Against Marcion 4.11–4.14

He brings forward as an argument the tax collector chosen by the Lord, as though chosen by an adversary of the law, a stranger to the law and a profane outsider to Judaism. He forgot Peter, a man of the law, who was not only chosen but also received testimony for the recognition given him by the Father; he had nowhere read that Christ was foretold as the light and hope and expectation of the nations. On the contrary, Christ rather approved the Jews in saying that the physician is not needed by the healthy but by the sick. For if he wished the heathen and tax collectors whom he was choosing to be understood as the sick, he was confirming that the Jews were healthy, to whom he said a physician was not needed. If this is so, he did wrong to come down to destroy the law, as if to cure a bad illness, since those who lived under it were in good health and had no need of a physician. And what sort of thing is it that he put forward the comparison of a physician and did not carry it out? For as no one brings a physician to the healthy, so no one brings one to those who are so much strangers as man is to Marcion's god, man having his own author and protector, and from him rather Christ as physician. The comparison settles this in advance: that a physician is rather provided by the one to whom the sick belong. But where did John come from, too, into the midst? A sudden Christ, a sudden John! So are all things with Marcion which have their own full order with the Creator. But the rest about John elsewhere; for each point must be answered as it comes up. Now I shall maintain this: to show that John agrees with Christ and Christ with John, as the Creator's prophet agrees with the Creator's Christ, and so let the heretic blush, having frustrated John's course in vain. For if John had done nothing at all as, according to Isaiah, the one crying out in the wilderness and preparer of the Lord's ways by proclaiming and commending repentance; if he had not also dipped Christ himself among the rest, no one would have challenged Christ's disciples, who ate and drank, by the standard of John's disciples, who were constantly fasting and praying; because, if there had been any difference between Christ and John and the flock of each, there would be no demand for comparison, and the aim of the challenge would be empty. For no one would wonder, and no one would be troubled, if the rival preachings of different divinities did not agree with each other about disciplines either, when they did not first agree about the authorities behind those disciplines. So Christ was John's, and John Christ's, both belonging to the Creator, and both preachers and teachers from the law and the prophets. If Christ had rejected John's discipline as belonging to another god, and had defended his disciples as rightly walking otherwise, as initiated, that is, into another and contrary divinity, well and good; but as it is, humbly giving the reason that the sons of the bridegroom could not fast while the bridegroom was with them, and promising that they would fast afterwards, when the bridegroom had been taken away from them, he neither defended his disciples, but rather excused them, as not having been rebuked without reason, nor rejected John's discipline, but rather conceded it, appointing it to his own time; whereas he would otherwise have rejected it and defended its rivals, if what was already in existence had not been his own. I hold my Christ in the name of bridegroom too, of whom the psalm says: “He is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber; his going forth is from the height of heaven, and his return to its very height”; who also rejoices to the Father through Isaiah: “Let my soul exult in the Lord, for he has clothed me with the garment of salvation and the tunic of joy; like a bridegroom he has put a miter on me, like a bride …” For he reckons the church too as in himself, of whom the same Spirit says to him: “And you will put them all around you like a bride's ornament.” This bride Christ also summons to himself through Solomon from the calling of the nations, since you have read: “Come, bride, from Lebanon”; with an elegant mention of Mount Lebanon, of course, whose name among the Greeks means frankincense, for he was betrothing the church to himself out of idolatry. Deny now, Marcion, that you are utterly mad. See, you are attacking the law of your own god too. He does not join marriages, does not admit those already joined, dips no one but a celibate or a eunuch, and reserves baptism for death or divorce. Why then do you make his Christ a bridegroom? This is the name of the one who joined male and female, not of one who separated them. You have also erred in that saying of the Lord in which he seems to distinguish new things and old. You are puffed up with old wineskins and have lost your brain to new wine, and so have sewn onto the old, that is the earlier, gospel the patch of heretical novelty. In what, I should like to learn, does the Creator differ? When he commands through Jeremiah, “Break up new fallow ground for yourselves,” does he not turn them away from the old? When he declares through Isaiah, “The old things have passed away; behold the new things which I make,” does he not turn them to the new? We have long since established that this appointment of former things, promised rather by the Creator, is displayed by Christ, under the authority of one and the same God, to whom both the old and the new belong. For no one commits new wine to old wineskins who has no old wineskins, and no one puts a new patch on an old garment unless he also has an old garment. He does not do something, if it is not to be done, who has the means to do it, if it were to be done. So if he was aiming the comparison at this, to show that he was separating the newness of the gospel from the oldness of the law, he was showing that the one from which he was separating it was also his own. The separation of things belonging to others would not have been worth noting, since no one joins his own things to another's in order to be able to separate them from another's. Separation presupposes the joining from which it is made. So the things he was separating he was also showing to have been in one, as they would have remained if he had not separated them. And yet, if we grant this separation, it is by reformation, by enlargement, by progress; as the fruit is separated from the seed, though the fruit comes from the seed, so the gospel is separated from the law while it advances out of the law: other than it, but not foreign to it; different, but not contrary. Nor is Christ's manner of speech new. When he puts forward comparisons, when he refutes questions, it comes from the seventy-seventh psalm: “I will open my mouth,” he says, “in a parable,” that is, a comparison; “I will utter problems,” that is, I will set out questions. If he had wished to show himself a man of another nation, he would certainly have shown it by the peculiarity of his speech.

About the sabbath too I state this first: that this question could not have arisen if Christ had not been proclaiming the God of the sabbath. For there would have been no dispute about why he was destroying the sabbath, if it was his duty to destroy it. And it would have been his duty to destroy it if he belonged to another god, and no one would have wondered at his doing what suited him. They wondered, therefore, because it did not suit him to proclaim God the Creator and attack his sabbath. And, to settle each first point so as not to renew the same things everywhere against every argument of the adversary that leans on some new institution of Christ, this definition will now stand: that the newness of each institution was disputed because nothing had yet been published about the newness of a divinity, just as there was no dispute about … ; and that it cannot be turned round from the very newness of any institution into a sufficient demonstration by Christ of another divinity, since it has been established that the newness itself, having been announced by the Creator, is not to be wondered at in Christ; and since another god ought certainly to have been set forth first, and his discipline introduced afterwards, because God gives authority to discipline, not discipline to God; unless Marcion, plainly so perverse, learned his letters not through a master but his master through letters. For the rest, I direct the matter of the sabbath thus. If Christ overthrew the sabbath, he did so after the Creator's example, since at the siege of the city of Jericho, when the ark of the covenant was carried round the walls for seven days, on the sabbath too, the Creator by his command destroyed the sabbath through work, as those think who hold this of Christ too, not knowing that neither Christ nor the Creator destroyed the sabbath, as we shall show shortly. And yet even then the sabbath was shaken through a Jesus, so that this too might be reported of Christ. Even if he pursued with hatred the most solemn day of the Jews, as a Christ not of the Jews, in professing hatred of the sabbath he also professed the Creator, as his Christ, following him who cried out by the mouth of Isaiah, “Your new moons and your sabbaths my soul hates.” But we also know in what sense these words too were said. Still, in this kind of case even an abrupt defense must be used against an abrupt challenge. Now I will argue about the very matter in which Christ's discipline seemed to destroy the sabbath. The disciples had been hungry that day; they had plucked ears of grain and rubbed them in their hands; by preparing food they had broken the holy rest. Christ excuses them and is charged with violating the sabbath; the Pharisees accuse. Marcion seizes on the issue of the controversy as though (to play a little with the truth of my Lord) it were a case of letter against intent: for the Creator's side is taken from the letter, and Christ's pretext from the intent, as though … from the example of David, who went into the temple on the sabbath and prepared food, boldly breaking the loaves of the presence. For he too remembered that this privilege had been granted to the sabbath from the beginning, when the day itself was first known: I mean exemption from fasting. For when the Creator forbade manna to be gathered for two days, he allowed it only on the day of preparation, so that the provision of food on the day before might free the rest of the following sabbath from fasting. It is well, then, that the Lord followed the same reason in destroying the sabbath, if they will have it so called; well, that he expressed the Creator's disposition too in honoring the sabbath by not fasting. In short, he would really have destroyed the sabbath, and the Creator himself, only if he had ordered his disciples to fast on the sabbath, against the letter and the intent of the Creator. But since he does not firmly defend his disciples but excuses them; since he sets human need against the charge as a plea; since he keeps the higher honor of the sabbath, that of not being made sad, rather than that of resting; since he puts David and his companions on a level with his own disciples in both fault and pardon; since he is pleased because the Creator allowed it; since by his example he too is so good: is he for that reason foreign to the Creator? Next the Pharisees watch whether he will heal on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him: certainly as a destroyer of the sabbath, not as the proclaimer of a new god. For perhaps I shall press this one point everywhere: that another Christ was nowhere proclaimed. But the Pharisees were wholly mistaken about the law of the sabbath, not noticing that God imposes rest from work conditionally, under a certain kind of work. For when he says of the sabbath day, “You shall not do any of your work on it,” by saying “your” he defined it as human work, which each one performs from his craft or business, not divine work. But the work of salvation and safety is not man's but properly God's; as again in the law: “You shall not do any work on it,” he says, “except what shall be done for every soul,” that is, in the cause of saving a soul, because God's work can be done through a man too for the salvation of a soul, yet by God. This Christ too was going to do as man, inasmuch as he was also God. Wishing, then, to lead them into this sense of the law through the restoration of the withered hand, he asks: “Is it lawful on the sabbath to do good or not? to save a life or to destroy it?” so that, by permitting the work he was about to do for a soul, he might remind them which works the law of the sabbath forbade, namely human ones, and which it enjoined, namely divine ones, which would be done for every soul; being called Lord of the sabbath because he protected the sabbath as his own possession. Even if he had destroyed it, he would have done so rightly as its Lord, still more he who instituted it. But he did not destroy it at all as its Lord, so that from this it can now be seen that not even at the carrying round of the ark at Jericho was the sabbath destroyed by the Creator. For that too was God's work, which he himself had commanded and which he had arranged for the sake of the souls of his people, placed in the danger of war. And if somewhere he professed hatred of sabbaths, by saying “your sabbaths,” counting them as men's, not his own, which the people celebrated without the fear of God, full of sins, loving God with their lips and not their heart, he gave a different standing to his own sabbaths, that is, those kept according to his discipline; these he afterwards declares through the same prophet to be true, delightful, and not to be profaned. So Christ did not rescind the sabbath at all, whose law he kept, both above, in the case of the disciples, working for a soul (for he allowed the hungry the comfort of food), and now in healing the withered hand, pressing home everywhere by his deeds, “I have not come to dissolve the law but to fulfill it,” even though Marcion has stopped his mouth over this saying. For here too he fulfilled the law, while interpreting its condition, while throwing light on the difference of works, while doing what the law excepts from the rest of the sabbath, while by his good deed making more holy the sabbath day itself, holy from the beginning by the Father's blessing, a day on which, that is, he provided divine help; which an adversary would have provided on other days, so as not to adorn the Creator's sabbath and not to render to the sabbath the works due to it. If on that day the prophet Elisha too restored to life the dead son of the Shunammite woman, you see, Pharisee, and you, Marcion, that it was long ago the Creator's to do good on sabbaths, to save life and not destroy it, and that Christ brought in nothing new that is not from the pattern, the gentleness, the mercy, and the foretelling too of the Creator. For here also he makes present the prophecy of a particular healing: “Slack hands grow strong,” as also slack knees did in the paralytic.

Certainly he brings good news of peace and all good things to Zion and Jerusalem; certainly he goes up the mountain and spends the night there in prayer, and is surely heard by the Father. Unroll the prophets, then, and recognize the whole sequence. “Go up on a high mountain,” says Isaiah, “you who bring good news to Zion; lift up your voice with strength, you who bring good news to Jerusalem.” (With strength still: they were amazed at his teaching, for he was teaching as one having power.) And again: “Therefore my people will know my name on that day” (what name, if not Christ's?) “that I am he who speaks”; for he it was then who spoke in the prophets, the Word, the Son of the Creator. “I am here while there is time, upon the mountains, as one bringing the good news of peace, as one bringing good news of good things.” Likewise Nahum, of the Twelve: “For behold the swift feet on the mountain of one bringing good news of peace.” Of the voice of prayer to the Father by night, the psalm plainly says: “My God, I will cry by day, and you will not hear; and by night, and it will not be in vain for me.” And elsewhere the psalm, of the same place and voice: “With my voice I cried to the Lord, and he heard me from his holy mountain.” You have the representation of the name; you have the act of one bringing good news; you have the place, the mountain, and the time, night, and the sound of the voice, and the Father's hearing: you have the Christ of the prophets. But why did he choose twelve apostles, and not some other number? So that I could interpret my Christ from this too, as foretold not only by the words of the prophets but also by the evidence of events. For I find figures of this number with the Creator: the twelve springs of Elim; the twelve gems on the priestly robe of Aaron; and the twelve stones chosen by Joshua from the Jordan and laid up in the ark of the covenant. For just so many apostles were portended: like springs and rivers, to water the world of the nations, formerly dry and deserted of the knowledge of God (as also through Isaiah: “I will put rivers in a waterless land”); like gems, to give light to the sacred robe of the church, which Christ, the Father's high priest, put on; and like stones, solid in faith, which the true Jesus chose out of the washing of the Jordan and received into the sanctuary of his covenant. What of this kind, by way of defending the number, fits Marcion's Christ? Nothing can be seen as done simply by him which can be seen as not done simply by mine. The thing will belong to him with whom the preparation for the thing is found. He changes Peter's name too from Simon, because the Creator also re-formed the names of Abraham, Sarah, and Hoshea, calling the last Joshua and adding syllables to the others. But why Peter in particular? If for the strength of his faith, many materials, equally solid, could have lent a name from their own. Or is it because Christ is both rock and stone? For we read that he was set as a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense. I pass over the rest. So he chose to share a name especially with the dearest of his disciples from among his own figures, more appropriately, I think, than from figures not his own. A multitude comes together from Tyre and other regions, even from overseas. The psalm was looking to this: “And behold, the foreigners and Tyre and the people of the Ethiopians, these were there. Mother Zion, a man will say, and a man was born in her” (for God was born man) “and he has built her” (by the Father's will); so that you may know that the Gentiles then came together to him who, being God, had been born man, to build the church by the Father's will from foreigners too. So also Isaiah: “Behold, these come from far off, and these from the north and the sea, and others from the land of the Persians”; of whom again: “Lift up your eyes round about and see: they are all gathered together”; and of whom further on, seeing people unknown and strangers: “And you will say in your heart, Who has borne me these? … Who has brought these up for me? And where were these for me?” Will this be the Christ not of the prophets? And who will be the Christ of the Marcionites? If perversity pleases, one who did not belong to the prophets.

I come now to his regular sayings, through which he introduces the distinctive character of his teaching; to Christ's edict, so to speak: “Blessed are the beggars” (for so the interpretation of the Greek word demands), “for theirs is the kingdom of God.” Already the very fact that he began with blessings belongs to the Creator, who consecrated all things, as he brought them forth, with no other word than a blessing: “My heart,” he says, “has uttered a most excellent word.” This will be the most excellent word, the word of blessing, which is recognized as inaugurating the new testament too, after the example of the old. What wonder, then, if he entered upon his work through a saying of this kind from the dispositions of the Creator, who always loves, comforts, protects, and vindicates beggars, the poor, the lowly, widows, and orphans, so that you may believe this seemingly private kindness of Christ to be a stream from the springs of the Savior? Truly I do not know where to turn among so great a multitude of such sayings, as in a forest, or a meadow, or an orchard. They must be gathered here and there as they come. The psalm cries out: “Do justice to the orphan and the beggar, and treat the lowly and poor justly; set free the poor, and rescue the beggar from the hand of the sinner.” Likewise the seventy-first psalm: “He will judge the beggars of the people in righteousness, and will save the sons of the poor”; and in what follows, of Christ: “All nations will serve him” (but David ruled over the one Jewish nation, so let no one think it spoken of David, because he too took in the lowly and those in distress), “because he has set free,” it says, “the beggar from the mighty; he will spare the beggar and the poor, and will save the souls of the poor; from usury and injustice he will redeem their souls, and their name will be honored in his sight.” Likewise: “Let the sinners be turned into the underworld, all the nations that forget God; for the beggar will not be forgotten for ever; the endurance of the poor will not perish for ever.” Likewise: “Who is like our God, who dwells on high and looks upon lowly things in heaven and on earth; who raises the beggar from the earth and lifts the poor from the dunghill, to make him sit with the princes of the people,” in his kingdom, of course? So too earlier, in the books of Kingdoms, Hannah, the mother of Samuel, giving glory to God in the Spirit: “Who raises the poor from the earth,” she says, “and lifts the beggar from the dunghill, to make him sit with the mighty of the people and on thrones of glory,” royal thrones, of course. And through Isaiah, how he inveighs against the oppressors of the needy! “But you, why have you burned my vineyard, and the plunder of the beggar is in your houses? Why do you injure my people and put the face of the beggars to shame?” And again: “Woe to those who write wickedness! For writing they write what is evil, avoiding the judgments of the beggars and plundering the rights of the poor of my people.” These judgments he demands for orphans and widows too, as for the needy, for their comfort: “Do justice to the orphan and treat the widow justly, and come, let us be reconciled, says the Lord.” He who has so great an affection for every condition of lowliness, his too will be the kingdom which Christ promises, since those to whom it is promised have long belonged to his affection. For even if you think that the Creator's promises were earthly and Christ's heavenly: it is well that no heaven of any other god has yet appeared, except his to whom the earth also belongs; it is well that the Creator promised lesser things first, so that I may more easily believe him about greater things too than one who never first built up belief in his generosity with lesser things. “Blessed are the hungry, for they will be filled.” I could have transferred this heading to the one above, since the hungry are none other than the poor and the beggars, if the Creator had not appointed this promise too particularly, as a groundwork for his gospel, of course; since through Isaiah he says of those whom he was to call from the end of the earth, the nations, of course: “Behold, they will come swiftly, lightly” (swiftly, as hastening at the end of the times; lightly, as without the burdens of the former law); “they will not hunger or thirst.” Therefore they will be filled, which is certainly not promised except to the hungry and thirsty. And again: “Behold,” he says, “those who serve me will be filled, but you will hunger; behold, those who serve me will drink, but you will thirst.” We shall see whether these opposites too are furnished beforehand for Christ. Meanwhile, the promise of fullness to the hungry belongs to the Creator. “Blessed are those who weep, for they will laugh.” Run through the saying of Isaiah: “Behold, those who serve me will be delighted, but you will be put to shame; behold, those who serve me will exult in joy, but you will cry out for sorrow of heart.” These opposites too we shall recognize in Christ. Certainly delight and exultation in joy are promised to those in the opposite condition, the sad, the sorrowful, and the anxious. So too the hundred and twenty-fifth psalm says: “Those who sow in tears will reap in exultation.” Further, laughter comes to those who exult and receive joy, just as weeping to those who grieve and suffer. So the Creator, foretelling the occasions of laughter and weeping, was first to say that those who weep would laugh. So he who began with the comfort of the poor, the lowly, the hungry, and the weeping was eager at once to present himself as the one whom he had shown through Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor” (“Blessed are the beggars, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”); “he has sent me to heal the brokenhearted” (“Blessed are those who hunger, for they will be filled”); “to call the sick” (“Blessed are those who weep, for they will laugh”); “to give to those who mourn in Zion glory, and instead of ashes the oil of joy, and a garment of glory instead of a spirit of weariness.” If Christ, as soon as he was received, carried out these things, either he is the one who foretold that he would come for these things, or, if the one who foretold has not yet come (I would say it absurdly, but necessarily), perhaps he commissioned Marcion's Christ! “Blessed will you be when men hate you and reproach you and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man.” By this declaration he doubtless exhorts to endurance. What less does the Creator say through Isaiah? “Do not fear reproach from men, and do not be diminished by their scorn.” What reproach, what scorn? That which was to come on account of the Son of Man. Which Son of Man? The one who is according to the Creator. How shall we prove it? From the hatred foretold against him too, as through Isaiah to the Jews, the authors of the hatred: “Because of you my name is blasphemed among the nations”; and elsewhere: “Hallow him who limits his own life, who is held in contempt by the nations, by servants and magistrates.” For if hatred was foretold against that Son of Man who is according to the Creator, and the gospel testifies that the name of Christians, certainly derived from Christ, will be hated on account of the Son of Man, that is, Christ, then it makes the cause of the hatred that Son of Man who was according to the Creator, against whom the hatred was foretold. And certainly, if he had not yet come, the hatred of the name, which is at work today, could not have come before the person who bears the name. For he is both hallowed among us, and he limits his own life, laying it down for us, and he is held in contempt by the nations. So the one who was born will be the Son of Man, on account of whom our name too is rejected.