Against Marcion 3.18

It is over his death, I suppose, that you plainly try to introduce a difference, denying that the suffering of the cross was foretold of the Creator's Christ, and arguing besides that it is not to be believed that the Creator exposed his Son to that kind of death which he himself had cursed: “Cursed,” he says, “is everyone who hangs on a tree.” But I rightly put off the meaning of this curse and treat only the foretelling of the cross, which is now the main question, since in other cases too the proof of the facts comes before the explanation. I shall first teach from the figures. And indeed this mystery, above all, had to be figured in prophecy: the more incredible it was, the more it would be a stumbling-block if it were foretold nakedly; and the more magnificent it was, the more it needed to be veiled, so that the difficulty of understanding might seek the grace of God. So first of all Isaac, when he was given up by his father as a sacrifice and himself carried the wood, was even then signifying Christ's death, who was surrendered by the Father as a victim and bore the wood of his own passion. Joseph too was to figure Christ, if only in this (not to delay my course), that he suffered persecution from his brothers because of God's favor, as Christ did from the Jews, his brothers according to the flesh. When he is blessed by his father in these words too: “His beauty is that of a bull; his horns are the horns of a unicorn; with them he will toss the nations all together to the very end of the earth,” it was certainly not a one-horned rhinoceros or a two-horned minotaur that was meant, but Christ was signified in him: a bull because of his twofold dealing, fierce to some as judge, gentle to others as savior; whose horns would be the extremities of the cross. For in a ship's yard too, which is part of a cross, the ends are called horns, and the upright post in the middle is the unicorn. By this power of the cross, in short, and horned in this way, he both now tosses all nations through faith, lifting them from earth to heaven, and will then toss them through judgment, casting them down from heaven to earth. He will also be the bull elsewhere in the same Scripture, when Jacob spiritually invokes a curse on Simeon and Levi, that is, on the scribes and Pharisees (for their lineage is derived from them): “Simeon and Levi have accomplished iniquity out of their own choice,” that is, the choice by which they persecuted Christ; “let my soul not come into their council, and let my heart not rest in their assembly, because in their anger they killed men,” that is, the prophets, “and in their desire they hamstrung a bull,” that is, Christ, whom, after the murder of the prophets, they fastened to the cross and raged against his sinews with nails. Otherwise it would be pointless, after murders, to reproach them with the butchery of some ox. Next, Moses: why did he pray sitting down with hands outstretched only at the time when Joshua was fighting against Amalek, when in so alarming a situation he should rather have commended his prayer with bent knees, hands beating his breast, and face rolling on the ground? Unless it was that there, where the name of the Lord was fighting (the Lord who was one day to fight against the devil), the form of the cross too was necessary, by which Jesus would bring back the victory. Why again did the same Moses, after forbidding the likeness of anything whatever, set up a bronze serpent placed on a pole, in the posture of one hanging, as a saving sight? Was he not here too aiming at the power of the Lord's cross, by which the serpent, the devil, was exposed, and for everyone bitten by the spiritual snakes who yet looked upon it and believed in it, healing from the bites of sins, and thereafter salvation, was proclaimed?