Against Marcion 3.7–3.15

Now let the heretic learn, along with the Jew himself (it will be more than enough), the reason for the Jew's errors too, from whom he borrowed his leadership in this argument and, the blind led by the blind, has fallen into the same pit. We say that the prophets, by showing two conditions of Christ, marked out beforehand the same number of comings. The one in humility, the first of course, when he was to be led like a sheep to the slaughter, and like a lamb voiceless before the shearer, so not opening his mouth; not even comely in appearance. “For we have announced concerning him,” it says, “as a little child, as a root in a thirsty land; and he has no form or glory; and we saw him, and he had no form or beauty, but his form was without honor, falling short of the sons of men; a man under the stroke, and knowing how to bear weakness”; as one set by the Father as a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense; made by him a little lower than the angels; declaring himself a worm and not a man, a reproach of men and the scorn of the people. These marks of lowliness befit the first coming, as those of sublimity befit the second, when he will no longer be a stone of stumbling or a rock of offense, but the chief cornerstone, taken up after rejection and raised to complete the temple, that is, the church; and indeed that stone in Daniel cut from the mountain, which will shatter and grind the image of the kingdoms of the world. Of this coming the same prophet says: “And behold, one coming as a son of man with the clouds of heaven came as far as the Ancient of Days. He stood in his sight, and those who stood by brought him near. And there was given to him royal power, and all the nations of the earth according to their kinds, and all glory serving him. And his power is for ever, which will not be taken away, and his kingdom, which will not be corrupted.” Then, clearly, he will have a form full of honor and a beauty unfailing beyond the sons of men: “For you are in the bloom of beauty,” it says, “beyond the sons of men; grace is poured out on your lips; therefore God has blessed you for ever. Gird your sword upon your thigh, mighty in your bloom and your beauty”; when also the Father, after he made him a little lower than the angels, will crown him with glory and honor and put all things under his feet. Then too those who pierced him will know him, and will beat their breasts, tribe by tribe, because in the past they did not recognize him in the lowliness of the human condition: “He is a man too,” says Jeremiah, “and who will know him?” For also: “His generation,” says Isaiah, “who will declare?” So too in Zechariah, in the person of Jesus, and indeed in the very mystery of the name, the true high priest of the Father, Christ Jesus, is sketched in a twofold condition for the two comings. First he is clothed in filthy garments, that is, in the indignity of passible and mortal flesh, when the devil also opposed him (the instigator, that is, of Judas the betrayer, not to mention his tempter after his baptism too); then he is stripped of his former filth and adorned with a full-length robe, a miter, and a clean turban, that is, with the glory and honor of the second coming. For if I also interpret the two goats that were offered at the fast, do they not also figure both stages of Christ? They were equal and alike, because of the Lord's one appearance, since he will not come in another form, as one who is to be recognized by those by whom he was wounded. But one of them, surrounded with scarlet, cursed, spat upon, torn, and pierced, was cast out by the people outside the city to perdition, marked with the plain signs of the Lord's passion; while the other, offered for sins and given to the priests of the temple for food, set its seal on the proofs of the second appearing, in which, when all sins have been expiated, the priests of the spiritual temple, that is, of the church, would enjoy as it were a public distribution of meat from the Lord's grace, while the rest go fasting from salvation. Since, then, the first coming was foretold as both much obscured by figures and cast down by every indignity, and the second as both manifest and worthy of God, therefore, fixing their eyes on the one alone which they could easily both understand and believe, that is, the second, they were not undeservedly deceived about the more obscure, certainly the less worthy, that is, the first. And so to this day they deny that their Christ has come, because he did not come in sublimity, not knowing that he was to come in humility as well.

Let the heretic now stop borrowing poison from the Jew, the asp, as they say, from the viper; let him now vomit up the venom of his own invention, claiming that Christ was a phantom. Except that in this opinion too he will have other forerunners, premature and in a way abortive Marcionites, whom the apostle John declared antichrists, denying that Christ had come in the flesh; not, however, in order to establish the right of another god (for on that point too they would have been branded), but because they had presumed it incredible that God should have flesh. All the more did the antichrist Marcion seize that presumption for himself, being better suited, naturally, to reject the bodily substance of Christ, since he had brought in a god who was neither the author of flesh nor its raiser, supremely good, no doubt, in this too, and utterly unlike the lies and deceits of the Creator. And so his Christ, so as not to lie or deceive and in this way perhaps be counted the Creator's, was not what he seemed and lied about what he was: flesh and not flesh, man and not man; and likewise, I suppose, God and not God. For why should he not have carried a phantom of God as well? Or am I to believe him about his inner substance, when he has been a cheat about his outer one? How will he be held truthful in what is hidden, when he has been found so deceitful in what is open? And how, by mixing in himself the truth of the spirit with the deceit of the flesh, did he make that fellowship of light, that is truth, with darkness, that is deceit, which the apostle denies? Now then, when the flesh of Christ is detected as a lie, it follows that everything done through the flesh of Christ was done by a lie: his meetings, his touching, his living with others, even his mighty works. For if by touching someone he freed him from an affliction, or was touched by someone, what was done bodily cannot be believed to have been truly done without the reality of the body itself. Nothing solid could be accomplished by what is empty, nothing full by what is void: a supposed condition, a supposed action; an imaginary worker, imaginary works. So neither will the sufferings of his Christ deserve belief. For he suffered nothing who did not truly suffer, and a phantom could not truly suffer. The whole work of God, then, is overturned. The whole weight and fruit of the Christian name, the death of Christ, is denied, which the apostle so emphatically commends, as real of course, making it the highest foundation of the gospel, of our salvation, and of his own preaching: “For I delivered to you,” he says, “first of all, that Christ died for our sins, and that he was buried, and that he rose on the third day.” Further, if his flesh is denied, how is his death asserted, which is the passion proper to flesh, as it returns through death into the earth from which it was taken, according to the law of its author? And once death is denied by denying the flesh, there will be no certainty about the resurrection either. For he did not rise, for the same reason that he did not die, namely not having the substance of flesh, to which resurrection belongs as death does. And so, once the resurrection of Christ is weakened, ours too is overturned. For it will not hold, the resurrection for whose sake Christ came, if Christ's does not hold. For just as those who said there is no resurrection of the dead are refuted by the apostle from the resurrection of Christ, so, if the resurrection of Christ does not stand, the resurrection of the dead is also taken away. And so our faith too is empty, and empty the preaching of the apostles. And they are even found to be false witnesses of God, because they testified that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise. And we are still in our sins, and those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished; due to rise again, certainly, but perhaps as a phantom, like Christ.

On this question, you who think the Creator's angels should be set against us, as though they too acted in a phantom, of course a supposed flesh, in the presence of Abraham and Lot, and yet truly met with them, ate, and carried out what they had been commanded: first, you will not be admitted to examples from the God whom you are destroying. For the better and more perfect the god you bring in, the less do that God's examples fit him, since unless he is wholly different he will not be better and more perfect at all. Next, know that it is not conceded to you either that the flesh in the angels was supposed; it was of true and solid human substance. For if it was not hard for him to display true senses and actions in a supposed flesh, it was much easier for him to give a true substance of flesh to true senses and actions, as its own author and craftsman. Your god, since he produced no flesh at all, might perhaps fittingly have brought in a phantom of that whose reality he had not been able to make; but my God, who took flesh from the clay and re-formed it into its present quality, not yet from married seed and yet flesh, could equally have built up flesh for the angels too out of any material whatever, he who built even the world out of nothing into so many and such great bodies, and that by a word. And surely, if your god promises men at some time the true substance of angels (“For they will be,” he says, “like angels”), why should my God not have fitted the true substance of men to angels, taken from wherever it was taken? For you will not answer me either where that angelic substance is taken from in your system. It is enough for me to define what befits God: namely the reality of the thing he presented to three witnessing senses, sight, touch, and hearing. It is harder for God to lie than to produce the reality of flesh from wherever he will, even though it was not born. Besides, to other heretics, who lay it down that that flesh in the angels would have had to be born of flesh if it had truly been human, we reply with a sure reason why it was both truly human and unborn. Truly human, because of the truthfulness of God, who is a stranger to lying and deceit, and because they could not be handled in human fashion by men except in human substance. Unborn, because Christ alone was to be born into flesh from flesh, in order to re-form our birth by his own birth, and so also to dissolve our death by his own death, rising again in the flesh in which he was born so that he could also die. And that is why he himself too appeared then with the angels at Abraham's tent in the reality of flesh, but flesh not yet born, because not yet to die, but already learning to live among men. All the more, then, the angels, not appointed to die for us, did not need to have taken on their brief furlough of flesh by being born, since they were not going to lay it down by dying. But wherever it was taken from, and however it was finally laid aside, they did not pretend it. If the Creator makes his angels spirits and his attendants a flaming fire, as truly spirits as fire, he likewise truly made them flesh; so that we may now recall, and announce to the heretics, that it belongs to him who once formed angels into men to promise that he will at some time re-form men into angels.

So, since you are not admitted to share in the Creator's examples, as belonging to another and having reasons of their own, I should like you yourself to set out your god's plan in exhibiting his Christ not in the reality of flesh. If he despised it as earthly and, as you people say, stuffed with dung, why did he not likewise scorn its likeness? For no image of a thing that deserves disdain deserves honor: the likeness follows the status. “But how could he live among men except through an image of human substance?” Why not rather through its reality, then, so as truly to live among them, if he had to live among them? How much more worthily would necessity have been served by good faith than by a trick! You make your god wretched enough by this very fact, that he could not exhibit his Christ except in the likeness of an unworthy thing, and one belonging to another at that. To some extent it will be fitting to use unworthy things if they are our own, just as it will not be fitting to use things belonging to another, even if worthy. Why then did he not come in some other, worthier substance, and above all his own, so as not to seem to have needed a thing both unworthy and foreign? If my Creator met with man through a bush and fire as well, and afterwards through a cloud and a pillar, and made use of the bodies of the elements in representations of himself, these examples of divine power show well enough that God did not need to provide either false or even true flesh. But if we look at the truth of the matter, no substance is worthy for God to put on. Whatever he puts on, he himself makes worthy, yet without a lie. And so what sort of thing is it that he should have thought the reality of flesh a disgrace rather than its falsehood? Yet he honored it by feigning it. How great flesh must be, when a phantom of it was necessary to a superior god!

Marcion took up all these conjuring tricks of a supposed bodiliness in Christ with this purpose: that his birth too should not be established from the evidence of human substance, and so Christ be claimed for the Creator, as one announced as capable of birth and therefore made of flesh. Very foolish here too, the man from Pontus: as if flesh in God were not more easily believed unborn than false, especially when the Creator's angels, who lived in true flesh and yet unborn, lay the groundwork for that belief. For that Philumene, too, rather persuaded Apelles and the other deserters from Marcion that Christ did carry flesh about in reality, yet flesh of no birth, as having borrowed it from the elements. But if Marcion feared that belief in flesh would also bring in belief in birth, then without doubt one who was seen to be a man was certainly believed to have been born. For a certain woman had cried out, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts you sucked”; and how were his mother and brothers said to be standing outside? Certainly, when he proclaimed himself the Son of Man, he was professing that he was born. We shall see about these passages in their proper time. For now, though I have put all these off to the examination of the gospel, still, as I laid down above: if one who was seen to be a man was bound in any case to be believed born, he thought in vain that belief in his birth could be overthrown by the device of imaginary flesh. For what did it profit that both flesh and birth were not real, when they were held to be real? Or if you say, “Let human opinion see to that,” you already honor your god with the title of deceit, if he knew himself to be other than he had made men think. Then you could equally have fitted him with a supposed birth, so as not to run into this question as well. For little women sometimes think themselves pregnant, swollen either by the tribute of blood or by some illness. And surely he ought to have played the phantom's stage-part through to the end, so that one who had acted the role of the substance itself should not leave out in his dance the origin of the flesh. Plainly you rejected the lie of a birth, for you put forward flesh itself as real. A real birth, no doubt, is the most shameful thing even for God! Come then, declaim against those most holy and venerable works of nature, inveigh against all that you are; destroy the origin of flesh and soul; call the womb a sewer, the workshop for producing so great a living being, that is, man; pursue the uncleanness and the shameful torments of childbirth, and the filthy, anxious, ridiculous outcome of the delivery itself. Yet when you have destroyed all these, to confirm that they are unworthy of God, birth will not be more unworthy than death, nor infancy than the cross, nor nature than punishment, nor flesh than condemnation. If Christ truly suffered these things, to be born was less; if he suffered them by a lie, as a phantom, he could also be born by a lie. These are the chief arguments of Marcion by which he makes Christ another's; I think we have shown well enough that they do not stand at all, while we teach that the reality of the condition in which God exhibited his Christ befits him far more than a lie. If it was reality, it was flesh; if it was flesh, he was born. For the things this heresy attacks are confirmed when the things by which it attacks are destroyed. So if he is to be held fleshly because born, and born because fleshly, because he was not a phantom, then he is to be recognized as the one whom the Creator's prophets announced as coming in the flesh and by birth, as being the Creator's Christ.

Challenge me now, as you usually do, over this comparison of Christ with Isaiah, contending that it fits in no respect. “For first,” you say, “Isaiah's Christ will have to be called Emmanuel, and then to take the power of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria against the king of the Assyrians. But this one who came was neither brought forth under a name of that kind nor engaged in any warfare.” But I will remind you to consider also what belongs with each of the two statements. For the interpretation of Emmanuel is added as well, “God with us,” so that you should look not only at the sound of the name but also at its sense. For the sound, Hebrew, that is “Emmanuel,” belongs to its own nation; but its sense, that is “God with us,” is common to all through translation. Ask, then, whether this phrase, “God with us,” which is “Emmanuel,” has been in use of Christ since Christ shone forth. And I think you will not deny it, since you yourself say “God with us,” that is, Emmanuel. Or if you are so foolish that, because with you he is called “God with us” and not “Emmanuel,” you therefore refuse to admit the coming of him whose proper title is to be called Emmanuel, as if this were not also “God with us,” you will find that among the Hebrews the Christians, and indeed the Marcionites, name Emmanuel when they mean to say “God with us”; just as every nation, in whatever sounds it says “God with us,” will be pronouncing Emmanuel, fulfilling the sound in the sense. But if Emmanuel is “God with us,” and “God with us” is Christ, who is even in us (“for as many of you as were dipped into Christ have put on Christ”), then Christ is as properly in the meaning of the name, “God with us,” as in the sound of the name, “Emmanuel.” And so it is established that he who was foretold as Emmanuel has already come, because what Emmanuel signifies has come, that is, “God with us.”

You are likewise led by the sound of names when you take “the power of Damascus,” “the spoils of Samaria,” and “the king of the Assyrians” as if they portended that the Creator's Christ would be a warrior, not noticing what Scripture puts first: “For before the child knows how to call father and mother, he will take the power of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria against the king of the Assyrians.” You should first look at the indication of age, whether it can present Christ as yet a man, let alone a general. No doubt the infant was to summon men to arms with his wailing and give the signal for battle not with a trumpet but with a rattle, and mark out the enemy not from horse or chariot or wall but from the neck or back of his nurse or carrier, and so subdue Damascus and Samaria instead of the breast! It is another matter if among you people of Pontus the infants of a barbarous nation burst into battle, first oiled, I suppose, in the sun, then armed with swaddling clothes and paid in butter, who know how to throw a lance before they know how to lick. Indeed, if nature nowhere allows this, to serve as a soldier before becoming a man, to take the power of Damascus before knowing the words for father and mother, it follows that the statement must be seen as figurative. “But nature does not allow a virgin to give birth either,” he says, “and yet the prophet is believed.” And rightly; for he laid the groundwork for belief in an incredible thing by giving the reason, that it was to be a sign: “Therefore,” he says, “the Lord will give you a sign: behold, a virgin will conceive in the womb and bear a son.” But a sign from God would not have been a sign unless it were some wondrous novelty. Finally, the Jews, whenever they dare to lie in order to throw us down, as though Scripture says not that a virgin but that a young woman will conceive and bear, are refuted by this: that an everyday thing, the pregnancy and childbirth of a young woman, can have no appearance of a sign. The virgin mother, then, appointed for a sign, will rightly be believed; but the warrior infant not equally, for the ground of a sign does not operate here. Rather, after the sign attached to the new birth, the next stage of the infant is then declared in another place, as one who is to eat honey and butter (and this is surely not for a sign, for it belongs to infancy too), and also to take the power of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria against the king of the Assyrians. Keep to the measure of his age and look for the sense of the prophecy; indeed, give back to the gospel of truth what you took from it as a later arrival, and the prophecy is understood as clearly as it is reported fulfilled. For let those magi of the East stand firm, honoring the newborn infancy of Christ with gold and incense, and the infant has taken the power of Damascus without battle and weapons. For besides what is known to everyone, that the power of the East, that is its strength and resources, used to abound in gold and spices, it is certainly the Creator's way to make gold the power of other nations too, as through Zechariah: “And Judah will stand forth at Jerusalem and will gather all the strength of the peoples round about, gold and silver.” And of that gift of gold David too says: “And there will be given to him of the gold of Arabia”; and again: “The kings of the Arabs and of Sheba will offer him gifts.” For the East generally held magi to be kings, and Damascus was formerly reckoned part of Arabia, before it was transferred to Syrophoenicia when the Syrias were divided; whose power Christ then took by taking its tokens, namely gold and spices. And the spoils of Samaria were the magi themselves, who, when they had recognized him, honored him with gifts, and on bended knee worshiped him as God and king, under the witness of the star that pointed the way and led them, became spoils of Samaria, that is of idolatry, by believing, of course, in Christ. For he marked idolatry by the name of Samaria, as disgraced for the idolatry by which it had then fallen away from God under King Jeroboam. Nor is this new for the Creator, to use a figurative transfer of names on the ground of comparable crimes. For he calls the rulers of the Jews rulers of Sodom, and the people itself the people of Gomorrah; and likewise elsewhere, “Your father,” he says, “was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite,” on account of like impiety, though he had once called them his own sons: “Sons I have begotten and raised up.” So too Egypt is sometimes understood by him as the whole world, under the charge of superstition and curse. So too Babylon, in our John as well, is a figure of the city of Rome, as likewise great, proud in its empire, and warring down the saints of God. It is by this usage, then, that he titled the magi too with the name of Samaritans, stripped of what they had held in common with the Samaritans, as we said, idolatry. And by “against the king of the Assyrians” understand “against Herod,” whom the magi indeed opposed at that time by not reporting to him about Christ, whom he was seeking to seize.

This interpretation of ours will be helped when, supposing Christ a warrior elsewhere too because of the names of certain weapons and words of that kind, you are refuted by comparison with the sense of the rest as well. “Gird your sword,” says David, “upon your thigh.” But what do you read of Christ just before? “You are in the bloom of beauty beyond the sons of men; grace is poured out on your lips.” It makes me laugh, if the one he was girding with a sword for war he was flattering about the bloom of his beauty and the grace of his lips. So too, adding, “and stretch out, and prosper, and reign,” he went on: “because of truth and gentleness and justice.” For who will work these things with a sword, and not rather their opposites, deceit, harshness, and injustice, the proper business of battles? Let us see, then, whether that sword is not a different one, since its action is different. For the apostle John too in the Apocalypse describes a sword coming out of the mouth of God, two-edged and very sharp, which must be understood as the divine Word: two-edged by the two testaments of the law and the gospel, sharp with wisdom, hostile to the devil, arming us against the spiritual enemies of wickedness and of all lust, cutting us off even from those dearest to us for the name of God. But if you will not acknowledge John, you have our common teacher Paul, girding our loins with truth and the breastplate of righteousness, and shoeing us with the preparation of the gospel of peace, not of war, bidding us take up the shield of faith, with which we can quench all the fiery darts of the devil, and the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, “which is,” he says, “the word of God.” This is the sword which the Lord himself came to send on the earth, not peace. If he is your Christ, then he too is a warrior. If he is not a warrior, brandishing an allegorical sword, then the Creator's Christ too in the psalm could, without anything warlike, be girded figuratively with the sword of the Word, and to him the aforesaid bloom and grace of lips fit; the sword with which he was already then being girded upon the thigh in David, and which he was at some time to send on the earth. For this is what it says: “and stretch out, and prosper, and reign”: stretching out the Word into all the earth for the calling of all the nations; to prosper by the success of the faith by which he was received; and reigning from then on, in that he conquered death by the resurrection. “And your right hand,” it says, “will lead you wonderfully”: the power, that is, of spiritual grace, by which the knowledge of Christ is led forth. “Your arrows are sharp”: the precepts flying everywhere, and threats, and exposures of the heart, pricking and piercing every conscience. “Peoples will fall under you”: in worship, of course. Such is the Creator's Christ, mighty in war and bearing arms; so too now he receives spoils, not of Samaria only but of all the nations. Recognize figurative spoils too, when you have learned that his arms are allegorical. And so, since the Lord speaks figuratively in this way and the apostle writes so, we are not rash in using such interpretations, examples of which even our adversaries admit; and so the Christ who came will be Isaiah's precisely in so far as he was not a warrior, since he is not foretold as such by Isaiah.

So much, then, for the question of the flesh, and through it of the birth, and meanwhile of the one name Emmanuel. But as to the other names, and above all “Christ,” what will the opposing side reply? If with you the name of Christ is as common as that of God, so that it is fitting for the son of either god to be called Christ, just as either father is called God, a sure reason will stand against this argument. For the name “God,” as belonging by nature to divinity, can be shared with all to whom divinity is ascribed, even idols, as the apostle says: “For there are those who are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth.” But the name “Christ,” coming to him not from nature but from an arrangement, becomes the proper possession of him by whom the arrangement is found to have been made, and is not open to be shared with another god, least of all a rival who has his own arrangement, to which he will owe names of his own too. For what sort of thing is it that people who have devised different arrangements of two gods allow a partnership of names amid the discord of their arrangements, when no proof of two rival gods would be more at hand than if, in their arrangements, a difference of names were found as well? For no state of difference is marked except by distinct designations. When these are lacking, then if ever the Greek catachresis, the misuse of another's term, comes to the rescue. But with God, I think, nothing ought to be lacking, nor his arrangement to be furnished from another's. Who is this god, who claims names for his son too from the Creator, names not merely belonging to another but old and commonplace, which even so would not suit a new and unknown god? How, finally, does he teach that a new patch is not sewn onto an old garment, nor new wine entrusted to old wineskins, when he himself is sewn onto and put into old names? How does he cut the gospel off from the law, when he is clothed in the whole law, namely in the name of Christ? Who prevented him from being called something else, since he preached something else and came from somewhere else, when for this very reason he did not take on the reality of a body, lest he be believed to be the Creator's Christ? It was futile for him to refuse to seem to be the one whose name he chose to bear, since even if he had truly had a body, he would all the more not have seemed the Creator's Christ if he had not been so called. But as it is, he rejects the substance whose name he took, though he would even prove the substance from the name. For if “Christ” means “anointed,” and to be anointed is certainly something that happens to a body, one who had no body could not be anointed at all; and one who could not be anointed at all could in no way be called Christ. It is another matter if he affected a phantom of the name too. “But how,” he says, “could he creep into the faith of the Jews except through a name customary and familiar among them?” You describe an inconstant or crafty god: to advance anything by deceiving is a plan either of distrust or of malice. The false prophets acted far more freely and simply, coming in the name of their own god against the Creator. But I do not find that this plan worked either, since they more readily believed him to be either their own Christ, or rather some deceiver, than the Christ of another god, as the gospel will prove.