Against Marcion 1.19

“On the contrary,” say the Marcionites, “our god, even if not from the beginning, even if not through creation, has been revealed through himself in Christ Jesus.” A book will be devoted to Christ as well, on his whole state — for the subjects must be kept apart, so that they may be treated more fully and in better order. Meanwhile it will be enough, at this stage, to meet them by showing, and that briefly, that Christ carried about the laws of no other god than the Creator. In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Christ Jesus deigned to flow down from heaven. In what year of the elder Antoninus the saving spirit of Marcion, as he would have it, breathed out of his Pontus like a dog-day wind, I have not troubled to find out. This much, however, is agreed: he is an Antonine heretic, impious under Pius. Now from Tiberius to Antoninus there are about one hundred and fifteen and a half years and half a month. They put just that much time between Christ and Marcion. Since, then, it was under Antoninus that Marcion first introduced this god, as we have proved, the matter is at once plain, if you have any sense: the dates prejudge that what first came forward under Antoninus did not come forward under Tiberius; that is, that the god of Antoninus's reign was not the god of Tiberius's, and so that he was not revealed by Christ who, it is agreed, was first proclaimed by Marcion.

To prove now that this is agreed, I shall take what remains from our opponents themselves. The separation of the law and the gospel is Marcion's own and principal work, and his disciples cannot deny what they hold in their chief document, by which they are initiated into this heresy and hardened in it. For this is Marcion's Antitheses, that is, “Contrary Oppositions,” which try to set the gospel at odds with the law, so that from the difference between the sayings of the two documents they may argue a difference of gods as well. Since, then, it is precisely that separation of law and gospel that has insinuated another god of the gospel over against the god of the law, it is evident that before that separation the god who became known from the argument of separation was not known; and so that he was not revealed by Christ, who lived before the separation, but was invented by Marcion, who set up the separation against the peace of gospel and law — a peace which, from the appearing of Christ to the audacity of Marcion, had been kept unharmed and unshaken by that reasoning which held no other god of both law and gospel than the Creator, against whom, so long afterwards, separation was let loose by the man of Pontus.