Against Marcion 3.22

You have the work of the apostles foretold too: “How timely are the feet of those who bring good news of peace, who bring good news of good things,” not of war or of evil. The psalm answers: “Their sound has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the earth,” as they carried about the law that went forth from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, so that what is written might come to pass: “And those who were far from my righteousness have drawn near to my righteousness and truth.” When the apostles girded themselves for this business, did they renounce the elders, the rulers, and the priests of the Jews, or not? “Yes indeed,” he says, “as preachers of another god.” On the contrary, of that very same God whose Scripture they were at that time fulfilling: “Depart, depart,” cries Isaiah, “go out from there and touch nothing unclean” (namely, blasphemy against Christ); “go out from the midst of her” (the synagogue, of course); “be separated, you who carry the vessels of the Lord.” For already, according to what is written above, the Lord had revealed his holy arm, that is, Christ, by his power, before the nations, so that all nations and the ends of the earth might see the salvation that was from God. So too, departing from Judaism itself, when they exchanged the bonds and burdens of the law for the freedom of the gospel, they were carrying out the psalm: “Let us burst their bonds and cast their yoke from us”; certainly after “the nations raged and the peoples meditated vain things; the kings of the earth stood up and the rulers gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ.” What then did the apostles suffer? “Every iniquity of persecution,” you say, “at the hands of the Creator's men, of course, as adversaries of the one they preached.” And why does the Creator, if he was the adversary of Christ, not only foretell that his apostles would suffer this, but also reproach it? For he would neither foretell the course of another god, of whom, as you people will have it, he was ignorant, nor reproach what he had himself brought about: “See how the righteous man perishes, and no one takes it to heart, and righteous men are taken away, and no one notices; for the righteous man has been taken away from the face of injustice.” Who, if not Christ? “Come,” they say, “let us take away the righteous man, because he is useless to us.” So, stating beforehand and adding afterwards that Christ likewise suffered, he prophesied that his righteous ones would suffer the same, the apostles as well as all the faithful after them; sealed, namely, with that mark of which Ezekiel speaks: “The Lord says to me: Pass through the midst of the gate, in the midst of Jerusalem, and put the sign Tau on the foreheads of the men.” For this very letter, the Greek Tau, our T, is the form of the cross, which he foretold would be on our foreheads in the true and catholic Jerusalem, in which the twenty-first psalm, speaking in the person of Christ himself to the Father, sings that Christ's brothers, the sons of God, would give glory to God: “I will declare your name to my brothers; in the midst of the church I will sing a hymn to you” (for what was to be done today in his name and Spirit he rightly foretold as to be done by himself); and a little further on: “From you is my praise in the great church”; and in the sixty-seventh: “In the churches bless the Lord God”; so that the prophecy of Micah might likewise agree: “My will is not in you, says the Lord, and I will not accept your sacrifices; for from the rising of the sun to its setting my name is glorified among the nations, and in every place a sacrifice is offered to my name, a pure sacrifice,” namely the rendering of glory, blessing, praise, and hymns. Since all these things are found in your church too, the sealing of foreheads, the sacraments of the churches, and the purity of the sacrifices, you ought now to burst out and say that the Spirit of the Creator prophesied of your Christ.