Book 5

Nothing is without an origin except God alone. And as far as origin precedes in the standing of all things, so far must it precede also in their re-examination, that the standing may be established; for you cannot discern what a thing is and of what kind, unless you are certain that it is, once you have learned whence it is. And so, having come down to this subject in the order of my little work, I demand of Marcion the origin of the apostle as well — a fresh sort of disciple, the pupil of no other, who for the present believe nothing except that nothing is to be believed rashly, and that whatever is believed without acknowledgement of its origin is believed rashly. And I shall most fittingly carry this inquiry to the point of anxiety, since the man is affirmed to me as an apostle whom I do not find in the roll of the apostles in the gospel. So then, hearing that he was afterwards taken on by the Lord, when the Lord was already at rest in the heavens, I judge it a kind of improvidence that Christ did not know beforehand that this man would be necessary to him, but, once the office of the apostolate had been arranged and dismissed upon its work, thought he must be added by sudden encounter and not by foresight — by necessity, so to speak, not by will. Therefore, shipmaster of Pontus, if you have never received stolen or contraband wares into your boats, if you have never diverted or adulterated any cargo whatever — being doubtless the more cautious and faithful in the things of God — I would have you publish to us by what token you have taken on the apostle Paul, who stamped him with the mark of a title, who consigned him to you, who put him on board, that you may be able to set him forth with assurance, lest he be proved to belong to that one who has produced all the documents of his apostleship. He professed himself an apostle, you say, and indeed not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ. Plainly anyone can profess himself; but his profession is made good by another's authority: one writes, another countersigns, another seals, another enters it in the records. No one is at once witness and professor on his own behalf. Besides this you have surely read that many would come who would say, I am Christ. If there is one to lie that he is Christ, how much more one to proclaim himself an apostle of Christ? Still I am moving in the character of a disciple and an inquirer, that even from here I may blunt your faith — you who have no means of proving it — and shame your effrontery — you who lay claim, and do not take up the means by which you might lay claim. Let there be a Christ, let there be an apostle, but of that other God, so long as they are not proved except out of the instrument of the Creator. For Genesis long ago promised me Paul as well. For among those figures and prophetic blessings of Jacob upon his sons, when he had said to Benjamin, Benjamin, he says, a ravening wolf shall feed in the morning, and at evening shall give food — for he foresaw that Paul would arise from the tribe of Benjamin, a ravening wolf feeding in the morning, that is, in his early age laying waste the flock of the Lord as a persecutor of the churches, and afterwards giving food at evening, that is, in his now declining age teaching the sheep of Christ as a doctor of the nations. For the harshness too of Saul's persecution of David at first, and afterwards his repentance and amends, receiving good for evil, portended nothing else than Paul in Saul according to the tribe, and Jesus in David according to the reckoning of the virgin. If these sacraments of the figures displease you, at least the Acts of the Apostles have handed down to me this order of Paul's career, not to be denied by you either. Thence I show the apostle to have been a persecutor, not from men nor through man; thence I am induced to believe him myself; thence I expel you from his defence, and I do not fear you saying, Do you then deny the apostle Paul? I do not blaspheme him whom I protect. I deny him in order to compel you to prove him; I deny him in order to convince you that he is mine. Or if you look to our faith, accept what makes it; if you appeal to your own, produce what underpins it. Either prove that what you believe is, or, if you do not prove it, how do you believe? Or what manner of believer are you against him by whom alone is proved to be that very thing which you believe? Have now both the apostle from my side, just as the Christ also, as much my apostle as my Christ. We shall fight on these same lines here too, we shall challenge on the very step of prescription — that the apostle, namely, who is denied to the Creator, who indeed is brought forward against the Creator, must teach nothing, hold nothing, will nothing according to the Creator, and above all must proclaim another God with as great constancy as that with which he broke off from the law of the Creator. For it is not likely that, turning men away from Judaism, he should not equally have shown into the faith of what God he was turning them, since no one could pass over from the Creator without knowing to whom he was to pass. For either Christ had already revealed another God — and then the apostle's testimony followed, that he might not be reckoned the apostle of a God whom Christ had revealed, and because what had already been revealed by Christ could not be hidden from the apostle — or else Christ had revealed nothing of the kind concerning God, and then it ought all the more to have been revealed by the apostle, since now it could not be by another, and is surely not to be believed if not revealed even by the apostle. This we have established beforehand, that from here we may profess that we shall prove no other God carried about by the apostle, just as we proved none by Christ, out of Paul's own epistles, which therefore — mutilated even in their number — the very shape of the heretic's gospel ought already to have prejudged.

ON THE EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS. The epistle that teaches the Galatians we too confess to be foremost against Judaism. For we embrace that whole abolition of the old law, as itself coming from the Creator's arrangement, just as we have already often argued in this work concerning the renewal foretold by the prophets of our God. But if the Creator promised that old things should pass away, with new things, namely, about to arise, and Christ, fixing the boundary of that distinction (the law and the prophets were until John) by setting John as the terminus between either order — of the old thereafter ceasing and the new beginning — then of necessity the apostle too, in Christ revealed after John, weakens the old and confirms the new, and so concerns himself with no other faith than the Creator's, with whom the passing away of the old was also being preached. Therefore both the destruction of the law and the building up of the gospel work for me in this epistle also, belonging to that presumption of the Galatians by which they presumed that Christ was to be believed as the Creator's, with the Creator's law preserved — for it still seemed incredible that the law should be laid aside by its own author. Moreover, if they had heard at all of another God from the apostle, they would assuredly have known of their own accord that they must withdraw from the law of that God whom they had left in following another. For who would wait any longer to learn that he ought to follow a new discipline, when he had received a new God? Rather, because the same divinity was being preached in the gospel which had always been known in the law, but the discipline was not the same, this was the whole state of the question: whether the Creator's law ought to be excluded by the gospel in the Creator's Christ. Take away this state of the case, and the question is void. And the question being void, all of their own accord recognising that they must withdraw from the order of the Creator through the faith of another God, no matter would have been left for the apostle to teach this so pressingly, which the very faith would of itself have dictated. Therefore the whole intent of this epistle teaches nothing else than the withdrawal of the law coming from the Creator's arrangement, as we shall still go on to urge. If likewise he brings forward no mention of any new God — which he would nowhere have done more readily than in this matter, so as to set forth the reason for dismissing the law by this single and most sufficient definition of a new divinity — it appears how he writes: I marvel that you are so quickly transferred from him who called you into grace to another gospel: another in conduct, not in religion; in discipline, not in divinity; since the gospel of Christ ought to call them away from the law to grace, not from the Creator to another God. For no one had moved them from the Creator, so as to seem to be transferred to another gospel as while they are transferred to the Creator. For also, by adding that there was no other gospel at all, he confirms that which he maintains to be. But the Creator too promises a gospel, saying through Isaiah, Go up onto the high mountain, you who bring good tidings to Sion; lift up your voice in strength, you who bring good tidings to Jerusalem; likewise of the person of the apostles, How timely are the feet of those bringing good tidings of peace, of those bringing good tidings of good things — to the nations also, surely; since, In his name, he says, shall the nations hope — Christ's name, to whom he says, I have set you for a light of the nations. But there is also a gospel of the new God, you say, then defended by the apostle. Then there are two gospels with two gods, and the apostle will have lied in saying that there is no other at all, when there is another, since he could so have defended his own gospel as rather to show it the one than to determine it the only one. But perhaps, to escape this point, you will say he therefore subjoined, Though an angel from heaven should preach otherwise, let him be anathema, because he knew the Creator too would preach a gospel. So again you entangle yourself. For this is what you are bound by: to confirm two gospels is not the part of one who has already denied that there is another. Yet the sense of him who set his own person first shines out: But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach otherwise. For it was said by way of illustration. For the rest, if not even he himself was to preach otherwise, then surely no angel either. Thus he named an angel for this purpose, that much more should men not be believed when even an angel was not to be, nor an apostle, lest he should refer the angel to the Creator's gospel. Thereupon, running through the order of his own conversion from persecutor into apostle, he confirms the scripture of the Acts of the Apostles, in which the very subject of this epistle is also recognised: that certain men had intervened who said that men ought to be circumcised and to keep the law of Moses, and that the apostles, then consulted on this question, declared on the authority of the Spirit that burdens ought not to be imposed on men which the fathers themselves had not been able to bear. But if from this too the Acts of the Apostles agree with Paul, why you reject them already appears, namely because they preach no other God than the Creator, nor a Christ of any other than the Creator's — since not even the promise of the Holy Spirit is proved to have been exhibited from any source but the instrument of the Acts. And it is surely not likely that they should agree with the apostle in part, when they show his order according to his own testimony, but disagree in part, when they announce the divinity of the Creator in Christ — so that Paul should not have followed the preaching of the apostles, from whom he received the form for unteaching the law.

Lastly, he writes that he went up to Jerusalem, to the patronage of Peter and of the other apostles, after fourteen years, to confer with them about the rule of his gospel, lest he should have run, or be running, in vain for so many years — that is, if he were preaching anything outside their form. So far did he desire to be approved and established by those whom, if ever, you wish to be understood as the more closely akin to Judaism. But when he says that not even Titus was circumcised, he begins to show that the question of circumcision alone was being shaken from the defence still made of the law by those whom for that reason he calls false and surreptitiously introduced brethren, men proceeding to establish nothing else than the continuance of the law, out of a faith in the Creator no doubt still intact, and so perverting the gospel — not by interpolation of the scripture, by which they would have fashioned a Christ of the Creator, but by retention of the old discipline, that they might not exclude the Creator's law. Therefore, he says, because of the false surreptitious brethren, who had crept in to spy out our liberty, which we have in Christ, that they might bring us into bondage, we did not yield to subjection even for an hour. Let us attend both to the very sense and to its cause, and the corruption of the scripture will appear. When he sends before, But not even Titus, who was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised, and then subjoins, Because of the surreptitious false brethren, and the rest, he is beginning, surely, to give the reason for a contrary act, showing on what account he did what he would neither have done nor disclosed, had not that on account of which he did it occurred. In short, I would have you say: had not those false brethren crept in to spy out their liberty, would they have yielded to subjection? I think not. Therefore they yielded, because there were those for whose sake it might be believed. For this was fitting for a faith still raw and still in suspense about the observance of the law, the apostle himself too being suspected of having run, or running, in vain. And so the false brethren had to be frustrated, as they spied out the Christian liberty, lest they should lead it into the bondage of Judaism before Paul knew that he had not run in vain, before his predecessors gave him their right hands, before from their reckoning he should take up the office of preaching among the nations. Necessarily, then, he yielded for a time; and so the reason holds for his circumcising Timothy and bringing in shaven men into the temple, which things are told in the Acts — so true that they agree with the apostle when he professes that he was made a Jew to the Jews, that he might gain the Jews, and lived under the law for the sake of those who were under the law, and so too for the sake of those surreptitiously introduced, and at last became all things to all, that he might gain all. If these things too require to be understood from this, then no one will doubt this either, that Paul was the preacher of that God and Christ whose law, though for the moment excluding it, he had yet admitted to suit the times — a law to be cast off at once, had he brought in a new God. Well, then, that Peter and James and John gave their right hands to Paul, and covenanted about the distribution of office, that Paul should go to the nations and they to the circumcision, only that they should remember the poor — and this according to the law of the Creator, who cherishes the poor and needy, as was proved in the review of your gospel. So clear is it that the question was about the law alone, while it is shown what ought to be kept out of the law. But he reproves Peter for not walking with a straight foot toward the truth of the gospel. He reproves him plainly, yet for no other reason than for the inconstancy of diet, which he varied according to the quality of persons, fearing those who were of the circumcision — not for any perversion of divinity, on account of which he would have withstood others too to their faces, he who for the lesser cause of doubtful conduct did not spare Peter himself. But how would the Marcionites have it believed? For the rest, let the apostle proceed, denying that a man is justified by works of the law, but by faith. Yet the faith of the same God whose also is the law. For he would not have laboured to distinguish faith from the law, when the diversity of the divinity itself would of its own accord have distinguished it, had there been any. With reason he did not rebuild what he had destroyed. But the law had to be destroyed from the time the voice of John cried in the wilderness, Prepare the ways of the Lord, that the rivers and hills and mountains might be filled and brought low, and the crooked and rough ways made into straightness and into plains — that is, the difficulties of the law into the facilities of the gospel. He remembered too that it was already the psalm's time: Let us break their bonds from us, and cast away their yoke from us — from the time the nations raged and the peoples imagined vain things; the kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ; so that now a man should be justified out of the liberty of faith, not out of the bondage of the law, because the just lives by faith. But if the prophet Habakkuk announced this beforehand, you have the apostle too confirming the prophets, just as Christ does. His, then, will be the faith in which the just shall live, whose also is the law, in which the worker is not justified. Accordingly, if in the law there is a curse, but in faith a blessing, you have both set forth by the Creator: Behold, he says, I have set before you a curse and a blessing. You cannot claim a distinction which, though it be of things, is therefore not of authors, since it is set forth by one author. But why Christ was made a curse for us is made plain by the very teaching of the apostle: how it agrees with us, that is, according to the faith of the Creator. For not because the Creator pronounced, Cursed is everyone hanged on a tree, will Christ therefore seem to belong to another God, and to have been on that account already then cursed in the law by the Creator. And how could the Creator have fore-cursed him whom he does not know? But why should it not rather befit the Creator to have given his own Son to his own curse, than to have subjected him to that God of yours — and that for a stranger man? In short, if this seems savage in the Creator regarding his Son, so it is in your God too; but if it is rational even in yours, so it is in mine too, and more in mine. For it would more easily be believed to be his — to have looked through the curse of Christ to a blessing for man — who had at some time set both a curse and a blessing before man, than his who has never with you professed either. We have received, then, a spiritual blessing through faith, he says — by which, namely, the just shall live, according to the Creator. This, then, is what I say, that the faith is of that God whose is the pattern of the grace of faith. But also, when he adds, For you are all sons of faith, it is shown what here above the heretic's industry has erased: the mention of Abraham, namely, by which the apostle affirms us to be sons of Abraham through faith, according to which mention he here too noted us sons of faith. For otherwise, how sons of faith? and of whose faith, if not Abraham's? For if Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him for righteousness, and thereafter he deserved to be named the father of many nations, while we too by believing God are likewise the more justified, like Abraham, and likewise obtain life, since the just lives by faith — so it comes about that he both above pronounced us sons of Abraham, as of the father of faith, and here sons of faith, through which Abraham had been promised the father of nations. The very point that he was recalling faith from circumcision — was he not seeking to constitute sons of Abraham, who had believed in the integrity of the flesh? In short, the faith of another God cannot be admitted to the pattern of another God, so as to reckon believers unto righteousness, to make the just live, to call the nations sons of faith. This whole thing is his with whom it is already known beforehand under the same mention of Abraham, while by the very sense he is convicted.

Still, he says, I speak after the manner of man: While we were children, we were placed under the elements of the world, to be in bondage to them. But this is not said in a merely human way. For it is not an illustration, but the truth. For what child — in sense, that is, such as the nations are — is not subject to the elements of the world, which it looks up to in place of God? But the human way lay in this, that, though he had said After the manner of man, yet a man's testament no one despises or overrides. For by the example of a human testament that endures, he was protecting the divine. The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He did not say, To seeds, as of many, but, To his seed, as of one, which is Christ. Let Marcion's sponge blush! Unless that I review out of abundance what he has taken away, since it is the stronger thing to convict him out of what he has kept. But when it came to pass that the time was fulfilled, God sent his Son — surely he who is the God also of those very times of which the age consists, who ordained too the signs of the times, suns and moons and constellations and stars, who lastly both arranged and foretold the revelation of his Son at the extremity of the times. In the last days the mountain of the Lord shall be made manifest; and, In the last days I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh, according to Joel. It was for him to have waited for the time to be fulfilled, whose was also the end of time, as the beginning. But that idle God, of no operation and of no preaching, and so of no time either — what did he do at all to bring it about that the time should be fulfilled and the fulfilment awaited? If nothing, it is empty enough that he should have awaited the Creator's times, serving the Creator. And for what purpose did he send his Son? That he might redeem those who were under the law; that is, that he might make the crooked into a straight way and the rough into smooth ways, according to Isaiah, that the old should pass and the new arise, a new law out of Sion and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem, and that we might receive the adoption of sons — the nations, namely, who were not sons. For he himself shall be a light of the nations, and in his name the nations shall hope. And so, that it might be certain that we are sons of God, he sent his Spirit into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. For in the last days, he says, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh. Whose grace, except his whose is also the promise of grace? What father, except him who is also the maker? After these riches, then, there was no returning to the weak and beggarly elements. But elements, among the Romans too, the first letters are wont to be called. Not, therefore, by disparagement of the world's elements did he wish to turn them away from the God of those elements, even though by saying above, If, then, you serve those who by nature are not gods, he brands the error of natural — that is, physical — superstition, which holds the elements in place of God; yet not even so does he tax the God of the elements. But what elements he wishes understood — the first letters, namely, of the law — he himself declares. You observe days and months and seasons and years and sabbaths, I suppose, and pure suppers and fasts and great days. For to cease from these too, as from circumcision, was required by the decrees of the Creator, who also says through Isaiah, Your new moons and sabbaths and the great day I will not endure; the fast and the holidays and your ceremonies my soul hates. And through Amos, I hate, I have rejected your ceremonies, and I will not smell in your assemblies; likewise through Hosea, I will turn away all her joys and her ceremonies and her sabbaths and her new moons and all her assemblies. What he himself had appointed, you say, did he erase? Rather he than another; or if another, then that one assisted the sentence of the Creator, taking away what the Creator too had condemned. But it is not for this place to ask why the Creator broke his own laws. It is enough that we have proved that he would break them, so that it may be confirmed that the apostle determined nothing against the Creator, since the very removal of the law is from the Creator. But as something of the booty is wont to slip from thieves as evidence, so I believe Marcion too left behind the last mention of Abraham, none more to be taken away, though he turned it in part. For if Abraham had two sons, one of the handmaid, the other of the freewoman, but he who was of the handmaid was born after the flesh, while he who was of the freewoman by promise (which things are allegorical, that is, portending something else; for these are two testaments, or two displays, as we find it interpreted: one from Mount Sinai, generating into the bondage of the synagogue of the Jews according to the law, the other generating above every principality, might, dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but in that to come, which is our mother, into which we have promised the holy church; and therefore he adds, Wherefore, brethren, we are not the sons of the handmaid, but of the freewoman) — assuredly he made plain that the nobility of Christianity, in the son of Abraham born of the freewoman, has the sacrament of an allegory, just as the legal bondage of Judaism in the son of the handmaid, and that so both arrangements belong to that God with whom we find the delineation of both arrangements. The very word he uses, By that liberty wherewith Christ has set us free, does it not constitute him the emancipator who had been lord? For not even Galba emancipated other men's slaves, though he would more easily set free the free. By him, therefore, will liberty be provided, with whom was the bondage of the law. And with reason. It did not befit the emancipated to be bound again by the yoke of bondage, that is, of the law, the psalm being now fulfilled: Let us break their bonds, and cast away their yoke from us, after the rulers were gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ. The emancipated from bondage, then, he persisted in erasing the very mark of bondage, circumcision — out of the authority, namely, of the prophetic preaching, mindful of what was said through Jeremiah, And circumcise the foreskins of your heart; for Moses too said, You shall circumcise your hardness of heart, that is, not the flesh. In short, if, coming from another God, he excluded circumcision, why does he also deny that uncircumcision avails anything in Christ, just as circumcision? For he ought to have preferred its rival, which he was assailing, had it been of a God who was circumcision's rival. But since both circumcision and uncircumcision were reckoned to one God, therefore both were of no avail in Christ, on account of the precedence of faith — that faith of which it was written, And in his name the nations shall believe; that faith which, by saying that it is perfected through love, he likewise showed to be the Creator's. For whether he means the love which is toward God — and this too is the Creator's, You shall love God with your whole heart, and with your whole soul, and with all your strength — or the love toward one's neighbour, And your neighbour as yourself, it is the Creator's. But he that troubles you shall bear judgement. From what God? From the good one? But he does not judge. From the Creator? But neither will he condemn the asserter of circumcision. But if there shall be no other to judge but the Creator, then he will not condemn the defenders of the law except he himself who appointed that it should cease. What now, if he even confirms it in the part in which he ought? For the whole law, he says, is fulfilled in you: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. Now if he wishes it understood as, It is fulfilled, as though now not to be fulfilled, then he does not wish me to love my neighbour as myself, so that this too should have ceased with the law. But we must persevere always in this precept. Therefore the law of the Creator has been approved even by the adversary, and has obtained from him not loss but compendium, its sum reduced into one precept now. But neither does this befit another more than the author. And so, when he says, Bear one another's burdens, and so you shall fulfil the law of Christ — if this cannot be done unless one love his neighbour as himself, it appears that, You shall love your neighbour as yourself, through which is heard, Bear one another's burdens, is the law of Christ, which is the Creator's, and that so Christ is the Creator's, while the law of Christ is the Creator's. You are mistaken: God is not mocked. But the God of Marcion can be mocked, who knows neither to be angry nor to avenge. For what a man sows, that also shall he reap. Therefore he holds out a God of retribution and judgement. But in doing good let us not grow weary, and while we have time, let us work good. Deny that the Creator commanded good to be done, and let the contrary doctrine be of a contrary divinity. But if he preaches retribution, from the same will come both the harvest of corruption and of life. And in his own time we shall reap, because Ecclesiastes too says, There will be a time for everything. But to me also, the servant of the Creator, the world is crucified, yet not the God of the world, and I to the world, yet not to the God of the world. For he set down the world as regards its conduct, in renouncing which we are mutually transfixed and die to one another. Persecutors he calls them of Christ. But when he adds that he bears the marks of Christ in his body (which surely are bodily things), he has now professed not a putative but a true and solid flesh of Christ, whose bodily marks he displays.

ON THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS. The forestructure of the former epistle so led me that I have not gone back over its heading, being certain that it can be reviewed elsewhere too — common, namely, and the same in all the epistles, in that he does not prescribe salvation to those to whom he writes, but grace and peace. I do not say what he, the destroyer of Judaism, has to do with the still Jewish custom. For even today the Jews address one another in the name of peace, and of old in the scriptures they so saluted. But I understand that he defended by his own office the preaching of the Creator: How timely the feet of those bringing good tidings of good things, of those bringing good tidings of peace. For as the evangelist of good things, that is, of the grace of God, he knew that peace was to be preferred. When, announcing these from God our Father and the Lord Jesus, he uses common names, suitable to our sacrament too, I do not think it can be discerned what God is Father, and what Lord is preached as Jesus, except from what is added, to whom they more befit. First, indeed, I prescribe that the Lord Father is to be acknowledged as no other than the Creator and founder both of man and of the universe; and further, that to the Father the name of Lord too is added on account of power, which the Son too receives through the Father; and then, that grace and peace belong not only to him from whom they were preached, but to him who had been offended. For grace is not made except after an offence, nor peace except after war. And the people, by transgression of discipline, and the whole race of man, by dissimulation of nature, had both sinned and rebelled against the Creator. But the God of Marcion, both because he is unknown could not be offended, and because he knows not to be angry. What grace, then, from one not offended? what peace from one not rebelled against? He says that the cross of Christ is foolishness to those who perish, but the power and wisdom of God to those who are to obtain salvation; and to show whence this came, he adds: For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and bring to nought the prudence of the prudent. If these are the Creator's, and he reckons among foolishness the things which pertain to the cause of the cross, then both the cross and, through the cross, Christ will pertain to the Creator, by whom was preached that which pertains to the cross. Or if the Creator, as a rival, on that account took away wisdom, that the cross of Christ his adversary might be reckoned foolishness, how can the Creator have pronounced anything pertaining to the cross of a Christ not his own, whom he did not know when he preached it? But also, why with the Lord who is supremely good and of lavish mercy do some refer salvation, believing the cross to be the power and wisdom of God, others perdition, to whom the cross of Christ is reputed foolishness — if it is not the Creator's part to have punished some offence both of the people and of the human race by the loss of wisdom and prudence? This the sequel will confirm, when he says, Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? and when here too he adds why: Since in the wisdom of God the world did not by wisdom know the Lord, God thought good to save the believers by the foolishness of preaching. But first I will dispute about the world, since the most subtle heretics here especially interpret world as the God of the world, while we understand the man who is in the world, from the simple form of human speech, by which we very often put that which contains for that which is contained. The circus cried out, and the forum spoke, and the basilica roared — that is, those who transacted business in those places. Therefore, because man, not God, in the world's wisdom did not know God, whom he ought to have known — both the Jew in the wisdom of the scriptures and every nation in the wisdom of works — therefore the same God, who was not acknowledged in his own wisdom, determined to beat back the wisdom of men with foolishness, by saving the believers, namely, in the foolish preaching of the cross. Since the Jews desire signs, who ought already to have been certain of God, and the Greeks seek wisdom, who set up their own, namely, not God's wisdom. For the rest, if a new God were being preached, in what had the Jews sinned in desiring signs by which to believe, or the Greeks in following the wisdom they should the rather believe? Thus the very recompense upon Jews and Greeks confirms both a zealous and a judging God, who from emulous retribution and as judge made foolish the wisdom of the world. But if the causes are his whose scriptures are adduced, then the apostle, treating of the Creator unknown, surely teaches that the Creator is to be known. Also, that he preaches Christ a stumbling-block to the Jews, he seals the Creator's prophecy concerning him, who says through Isaiah, Behold, I have set in Sion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence; and the rock was Christ. This Marcion too keeps. But what is the foolish thing of God wiser than men, except the cross and death of Christ? What is the weak thing of God stronger than man, except the nativity and flesh of God? But if Christ was neither born of a virgin nor framed of flesh, and through this neither truly suffered the cross nor death, there was nothing foolish and weak in him; nor did God then choose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, nor the weak things of the world to confound the strong, nor the base and least and contemptible things, which are not — that is, which are not truly — to confound the things which are, that is, which truly are. For nothing arranged by God is truly small and ignoble and contemptible, but what is by man. But with the Creator even the old things can be reckoned to foolishness and weakness and baseness and littleness and contempt. What more foolish, what weaker, than the exaction by God of bloody sacrifices and reeking holocausts? What weaker than the cleansing of little vessels and pallets? What more base than another dishonouring of the flesh already blushing? What so lowly as the prescription of retaliation? What so contemptible as the abstaining from foods? The whole Old Testament, so far as I know, every heretic derides. For God chose the foolish things of the world to confound wisdom. The God of Marcion has nothing of the kind, because he does not even emulously confute contraries with contraries, that no flesh should glory; that, as it is written, He that glories, let him glory in the Lord. In whom? Surely in him who commanded this. Unless the Creator of the precept, that one may glory in the God of Marcion.

By all these things, then, he shows of what God he speaks the wisdom among the perfect: of him, namely, who took away the wisdom of the wise and made void the prudence of the prudent, who made foolish the wisdom of the world, choosing its foolish things and arranging them for salvation. This wisdom he says was in secret — the wisdom which was in foolish and little and base things, which lay hidden too under figures, allegories, and riddles, to be revealed afterwards in Christ, set for a light of the nations by the Creator, who promised through the voice of Isaiah that he would lay open invisible and hidden treasures. For that the God who did nothing at all in which anything could be supposed to have been hidden should have hidden anything, is incredible enough. If he himself existed, he could not lie hidden, much less any of his sacraments. But the Creator is as well known as his sacraments, openly running their course, namely, among Israel, but overshadowed by significations, in which the wisdom of God lay concealed, to be narrated among the perfect in its own time, but set forth in the purpose of God before the ages. Whose are the ages, except the Creator's? For if the ages are built of times, and times are joined together of days and months and years, and days and months and years are marked by the suns and moons and constellations of the Creator, set by him for this (And they shall be, he says, for signs of months and years), it appears that both the ages are the Creator's, and that all that is said to have been purposed before the ages is of no other than him whose are the ages. Or let Marcion prove the ages of his God; let him show the very world too in which the ages are reckoned — a kind of vessel of times — and some signs or order of them. If he demonstrates nothing, I return to say this too: But why did he purpose our glory before the ages? It might seem that he purposed it before the ages, which he would reveal by the introduction of the age. But when he does this with almost all the ages of the Creator now run forth, he purposed it before the ages in vain, and not rather within the ages, since he was about to reveal it almost after the ages. For it is not his to have hastened in purposing whose it was also to have delayed in revealing. But to the Creator both befit: both to have purposed before the ages and to have revealed at the end of the ages, because both what he purposed and revealed he furnished beforehand, in the middle space of the ages, in figures and riddles and allegories. But because he subjoins of our glory that none of the princes of this age knew it — for if they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory — the heretic argues that the princes of this age crucified the Lord, the Christ, namely, of another God, that this too may fall back upon the Creator. But for him to whom we showed above in what ways our glory is to be reckoned of the Creator, it ought to be foreshown that the glory which was in secret with the Creator was rightly unknown even to all the virtues and powers of the Creator, because not even servants are permitted to know the counsels of their lords, much less those apostate angels and the very prince of transgression, the devil — whom I would contend to have been the more strangers, on account of their fault, from all consciousness of the Creator's arrangements. But now it does not even befit me to interpret the princes of this age as the virtues and powers of the Creator, because the apostle ascribes ignorance to them, whereas Jesus, even according to our gospel, the devil too knew in the temptation, and according to the common instrument the unclean spirit knew that he was the Holy One of God and was called Jesus and had come for their destruction. The parable too of the strong armed man, whom another stronger overpowered and seized his goods, if it be taken of the Creator according to Marcion, then the Creator could no longer have been ignorant of the God of glory, while he is overpowered by him, nor have nailed to the cross him against whom he could not prevail; and it remains that, according to me at least, it is credible that the virtues and powers of the Creator, knowing the God of glory, crucified him their own Christ — by that desperation and overflow of malice with which the most wicked servants too do not hesitate to slay their lords. For it is written with me that Satan entered into Judas. But according to Marcion, not even the apostle in this place suffers ignorance to be ascribed to the virtues of the Creator concerning the Lord of glory, because, namely, he does not wish them understood as the princes of this age. But if he seems not to have spoken of spiritual princes, then he spoke of secular ones — of the chief people, surely not among the nations — of its very rulers, of King Herod, of Pilate too, and of the Roman dignity, by which the greater principality of this age presided. Thus, while the argumentations of the opposite party are destroyed, our expositions are built up. But you wish further that our glory be of your God, and that it was with him in secret. And why does God and the apostle still both rely on the same instrument? What has he everywhere to do with the sentences of the prophets? For who has known the mind of the Lord, and who was his counsellor? It is Isaiah. What has he even to do with examples of our God? For when he affirms himself a prudent architect, we find this signified by the proclaimer of the divine discipline, the Creator, through Isaiah. For I will take away, he says, from Judaea, among the rest, also the wise architect. And was not Paul himself then destined — to be taken from Judaea, that is, from Judaism, unto the building of Christianity, about to lay the one foundation which is Christ? For of this too the Creator says through the same prophet, Behold, I lay in the foundations of Sion a precious stone, honourable, and he that believes in him shall not be confounded. Unless God professed himself the builder of an earthly work, so as not to signify of his own Christ, who was to be the foundation of believers in him, upon which, according as each shall have built up doctrine worthy or unworthy, if his work shall be proved by fire, if a reward shall be paid him by fire, it is the Creator's, because by fire your superstructure is judged — upon his own foundation, namely, that is, his own Christ. Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If man — both substance and work and image and likeness, both flesh through earth and soul through the breath of the Creator — then the whole God of Marcion dwells in another's property, if we are not the temple of the Creator. But if anyone shall defile the temple of God, he shall be defiled — surely by the God of the temple. By threatening an avenger you will be threatening the Creator. Be foolish, that you may be wise. Why? For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. With what God? If our former arguments have decided nothing for us toward this sense too, well that he here too builds up: For it is written, He that takes the wise in their craftiness; and again, The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain. For it will in sum have been prescribed by us that the apostle could use no sentence of that God whom he ought to destroy, if he were not teaching him. Therefore, he says, let no one glory in man. And this according to the Creator's discipline: Wretched is the man who has hope in man! and, It is good to trust in God rather than to trust in men; and so, to glory likewise.

And the hidden things of darkness he himself will illuminate — surely through Christ, who promised Christ as illumination, who declared himself also a lamp, searching hearts and reins. From him too shall be praise to each one, from whom too the contrary of praise, as from a judge. Surely, you say, here at least he interprets world as the God of the world, by saying, We have been made a spectacle to the world and to angels and to men. For if by world he had meant the men of the world, he would not afterwards have named men also. Nay, lest you should argue thus, the providence of the Holy Spirit showed how he had said, We have been made a spectacle to the world — namely, to the angels who minister to the world, and to the men whom they serve. For the force of so great a constancy, not to say the Holy Spirit, feared — writing especially to sons whom he had begotten in the gospel — to name freely the God of the world, against whom he could not seem to preach except expressly. I do not defend, according to the law of the Creator, that he who had his father's wife was displeasing to him. He followed the discipline of the common and public religion. But when he condemns the same man to be delivered to Satan, he is the herald of a condemning God. Let it be seen too how he said, Unto the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord, since he judged both of the destruction of the flesh and of the salvation of the spirit, and, in bidding evil to be taken away from the midst, recalled a most frequent sentence of the Creator. Purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, as you are unleavened. Therefore the unleavened bread were figures of ourselves with the Creator. So too our Passover, Christ, has been sacrificed. Why is Christ the Passover, if the Passover were not a figure of Christ, by the likeness of the saving blood and of the flock of Christ? Why does he clothe us and Christ with the images of the Creator's solemnities, if they were not ours? But, turning us from fornication, he makes manifest the resurrection of the flesh. The body, he says, is not for fornication, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body — as the temple for God, and God for the temple. The temple, then, for God shall perish, and God for the temple. But you see, He that raised up the Lord will raise us up also — and will raise us up in the body too, because the body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And well that he heaps up, Do you not know that your bodies are the members of Christ? What will the heretic say? Shall the members of Christ not rise again, which are now no longer ours? For we were bought with a great price. With none at all, surely, if Christ was a phantasm and had no substance of body which he might pay for our bodies. Therefore Christ both had wherewith to redeem us, and if with something great he redeemed these bodies — into which the same fornication shall not be committed, since they are now Christ's members and not ours — surely he will keep safe for himself what he purchased at a great price. How now shall we honour, how take up, God in a body that is to perish? Then follows his engaging upon marriage, which Marcion, more constant than the apostle, forbids. For the apostle, though he prefers the good of continence, yet permits marriage both to be contracted and to be in use, and advises rather to keep it than to put it asunder. Plainly Christ forbids divorce, but Moses permits it. Marcion, taking away all conjugal intercourse from the faithful (let his catechumens see to it), ordering repudiation before marriage — whose sentence does he follow, Moses' or Christ's? But Christ too, when he commands that a woman should not depart from her husband, or, if she has departed, should remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband, both permitted repudiation, which he did not wholly forbid, and confirmed marriage, which he first forbade to be put asunder, and, if perchance put asunder, willed to be reformed. But what causes does he give for continence too? Because the time is contracted. I had thought it because another God is in Christ; and yet, from him by whom is the contraction of time, will come also that which suits the contraction of time. No one takes thought for another's time. You affirm your God to be petty, Marcion, whom in anything the Creator's time straitens. Surely, when he prescribes that one must marry only in the Lord, lest a faithful man contract a heathen marriage, he upholds the law of the Creator, who everywhere forbids marriages with men of other tribes. But, Even if there are those who are called gods, whether in the heavens or on earth, it appears how he said it: not as though they truly were, but because there are those who are called so, when they are not. For he had begun, about to dispute of things offered to idols: We know that an idol is nothing. But the Creator even Marcion does not deny to be God; therefore the apostle cannot seem to have placed the Creator too among those who are called gods and yet are not — since, even if they were, yet to us there would be one God the Father. From whom are all things to us, except him whose are all things? Which things are these? You have in what precedes, All things are yours, whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come. So fully does he make the Creator the God of all, from whom are both the world and life and death, which cannot be of another God. From him, therefore, among all things, is Christ too. Teaching that each ought to live by his own labour, he had set before enough examples of soldiers, shepherds, husbandmen; but divine authority was wanting to him. He therefore opposes to the ungrateful the law of the Creator, which he was destroying; for of his own God he had no such law. You shall not muzzle, he says, the ox that treads out the corn; and he adds, Does it concern the Lord about oxen? — yes, even about oxen kind, for men's sake? For it is written for our sakes, he says. Therefore he both approved the allegorical law according to us, and as advocating for those who live of the gospel, and on this account that the evangelists are of no other than him whose is the law that looked forward to them, when he says, For it is written for our sakes. But he was unwilling to use the power of the law, because he preferred to labour for nothing. This he referred to his own glory, which he denied that anyone would make void — not to the destruction of the law, which he proved another would use. For behold, blind Marcion stumbles even upon the rock from which our fathers drank in the wilderness. For if that rock was Christ, surely it was the Creator's, whose also was the people. Of what is he interpreting a figure of a stranger sacrament? Or is it that he might teach this very thing, that the old things were figured unto a Christ to be reviewed out of them? For, about to run through the rest of the people's outcome too, he sends before, But these things were made examples to us. Tell me: were examples made to men by the Creator of another and unknown God, or does one God borrow examples from another — and that a rival? It frightens me about him from whom he transfers my faith to himself. Will the adversary make me better toward him? Now if I sin in the same things as the people, am I to suffer the same things, or not? But if not the same, in vain does he set before me to be feared what I am not to suffer. But from whom shall I suffer? If from the Creator, what is it his to inflict? And what manner of thing will it be that a zealous God should punish the sinner of his rival rather than, on the contrary, cherish him? If from that God of yours? But he knows not to punish. Thus this whole proposition of the apostle stands by no reason, if it is not the Creator's discipline. In short, even in the close he answers his preface. But these things, as they happened to them, were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages have come. O Creator, both foreknowing now and admonishing the Christians of another! I pass over, when sometimes there are things equal to those already reviewed, certain of which I also briefly dismiss. A great argument of another God: the permission of all victuals against the law. As though we too did not confess that the burdens of the law were dismissed — but by him who imposed them, who promised renewal. So too he gave back the foods he took away, which he had furnished from the beginning. But if any other God had been the destroyer of our God, he would have forbidden his own nothing more than to live off the supplies of the adversary.

The head of the man is Christ. What Christ, who is not the author of man? For he set down head as authority, and authority will be of no other than the author. Of what man, then, is he the head? Surely of him concerning whom he subjoins, For a man ought not to veil his head, since he is the image of God. Therefore, if he is the image of the Creator (for the Creator, looking upon his Word, Christ, as the man to be, said, Let us make man after our image and likeness), how can I have another as my head, not him whose image I am? For since I am the image of the Creator, there is no room in me for another head. But also, why ought the woman to have power over her head? If it is because she is of the man and made for the man's sake, according to the institution of the Creator, then here too the apostle has taken care of his discipline, of whose institution he interprets the reasons of the discipline. He adds also, On account of the angels. What angels? that is, of whom? If apostates of the Creator, with reason — that, by that very countenance which gave them offence, she might carry a certain mark of the humility of her dress and the obscuring of her comeliness. But if on account of the angels of another God, what does he fear, if not even the Marcionites themselves desire women? We have often already shown that heresies are set among evils as an evil with the apostle, and that those are to be understood as approved who flee heresies as an evil. So likewise, in the sacrament of the bread and cup, we have already proved in the gospel the truth of the Lord's body and blood against the phantasm of Marcion. But also that every mention of judgement befits the Creator, as the God who judges, has been treated through almost the whole work. Now I speak of spiritual gifts, that these too were promised in Christ by the Creator, under that most just prescription, I think, by which the exhibition is to be believed of no other than him whose promise has been proved. Isaiah pronounced, A rod shall come forth from the root of Jesse, and a flower shall ascend from the root, and the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him. Then he enumerates its kinds: the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, and the Spirit of knowledge and of godliness; the Spirit of the fear of God shall fill him. For he showed that Christ should arise in the figure of a flower from a rod that issued from the root of Jesse — that is, the virgin of the lineage of David, the son of Jesse — in which Christ the whole substance of the Spirit was to consist, not as though to come upon him afterwards who was always the Spirit of God, even before the flesh — lest from this you argue that the prophecy pertains to that Christ who, as a mere man, only out of the reckoning of David, should afterwards obtain the Spirit of his God — but because from the time he flowered in the flesh, taken from the stock of David, all working of spiritual grace had to rest in him, and to leave off and make an end, as far as concerns the Jews; as the very fact testifies, that thenceforth nothing of the Creator's Spirit breathes among them, the wise and prudent architect and counsellor and prophet having been taken away from Judaea, so that this is the meaning of, The law and the prophets were until John. Now receive how, after Christ's reception into heaven, he pronounced that gifts of grace would come. He ascended on high, that is, into heaven; he led captivity captive, that is, death or human bondage; he gave gifts to the sons of men, that is, donatives, which we call charismata. Elegantly he says to the sons of men, not at random to men, showing us the sons of men, that is, of true men, namely of the apostles. For in the gospel, he says, I have begotten you; and, My sons, of whom I am again in travail. Now too that promise of the Spirit made absolutely through Joel: In the last days I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh, and their sons and daughters shall prophesy, and upon my menservants and maidservants of my Spirit will I pour out. And surely, if in the last days the Creator promised the grace of the Spirit, and Christ the dispenser of spiritual things appeared in the last days — the apostle saying, But when the time was fulfilled, God sent his Son, and again, Because the time is now contracted — it appears, from the preaching of the last times too, that this grace of the Spirit pertains to the Christ of the Creator who preached it. Compare, then, the kinds in the apostle and in Isaiah. To one, he says, is given through the Spirit the word of wisdom: at once Isaiah too set down the Spirit of wisdom. To another the word of knowledge: this will be the Spirit of understanding and counsel. To another faith in the same Spirit: this will be the Spirit of godliness and the fear of God. To another the gift of healings, to another of mighty works: this will be the Spirit of might. To another prophecy, to another the discerning of spirits, to another kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues: this will be the Spirit of knowledge. See the apostle, both in making the distribution of the one Spirit and in interpreting its particularity, conspiring with the prophet. I can say that the very one who fitted the unity of the various charismata to the framework of our body through many and diverse members showed the same to be Lord both of the human body and of the Holy Spirit, who would not have the merit of the charismata be in the body of the spirit, which he placed not even in the human body; who too, concerning love which is to be set before all charismata, instructed the apostle by the chief precept, which Christ also approved: You shall love the Lord with your whole heart and with all your strength and with all your soul, and your neighbour as yourself. And though this was written in the law, he recalls that the Creator would speak in other tongues and in other lips; and with this commemoration he confirms the gift of tongues, nor can he here be seen to have confirmed a strange gift by the preaching of the Creator. Likewise, in prescribing silence to women in the church, that they should not speak even for the sake of learning (for the right of prophesying he has already shown that they too have, when he imposes a veil on a woman even when prophesying), he takes from the law the authority for the subjection of the woman — which, to say it once for all, he ought not to have known except for its destruction. But that we may now withdraw from spiritual matters, the very facts ought to prove which of us rashly claims his God, and whether these things can be opposed to our side; and whether, if the Creator promised in his own Christ not yet revealed — destined, namely, for the Jews only — operations to be had in their own time, in his own Christ, and among his own people. Let Marcion, therefore, exhibit the gifts of his God: some prophets, who yet have spoken not from human sense but from the Spirit of God, who have both foretold things to come and laid bare the secrets of the heart; let him put forth some psalm, some vision, some prayer, only let it be spiritual, in ecstasy, that is, in rapture, if any interpretation of a tongue has come in; let him prove to me too that some woman among him has prophesied, of those holier women of his that he boasts of: if all these things are more readily produced by me — and surely conspiring with the rules and arrangements and disciplines of the Creator — without doubt both the Christ and the Spirit and the apostle will be my God's. He has my profession, whoever shall wish to demand it. Meanwhile the Marcionite will exhibit nothing of this kind, who already fears to pronounce whose his Christ is, not yet revealed. Just as mine is to be awaited, who has been preached from the beginning, his on that account is not, because he is not from the beginning. Better that we believe in a Christ to come than the heretic in none. How some at that time denied the resurrection of the dead must first be looked into. Surely in the same way as now too; since the resurrection of the flesh is always denied. For the soul most even of the wise, claiming it divine, promise that it is saved; and the very common folk venerate their dead with that presumption by which they trust that their souls remain. But that bodies, whether by fires at once, or by wild beasts, or even most carefully preserved, are yet abolished in time, is manifest. If, therefore, the apostle rebuts those who deny the resurrection of the flesh, surely against them he upholds what they denied, namely the resurrection of the flesh. You have the answer in compendium; the rest now out of abundance. For the very thing that it is called the resurrection of the dead requires the properties of the words to be defended. Thus a thing is not dead except what has lost the soul by whose faculty it lived. The body is what loses the soul, and by losing it becomes dead; so the term dead befits the body. Further, if the resurrection is of the dead, and the dead is nothing else than the body, the resurrection will be of the body. So too the term resurrection claims no other thing than what fell. For rising can be said even of what did not fall at all, what always lay before. But to rise again is only of what fell; for, by rising again, because it fell, it is said to rise again. For the syllable RE is always applied to repetition. We say, then, that the body falls into the earth through death, as the very fact testifies, by the law of God. For to the body it was said, You are earth, and into earth you shall go. Thus what is of earth shall go into earth. This falls, which goes into earth; this rises again, which falls. Because through a man came death, through a man too the resurrection. Here too Christ's body is shown to me in the name of man, who consists of a body, as we have often already taught. But if in Christ we are all made alive even as we are killed in Adam — since in Adam we are killed in body, so of necessity in Christ we are made alive in body. For the rest, the likeness does not hold if the making-alive in Christ does not concur in the same substance of the killing in Adam. But he interposed something further about Christ, not to be omitted on account of the present dispute. For the resurrection of the flesh will be the more proved, the more I show Christ to be of that God with whom the resurrection of the flesh is believed. When he says, For he must reign till he puts his enemies under his feet, even from this already he proclaims an avenging God, and thereupon him who promised this to Christ: Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies the footstool of your feet: the Lord shall send forth the rod of your strength out of Sion, and you shall rule in the midst of your enemies. But it is necessary that I defend, as belonging to my sense, those scriptures which the Jews too try to take away from us. They say, then, that this psalm sang of Hezekiah, because he sat at the right hand of the temple, and God turned away and consumed his enemies; and that therefore the rest too, Before the morning-star from the womb I begot you, agrees with Hezekiah and with Hezekiah's birth. We bring forth the gospels (of whose credit we ought surely already in so great a work to have confirmed these men in something), declaring the Lord by a nocturnal nativity — so that this is, before the morning-star — and rather from the star understood, and from the testimony of the angel who by night announced to the shepherds that Christ was just then born, and from the place of the birth, for it is to an inn that men gather at night. Perhaps it was mystically done that Christ should be born by night, who was to be the light of truth in the darkness of ignorance. But neither would God have said, I begot you, except to a true son. For though of the whole people he says, I have begotten sons, yet he did not add, From the womb. But why did he add, From the womb, so vainly, as though it could be doubted of any man that he was born from the womb, unless because he wished it more curiously understood concerning Christ: From the womb I begot you, that is, from the womb alone, without the seed of man, ascribing to the flesh out of the womb what is of the spirit? This too befits him here: You are a priest for ever. But Hezekiah was neither a priest, nor for ever, even had he been one. After the order, he says, of Melchizedek. What has Hezekiah to do with Melchizedek, the priest of the Most High, and that uncircumcised, who blessed Abraham already circumcised after receiving the oblation of tithes? But the order of Melchizedek will agree with Christ, since indeed Christ is the proper and lawful high priest of God, the pontiff of an uncircumcised priesthood, then established among the nations, by whom he was rather to be received — about at some time to acknowledge both circumcision and the race of Abraham, when at last he comes, and will deem them worthy of acceptance and blessing. There is also another psalm beginning thus: God, give your judgement to the king — that is, to the Christ who is to reign — and your righteousness to the king's son — that is, to the people of Christ. For his sons are they who are reborn in him. But this psalm too will be said to sing of Solomon. Yet, since the things that befit Christ alone cannot teach that the rest too pertain not to Solomon but to Christ? He came down, he says, like rain upon the fleece, and like drops distilling upon the earth — describing his placid and imperceptible descent from heaven into flesh. But Solomon, even if he came down from somewhere, yet not like rain, because not from heaven. But I will propose simpler things. He shall have dominion, he says, from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth. This is given to Christ alone; for the rest, Solomon ruled over the one and small Judaea. All kings shall adore him. Which all, except Christ? And all nations shall serve him. To which all, except Christ? Let his name be for ever. Whose name is for ever, except Christ's? Before the sun shall his name endure. For before the sun is the Word of God, that is, Christ. And in him shall all the peoples be blessed. In Solomon no nation is blessed, but in Christ every one. What now, if this psalm shows him to be God too? And they shall call him blessed; because, Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, who alone does wonders: blessed be the name of his glory, and the whole earth shall be filled with his glory. Against this, Solomon — I dare to say — lost even the glory he had in God, dragged through a woman even into idolatry. And so, since in the midst of the psalm this too is set, His enemies shall lick the dust, subjected, namely, to his feet, it will pertain to that on account of which I both brought in this psalm and defended it to my sense, that I might confirm both the glory of the kingdom and the subjection of the enemies according to the arrangement of the Creator, about to obtain it, to be believed of no other than the Creator's.

Let us return now to the resurrection, which we have indeed satisfied elsewhere too in a proper volume, resisting all heretics; but here too we are not wanting, on account of those who do not know that little work. What, he says, shall they do who are baptised for the dead, if the dead rise not? See to it, this institution. The Kalends of February, perchance, will answer to that of asking for the dead. Do not, then, straightway brand the apostle as a new author or confirmer of it, since it was the more to establish the resurrection of the flesh, in that those who were vainly baptised for the dead did this in faith of the resurrection. We have him somewhere as the definer of one baptism. Therefore to be baptised for the dead too is to be baptised for bodies; for we have shown the dead to be the body. What shall they do who are baptised for bodies, if bodies rise not? And so rightly do we fix this step, that the apostle introduced his second disputation likewise concerning the body. But some will say, How do the dead rise? and with what body do they come? For the resurrection being defended, which was denied, it was consequent to treat of the quality of the body, which was not seen. But of that it is fitting to engage with others. For Marcion, in no wise admitting the resurrection of the flesh, and promising salvation to the soul alone, makes a question not of quality but of substance. But even from these things he is most manifestly hedged in, which the apostle treats concerning the quality of the body, on account of those who say, How shall the dead rise? and with what body do they come? For he has now preached that the body shall rise, if he treated of the body's quality. In short, if he proposes examples of a grain of wheat or of any such thing, or to which God shall give a body as he will; if he says that to each of the seeds there is its own body, so that there is one flesh of men, another of cattle and birds, and bodies celestial and terrestrial, and one glory of the sun, another of the moon, another of the stars — does he not hold out a carnal and corporeal resurrection, which he commends by carnal and corporeal examples? does he not also pledge it from that God whose are the examples too? So too the resurrection, he says. How? Just as the grain is sown a body, it rises a body. He called the sowing, then, the dissolution of the body into the earth, because it is sown in corruption, in dishonour, in weakness. That same order which is in the dissolution is here too in the resurrection of the body, namely, as in the grain. For the rest, if you take away from the resurrection the body which you gave to the dissolution, where will the difference of the outcome stand? Likewise too, if it is sown an animal body, it rises a spiritual body. And if the soul or the spirit has some proper body, so that the animal body can be seen to signify the soul, and the spiritual body the spirit, not on that account does he say that the soul shall be spirit in the resurrection, but the body, which, born with the soul and living through the soul, takes the name of animal, shall be spiritual, while it rises through the spirit into eternity. In short, if not the soul but the flesh is sown in corruption, while it is dissolved into the earth, then no longer will the soul be the animal body, but the flesh which was the animal body, since out of the animal is made the spiritual, as he also says below, Not first that which is spiritual. For to this end he forestructures even concerning Christ himself: The first man Adam was made into a living soul, the last Adam into a quickening spirit; though the most foolish heretic would not have it so, for he set down Lord instead of last Adam, fearing, namely, lest, if he had Lord as the last Adam, we should defend Christ also of the same one in the last Adam whose he is in the first. But the falsehood shines out. For why first Adam, except because there is also a last Adam? They have no order between them except things equal and of the same name or substance or author. For though there can in diverse things too be one first, another last, yet of one author. For the rest, if the author too is another, even he himself can indeed be called last. Yet what he introduced is first; but last only if it be equal to the first. But it is not equal to the first, because it is not of the same author. In the same way too he is convicted in the name of man. The first man, he says, of the dust earthy, the second Lord from heaven. Why second, if not a man, which the first too is? Or is the first too Lord, if the second is? But it is enough if in the gospel he applies to Christ Son of man and man, and in man Adam he cannot deny him. The sequel too presses him. For when the apostle says, As is the earthy — man, namely — such are the earthy also — men, surely — then also, As is the heavenly — man — such are the heavenly also — men. For he could not but have set heavenly men over against earthy men, that he might the more studiously distinguish their state and hope in the fellowship of the appellation. For he calls them earthy and heavenly men in state and hope, yet on a par, who according to their outcome are reckoned either in Adam or in Christ. And therefore now, to the exhortation of heavenly hope, As we have borne, he says, the image of the earthy, let us bear also the image of the heavenly — referring it not to any substance of the resurrection, but to the discipline of the present time. For, Let us bear, he says, not, We shall bear — preceptively, not promissively — wishing that we, just as he himself walked, so should walk, and depart from the image of the earthy, that is, the old man, which is the carnal working. In short, what does he subjoin? For this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood shall not possess the kingdom of God — the works, namely, of flesh and blood, by which too, writing to the Galatians, he took away the kingdom of God; being wont elsewhere too to put the substance for the works of the substance, as when he says that those who are in the flesh cannot please God. For when shall we be able to please God, except while we are in this flesh? Of working there is, I think, no other time. But if, though placed in the flesh, we flee the works of the flesh, then we shall not be in the flesh, while we are not in the substance of the flesh, but in the fault of it. But if under the name of flesh we are bidden to lay aside the works, not the substance, of the flesh, then to the works of the flesh, not to the substance of the flesh, under the name of flesh, is the kingdom of God denied. For that is not condemned in which evil is done, but that which is done. To give poison is a crime, yet the cup in which it is given is not guilty. So too the body is the vessel of carnal works, but the soul is what, being in it, tempers the poison of some evil deed. But what manner of thing is it that, if the soul, the authoress of the works of the flesh, shall earn the kingdom of God through the expiation of those things which it committed in the body, the body — a mere minister — should remain in damnation? Shall the cup be punished, the poisoner being absolved? And yet we do not at all defend the kingdom of God for the flesh, but the resurrection of its own substance, as the door of the kingdom, by which entrance is made. For the rest, the resurrection is one thing, the kingdom another. For first the resurrection, then the kingdom. We say, then, that the flesh rises, but, changed, obtains the kingdom. For the dead shall rise incorrupt — those, namely, who had been corrupt, their bodies fallen into dissolution. And we shall be changed, in a moment, in the momentary motion of an eye. For this corruptible — holding, surely, his own flesh, the apostle was saying — must put on incorruption, and this mortal immortality, that the substance, namely, may be made fit for the kingdom of God. For we shall be as the angels. This will be the transformation of the flesh, but of the flesh raised up. Or if there shall be none, how shall it put on incorruption and immortality? Made another, then, through transformation, it shall then obtain the kingdom of God — no longer flesh nor blood, but what God shall have given to it for a body. And therefore rightly the apostle: Flesh and blood shall not obtain the kingdom of God — ascribing it to the transformation which comes after the resurrection. But if then shall come to pass the word that is written with the Creator, Where, death, is your victory or your contention? Where, death, is your sting? (and this word is the Creator's through the prophet), his too will be the thing — that is, the kingdom — whose word shall come to pass in the kingdom. Nor does he give thanks to another God, in that he received for us, surely, victory over death and triumph.

ON THE SECOND EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS. If the word God has become common through the fault of human error, in that many are called and believed gods in the world, yet the blessed God of our Lord Jesus Christ will be understood as no other than the Creator, who both blessed the universe (you have Genesis) and is blessed by the universe (you have Daniel). Likewise, if a father can be called the father of no God more than of the Creator, yet the Father of mercies will be the same who has been called merciful and compassionate and most rich in mercy. You have in Jonah the very example of mercy, which he furnished to the Ninevites entreating him; easy to be bent too by Hezekiah's weeping, and by Ahab, the husband of Jezebel, beseeching that the blood of Naboth be forgiven, and by David acknowledging his sin to indulge at once — preferring, namely, the repentance of the sinner to his death, out of the affection of mercy. If the God of Marcion has produced or pronounced anything of the kind, I will acknowledge the Father of mercies. But if from the time he was revealed he ascribes this title to him, as though from then he were the Father of mercies, from when he set about to free mankind — but we too from that time deny him, from which he is said to be revealed. He cannot, then, ascribe anything to him whom he then shows when he ascribes anything to him. For if he were first established to be, then something could be ascribed to him too. For what is ascribed is an accident, but accidents are preceded by the showing of the very thing to which they happen — especially when what is ascribed to him who has not first been shown is already another's. He will the more be denied to be, the more that by which he is affirmed to be is of him who has already been shown. So too the new testament will be of no other than him who promised it; and if not the letter, yet his spirit; this will be the newness. In short, he who had cut the letter on tablets of stone, the same had also pronounced concerning the spirit, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh. And if the letter kills, but the spirit makes alive, both are his who says, I will kill and I will make alive, I will smite and I will heal. We have of old claimed the twofold power of the Creator, both of judge and of good: of the letter killing through the law, and of the spirit making alive through the gospel. Things which, though diverse, were first reviewed with one — these cannot make two gods. He commemorates too of the veil of Moses, by which he covered his face, incontemplable to the sons of Israel. If for this reason, that he might defend the greater splendour of the new testament, which abides in glory, than of the old, which had to be made void, this too suits my faith, which prefers the gospel to the law; and see whether it suits mine the more. For there will be a setting of something over a thing where there was also that over which it is set. But when he says, But the senses of the world were blunted — surely not of the Creator, but of the people, who is in the world. For of Israel he says, To this day that same veil is upon their heart. He shows that the veil of the face in Moses was a figure of the veil of the heart in the people, because not even now is Moses perceived among them by the heart, just as not then by the face. What is it, then, that is still veiled in Moses which pertains to Paul, if the Creator's Christ preached by Moses has not yet come? how are the hearts of the Jews still noted as covered and veiled, the preachings of Moses concerning Christ — in whom they ought to understand him — not yet exhibited? What has it to do with an apostle of another Christ, that the Jews did not understand the sacraments of their own God — except because the veil of their heart pertained to the blindness by which they had not perceived the Christ of Moses? In short, what follows, But when it shall be turned to God, the veil shall be taken away, this he says properly of the Jew, with whom is the veil of Moses, who, when he shall have passed into the faith of Christ, understands that Moses preached of Christ. But how shall the veil of the Creator be taken away in the Christ of another God, whose sacraments the Creator could not have veiled — unknown things, namely, of one unknown? He says, then, that we now, with open face — namely of the heart, which is veiled in the Jews — beholding Christ, are transfigured into the same image from glory, by which, namely, Moses too was transfigured from the glory of the Lord, into glory. Thus, setting forth the bodily illumination of Moses from his meeting with the Lord, and the bodily veil from the weakness of the people, and superinducing the spiritual revelation and spiritual splendour in Christ — as from the Lord, he says, of the spirits — he testifies that the whole order of Moses was a figure of a Christ ignored among the Jews, but acknowledged among us. We know that certain senses can suffer ambiguity from the sound of the pronunciation or the mode of the punctuation, when a doubleness of these intervenes. This Marcion seized, reading thus: In whom the God of this age — so as, by showing the Creator the God of this age, to suggest another God of another age. We, on the contrary, say it must be punctuated thus: In whom God, then: has blinded the minds of the unbelievers of this age; In whom, that is, in the unbelieving Jews, in whom the gospel was covered to some still under the veil of Moses. For God had threatened them — loving him with their lips, but in heart standing far off from him: With the ear you shall hear and not hear, with the eyes you shall see and not see; and, Unless you believe, neither shall you understand; and, I will take away the wisdom of the wise and make void the prudence of the prudent. But these things he was not threatening about hiding the gospel of an unknown God. So, even if he is the God of this age, yet of the unbelievers of this age he blinds the heart, because they did not of their own accord recognise his Christ, to be understood from the scriptures. And having treated thus far what is set in the ambiguity of punctuation, lest it profit the adversary — content with my victory, I can even pass over this whole contention altogether. For a simpler answer will be at hand: to interpret the lord of this age as the devil, who said, as the prophet reports, I will be like the Most High, I will set my throne in the clouds — as indeed the whole superstition of this age is enslaved to him who blinds the hearts of the unbelievers, and chiefly of the apostate Marcion. In short, he did not see the close of the sense meeting him: For God, who said out of darkness let light shine, has shone in our hearts, unto the illumination of the knowledge of himself in the person of Christ. Who said, Let there be light? And of the illumination of the world, who said to Christ, I have set you for a light of the nations — of those sitting, namely, in darkness and in the shadow of death? To whom the Spirit answers in the psalm, out of foresight of the future. The light of your countenance, he says, is signed upon us, Lord. But the countenance of God is Christ the Lord. Whence also the apostle above, Who is, he says, the image of God. Therefore, if Christ is the person of the Creator who says, Let there be light, then both Christ and the apostles and the gospel and the veil and Moses and the whole series, according to the testimony of the close, are of the Creator, the God of this age — certainly not of him who never said, Let there be light. I pass over here too about another epistle, which we have inscribed To the Ephesians, but the heretics To the Laodiceans. For he says that the nations should remember that at that time, when they were without Christ, aliens from Israel, without converse and testaments and the hope of promise, they were even without God — surely in the world, even if of the Creator. Therefore, if he said the nations were without God, but their God is the devil, not the Creator, it appears that by the lord of this age must be understood him whom the nations received in place of God, not the Creator, whom they do not know. But what manner of thing is it that the treasure should not be held to be of the same one whose are also the vessels in which it is — in our earthen vessels? For if it is the glory of God that so great a treasure should be held in earthen vessels, and the earthen vessels are the Creator's, then both the glory is the Creator's, whose vessels savour of the eminence of the power of God, and the very power; because for this reason it was committed into earthen vessels, that its eminence might be proved. For the rest, it will no longer be the glory of another God, and therefore not even his power, but rather a disgrace and weakness, whose eminence earthen and indeed alien vessels have received. But if these are the earthen vessels in which he says we suffer so much, in which too we carry about the mortification of God, the God is ungrateful and unjust enough, if he is not also to raise up this substance in which, for his faith, so much is endured, in which too the death of Christ is carried about, in which too the eminence of power is consecrated. For he proposes, That the life of Christ too may be made manifest in our body — namely, as his death too is carried about in the body. Of what life of Christ, then, does he speak? that by which we now live in him? And how in the sequel does he exhort, not to things visible nor temporal, but to things invisible and eternal — that is, not to things present, but to things future? But if he speaks of the future life of Christ, saying that it will appear in the body, he plainly preached the resurrection of the flesh — saying indeed that our outward man is corrupted, and not as though by eternal destruction after death, but by labours and discomforts, of which he sent before, adding, And we shall not fail. For in saying too that our inward man is renewed from day to day, here he shows both: both the corruption of the body from the vexation of temptations, and the renewal of the mind from the contemplation of the promises.

Of our earthly dwelling-place he does not say that we have a house eternal, not made with hands, in heaven, because what is made with hands of the Creator perishes wholly, dissolved after death. For, treating of these things to console the fear of death and the sadness of dissolution itself, he makes it more manifest too through the sequel, when he subjoins that we groan over this tabernacle of the earthly body, desiring to be clothed upon with that which is from heaven; since even, when despoiled, we shall not be found naked — that is, we shall receive what we were despoiled of, that is, the body. And again: For we who are in this tabernacle of the body groan, in that we are burdened, not wishing to be unclothed, but to be clothed upon. For here he expressed what in the first epistle he touched: And the dead shall rise incorrupt — those who have already died — and we shall be changed — we who shall be found by God in the flesh. For those too shall rise incorrupt, the body, namely, being recovered, and that entire, so that from this they may be incorrupt; and these, on account of the now last moment of time, and on account of the merits of the vexations of antichrist, by an abridgement of death, but changed, shall obtain rather to be clothed upon by that which is from heaven than to put off the body. So, if these put on over their body that heavenly thing, then surely the dead too shall receive a body over which they too may put on incorruption from heaven; because of them too he says, This corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal immortality. They put on, when they shall have received a body; these put on over, because they have not lost the body; and therefore not rashly did he say, not wishing to be unclothed of the body, but to be clothed upon — that is, not wishing to experience death, but to be anticipated by life, that this mortal may be swallowed up by life, while it is snatched from death through the over-garment of transformation. Therefore, because he shows this to be better, that we be not saddened by the anticipation of death, if it perchance come, he says too that we have from God an earnest of the Spirit, as though pledged unto the same hope of the over-garment; and that we are absent from the Lord so long as we are in the flesh, and on this account ought to count it good to be rather absent from the body and present with the Lord, that we may even gladly accept death. And so he says that we must all be manifested before the tribunal of Christ, that each may receive the things he did through the body, whether good or evil. For if then is the retribution of merits, how can some already be reckoned with God? And by naming a tribunal, and the reckoning of good and evil work, he shows the judge of either sentence, and confirmed the representation of all bodies. For what was committed in the body cannot but be judged in the body. For God is unjust, if a man is not punished or aided through that by which he wrought. If, then, there is any new condition in Christ, the old things have passed, behold all things are made new — the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled. If too he bids us cleanse ourselves from the defilement of flesh and blood, the substance does not receive the kingdom of God; if he destines too the church a holy virgin to be assigned to Christ — surely as a bride to a bridegroom — the image cannot be joined to one hostile to the truth of the thing itself. If he calls the false apostles deceitful workers, transfigurers of themselves, by hypocrisy, namely, of conduct, not of adulterated preaching, he taxes them. So fully was the difference about discipline, not about divinity. If Satan is transfigured into an angel of light, this cannot be directed against the Creator. For the Creator is God, not an angel; he would have been said to transfigure himself into a God of light, not into an angel, had he not signified that Satan whom both we and Marcion know to be an angel. Of paradise his pen is its own to every question it suffers. Here perhaps I shall wonder, if God could have a paradise of his own who has no terrestrial arrangement — unless he used the Creator's paradise too on sufferance, as he did the world. And yet to take up a man into heaven is the Creator's example, in Elijah. But I shall rather wonder that the Lord supremely good — to whom smiting and raging are alien — should have applied to his apostle, to buffet him, an angel of Satan, not even his own at least, but the Creator's, and, when besought thrice, should not have granted it. The God of Marcion, then, also corrects, emulating the Creator who casts down the proud — putting down, namely, the mighty from their throne. Or is he himself perchance the one who also gave Satan power over the body of Job, that virtue might be approved in weakness? Why too does the chastiser of the Galatians still hold the form of the law, prefixing that every word should stand by three witnesses? Why does he threaten that he will not spare sinners, the preacher of a most gentle God? Nay, he affirms that the very power of acting more harshly in their presence was given him by the Lord. Deny now, heretic, that your God is to be feared, whose apostle was feared!

ON THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. When the work is being driven to a close, the things which recur must now be reviewed briefly, but some passed over which have recurred more often. It irks me to engage still about the law, who have so often proved that its concession furnishes no argument of a different God in Christ — being, namely, both preached and promised unto Christ with the Creator — inasmuch as this epistle too seems for the most part to exclude the law. But that God too is carried about by the apostle as judge we have often already shown, and in the judge an avenger, and the Creator in the avenger. So here too, when he says, For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believes, to Jew and Greek, because the righteousness of God is revealed in it from faith to faith — without doubt he reckons both gospel and salvation to a just God, not to a good one, so to speak, according to the heretic's distinction — transferring from the faith of the law to the faith of the gospel, of his own law surely and his own gospel. Since too he says that wrath is revealed from heaven upon the impiety and injustice of men, who hold the truth in injustice. Of what God's wrath? Surely the Creator's. Therefore his truth too will be whose is also the wrath, which is to be revealed in vengeance for the truth. Adding too, But we know that the judgement of God is according to truth, he both proved the wrath itself, from which comes judgement for truth, and again confirmed the truth of the same God whose wrath he proved by proving the judgement. It is another matter, if the Creator, angry, avenges the truth of another God held in injustice. But how great pits Marcion has made in this epistle especially, by taking away what he would, will appear from the integrity of our instrument. It is enough for me to take as negligences and blindnesses of his those things which he likewise did not see to be erased. For if God shall judge the secrets of men, both of those who sinned in the law and of those without law — because these too do not know the law, and by nature do the things of the law — surely that God shall judge whose are both the law and nature itself, which is, as it were, a law to those ignorant of the law. But how shall he judge? According to the gospel, he says, through Christ. Therefore both the gospel and Christ are his whose are also the law and nature, which shall be vindicated through the gospel and Christ — by that judgement of God, surely, which above too was according to truth. Therefore, since the wrath which is to be revealed from heaven for the defence of that truth is of none but the God of wrath, so too here this sense, cohering with the former, in which the judgement of the Creator is proclaimed, cannot be referred to another God, who neither judges nor is angry, but to him whose, while these are — I mean the judgement and the wrath — these too of necessity are: the gospel and Christ, through whom these have to be transacted. And therefore he inveighs against transgressors of the law — teaching not to steal, and stealing — as a man of the law of God, not as touching the Creator himself in these ways, who, even while forbidding to steal, commanded a fraud upon the Egyptians of gold and silver — just as they twist the rest too against him. Forsooth the apostle feared to make plain a reproach to the God from whom he did not fear to have departed! And so much had he assailed the Jews, that he heaped up the prophetic rebuke: On your account the name of God is blasphemed. How perverse, then, that he himself should blaspheme him for whose sake of being blasphemed he upbraids the wicked! He prefers too the circumcision of the heart to uncircumcision; with the God of the law was made the circumcision of the heart, not of the flesh, in spirit, not in letter. But if this is the circumcision of Jeremiah, And circumcise the foreskins of your heart, as Moses too said, Circumcise your hardness of heart — then his will be the spirit circumcising the heart whose is also the letter reaping its flesh, and his the Jew who is in secret whose too is the Jew in the open, because the apostle would not even name a Jew who was not the servant of the God of the Jews. Then the law, now the righteousness of God through the faith of Christ. What is this distinction? Did your God serve the arrangement of the Creator, giving him his time and his law? or is his now whose it then was? His is the law whose too is the faith of Christ; it is a distinction of arrangements, not of gods. He admonishes those justified by the faith of Christ, not by the law, to have peace toward God. Toward what God? Of whom we were nowhere enemies, or against whose law and nature we rebelled? For if peace is fitting with him with whom there was war, by him too we shall be justified, and his will be Christ, by whose faith we shall be justified, to whose peace it is fitting that his enemies should at some time be reduced. But the law, he says, entered in, that sin might abound. Why? That grace might superabound, he says. Of what God the grace, if not whose too is the law? Unless the Creator on this account intercalated the law, to procure the business of the grace of another God — and that a rival, not to say an unknown one — that, as with him sin had reigned unto death, so too grace might reign in righteousness unto life through Jesus Christ, his adversary. For this the law of the Creator had concluded all under sin, and had brought the whole world into guilt, and stopped every mouth, that none should glory through it, so that grace might be reserved unto the glory of Christ — not the Creator's, but Marcion's. I can here too forestructure concerning the substance of Christ, from the prospect of the following question. For he says, We are dead to the law. Therefore the body of Christ can even be contended to be a body, not at once flesh. But also, of whatever substance it be, when he names the body of him whom he subjoins to have risen from the dead, no other body can be understood than of flesh, against which the law of death was pronounced. But behold he both bears witness to the law and excuses it from the cause of sin. What then shall we say? Is the law sin? God forbid. Blush, Marcion. God forbid. The apostle abominates the accusation of the law. But I do not know sin except through the law. O highest proclamation hence of the law, through which it was made plain that sin lay hidden! Not, then, did the law seduce, but sin through the occasion of the precept. Why do you impute to the God of the law what the apostle does not dare to impute to his law? Nay, he heaps up: The law is holy, and its precept just and good. If he so venerates the law of the Creator, how he destroys the Creator himself I do not know. Who distinguishes two gods, one just, another good, when he ought to be believed both whose precept is both good and just? But if he also confirms the law to be spiritual, surely it is prophetic too, surely figurative too. For I ought even from this to constitute Christ figuratively preached in the law, in such a way that he could not be acknowledged by all the Jews.

If the Father sent him in the likeness of sinful flesh, not on that account shall the flesh which appeared in him be called a phantasm. For he ascribed sin above to the flesh, and made it the law of sin dwelling in his members and warring against the law of the mind. For this reason, then, the Son was sent in the likeness of sinful flesh, that he might redeem the flesh of sin by a like substance — that is, a fleshly one, which was like to the sinning flesh, while not itself sinning. For this too will be the power of God: in a like substance to perfect salvation. For it is no great thing if the Spirit of God should heal the flesh; but if flesh like to the sinning flesh, while it is flesh, but not of sin. Thus the likeness will pertain to the title of sin, not to a falsehood of substance. For he would not have added Of sin, if he wished a likeness of substance to be understood, so as to deny the truth; for he would have set down only Of flesh, not also Of sin. But when he so framed it, Of sinful flesh, he both confirmed the substance, that is, flesh, and referred the likeness to the vice of the substance, that is, to sin. Suppose now the likeness were said of substance — not on that account will the truth of substance be denied. Why, then, true, though like? Because true indeed, but not from seed, of a like state, but true of a reckoning not like, yet not unlike. For the rest, there is no likeness in contraries. Spirit would not be called the likeness of flesh, because flesh too would not take on a likeness of spirit; but it would be called a phantasm, if what was not appeared. But it is called a likeness when there is what appears. For it is, while it is the equal of another. But a phantasm, in that it only seems, is not a likeness. And here too, expounding how he would not have us be in the flesh, though we are in the flesh — that is, that we should not be in the works of the flesh — he shows that on this reasoning he wrote, Flesh and blood cannot obtain the kingdom of God: not condemning the substance, but its works; which, because they can not be admitted by us, though still placed in the flesh, will pertain not to the guilt of the substance, but of the conduct. Likewise, if the body indeed is dead because of sin — so that it is the death not of the soul but of the body — but the spirit is life because of righteousness, to which death came because of sin, that is, to the body. For nothing is restored except to him who lost it; and so there will be a resurrection of the dead, since it is of bodies. For he subjoins: He who raised Christ from the dead shall make alive your mortal bodies too. So fully did he both confirm the resurrection of the flesh — without which neither can a thing be called body nor anything else understood as mortal — and prove the bodily substance of Christ; since our mortal bodies too shall likewise be made alive, just as he too was raised up — not otherwise, namely, than because in the body. Here too I leap over a most ample chasm of intercepted scripture, but I lay hold of the apostle bearing witness to Israel that they have a zeal of God — their own, surely — yet not according to knowledge. For, being ignorant of God, he says, and seeking to set up their own righteousness, that is, of their own law, they did not submit themselves to the righteousness of God; for Christ is the end of the law unto righteousness to everyone that believes. Here will be the heretic's argument: that the Jews were ignorant of the superior God, against whom they set up their own righteousness, that is, of their own law, not receiving Christ, the end of the law. Why then does he bear witness of their zeal toward their own God, if he does not also upbraid them with ignorance toward the same God? — that they were indeed driven by zeal of God, but not according to knowledge, being ignorant of him, namely, while they are ignorant of his arrangements in Christ, the consummation that was to stand for the law, and so maintain their own righteousness against him. And so the Creator himself too attests their ignorance toward himself: Israel has not known me, and my people has not understood me; and that they would rather set up their own righteousness, teaching doctrines the precepts of men, and were also gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ — out of ignorance, namely. Nothing, therefore, can be expounded as of another God which befits the Creator, because otherwise the apostle would undeservedly have branded the Jews with ignorance toward an unknown God. For wherein had they sinned, if they set up the righteousness of their own God against him whom they were ignorant of? But behold he exclaims: O the depth of the riches and wisdom of God, and his ways past tracing out! Whence that outburst? Out of the remembrance, namely, of the scriptures which he had unrolled before, out of the contemplation of the sacraments which he had above expounded, of the faith of Christ coming out of the law. If Marcion erased these of set purpose, why does his apostle exclaim, beholding no riches of a God so poor and beggarly as one who founded nothing, preached nothing, lastly possessed nothing, as one who descends into another's property? But the wealth and riches of the Creator, once hidden, are now unlocked. For so he had promised: And I will give them hidden treasures, I will open the invisible to them. Thence, then, it was exclaimed: O the depth of the riches and wisdom of God! whose treasures now lay open. This is Isaiah's, and the sequel too is from the instrument of the same prophet: For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who was his counsellor? who has first given to him, and it shall be recompensed to him? You who took away so much from the scriptures, why did you keep these things, as though they too were not the Creator's? Plainly, let us see the precepts of the new God. Hating, he says, evil, and cleaving to good. Is it another thing with the Creator, Take away evil from you, and Turn away from evil and do good? Affectioned to one another in brotherly love; for it is not the very same as, You shall love your neighbour as yourself. Rejoicing in hope — of God, surely. For it is good to hope in the Lord rather than to hope in magistrates. Enduring tribulation. For the Lord shall hear you in the day of tribulation. You have the psalm. Bless, and curse not. Who shall teach this but he who founded all things with blessings? Not minded on high things, but consenting to the lowly; be not wise in your own eyes. For they hear Woe through Isaiah. Render to no one evil for evil. And, Remember not the malice of your brother. Nor avenging yourselves. For vengeance is mine, and I will repay, says the Lord. Have peace with all men. Therefore the legal retaliation too did not permit the recompensing of injury, but checked its inception through fear of recompense. With reason, then, he concluded the whole discipline of the Creator in his chief precept, You shall love your neighbour as yourself. If this supplement of the law is from the law itself, what God is the God of the law I now do not know. I fear it is the God of Marcion. But if the gospel of Christ is fulfilled by this precept, and it is Christ's, not the Creator's, by which now we contend — did Christ say or not, I came not to dissolve the law, but to fulfil it? In vain did Pontus labour to deny that sentence. If the gospel did not fulfil the law, behold the law fulfilled the gospel. But well that in the close too he threatens the tribunal of Christ — surely of the judge and avenger, surely of the Creator — establishing him certainly as one to be propitiated whom he holds out as to be feared, even if he were preaching another.

ON THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE THESSALONIANS. It will not weary me to attend to the shorter epistles too. There is savour even in few things. The Jews had killed their own prophets. I can say, What has this to do with an apostle of another and indeed a supremely good God, who is said not even to condemn the offences of his own, and who too, by destroying those same prophets, in a manner slays them himself? For what evil did Israel commit with him, if it killed those whom he too reprobated, if he first pronounced a hostile sentence against them? But it sinned with their own God. He upbraided the iniquity to whom the injured one belongs; surely it is anyone rather than the adversary of the injured. But neither would he have loaded them by imputing the slaying of the Lord too, who both killed the Lord, by saying, and their own prophets — though Their own is the heretic's addition. For what so bitter, if they slew Christ the preacher of another God, who butchered the prophets of their own God? But the standing of the heightening is, that they had slain both the Lord and his servants. In short, if they slew the Christ of one God, the prophets of another, he equalled the impieties, he did not heighten them. But they were not to be equalled; therefore they could not be heightened, except the offences out of either title were committed against the same Lord. Therefore of the same God are both the Christ and the prophets. But what holiness he calls the will of God you would recognise from the contraries which he forbids. For he says, To abstain from fornication, not from marriage; that each should know how to treat his own vessel in honour. How? while not in lust, as the nations. But lust is not, even among the nations, ascribed to marriage, but to extraordinary and unnatural and monstrous things. The law of nature is contrary to luxury, and to baseness too and uncleanness, which excludes not marriage but lust, which would treat our vessel in the honour of marriage. But this passage I have treated with the precedence reserved for the other — that is, the fuller — holiness, preferring continence and virginity to marriage, but not to forbidden marriages. For I rebut the destroyers of the God of marriage, not the followers of chastity. He says that those who remain unto the coming of Christ, together with those who are dead in Christ, who shall first rise, shall be caught up in the clouds into the air, to meet the Lord. I recognise the heavenly substances themselves — even Jerusalem which is above — marvelling at these things already then foreseen, and announcing through Isaiah, Who are these that fly hither like clouds, and like doves with their young to me? If Christ has prepared this ascent for us, that will be the Christ of whom Amos says: Who builds his ascent into the heavens — surely for himself and his own. Thereafter from whom shall I now hope, except from him from whom I heard these things? Whose Spirit does he forbid to be quenched, and what prophecies does he forbid to be held as nothing? Surely not the Creator's Spirit, nor the Creator's prophecies, according to Marcion. For what he destroys, he has already quenched and made nothing, nor can he forbid that which he made nothing. Therefore it lies upon Marcion to exhibit today in his church the Spirit of his God, thenceforth, which is not to be quenched, and prophecies which are not to be held as nothing. And if he has exhibited what he thinks, let him know that we shall challenge whatever it be to the form of spiritual and prophetic grace and power, that it should both foretell things to come and reveal the secrets of the heart and expound mysteries. When he shall have produced and proved nothing of the kind, we shall produce both the Spirit and the prophecies of the Creator, foretelling according to himself. And so it will be established of whom the apostle spoke — namely, of those things which were to be in the church of that God who, while he is, his Spirit too works, and his promise is celebrated. Come now, you who deny the salvation of the flesh, and, whenever the body is named in such a context, interpret it as some other thing I know not what than the substance of the flesh — how did the apostle distinguish all in their new substances by definite names, and set all in the one matter of salvation, wishing that our spirit and body and soul be preserved without complaint at the coming of our Saviour Christ? For he set down both soul and body, as two things, so as two distinct ones. For though the soul too has a body of its own quality, as the spirit also, yet since both body and soul are distinctly named, the soul has its own proper term, not needing the common term of body; that is left to the flesh, which, not named by its own, must of necessity use the common one. For I see no other substance in man, after spirit and soul, to which the term body may be accommodated, except the flesh — understanding this so often under the name of body, as often as it is not named; much more here, since what is called body is named by its own name.

ON THE SECOND EPISTLE TO THE THESSALONIANS. We are compelled to repeat certain things again and again, that we may confirm by them what coheres. We say that here too the Lord, the recompenser of either merit, is carried about by the apostle — either the Creator, or, what Marcion would not have, the equal of the Creator — with whom it is just that to our afflicters affliction should be repaid, and to us, who are afflicted, rest, in the revelation of the Lord Jesus coming from heaven with the angels of his power and in a flame of fire. But the flame and fire which I defend the heretic has quenched, lest, namely, he should make the God ours. Yet the vanity of the erasure shines out. For when the apostle writes that the Lord will come to vengeance, to be exacted of those who know not God and who obey not the gospel — whom he says shall pay a penalty of destruction, eternal, from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might — it follows that he introduces a flame of fire, namely, coming to punish. So here too, though Marcion be unwilling, Christ is of the burning God, and in that other it is the Creator's, that he avenges himself even on those who know not the Lord, that is, on the heathen. For he set apart, Those who obey not the gospel — whether Christian sinners or Jews. Further, to exact penalties of the heathen, who perchance do not know the gospel, is not the part of that God who is naturally unknown, and is nowhere revealed except in the gospel, not knowable to all. But to the Creator even a natural acknowledgement is owed, by understanding from his works and thence seeking unto fuller knowledge. His, therefore, it is to strike even those ignorant of God, whom it is not lawful to be ignorant of. The very thing he says, From the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might, using the words of Isaiah, savours from the very cause of the same Lord rising up to shatter the earth. But who is the man of sin, the son of perdition, who must first be revealed before the Lord's coming, exalting himself above all that is called God and above all religion, about to sit in the temple of God and to boast himself God? According to us, indeed, antichrist, as the old and new prophecies teach, as John the apostle, who says that already the antichrists have gone forth into the world, forerunners of the spirit of antichrist, denying that Christ has come in the flesh, and dissolving Jesus — namely, in God the Creator: but according to Marcion, I do not know whether he be the Christ of the Creator. He has not yet come, with him. But whichever of the two he is, I ask why he comes in all power and signs and lying wonders? Therefore, he says, because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved; and for this there shall be sent them a working of deceit, that all may be judged who believed not the truth, but consented to iniquity. Therefore, if it is antichrist — and according to the Creator — then the Creator will be God who sends him to thrust into error those who believed not the truth that they might be saved; his too will be the truth and salvation who avenges them by the suggestion of error — that is, the Creator's, to whom the very zeal belongs of deceiving by error those whom he did not take by truth. But if it is not antichrist, according to us, then it is the Christ of the Creator, according to Marcion. And what manner of thing will it be that, to avenge his own truth, he should send the Christ of the Creator? But if he agrees too about antichrist, I shall likewise say: What manner of thing is it that Satan, an angel of the Creator, should be necessary to him, and be slain by him, having to discharge the working of deceit for the Creator? In sum, if it is beyond doubt that the angel and the truth and the salvation are his whose are also the wrath and the emulation and the sending of deceits against the despisers and deserters, even against the ignorant (so that now Marcion too may come down a step, conceding his God too to be a zealous one) — who shall more worthily be angry? I think, he who from the beginning of things prepared nature by works, benefits, plagues, preachings, witnesses, unto the acknowledgement of himself, and yet was not acknowledged; or he who once, by the single instrument of the gospel — and that uncertain, surely not openly preaching another God — was brought forth? So, to whom vengeance befits, to him will befit the material of vengeance — I mean the gospel, and the truth and salvation. But that he should bid him work who would eat, is the discipline of him who ordered a free mouth for the ox treading out the corn.

ON THE EPISTLE TO THE LAODICEANS. By the truth of the church, we hold this epistle sent to the Ephesians, not to the Laodiceans; but Marcion at some time desired to interpolate its title, as though he too were a most diligent investigator in this matter. But nothing turns on the titles, since the apostle wrote to all when he wrote to some — yet certainly preaching in Christ that God to whom belong the things that are preached. To whom, then, will they belong, according to the good pleasure which he set forth in the sacrament of his will, unto a dispensation of the fulfilment of the times (so to speak, as that word sounds in the Greek) to recapitulate — that is, to bring back to the beginning, or to review from the beginning — all things in Christ which are in the heavens and which are on earth — except him whose are all things from the beginning, even the very beginning, from which are both the times and the dispensation of the fulfilment of the times, on account of which all things are reviewed unto the beginning in Christ? But of another God what is the beginning — that is, the whence — whose work is none? what times without a beginning? what fulfilment without times? what dispensation without fulfilment? In short, what did he do on earth already of old, that any long dispensation of the times to be fulfilled should be reckoned, unto the reviewing of all things in Christ, even of those which are in the heavens? Nor shall we suppose that the things in the heavens, whatever they are, were wrought by another than by him by whom it is established that the things on earth too were wrought, by all consent. But if it cannot be that all these things are reckoned of another God from the beginning than the Creator, who will believe that they are reviewed by another unto another Christ, and not by their own author and unto his own Christ? If they are the Creator's, of necessity they must be diverse, since of a diverse God; if diverse, surely contrary. How then are contraries reviewed unto him by whom in the end they are destroyed? For also, what Christ do the following words announce, when he says, That we should be unto the praise of his glory, who first hoped in Christ? For who could have first hoped, that is, hoped before he came, in God, except the Jews, to whom Christ was foretold from the beginning? He, then, who was foretold was also first hoped in. And so this he refers to himself, that is, to the Jews, that he may make a distinction, turning to the nations: In whom you too, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel, in whom you believed and were sealed with the holy Spirit of his promise. Of what promise? made through Joel: In the last days I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh — that is, upon the nations too. So both the Spirit and the gospel will be in that Christ who was first hoped in, while he was being preached. But the Father of glory too is he whose Christ is sung the King of glory in the psalm, ascending: Who is this King of glory? the Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory. From him is the Spirit of wisdom desired, with whom this species too of spiritual things is enumerated among the seven spirits through Isaiah. He will give the enlightened eyes of the heart who enriched the outward eyes too with light, who is displeased with the blindness of the people. And who is blind but my children? you are blinded, the servants of God. With him too are the riches of the inheritance in the saints, who promised that inheritance out of the calling of the nations. Ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance. He wrought in Christ his might, by raising him from the dead, and placing him at his right hand, and subjecting all things — who also said, Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies the footstool of your feet; because also elsewhere the Spirit says to the Father concerning the Son, You have subjected all things under his feet. If from these things another God and another Christ are inferred, which are recognised in the Creator, let us now seek the Creator. Plainly, I think, we find him, when he says that those were dead in the offences in which they had walked, according to the age of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, who works in the sons of unbelief. But the world here too Marcion cannot interpret as the God of the world. For the made is not like the maker, the thing fashioned like the fashioner, the world like God. Nor will he be called the prince of the power of the air who is the prince of the power of the ages. For never is the president of the higher noted from the lower, though the lower too are reckoned to him. Nor can he be seen as the worker of unbelief, which he himself rather suffers both from the Jews and from the nations. It is enough, then, if these things do not fall upon the Creator. But if there is also one to whom they better befit, surely the apostle knew this the better. Who is he? Without doubt that one who obstructs against the Creator himself the sons of unbelief, having gained possession of this air, as the prophet reports him saying: I will set my throne in the clouds; I will be like the Most High. This will be the devil, whom elsewhere too (if indeed they will so have the apostle read) we shall acknowledge as the god of this age. For thus he has filled the whole world with the lie of his divinity. And plainly, if he had not been, then these things might have looked toward the Creator. But the apostle too had walked in Judaism. Not because he interposed about offences, in which we too all walked, is the Creator on that account to be understood the lord of offences and prince of this air; but because in Judaism he had been one of the sons of unbelief, having the devil as his worker, when he persecuted the church and Christ of the Creator — on which account too, We were, he says, children of wrath, but by nature. Lest, because the Creator called the Jews sons, the heretic argue from this that the Creator is the lord of wrath. For when he says, We were by nature children of wrath, but the Jews are not by nature the sons of the Creator, but by the election of the fathers, he referred the children of wrath to nature, not to the Creator — to sum it up, subjoining, As also the rest, who surely are not the sons of God. It appears that to the common nature of all men are reckoned both offences and the concupiscences of the flesh and unbelief and wrath, the devil nevertheless seizing upon nature, which he too has already infected by the seed of sin brought in. We are, he says, his workmanship, created in Christ. It is one thing to make, another to create; but he gave both to one. Now man is the workmanship of the Creator. The same, then, created in Christ who also made. For as far as concerns substance, he made; as far as concerns grace, he created. Look at the cohering words too. Remember that you were once nations in the flesh, who were called uncircumcision by that which is called circumcision in the flesh, made by hand; that you were at that time without Christ, alienated from the converse of Israel and strangers to their testaments and promise, having no hope, and without God in the world. But without what God were the nations, and without what Christ? Surely him whose was the converse of Israel and the testaments and the promise. But now, he says, in Christ you who were far off are made near in his blood. From whom were they formerly far off? From those whom he names above: from the Christ of the Creator, from the converse of Israel, from the testaments, from the hope of the promise, from God himself. If these things are so, then the nations are now made near in Christ to those from whom they were then far off. But if to the converse of Israel, which is in the religion of God the Creator, and to the testaments — from God himself. If these things are so, then they are now made near, by calling, to those called from afar. They who were far from me have drawn near to my righteousness. For both the righteousness and the peace of the Creator were announced in Christ, as we have often already shown. And so, He himself, he says, is our peace, who made the two one — the Jewish people, namely, and the Gentile. The near and the far, the middle wall of enmity being dissolved, in his flesh. But Marcion took away His, that he might give the enmity to the flesh, as though to a carnal vice, not to a flesh hostile to Christ. Thus, as I said elsewhere, here too, not Marrucinian but Pontic, whose blood you confessed above, here you deny the flesh. If he made void the law of precepts by decrees — surely by fulfilling the law (for now there is no force in, You shall not commit adultery, when it is said, You shall not even look to lust; there is no force in, You shall not kill, when it is said, You shall not even curse) — he cannot make an adversary of the law out of one who assists it. That he might create the two in himself — who had made the same, creating (according to what is above too: We are his workmanship, created in Christ) — into one new man, making peace (if truly new, then truly a man too, not a phantasm; but new and newly — that is, newly born of a virgin by the Spirit of God) — that he might reconcile both to God, even to the God whom both kinds had offended, both the Jewish and the Gentile people, in one body, he says, having slain the enmity in it through the cross. So here too the flesh is the body in Christ, which could suffer the cross. This, then, announcing peace to those near and to those far, having obtained access together to the Father, we are now no longer strangers nor sojourners, but fellow-citizens of the saints, and of the household of God (surely of him from whom we showed above that we were aliens and set far off), built upon the foundation of the apostles. The heretic took away, And of the prophets, forgetting that the Lord set in the church, as apostles, so prophets too. He feared, namely, lest our building in Christ should stand even upon the foundations of the old prophets, since the apostle himself everywhere does not cease to build us up out of the prophets. For whence did he take to call Christ the chief cornerstone, except from the signification of the psalm: The stone which the builders rejected, the same is made into the head of the corner?

At the hands of the heretic who cuts away, I do not wonder if he withdraws syllables, when he very often subducts whole pages. The apostle, he says, was given grace, last of all, to enlighten all men as to what is the dispensation of the sacrament hidden from the ages in God, who created all things. The heretic snatched away the preposition In, and so makes it read: Hidden from the ages, to God who created all things. But the falsehood flashes out. For the apostle infers, That now there may be made known to the principalities and powers in the super-celestial places, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God. Of what principalities and powers does he speak? If the Creator's, what manner of thing is it that that God wished his wisdom to be shown to the Creator's principalities and powers, but not to himself — when the powers could not have known anything without their own prince? Or if for this reason he did not name God here, as though among them the prince himself too be reckoned, then he would have pronounced the sacrament hidden too from the principalities and powers of him who created all things, reckoning him likewise among them. But if he says it was hidden from them, to that one he ought to have said it was manifest. Therefore it was not hidden from God, but hidden in God the creator of all things, but hidden from his principalities and powers. For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who was his counsellor? Here the heretic, caught, perhaps changed it to say that his God wished to make known to his own powers and principalities the dispensation of his sacrament, of which the God the founder of all things was ignorant. And how was it fitting to allege the ignorance of the Creator — a stranger and severed by long separation — when even the household members of the superior God did not know it? Yet to the Creator too it was to be known as future. Or was it not surely known, what under heaven and on earth, which were his, was to be revealed? Therefore from this is confirmed what we built above. For if the Creator was at some time to know that hidden sacrament of the superior God, and so the scripture ran, Hidden to God who created all things, he ought to have inferred thus: That there may be made known to him the manifold wisdom of God — then also to the powers and principalities of whatever God, with whom the Creator was to know it. So fully is it established that it was subtracted, which even so is safe to its own truth. I wish now too to weave a controversy with you about the apostle's allegories. What forms would he have had in the prophets, as one new? He led captivity captive, he says. With what arms? in what battles? from the laying waste of what nation? from the overthrow of what city? what women, what children, or what petty kings did he, as victor, bind in chains? For when in David Christ is sung as girded with a sword upon his thigh, or in Isaiah as receiving the spoils of Samaria and the strength of Damascus, you truly hammer him out a visible warrior too. Acknowledge, then, both his armour and his warfare to be spiritual, if you have already learned that there is a spiritual captivity, that you may acknowledge this too to be his — or because the apostle took the mention of this captivity too from the prophets, from whom too his commandments. Putting off lying, speak truth, each to his neighbour; and, Be angry and sin not (in the very words by which the psalm would expound his sense), let not the sun go down upon your wrath. Do not partake in the works of darkness. For with the just you shall be just, and with the perverse you shall be perverted; and, Take away evil from your midst; and, Go out from the midst of them; and, Touch not the unclean thing; be separate, you who bear the vessels of the Lord. So too, To be drunk with wine is unto disgrace — that is from the place where those who make the saints drunk are rebuked: And you gave my saints wine to drink; which both Aaron the priest and his sons were forbidden to drink, when they approached the holy things. And to sing to God in psalms and hymns and to teach is his who knew how to accuse before God those who drank wine to timbrels and psalteries. Thus, whose precepts and seeds of precepts or increments I find, his apostle I acknowledge. For the rest, whence does he confirm that women ought to be subject to men? Because the man, he says, is the head of the woman. Tell me, Marcion: from a work of the Creator does your God lend authority to his own law? This now is plainly the lesser thing, since both for his own Christ and for his church he takes a status from there, just as Christ too is the head of the church. Likewise too, when he says, He who loves his own wife loves his own flesh, just as Christ too the church. You see your Christ and your church compared to a work of the Creator. How much honour is given to the flesh in the name of the church! Let no one, he says, hate his own flesh (except plainly Marcion alone), but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ too the church. But you alone hate it, taking away from it the resurrection. You ought to hate the church too, because it is likewise loved by Christ. But indeed Christ loved the flesh too, just as the church. No one but loves even the image of his bride; nay, he will both preserve and honour and crown it. The likeness has a partnership of honour with the truth. I shall now labour to prove the same God of the male and of Christ, of the woman and of the church, of the flesh and of the spirit, since the apostle himself adduces — nay, expounds — the sentence of the Creator: For this cause a man shall leave father and mother, and the two shall be in one flesh. This is a great sacrament. It is enough among these things if the Creator's sacraments are great with the apostle, the least with the heretics. But I, he says, speak of Christ and the church. He has an interpretation, not a separation, of the sacrament. He shows the figure of the sacrament to have been furnished beforehand by him whose surely the sacrament was. What seems to Marcion? The Creator surely could not furnish figures beforehand to an unknown God — and even, if known, to an adversary. The superior God ought to have borrowed nothing from the inferior, and that rather unto destruction. Let children too obey their parents. For though Marcion took away, This is the first precept in promise, the law speaks, Honour father and mother; and, Parents, bring up your children in the discipline and correction of the Lord. For you have heard it said to the ancients too, You shall tell these things in the ears of your children, and your children likewise in the ears of their children. Why now do you give me two gods, if the discipline is one? And if there are two, I will follow him who first taught. But if our wrestling is against the world-holders — O how many gods the Creators already are! For why should I not vindicate this too — that one world-holder ought to have been named, if it signified the Creator, whose were those powers which he set before? Further, since above he bids us put on the armour in which we may stand against the machinations of the devil, he now shows that those things are the devil's which he subjoins to the devil — the powers and world-holders of these darknesses, which we too reckon to the devil. Or if the devil is the Creator, who will be the devil with the Creator? Or, as there are two gods, so two devils too, and, in the plural, powers and world-holders? But how is the Creator both devil and God, when the devil is not himself both God and devil? For either both are gods too, if both are now devils; or he who is God here and not devil, just as the devil is not God. The very word devil — I ask of what accusation it can befit the Creator. Perhaps he carried off some plan of the superior God — which the Creator himself suffered from the archangel, and that one lying. For he had not forbidden the taste of that little tree lest they should become gods, but lest they should die of the transgression. Nor did the spiritual wickednesses signify the Creator because he added, In the heavens. For the apostle too knew that spiritual wickednesses had been wrought in the heavens — of the angels that gave offence with the daughters of men. And what manner of thing was it that by ambiguities and through riddles I know not what he should tax the Creator — he who, set already in chains for the liberty of his preaching, was begging from God constancy in manifesting the sacrament by the opening of his mouth, which there he was bidding to be demanded of God, and surely furnishing it for the church?

ON THE EPISTLE TO THE COLOSSIANS. In my prescription against all heresies I am wont to fix a compendium from the testimony of the times, vindicating our rule as prior to all heretical posterity. This now the apostle too will prove, saying, Of the hope laid up in the heavens, which you heard in the word of the truth of the gospel, which has come to you, just as into the whole world too. For if even then the evangelic tradition had spread everywhere, how much more now? Further, if ours is that which has spread everywhere, more than any heretical thing, much less the Antoninian Marcion's, it will be ours, apostolic. But Marcion's, though it have filled the whole world, will not even then be able to defend itself as apostolic. For that will even so be established to be apostolic which first filled the world — namely, with the gospel of that God who sang this too of his preachings: Into all the earth their sound has gone out, and into the ends of the world their words. He says Christ is the image of the invisible God. But we too call the Father of Christ invisible, knowing that the Son was always seen of old, if to any he was seen under the name of God, as his image — lest from this too he split off some difference of a visible and an invisible God, since of old the definition of our God has been, No one shall see God and live. If Christ is not the firstborn of creation, as the Word of the Creator through whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made; if in him were not created all things that are in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; if all things were not created through him and in him (for these things Marcion ought to have been displeased at) — surely the apostle would not have set it down so nakedly, And he is before all. For how before all, if not before all things? How before all things, if not the firstborn of creation, if not the Word of the Creator? Whence shall he be proved to have been before all, who appeared after all things? Who knows that one to have been prior whom he did not know to be at all? How likewise did he think good that all fullness should dwell in himself? For first, what is this fullness, except out of those things which Marcion took away — created in Christ, in the heavens and on earth, angels and men — except out of those invisible and visible things, except out of thrones and dominions and principalities and powers? Or if our pseudo-apostles and Jewish evangelisers brought these in of their own, and to the fullness of his God, Marcion, who created nothing — for the rest, what manner of thing is it that the rival and destroyer of the Creator should have wished the Creator's fullness to dwell in his own Christ? To whom, in short, does he reconcile all things unto himself, making peace through the blood of his cross, except him whom these same things had offended, against whom they had rebelled by transgression, whose at the last they had been? For they could be conciliated to a stranger, but reconciled to no other than their own. So too us, once alienated and enemies in mind in evil works, he reduces into grace with the Creator, whose offence we had committed, worshipping the creation against the Creator. But if anywhere too he says the church is the body of Christ — as here he says that he fills up the remnants of the tribulations of Christ in his flesh for his body, which is the church — you will not on that account transfer the mention of the body wholly from the substance of the flesh. For above too he says that we are reconciled in his body through death — surely in that body in which he could die, through the flesh he died, not through the church, but plainly for the church, exchanging body for body, the carnal for the spiritual. But when he warns us to beware of subtle speech and philosophy, as of vain seduction which is according to the elements of the world — not speaking of heaven or earth, but of secular letters and tradition, namely of subtle-speaking men and philosophers — it is a long matter, indeed, and of another work, to show that by this sentence all heresies are condemned, because all consist of the resources of subtle speech and the rules of philosophy. But let Marcion acknowledge the chief boundary of his faith from the school of Epicurus, bringing in a dull lord, that he may say he is not to be feared; placing too matter, with God the Creator, from the porch of the Stoics; denying the resurrection of the flesh, on which likewise no philosophy agrees. From whose ingenuities our truth is so far removed, that it both dreads to rouse the wrath of God, and trusts that he brought forth all things out of nothing, and promises that he will restore the same flesh, and does not blush at a Christ born from a virgin's womb — though the philosophers and heretics and the very heathen laugh. For God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise — he, without doubt, who out of regard for this his arrangement threatened beforehand that he would destroy the wisdom of the wise. By this simplicity of truth, contrary to subtle speech and philosophy, we can savour nothing perverse. In short, if God makes us alive with Christ, forgiving us our offences, we cannot believe that offences are forgiven by him against whom they were not committed, as one formerly unknown. Come now, when he says, Let no one judge you in food and drink, or in part of a feast-day or a new moon or a sabbath, which is a shadow of things to come, but the body is Christ's — what seems to you, Marcion? Of the law we now do not treat again, except that here too he teaches in what manner it has been excluded, while, namely, it is transferred from the shadow to the body — that is, from figures to the truth, which is Christ. Therefore the shadow too is his whose is the body — that is, both the law is his and Christ. Separate the law to one God and Christ to another, if you can separate any shadow from the body of which it is the shadow. Manifestly Christ is of the law, if he is the body of the shadow. But if he also taxes some who out of angelic visions said that food must be abstained from — Touch not, taste not — wishing to walk in the lowliness of sense, not holding the head — not on that account does he assail the law and Moses, as though out of angelic superstition he had appointed the interdiction of certain foods. For it is established that Moses received the law from God. In short, this discipline — According to the precepts, he says, and doctrine of men — he reckoned upon those who held not the head, that is, him in whom all things are reviewed, brought back to the beginning in Christ — even the indifference of foods. The rest of the precepts — that it may suffice to have already taught elsewhere whence they flowed from the Creator, who, when he preached that the old things would pass, about to make all things new, commanding too, Make for yourselves a new renewal, even then was teaching to put off the old man and put on the new.

ON THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS. When he enumerates the variety of preaching — that some, from the confidence of his chains, uttered the word more boldly, others through envy and contention, certain through esteem of the discourse, very many out of love, some out of emulation, now some too out of strife, preached Christ — there was surely here a place too for taxing the very preaching, on the diversity of sentence which made so great a variety even of dispositions. But, setting forth in the diversity the causes only of dispositions, not the rules of the sacraments, he confirms that one Christ nevertheless, and one God of his, was preached, whatever the intent; and therefore, It is nothing to me, he says, whether by occasion or in truth Christ is announced, because one was announced, whether out of occasion or out of the truth of faith. For he referred the mention of truth to the faith of the preaching, not to the rule itself, because the rule indeed was one, but the faith of certain preachers was true, that is, simple, of certain over-learned. Since this is so, it appears that the Christ preached was he who was always announced. For if another, far from the apostle, were brought in, the newness of the thing would have made a diversity. For there would not have been wanting those who would nonetheless interpret the evangelic preaching as of the Christ of the Creator, since even today the greater part in all places is of our sentence than of the heretical. So that here too the apostle would not have been silent about noting and rebuking the diversity. Thus, since the diversity is not even taxed, the newness is not proved. Plainly the Marcionites think that here too the apostle votes for them about the substance of Christ — that there was a phantasm of flesh in Christ — when he says that, being constituted in the form of God, he counted it not robbery to be equal to God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, not the truth, and in the likeness of man, not in man, and being found in fashion as man, not in substance, that is, not in flesh — as though fashion and likeness and form did not accrue to substance too. But well that elsewhere too he calls Christ the image of the invisible God. Surely, then, here too, in that he sets him in the form of God, will Christ likewise not be truly God, if not truly man too, being constituted in the form of man? For both ways the truth will have to be excluded, if fashion and likeness and form be claimed for a phantasm. But if in form and in image, in which he is the Son of the Father, he is truly God, it is prejudged that in the form and image too of man, in which he is the Son of man, he was found truly man. For he set down found with reason, that is, most certainly man. For what is found is established to be. So too God was found through power, as man through flesh, because he would not have pronounced one subject to death who was not constituted in mortal substance. But more is what he added, And the death of the cross. For he would not have heightened the atrocity by extolling the might of the subjection, had he known it imaginary, by a phantasm — rather frustrated than experienced, nor discharging any might in the passion, but in mockery. But the things which formerly he had reckoned gain, which above too he enumerates — the glory of the flesh, the mark of circumcision, the reckoning of Hebrew race out of a Hebrew, the title of the tribe of Benjamin, the dignity of pure Pharisaism — these now he reckons to himself for loss; not God, but the stupor of the Jews. These he counts but as dung, in comparison with the knowledge of Christ, not in rejection of God the Creator; having a righteousness not now his own, which is of the law, but that which is through him, namely Christ, of God. Therefore, you say, by this distinction the law was not of the God of Christ. Subtly enough. Receive, then, more subtly. For when he says, Not that which is of the law, but that which is through him, he would not have said Through him of another than him whose the law was. Our citizenship, he says, is in the heavens. I recognise the old promise of the Creator to Abraham: And I will make your seed as the stars in heaven. Therefore too star differs from star in glory. But if Christ, coming from the heavens, transfigured the body of our lowliness, conformed to the body of his glory, then this our body shall rise, which is humbled in sufferings, and cast into the earth by the very law of death. For how shall it be transfigured, if it shall be nothing? Or if it is said of those who, found in the flesh at the coming of God, are to be reckoned, what shall they do who first rise? They will have nothing out of which to be transfigured. But, We shall be caught up, he says, together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord. If caught up together with them, surely transfigured too together with them.

ON THE EPISTLE TO PHILEMON. To this epistle alone its brevity was of profit, that it might escape the falsifying hands of Marcion. Yet I wonder that, when he received letters written to one man, he rejected the two to Timothy and the one to Titus, composed about ecclesiastical order. He affected, I think, to interpolate even the number of the epistles. Remember, inspector, that the things which were treated beforehand we have proved of the apostle too in their place, and that whatever was deferred to this work we have discharged — lest either here you think the iteration superfluous, by which we have confirmed the former hope, or there hold the deferment suspect, by which we drew out these very things. If you inspect the whole little work, you will judge neither here a redundance nor there a diffidence.