended both in the figure of a stone and of a rock and of a mountain. But if he speaks of his own coming, why does he compare it to the days of Noah and of Lot, foul and atrocious — a god gentle and mild? Why does he admonish to remember the wife of Lot, who contemned the precept of the Creator not with impunity, if he does not come with judgement to avenge his own precepts? Even if he avenges as that one, if he judges me, he ought not to have formed me by the evidences of him whom he destroys, lest that one seem to form me. But if here too he speaks not of his own coming, but of the Jews' Christ, let us await even now lest he proclaim anything of his own, believing meanwhile him to be the one whom in every place he proclaims.

For commanding too the perseverance and instance of praying, he sets forth the parable of the judge compelled to hear the widow by the instance and perseverance of her interpellations. Therefore he shows that a god a judge is to be prayed, not himself, if he himself is not the judge. But he subjoined that God would make the vengeance of his elect. If, then, he himself shall be the judge who is also the avenger, he has therefore proved the Creator the better god, whom he shows the avenger of his elect crying to him day and night. And yet, when he brings in the temple of the Creator, and describes two adoring with diverse mind — the Pharisee in pride, the publican in humility — and therefore the one reprobated, the other justified to have gone down — surely, by teaching by what discipline he is to be prayed, he constitutes him also to be prayed here from whom they were to bring back that discipline of praying, whether the reprobatrix of pride or the justificatrix of humility. Of another god I find with Christ neither temple nor worshippers nor judgement, but the Creator's. Him he bids be adored in humility, as the lifter-up of the lowly, not in pride, as the destroyer of the proud. What other to be adored has he shown me? by what discipline? by what hope? None, I think. For even the prayer which he taught we have proved to suit the Creator. It is another matter if he, as a best and spontaneously good god, does not even wish to be adored. But "Who is good, except one God only?" he says. Not as though out of two gods he had shown one to be best, but that one only is best, the only god, who is so the one best, because the only god. And surely best, who rains upon the just and unjust, and makes his sun rise upon the good and the evil, sustaining and nourishing and helping even the Marcionites. In short, asked by a certain man, "Good master, what doing shall I possess eternal life?" he inquired about the precepts of the Creator, whether he knew them, that is, did them — to attest that everlasting life is acquired by the precepts of the Creator; and when that man had affirmed that he had observed from his youth all the more principal things, "One thing," he says, "is wanting to thee: all things whatsoever thou hast, sell, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me." Come now, Marcion, and all you fellow-sufferers and co-hateful ones of his, you heretics, what will you dare to say? Did Christ rescind the prior precepts, of not killing, of not committing adultery, of not stealing, of not testifying false, of loving father and mother? or did he both keep them and add what was lacking? Although this precept too of largesse to the needy is everywhere diffused in the law and the prophets, so that that most glorious observer of the precepts was traduced as about to hold his money far dearer. So this too is safe in the gospel: "I came not to dissolve the law and the prophets, but rather to fulfil." At the same time he freed too the rest from doubt, manifesting that the name both of God and of "good" is one, and eternal life, and treasure in heaven, and himself — whose precepts by supplying he both preserved and increased — to be recognized in this place too according to Micah, who says, "If it has been announced to thee, man, what is good, or what does the Lord require of thee, but to do judgement, to love mercy, and to be prepared to follow the Lord thy God?" For Christ too, a man, announcing what is good, the knowledge of the law, "The precepts," he says, "thou knowest." To do judgement: "Sell," he says, "what thou hast." To love mercy: "And give," he says, "to the needy." To be prepared to go with the Lord: "And come," he says, "follow me." So distinguished was the Jewish nation from the beginning by tribes and peoples and families and houses, that no one could easily be ignorant of his lineage, even from the recent Augustan censuses, then perhaps still pending. But the Jesus of Marcion (and one would not doubt born who appeared a man) surely, in that he was not born, could have had no public knowledge of his lineage, but was to be reckoned some one of those who in whatever way were held unknown. When, therefore, the 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 the son of David — that is, of the family of David — through his mother and brothers, who at some time, surely out of knowledge, had been announced to him? But those going before rebuked the blind man, that he should be silent — with reason, namely because he was crying out, not because he lied about the son of David. Or teach that those rebuking knew that Jesus was not the son of David, that on that account they may be believed to have enjoined silence on the blind man. But even if you should teach it, he would more easily presume them to be ignorant than that the Lord could have sustained a false proclamation about himself. But the Lord was patient. Yet not a confirmer of error — nay, even a detector of it — so that he would not have first cleared up this blindness of that man, lest he should further esteem Jesus the son of David. And yet, lest you should defame his patience, and affix to him any reason of dissimulation, and deny him the son of David — most manifestly he confirmed the blind man's proclamation both by the very reward of the medicine and by the testimony of his faith. "Thy faith," he says, "has made thee safe." What would you have the blind man have believed? That Jesus had come down from that god toward the casting-down of the Creator, toward the destruction of the law and the prophets? not that he was the one who was destined from the root of Jesse and from the fruit of the loins of David, the remunerator of the blind too? But not yet, I think, were the blind then such as Marcion is, that this should have been the faith of that blind man, by which he believed in the voice of "Jesus, son of David." He who both knew this of himself and willed himself to be known by all, gave the man's faith — even though better-eyed, even though sharer of the true light — an outer vision too, that we too might learn both the rule and at once the reward of faith. He who wishes to see Jesus the son of David, let him believe through the registration of the virgin. He who shall not so believe, shall not hear from him, "Thy faith has made thee safe," and so shall remain blind, rushing into the antithesis, the antithesis itself too rushing. For so the blind is wont to lead the blind. For if at some time the blind, in the recovery of Zion, had offended David, resisting that he should be admitted (into a figure of the people, accordingly blind, not about to admit one day Christ the son of David), therefore Christ on the contrary aided the blind man, that from this he might show himself not to be the son of David — that out of a diversity of mind he was good to the blind, whom that one had bidden be cut down. And why indeed did he say he had furnished it to a depraved faith? Nay, this too the son of David, the antithesis to be beaten back out of his own. For they too who had offended David were blind; but now a man of the same flesh had offered himself a suppliant to the son of David. Therefore, to him making satisfaction in a manner, the son of David, appeased, restored his sight, with the testimony of the faith by which he had believed this very thing, that the son of David was to be entreated by him. And yet David, I think, the audacity of men had offended, not their ill health.

There follows too the salvation of the house of Zacchaeus. By what desert? Had he too believed that Christ had come from Marcion? And yet there was still in the ears of all that voice of the blind man, "Have mercy on me, Jesus, son of David," and "All the people rendered praises to God" — not Marcion's, but David's. Truly Zacchaeus, even though a foreigner, perhaps yet, breathed upon by some knowledge of the Scriptures out of Jewish commerce — but it is more even if, ignorant of Isaiah, he had fulfilled his precepts. "Break," it says, "thy bread to the hungry, and those not having a roof bring into thy house." This he was doing most of all, received in his house feeding the Lord. "And if thou see one naked, cover him." This he was promising most of all, offering half his substance to all works of mercy, loosing the obligations of more violent contracts and dismissing the afflicted into release, and dissipating every unjust bond, by saying, "And if I have taken anything from anyone by calumny, I restore fourfold." And so the Lord, "Today," he says, "is salvation to this house," testified that those things were salutary which the prophet of the Creator had enjoined. But when he says, "For the Son of man has come to save what perished," I no longer contend that he has come to save what had perished, whose it had been and to whom it had perished which he had come to save; but I direct to the step of another question. That it is about man there is no doubt. He, since he consists of two substances, of body and soul, it must be inquired of what species of substance they seem to have perished. If of body, then the body had perished, the soul not. What had perished, the Son of man makes safe: the flesh therefore too has salvation. If of soul it had perished, the perdition of the soul is destined for salvation: the flesh, which did not perish, is safe. If the whole man had perished out of either substance, the whole man must of necessity be made safe, and the opinion of the heretics, denying the salvation of the flesh, is dashed. Now too the Christ of the Creator is confirmed, who according to the Creator promised the salvation of the whole man. The parable too of the servants, who are judged according to the reckoning of the lord's money lent at interest, shows God a judge, even from the part of severity, not only honouring but also taking away what one seems to have had. Or if here too he shall fashion the Creator austere, taking up what he laid not down and reaping what he sowed not, here too that one instructs me whose money he teaches me to lend at interest.

Christ knew whence the baptism of John was. And why did he ask as one ignorant? He knew the Pharisees would not answer him. And why did he ask in vain? Was it that out of their own mouth he might judge them, or out of their heart? Refer, then, these things too to the excuse of the Creator, and to the comparison with Christ, and consider now what was to follow, if the Pharisees had reported anything to the interrogation. Suppose they had reported the baptism of John to be human — they would straightway have been crushed with stones. Some Marcion would arise against Marcion, who should say, "O best god, O god diverse from the examples of the Creator! Knowing men would go headlong, he set them himself upon the precipice." For so too concerning the Creator it is treated in the law of the tree. But the baptism of John was from heaven. "And why then," says Christ, "did you not believe him?" Therefore he who had willed John to be believed, about to rebuke that they had not believed him, was his whose sacrament John administered. Certainly to those unwilling to report what they thought, when he too opposes a reciprocal, "And I do not tell you in what power I do these things," he rendered evil for evil. "Render the things that are Caesar's to Caesar, and the things that are God's to God." What will be God's? Those which are like Caesar's denarius — namely his image and likeness. Man, therefore, he bids be rendered to the Creator, in whose image and likeness and name and matter he was expressed. Let the god of Marcion seek himself a coinage; Christ bids the denarius of man be rendered to his own Caesar, not to an alien — unless of necessity, since he has no denarius of his own. A just and worthy prescription is it, in every question, that the sense of the answer ought to pertain to the proposal of the interrogation. For the rest, to answer one thing to one who consults about another is the part of a madman. So much the more let it be far from Christ which befits not even a man. The Sadducees, deniers of the resurrection, having a question about it, had proposed to the Lord, out of the law, the matter of the woman who, seven brothers dying in order, had married them according to the legal precept — of which man's wife she should be reckoned at the resurrection. This was the matter of the question, this the substance of the consultation. To this Christ must of necessity have answered. He feared no one, that he should seem to have declined the questions, or, by occasion of them, to have shown beneath the surface what he did not otherwise teach openly. He answered, then, that the sons of this age marry. You see how pertinently to the cause. Because it was asked about the age to come, in which he was to determine that no one marries, he prebuilt here that one marries and is given in marriage where there is also dying. But those whom God shall have deemed worthy of the possession of that age and of the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage, because neither are they about to die any longer, since they are made like the angels, made sons of God and of the resurrection. Since, then, the sense of the answer is to be directed to nothing else than to the proposal of the interrogation, if by this sense the answer solves the proposal of the interrogation, the answer of the Lord savours of nothing else than that by which the question is solved. You have both the times of marriages permitted and denied, not out of their own proper question, but out of the question of the resurrection. You have both the confirmation of the resurrection itself, and the whole of what the Sadducees were inquiring — not interrogating about another god, nor seeking about the proper right of marriages. But if you make Christ answer to those things about which he was not consulted, you deny that he could answer to those about which he was interrogated, caught, namely, by the wisdom of the Sadducees. Over and above now, and after the prescription, I will treat against the cohering argumentations. For they have run in reading the text of the Scripture thus woven together: "But whom God has deemed worthy of that age." To "that age" they join "of god," that they may make another god of that age; when it ought to be read thus: "But whom God has deemed worthy" — so that, a distinction being made here after "God," "of that age" may pertain to what follows, that is, "whom God has deemed worthy of the possession and resurrection of that age." For it was consulted not about God, but about the state of that age — whose wife she would be after the resurrection in that age. So too the answer about the very marriages they subvert, so that, "The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage," may be said of the men of the Creator permitting marriages, but that he, those whom the god of that age — another, namely — has deemed worthy of the resurrection, that now these too do not marry, because they are not the sons of this age; when, consulted about the marriages of that age, he had not denied those of this age, about which he was consulted. And so those who received the very force both of the voice and of the pronouncement and of the distinction, perceived nothing else than what pertained to the matter of the consultation. And indeed the scribes, "Master," they say, "thou hast spoken well." For he had confirmed the resurrection, by publishing its form against the opinion of the Sadducees. In short, he did not refuse the testimony of those who had presumed that he had so answered. But if the scribes esteemed Christ the son of David, while David himself calls him lord, what is this to Christ? He was not blunting the error of the scribes, but procuring honour to Christ from David, whom he confirmed lord of David rather than son — which would not suit a destroyer of the Creator. But on our part how congruent the interpretation! For he who of old had been invoked by that blind man as the son of David — what he then kept silent, not having the scribes present, now spontaneously, of set purpose, before them, he brought forth, that he might show himself, whom the blind man, according to the doctrine of the scribes, had proclaimed only the son of David, to be also his lord — the faith indeed of the blind man being rewarded, by which he had believed him the son of David, but the tradition of the scribes being beaten back, by which they did not know him as lord too. Whatever should look to the glory of Christ the Creator's, thus no other would protect than the Christ of the Creator.

It has been established concerning the propriety of names, that it is owing to him who first both announced his own Christ to men and renamed Jesus. It will be established therefore too concerning the shamelessness of him who says that many shall come in his name, which is not his, if Christ and Jesus is not the Creator's, to whom the propriety of the names pertains; and besides forbids them to be received, of whom he himself too is the equal, as one who comes likewise in another's name, if it were not his to forestall the disciples against the lie of a name, who through the propriety of the name possessed the truth of it. They will come, in short, those saying, "I am Christ." You will receive them, who have received a like one. For this one too came in his own name. What now, since he too will come, the lord of the names, the Christ and Jesus of the Creator? Will you reject him? And how iniquitous, how unjust and unworthy of a best god, that you should not receive him coming in his own name, who received another in his name! Let us see too what signs he imposes on the times. Wars, I suppose, and kingdom upon kingdom, and nation upon nation, and pestilence, and famines, and earthquakes, and terrors, and prodigies from heaven — all which suit a severe and atrocious god. When he adds too that these things must come to pass, what does he exhibit himself? a destroyer or an approver of the Creator? Whose arrangements he confirms must be fulfilled — which, as a best god, he would rather have taken away than constituted, both so sad and so atrocious, if they had not been his own. But before these things he foretells too that persecutions and passions shall come upon them, surely unto martyrdom and unto salvation. Receive it proclaimed in Zechariah: "The Lord almighty," it says, "shall protect them, and they shall consume them and shall stone them with sling-stones, and shall drink their blood like wine, and shall fill the bowls as of an altar; and the Lord shall save them in that day, like sheep, his people, because holy stones are rolled." And lest you think these things are proclaimed of the passions which awaited them at the hands of the foreigners under the name of so many wars, regard the species. No one in the proclamation of wars to be waged with legitimate arms enumerates stoning, more familiar to popular assemblies and an unarmed tumult. No one in war measures such floods of blood by the capacity of bowls, or equates it to the bloodying of a single altar. No one calls sheep those who in war, armed and themselves fighting out of the same fierceness, fall — but those who, in their own propriety and patience, are slaughtered rather giving up themselves than avenging. In short, "Because holy stones," it says, "are rolled," not because soldiers fight. For stones are also the foundations upon which we are built, built up, according to Paul, upon the foundation of the apostles, who, holy stones set against the offence of all, were rolled. Here too, then, the same one forbids to think what ought to be answered before tribunals, who both suggested to Balaam what he had not thought — nay, contrary to what he had thought — and to Moses, pleading slowness of tongue, promised a mouth. And he demonstrated through Isaiah wisdom itself, which no one should resist: "This one shall say, I am God's, and shall cry out in the name of Jacob, and another shall be inscribed in the name of Israel." For what is wiser and more incontradictible than a simple and outstretched confession in the name of a martyr prevailing with God — which is the interpretation of Israel? Nor is it wonderful if he restrained forethought, who himself too received from the Father the seasonable supply of pronouncing: "The Lord gives me the tongue of discipline, when I ought to bring forth a word" — unless Marcion brings in a Christ not subject to the Father. From the near ones too persecutions, and surely a blasphemy of the name out of hatred, having been proclaimed, I need not again show. But "by endurance," he says, "you shall make safe your souls" — concerning which surely the psalm, "The endurance," it says, "of the just shall not perish unto the end." Because elsewhere too, "Honourable is the death of the just" — out of endurance without doubt, because Zechariah too: "But there shall be a crown for those who have endured." But lest you dare to argue that the apostles were harassed by the Jews as heralds of another god, remember that the prophets too suffered the same from the Jews, yet were apostles of no other god than the Creator. But, the time of the destruction being shown thereafter — when Jerusalem had begun to be walled about with armies — he narrates the signs of the last end, prodigies of sun and moon and stars, and on earth distresses of the nations astounded as it were by the sound of a fluctuating sea, in expectation of the evils impending over the world. That the very powers of the heavens too should be shaken, hear Joel: "And I will give prodigies in heaven, and on earth blood and fire and the vapour of smoke: the sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood, before the great and illustrious day of the Lord come." You have Habakkuk too: "The earth shall be burst by the rivers, they shall see thee, and the peoples shall be in travail: thou shalt scatter the waters with thy step; the abyss gave its sound, the loftiness of its fear was lifted up: the sun and the moon stood in their order, into light thy lightnings shall go, into brightness the lightning of thy shield: in thy threatening thou shalt diminish the earth, and in thy indignation thou shalt put down the nations." They agree, I think, both the Lord's pronouncements and the prophets', concerning the shakings of the world and the orb 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 the heavens with very great power." "But when these things shall begin to come to pass, you shall lift yourselves up and raise your heads, because your redemption has drawn near" — namely in the time of the kingdom, concerning which the very parable will be subjoined: "So you too, when you shall see all these things come to pass, know that the kingdom of God has drawn near." This will be the great and illustrious day of the Lord, of the Son of man coming from the heavens, according to Daniel: "Behold, with the clouds of heaven as it were the Son of man coming," and the rest. "And there was given to him royal power" — which in the parable he had gone out to ask, having left money with his servants, that it might be lent 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 they shall neither die in it, nor marry, but shall be as the angels. Concerning the same coming of the Son of man and its fruit, in Habakkuk: "Thou wentest forth unto the salvation of thy people, to save thy Christs" — about to lift themselves up, namely, and raise their heads in the time of the kingdom, redeemed. Therefore, since these things which are of the promises agree accordingly, just as those which are of the shakings, out of the consonance of the prophetic and dominical pronouncements, you will be able here to interstructure no distinction, so as to refer the shakings indeed to the Creator, the god of savagery namely — which the best god ought neither to permit, far less to await — but to ascribe the promises to the best god, which the Creator, ignorant of that one, would not have prophesied. Or if he prophesied his own, not distant from the promises of Christ, he will be equal in liberality to the best god, nor will more seem to be promised by your Christ than by my Son of man. The very course of the gospel Scripture, from the interrogation of the disciples even to the parable of the fig-tree, you will find by the context of the sense so to cleave to the Son of man on this side and that, that it compacts into him both the sad and the joyful, both the shakings and the promises, nor can you separate from him the one part. For one coming of the Son of man being constituted between two issues, of shakings and of promises, it is of necessity that to the one Son of man pertain both the incommodities of the nations and the vows of the saints — who is so placed in the midst that he is common to both issues, about to conclude the one by his coming, that is, the incommodities of the nations, to begin the other, that is, the vows of the saints — so that, whether you concede the coming of the Son of man to be my Christ's, by which you assign to him the impending evils which precede his coming, you are compelled to ascribe to him too the goods which arise from his coming; or whether you prefer it to be yours, by which you ascribe to him the goods which arise from his coming, you are compelled to reckon to him too the evils which precede his coming. For the evils cohere to the coming of the Son of man by preceding it, as much as the goods by following it. Seek, then, which of the two Christs you will constitute in the person of the one Son of man, into whom either arrangement is referred. Either you have given me the Creator best, or your god harsh by nature. In sum, consider the example of the very parable. "Look at the fig-tree and all the trees: when they have brought forth fruit, men understand that summer has drawn near; so you too, when you see these things come to pass, know that the kingdom of God is at hand." For if the fruitings of the little trees give a sign of the summer time, by preceding it, accordingly the conflictings of the world prenote a sign of the kingdom, by preceding it. But every sign belongs to him whose is the thing of which it is the sign, and to every thing a sign is imposed by him whose the thing is. Thus if the conflictings are signs of the kingdom, just as the fruitings of summer, then the kingdom too is the Creator's, whose are reckoned the conflictings which are signs of the kingdom. He had premised that these things, so atrocious, so dreadful, must come to pass — a best god — certainly proclaimed by the prophets and the law; so far did he not destroy the law and the prophets, since he confirms that the things they had proclaimed must be perfected. He drives in still further that heaven and earth shall not pass until all things be accomplished. What are these? If they are the Creator's, with reason the elements shall sustain the order of their lord to be discharged; if they are the best god's, I know not whether heaven and earth would sustain the things a rival has appointed to be perfected. If the Creator shall suffer this, he is not a jealous god. Let heaven and earth pass, then, come now. For so their lord has destined, while his word abides for ever. For so too Isaiah foretold. Let the disciples too be admonished, lest at any time their hearts be weighed down with surfeit and drunkenness and worldly cares, and that day come suddenly upon them as a snare — surely upon those who have forgotten God out of the fullness and thought of the world. It will be an admonition of Moses. So far will he free from the snare of that day who brought in this admonition of old. There were other places too at Jerusalem for teaching, and others outside Jerusalem for retiring. But by day he taught in the temple, as one who through Hosea had foretold, "In my temple they found me, and there it was disputed with them." But at night he retired into the olive-grove. For so Zechariah had demonstrated: "And his feet shall stand upon the mount of olives." There were hours too suited to the audience. At dawn it was to be assembled, who, when he had said through Isaiah, "The Lord gives me the tongue of discipline," added, "He has set an ear to me in the morning to hear." If this is to dissolve the prophecies, what will it be to fulfil them?

Accordingly he knew too when he ought to suffer, whose passion the law figures. For out of so many Jewish feasts he chose the day of the passover. For into this mystery Moses had pronounced, "It is the passover of the Lord." Therefore too he showed his affection: "With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer." O destroyer of the law, who had desired even to keep the passover! Did the Jewish mutton-flesh delight him, forsooth? Or was he not the one who, about to be led like a sheep to the slaughter, and like a sheep before the shearer, so not about to open his mouth, desired to fulfil the figure of his own salutary blood? He could have been betrayed too by any stranger — that I might not say that in this too the psalm is discharged: "He who eats bread with me shall lift up his heel against me." He could have been betrayed too without a price. For what need of the labours of a betrayer about him who, offending the people openly, could no more have been betrayed than assailed? But this would have suited another Christ, not one who fulfilled the prophecies. For it is written: "Because they sold the just." For both the quantity and the issue of the price, afterward, Judas repenting, recalled and given for the purchase of the potter's field — as is contained in the gospel of Matthew — Jeremiah foresang: "And they took thirty pieces of silver, the price of him appraised or honoured, and gave them for the potter's field." Professing therefore that with desire he had desired to eat the passover as his own (for it is unworthy that God should desire anything alien), he took bread and distributed it to the disciples, and made it his body, by saying "This is my body," that is, the figure of my body. But it would not have been a figure, were it not the body of a truth. For the rest, an empty thing, which is a phantom, could not take a figure. Or if for this reason he fashioned bread for himself a body, because he lacked the truth of a body, then he ought to have delivered bread for us. It made for the vanity of Marcion, that bread should be crucified. But why does he call bread his body, and not rather a pumpkin, which Marcion had in place of a heart? Not understanding that this was an old figure of the body of Christ, who says through Jeremiah, "Against me they have devised a device, saying, Come, let us cast wood upon his bread" — namely the cross upon his body. And so the illuminator of antiquities sufficiently declared what he then willed to have signified by bread, calling bread his body. So too, in the mention of the cup, constituting the testament sealed with his blood, he confirmed the substance of the body. For of no body can there be blood but of flesh. For even if some quality of body not fleshy be opposed to us, surely it will not have blood unless fleshly. Thus the proof of the body will stand from the testimony of the flesh, the proof of the flesh from the testimony of the blood. But that you may recognize the old figure too of blood in wine, Isaiah will be at hand: "Who," he says, "is he that comes from Edom? the redness of his garments from Bozrah? so comely in a violent robe with strength? Why are thy garments red, and thy raiment as of one who treads a full winepress?" For the prophetic spirit, as it were already contemplating the Lord coming to his passion, clothed namely in flesh, as suffering in it, designates the bloody state of the flesh in the redness of the garments, of the flesh trodden and pressed out by the force of the passion as in a winepress, because thence men come down as it were bloody from the redness of the wine. Much more manifestly Genesis, in the blessing of Judah, of whose tribe the registration of the flesh of Christ was to proceed, even then delineated Christ in Judah: "He shall wash," it says, "his robe in wine, and his garment in the blood of the grape" — showing his robe and garment to be the flesh, and the wine the blood. So too 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 now the "Woe" is established to be understood an outcry of imprecation and threatening, and to be reckoned to one angered and offended; unless Judas was to bring back so great a crime with impunity. Or if with impunity, the "Woe" is idle; if not with impunity, then surely he is to be punished by him against whom he admitted the crime of betrayal. Now if knowingly he suffered the man whom he had himself enrolled into his company to rush into so great a crime, do not now bring up again concerning the Creator, in the matter of Adam, the things which are retorted upon your god too — that either he was ignorant, who out of providence did not stand in the way of one about to sin, or could not stand in the way, if he was ignorant, or would not, if he both knew and could, and so is to be judged malicious, who suffered his own man to perish out of a delinquency. I persuade you, then, to acknowledge rather in this one too the Creator, than to make a best god equal to him against your own opinion. For both, in destining Peter, who had spoken something presumptuously, rather to denial, he showed you a jealous god. He ought too to be betrayed by a kiss, the prophetic Christ, namely — as the son of him who was loved by the people with the lips. Brought into the assembly, he is interrogated whether he were the Christ. Concerning what Christ would the Jews have inquired but their own? Why then did he not, even then, betray another to them? "That he might be able to suffer," you say. That is, that that best one might plunge those still ignorant into crime. And yet, even if he had said it, he would have been about to suffer. "For if I tell you," he says, "you do not believe." But, not about to believe, they would have persevered in his slaying. And why should he not the rather have been about to suffer, if he had been of another god, and through this had manifested himself the adversary of the Creator? Therefore not that he might suffer did he then too forbear to show himself another, but because they were desiring to wring a confession out of his mouth — yet, even confessing, not about to believe, who ought to have acknowledged him from his works fulfilling the Scriptures — therefore it was his to hide himself from those to whom acknowledgement was spontaneously due. And yet, still reaching out his hand to them, "Henceforth," he says, "shall the Son of man be sitting at the right hand of the power of God." For he was suggesting himself, out of the prophecy of Daniel, the Son of man, and, out of the psalm of David, the one sitting at the right hand of God. And so, illumined out of that saying and the comparison of Scripture as to whom he wished himself to be understood, "Then art thou the Son of God?" they say. Of what god, but whom alone they had known? Of what god, but whom they remembered in the psalm to have said to his Son, "Sit at my right hand"? But he answered, "You say it" — as though "not I." And yet he confirmed that he was that which they had said, while they again interrogate. But whence will you prove that they pronounced it interrogatively and not themselves confirmingly, "Then art thou the Son of God?" So that, because obliquely he had shown himself to be understood through the Scriptures as the Son of God, they so perceived, "Then art thou the Son of God?" which thou wilt not openly say; equally so he too, "You say it," answered confirmingly, and so was his pronouncement, that they persevered in that which the pronouncement savoured.

For having led him to Pilate, they began to charge that he called himself Christ a king, without doubt the Son of God, about to sit at the right hand of God. For otherwise they would have weighed him with another title, uncertain whether he had called himself the Son of God, had he not pronounced "You say it" thus, that he was that which they said. To Pilate too, interrogating, "Art thou Christ?" likewise, "Thou sayest," lest for fear of his power he should seem to have answered more. The Lord was set, therefore, in judgement. "And he set in judgement his people." "The Lord himself shall come into judgement with the elders and the rulers of the people," according to Isaiah. And thereafter he fulfilled every writing of his own passion. "There the nations were in tumult, 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." The nations, the Romans who were with Pilate; the peoples, the tribes of Israel; the kings, in Herod; the rulers, in the chief priests. For also sent to Herod as it were a gift by Pilate, he gave faith to the voices of Hosea. For of Christ he had prophesied: "And bound they shall lead him as a gift to the king." In short, Herod was delighted at the sight of Jesus, but heard no voice from him. For "as a lamb before the shearer, so he opened not his mouth" — because the Lord had given him the tongue of discipline, that he might know how he ought to bring forth a word — that tongue, namely, which in the psalm he then proved glued to his throat, by not speaking. And Barabbas indeed, most guilty, is granted his life as if a good man, but Christ, most just, is demanded for death as a homicide. But also two criminals are fastened about him, that he might be reckoned among the iniquitous, namely. His clothing plainly, divided by the soldiers, part assigned by lot — Marcion took away, regarding the prophecy of the psalm: "They divided my garments among them, and upon my vesture they cast lots." Take away therefore the cross itself. Yet the same psalm is not silent about it: "They pierced my hands and my feet." The whole issue in him is read. "Dogs surrounded me, the synagogue of the malicious encompassed me: all who looked at me mocked me with the nose: they spoke with the lips, and shook their heads: he hoped in God, let him free him." To what end now is the testimony of the garments? Have the booty of your falsity; the whole psalm is the garments of Christ. But behold, the elements too are shaken. For their Lord was suffering. For the rest, had it been the adversary that was hurt, the heaven would have flourished with its lights, the sun would the rather have insulted with its rays, the day the rather would have stood, gladly beholding Marcion's Christ hanging on the gibbet. These arguments too would have suited me, even had they not been foretold. "The heaven," says Isaiah, "I will clothe with darkness." This will be the day of which also Amos: "And it shall be in that day, says the Lord, the sun shall set at noon" (you have too the signification of the sixth hour), "and it shall be darkened upon the earth." The veil of the temple too was rent, by the eruption of the angel, forsaking the daughter of Zion, as a watch-tower in a vineyard and a hut in a cucumber-field. O how far he persevered, even in the thirtieth psalm, to render Christ himself! He cries out to the Father, that even dying with his last voice he might fulfil the prophets. With this saying he expired. Who? The spirit himself, or the flesh the spirit? But the spirit could not expire itself. He is one who expires, another who is expired. If the spirit is expired, it must of necessity be expired by another. But if it had been spirit alone, it would rather have been said to have departed than to have expired. Who then expires the spirit but the flesh, which both breathes while it has it, and so, when it loses it, expires it? In short, if there was no flesh, but a phantom of flesh, and the phantom was of spirit, but 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 along with the spirit. Nothing therefore remained on the tree, nothing hung even after the expiration, nothing was demanded of Pilate, nothing taken down from the gibbet, nothing wrapped in linen, nothing laid in a new tomb. And yet not nothing. What, then, was that? If a phantom, then Christ was still in it. If Christ had departed, then he had taken away the phantom. It remains for heretical shamelessness to say that a phantom of the phantom remained there. But if Joseph too knew it to be a body which he handled with all piety — that Joseph who had not consented with the Jews in their crime? "Blessed the man who has not gone away in the counsel of the impious, and in the way of sinners has not stood, and in the seat of pestilence has not sat."

It behoved that the Lord's burier too be prophesied, and even then deservedly be blessed, if not even the office of those women be passed over by prophecy, who before light came together to the sepulchre with a preparation of spices. For concerning this through Hosea: "That they may seek my face," it says, "before light they shall watch toward me, saying, Let us go and turn back to the Lord, because he himself has snatched away and will heal us, has struck and will have mercy upon us, he will heal us after two days, on the third day we shall rise again." Who would not believe these things rolled in the reconsideration of those women, between the grief of the present destitution, by which they seemed to themselves stricken by the Lord, and the hope of the resurrection itself, by which they rightly esteem they are restored? But the body not being found, his burial had been taken away from the midst, according to Isaiah. But also two angels appeared there. For with about so many attendants the word of God was wont to be employed, consisting in two witnesses. The women too returning from the sepulchre, and from that vision of angels, Isaiah foresaw: "Women," he says, "coming from a sight, come" — to announce, namely, the resurrection of the Lord. But well that the disbelief of the disciples persevered, that even to the end our defence might stand — that Christ Jesus published himself to the disciples as no other than the prophets'. For when two of them were journeying, and the Lord had joined himself to them, not appearing as himself, even dissembling out of consciousness of the thing done, "But we thought," they say, "that he himself was the redeemer of Israel" — surely their own Christ, that is, the Creator's. So far had he published himself no other to them. For the rest, they would not have esteemed him the Creator's; and when he was esteemed the Creator's, he would not have sustained this esteem of himself, if he were not he who is esteemed. Or else he himself will be the author of error and the prevaricator of truth, against the title of a best god. But neither after the resurrection did he show himself to them any other than the one they had said was esteemed by them. Plainly he inveighed against them: "O foolish and slow of heart in not believing all things which he spoke to you." Which things he spoke, prove him to be not of another god, but of the same god. For the same things the angels too to the women: "Remember what he spoke to you in Galilee, saying, that the Son of man must be betrayed and crucified and on the third day rise again." And why must he, except because thus it was written by God the Creator? Therefore he rebuked them as scandalized only by the passion, and as doubtful about the faith of the resurrection announced to them by the women — through which they had not believed him to be the one whom they had esteemed. And so, what they had esteemed, wishing it to be believed, he confirmed himself to be the one they had esteemed — namely the Christ of the Creator, the redeemer of Israel. But concerning the truth of the body, what can be clearer? — when, while they hesitated lest it be a phantom — nay, believing it a phantom — "Why are you troubled?" he says, "and why do thoughts rise in your hearts? See my hands and feet, that it is I myself; because a spirit has not bones, as you see me to have." And Marcion was unwilling, I believe of set purpose, to erase certain things contrary to him from his gospel, that out of those which he could have erased and did not, he might either be denied to have erased those which he erased, or be said to have erased them with reason. Nor does he spare any but those which he subverts by interpreting otherwise no less than by deleting. He wishes therefore "A spirit has not bones, as you see me to have" to be so said that "as you see me to have" be referred to the spirit — "as you see me to have," that is, not having bones, just as a spirit too. And what is the reason of that tortuousness? — when he could have pronounced simply, "Because a spirit has not bones, as you see me not to have." But why does he offer to their inspection his hands and feet, which members consist of bones, if he had no bones? Why does he add, "And know that it is I," whom, namely, they had formerly known to be corporeal? Or if he was a phantom utterly, why did he rebuke them for believing him a phantom? And yet, while they still did not believe, on that account he desired food, that he might show himself to have teeth too. We have fulfilled, as I think, our undertaking. We have exhibited Jesus Christ, by the doctrines, opinions, affections, senses, powers, passions, even by the resurrection of the prophets, no other than the Creator's — since, sending too his apostles to preach to all nations, he commanded the fulfilment of the psalm, "Into all the earth their sound shall go out, and to the ends of the earth their voices." I pity thee, Marcion; in vain hast thou laboured. For Christ Jesus in thy gospel is mine.