Against Marcion 4.19–4.22

That wealthy women attached themselves to Christ and also ministered to him from their means, among them the wife of the king's steward, comes from prophecy. For he called these through Isaiah: “Rich women, rise up and hear my voice,” to show them first as disciples, then as workers and ministers: “Daughters, in hope hear (my) words; remember the day of the year with labor in hope”; for with labor they followed him, and in hope they ministered.

Likewise, regarding parables, let it suffice to have proved once that this kind of speech was promised by the Creator. But now that saying of his to the people too, “With the ear you will hear and not hear,” gave Christ reason to press home often: “He who has ears, let him hear,” not as though Christ, being a different god, granted a hearing which the Creator had taken away, but because exhortation followed the threat. For those who had ears were not hearing of their own accord; he was showing that the ears of the heart were needed, with which the Creator had said they would not hear; and therefore through Christ he adds: “Take heed how you hear,” that is, lest you hear with the ear and not hear, hearing, that is, not with the heart but with the ear. If you fit a worthy sense to the saying, according to the mind of him who was rousing them to hear, then even by saying “Take heed how you hear” he was threatening those who would not hear. Surely the most gentle god does not threaten, since he neither judges nor is angry. This is proved also by the sense that follows: “To him who has, more will be given, but from him who has not, even what he thinks he has will be taken away.” What will be given? An increase of faith or of understanding, or salvation itself. What will be taken away? Surely what will be given. By whom will it be given, and taken away? If it is taken away by the Creator, it will also be given by him; if it is given by Marcion's god, it will also be taken away by him. Yet under whatever name he threatens the taking away, it will not belong to the god who does not know how to threaten, who knows nothing of anger. But I marvel that he should say a lamp is not usually hidden, he who had hidden himself through so long an age, a greater and more necessary light; that he should promise to bring everything out of secrecy into the open, he who keeps his god in shadow even until now, waiting, I suppose, for Marcion to be born.

We come to the argument most constantly used by all who dispute the Lord's birth. He himself, they say, testifies that he was not born, by saying: “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” So heretics always either snatch plain and simple words by conjecture to whatever sense they wish, or on the other hand dissolve words that are conditional and reasoned by treating them as simple, as in this place. We, on the contrary, say first that it could not have been announced to him that his mother and brothers were standing outside seeking to see him, if he had had no mother and no brothers; the one who announced it surely knew them, either known from before or learned then and there, while they were desiring to see him or while they themselves were sending the message. To this first proposition of ours the other side usually replies: (What if it was announced to him in order to test him? But Scripture does not say this; and just as it usually indicates when something was done by way of testing — “Behold, a lawyer stood up, testing him,” and on the question of tribute: “And the Pharisees came to him, testing him” — so, where it makes no mention of testing, it does not admit an interpretation of testing. And yet, more than is needed, I demand the reasons for the test: for what purpose would they have tested him by naming his mother and brothers? If it was to learn whether he had been born or not, when was this ever in question, that they should settle it by that test? Who would doubt that one he saw to be a man had been born? One he had heard declare himself the Son of Man? One whom, seeing every human quality in him, he would hesitate to believe God or the Son of God, more readily thinking him a prophet, however great, but surely born? Even if he had had to be tested to probe his birth, any other proof would have suited the test better than a mention of those persons whom he could have lacked even though born. Tell me, does a mother outlive everyone who is born? Are brothers born after everyone who is born? May one not rather have fathers and sisters, or even no one? Besides, it is established that a census had then been taken in Judea under Augustus by Sentius Saturninus, in whose records they could have inquired into his family. So the theory of this testing does not stand at all; his mother and brothers truly were standing outside, and it remains to discern the sense of one who says, not simply, “Who is my mother or my brothers?” as though denying his family and birth, but out of the necessity of the case and on a reasoned condition. For when persons so close stood outside, while strangers inside were intent on his words, and moreover sought to call him away from his solemn work, he was rightly indignant; he did not so much deny them as disown them. And so, when he had first said, “Who is my mother and who are my brothers?”, and then added, “except those who hear my words and do them,” he transferred the names of blood to others, whom he judged closer on account of faith. But no one transfers anything except one who has what he transfers. If, then, he made mother and brothers of those who were not, how did he deny those who were? Rather, by this very thing he the more confessed that he had a mother and brothers, in that he refused to acknowledge them, on the condition of deserts, that is, not by denying his kin, teaching in his own person that whoever put father or mother or brothers before the word of God was not a worthy disciple. By adopting others he confirmed those whom he denied because of offense, putting the others in their place not as more real but as more worthy. In short, it would be nothing great if he put faith before a blood kinship that he did not have.

But who is this who commands the winds and the sea? (No doubt a new ruler and owner of the elements, now that the Creator has been subdued and shut out. Not so. Rather, these substances recognized their own maker, they who had been used to obeying even his servants. Look into Exodus, Marcion: see the rod of Moses commanding the Red Sea, vaster than all the lakes of Judea, so that, split to its depths and held fixed on either side in equal astonishment at the division, it let the people pass over dry-shod by a path through its very bowels, and again, at the nod of the same rod, as nature returned, overwhelmed the Egyptian army as the waves came together; and the south winds too served that work. Read also that at its crossing the Jordan was a sword for dividing … family by lot, whose rush and downward course Joshua too had plainly taught to stand still while the prophets passed over. (What have you to say to this? If he is your Christ, he will not be more powerful than the Creator's servants. But I would have used only these examples if a prediction of this voyage on the sea had not also gone before Christ. For when he crosses the lake, a psalm is fulfilled: “The Lord,” it says, “upon many waters”; when he scatters the waves of the lake, Habakkuk is fulfilled: “Scattering waters on his way”; when the sea is dashed down at his threats, Nahum too is discharged: “Threatening the sea,” he says, “and drying it up,” surely along with the winds by which it was being stirred up. From which do you want my Christ to be vindicated? From the examples or from the prophets of the Creator?

Come now, you who think that a military and armed warrior is foretold, not figuratively or allegorically, one who would win a spiritual war against spiritual enemies with spiritual soldiery and spiritual weapons, spiritually: when you find in one man a multitude of demons calling itself a legion, surely a spiritual one, learn that Christ too is to be understood as the conqueror of spiritual enemies, spiritually armed and spiritually warlike, and that he is the very one who was to fight even with a legion of demons, so that the psalm may be seen to have spoken of this war too: “The Lord strong, the Lord mighty in battle.” For when he was to do battle with the last enemy, death, he triumphed through the trophy of the cross. But of which God did the legion testify that Jesus was the Son? Without doubt of the one whose torments and abyss they knew and feared. For they can hardly have been ignorant until then of what the power of a new and unknown god was working on earth, because it is not likely that the Creator was ignorant of it. For even if he had once been ignorant of another god above himself, yet he had surely found him out by now, acting beneath his own heaven. And what the master had found out would by now have become known to his whole household too, … in the same world and within the same circuit of heaven in which the foreign divinity was moving about. To the extent, then, that the Creator and his substance would have known of it, had it existed, to that extent it did not exist, because the demons knew no other Christ than the Christ of their own God. For they would not have begged from another what they remembered they must beg from the Creator, namely to be spared the Creator's abyss. And in the end they obtained it. For what merit? Because they had lied, because they had made him the son of a cruel god? And what kind of god will he be who helped liars and put up with slanderers? But no: because they had not lied, because they had recognized him as the God of the abyss and as their own, he himself thereby confirmed that he was the one whom the demons recognized, Jesus, Son of the God who judges and avenges.

Here is something too of those petty traits and weaknesses of the Creator in Christ — for I too wish to ascribe ignorance to him; allow me this against the heretic —: he is touched by a woman who was flowing with blood, and he did not know by whom. “Who touched me?” he says. Even when the disciples make excuses, he persists in the language of ignorance: “Someone touched me,” and he affirms it from evidence: “For I perceived that power had gone out from me.” What does the heretic say? Did he know the person? Then why did he speak as though he did not know? Surely to call forth her confession, to test her fear. So too (the Creator) once asked, as though he did not know: “Adam, where are you?” You have both the Creator excused along with Christ and Christ made equal to the Creator. (But this too, they say, he did as an opponent of the law: because the law keeps a bleeding woman from touching, he was eager not only to allow her touch but even to grant her healing. O god, beneficent not by nature but by rivalry! But if we find that the woman's faith merited this, since he said, “Your faith has saved you,” who are you to read rivalry with the law into this deed, which the Lord himself shows was done as a reward for faith? But you want to make this the woman's faith, that she had despised the law. And who could believe that a woman who was not yet aware of any (new) god, not yet initiated into any new law, would break through the law by which she was still bound? In short, by what faith did she break through it? Believing in what god? Despising the Creator for whom? Surely she touched him by faith in him. If by faith in the Creator, which knew no other god, how did she break through his law? For she broke through it, if she did, precisely as far as from faith in the Creator. But how will both fit together, that she both broke through it and broke through it by faith in the one on whose account she ought not to have broken through it? I will tell you. Her faith was first this: she trusted that her God prefers mercy to sacrifice itself, and she was sure that this God was at work in Christ. If with this faith she touched him, it was not as a holy man nor as a prophet, whom she would know could be defiled because of his human substance, but as God himself, who she had assumed could be polluted by no uncleanness. So she did not rashly interpret the law for herself as meaning that those things are defiled which are capable of defilement, not God, whom she trusted was in Christ. She also reflected that what the law regulates is the regular and customary flow of menstrual blood or of childbirth, which comes from the working of nature, not from a defect of health; but hers was overflowing from a defect of health, for which she knew that what was needed was not a limit of time but the help of divine mercy; and so she can be seen not to have broken through the law but to have drawn a distinction within it. This will be the faith that had also brought understanding: “Unless you believe,” he says, “you will not understand.” Approving this faith of the woman, who believed only in the Creator, Christ answered that he was the God of the faith which he approved. Nor will I pass over this: when his garment was touched, a garment surely put on a body and not on a phantom, a body too was being demonstrated; not as though we were going over this ground again, but because it bears on the present question. For if there was no reality of a body, a phantom, being an empty thing, surely could not be defiled. How then could one who cannot be defiled, because of the emptiness of his substance, have wanted it, as a rival of the law? He was lying, since he was not truly being polluted.

He sends the disciples out to preach the kingdom of God. Did he even here make known whose? He forbids them to carry anything on the journey for food or clothing. Who would have commanded this, except the one who both feeds the ravens and clothes the flowers of the field, who long before had commanded that the ox treading out the grain should have its mouth left free, so that it might be permitted to take fodder from its work, because the worker is worthy of his wage? Let Marcion delete these things, so long as their sense remains intact. But when he commands them to shake the dust off their feet against those by whom they had not been received, he orders this too to be done as a testimony. No one bears witness to what is not destined for judgment: one who orders inhospitality to be turned into testimony is threatening as a judge.

That no new god had been established by Christ was declared also by the common opinion of all, in which some asserted to Herod that Christ Jesus was John, others Elijah, others one of the old prophets. Whichever of these he had been, he surely would not have been raised for this purpose, to preach another god after his resurrection.

He feeds the people in the wilderness, after the ancient custom, of course. Or, if the majesty is not the same, then he is now less than the Creator, who sustained, not for one day but for forty years, not from lesser materials of bread and fish but from heavenly manna, not about five thousand but six hundred thousand men. But the majesty was so much (the same) that he willed the scantiness of the food not only to suffice but even to abound, after the ancient example. For so too, in the time of famine under Elijah, the small and last provisions of the widow of Zarephath had overflowed through the whole time of the famine by the prophet's blessing. You have the third book of Kingdoms. If you unroll the fourth as well, you will find this whole procedure of Christ in the case of that man of God who, when ten barley loaves were offered to him, ordered them to be distributed to the people; and when his servant, likewise comparing the multitude with the meagerness of the food, answered: “What then? Shall I set this before a hundred men?”, he said: “Give, and they will eat, for thus says the Lord: They will eat and leave some over,” according to the word of the Lord. O Christ, old even in what is new!

So Peter, who had seen these things and compared them with those of old, and had recognized them not only as deeds of the past but as already then prophesying the future, when the Lord asked who he seemed to them to be and he answered for all, “You are the Christ,” cannot have perceived him to be any Christ but the one he knew in the Scriptures, whom he was now recognizing in deeds. Christ himself confirms this too, bearing with it thus far, and indeed enjoining silence. For if Peter could not confess him as other than the Creator's Christ, and he commanded them to tell no one, surely what he did not want published was what Peter had perceived. No, you say: because Peter had not perceived rightly, he did not want a lie spread about. But he declared another reason for silence: that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and scribes and priests and be killed and rise again after the third day. Since these things too were foretold of the Creator's Christ, as we shall fully show in their places, in this way too he shows himself to be the one of whom they were foretold. Certainly, even if they had not been foretold, the reason he gave for the silence he imposed was one which showed no error of Peter's: the necessity of undergoing his sufferings.

“Whoever wishes,” he says, “to save his soul will lose it, and whoever loses it for my sake will save it.” Certainly the Son of Man uttered this sentence. Look, then, you too, together with the king of Babylon, into his burning furnace, and you will find there one like a son of man — for he was not yet truly so, not yet born of a human being — already then establishing these outcomes. He saves the souls of the three brothers, who had agreed to lose them for God, but he destroyed those of the Chaldeans, which they had preferred to save by idolatry. What is this new teaching, whose proofs are old? And indeed predictions of martyrdoms too have run their course, both of those to come and of those who would receive a reward from God: “See,” says Isaiah, “how the righteous man perished, and no one takes it to heart; and righteous men are taken away, and no one considers it.” When does this happen more than in persecution? … of his saints, surely not a simple death, nor one common by the law of nature, but that distinguished death, the soldier's death for the faith, in which whoever loses his soul for God's sake keeps it; so that here too you may recognize a judge, who will repay the soul's evil gain with its loss and the soul's good loss with its salvation. And he shows me a jealous God, returning evil for evil: “Whoever is ashamed of me,” he says, “of him will I also be ashamed.” … since the matter for shame fits none but my Christ, whose course is the more shameful in that it lies open even to the insults of heretics, who declaim with all the bitterness they can upon the whole foulness of his birth and upbringing and on the unworthiness of the flesh itself. But how will the other be liable to shame, when he is incapable of it? — he was not curdled in a womb, even though a virgin's, still a woman's, … and, even if not from seed, yet by the law of bodily substance, out of blood and fluid; he was not held to be flesh before he had form, nor called a mere animal thing after he took shape; he was not released after the torment of ten months, nor poured out onto the ground through the body's sewer, with the sudden shock of pains, along with the filth of so long a time; he did not greet the light at once with tears, from the first wound of his cord; he was not washed well, nor treated with salt and honey, nor initiated in swaddling clothes into what is already a burial wrapping, nor rolled thereafter through uncleanness from lap to lap, a nuisance at the breasts, long an infant, hardly a boy, late a man; no, he was set down from heaven, grown all at once, whole all at once, instantly Christ, spirit and power and God only. Moreover, (being) not real, since he was not seen, he was not to be blushed for on account of the curse of the cross either, whose reality he lacked, lacking a body. So he could not have said, “Whoever is ashamed of me.” Our Christ is the one who must have declared this, made a little lower than the angels by the Father, a worm and not a man, a reproach of men and the scorn of the people, to the extent that he willed, so that we might be healed by his bruise, so that our salvation might consist in his disgrace. And rightly he humbled himself for his own man, for his own image and likeness, not another's, so that, since man had (not) blushed to worship stone and wood, with the same boldness, unashamed of Christ, he might make satisfaction to God for the shamelessness of idolatry by the shamelessness of faith. Which of these things fits your Christ, Marcion, to make him deserve shame? Plainly you ought to be ashamed that you made him up yourself.

Now you ought to have blushed most of all at this: that you allow him to be seen, on the retreat of the mountain, with Moses and Elijah, whom he had come to destroy. This, no doubt, is what that voice from heaven meant to be understood: “This is my beloved Son; hear him,” that is, no longer Moses and Elijah. Then the voice alone would have been enough, without a display of Moses and Elijah. For by defining whom they should hear, he would have forbidden any others whatever to be heard. Or did he allow Isaiah and Jeremiah and the rest, whom he did not display, to be heard, if he forbade those whom he displayed? Now, even if their presence was necessary, surely they would not have been shown in conversation with him, which is a sign of intimacy, nor sharing his glory, which is a token of esteem and favor, but in some squalor, which is a proof of destruction; or rather in the Creator's darkness, which he had been sent to scatter, set far apart even from the glory of Christ, who was going to separate their very words and writings from his gospel. Is this how he shows them to be strangers, by keeping them with him? Is this how one should abandon those whom he joins to himself? Is this how he destroys those whom he builds up with his own rays? What would their own Christ have done? I suppose, by this perversity, he would have revealed them as Marcion's Christ ought to have done, or would (have shown) any others at all with him rather than his own prophets. But what is so proper to the Creator's Christ as to show his own heralds with him? To be seen with those to whom he had appeared in revelations? To speak with those who had spoken of him? To share his glory with those by whom he had been called the Lord of glory? With his chief servants, one of whom was once the shaper of the people and the other at some time its reshaper, one the initiator of the old testament and the other the finisher of the new? So Peter too, recognizing the fitting company of his Christ, suggests a plan for keeping him (in) their company: “It is good for us to be here” — good indeed, where Moses and Elijah are, of course — “and let us make three tabernacles here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” (But not knowing what he said. How not knowing? Was it by simple error, or on the principle by which we maintain, in the cause of the new prophecy, that ecstasy, that is, being out of one's mind, belongs to grace? For a man placed in the Spirit, especially when he beholds the glory of God or when God speaks through him, must of necessity lose his senses, being overshadowed, that is, by the divine power. Although there is a dispute on this between us and the psychics, meanwhile it is easy to prove that Peter was out of his mind. For how would he have recognized Moses and Elijah — for the people had no images or statues of them, nor likenesses, since the law forbade them — except because he had seen them in the Spirit? And so what he said, being placed in the Spirit and not in his senses, he could not know. But if he did not know in the sense of erring, because he thought the Christ belonged to them, then it is established that earlier too, when Christ asked whom they thought him to be, Peter said, “You are the Christ,” of the Creator's Christ; because, if he had then recognized him as another god's, he would not have erred here either. But if he erred here because he had erred earlier too, then you are certain that up to that day no new divinity had been revealed by Christ, that Peter had not erred up to then, since Christ up to then had revealed nothing of the kind, and that Christ must be reckoned no other's than the Creator's all that time, whose whole pattern he expressed here too. He takes three of his disciples as witnesses of the vision and voice to come. This too is the Creator's way: “On three witnesses,” he says, “every word shall stand.” He withdraws up a mountain. I recognize the pattern of the place. For the Creator too had initiated the ancient people at a mountain, with a vision and with his voice. It was fitting that the new testament should be sealed on that platform on which the old had been written, and under the same enveloping cloud, which no one will doubt was massed together from the Creator's air — unless he had brought down his own clouds too — since he too had forced his way through the Creator's sky. Or did he likewise use the Creator's cloud on loan? So neither now was the cloud mute, but there was the accustomed voice from heaven, and the Father's new testimony about the Son, to whom he says in the second psalm: “You are my Son; today I have begotten you,” and of whom also through Isaiah: “Who fears God? Let him hear the voice of his Son.” So, presenting him now — “This is my Son” — surely he implies: whom I promised. For if he once promised and afterward says, “This is he,” it belongs to one who once promised to use such words when pointing out the one promised, not to one to whom it could be answered: ‘Who are you yourself, to say, “This is my Son,” of whom you gave no more notice beforehand than you revealed yourself, what you were before?’ “Hear him,” then! Whom? (Who but the one whom) from the beginning he had declared must be heard, under the name of a prophet, since he was also to be thought a prophet by the people: “A prophet,” says Moses, “God will raise up for us from your sons” — according to fleshly descent, that is — “you shall hear him as you hear me. And everyone who will not hear him, his soul shall be cut off from his people.” So too Isaiah: “Who among you fears (God)? Let him hear the voice of his Son,” a voice which the Father himself was going to commend: “establishing,” he says, “the words of his Son,” namely by saying: “This is my beloved Son; hear him.” So even if the hearing was transferred from Moses and Elijah to Christ, it was not as from another god nor to another Christ, but from the Creator to his Christ, in keeping with the departure of the old testament and the succession of the new: “Not an envoy,” says Isaiah, “nor a messenger, but God himself will save them,” now himself preaching and fulfilling the law and the prophets. So the Father handed the new disciples over to the Son, after Moses and Elijah had first been shown with him in the privilege of glory and then dismissed, as though now discharged from both office and honor, so that this very point might be confirmed, for Marcion's sake: that Christ shares even his glory with Moses and Elijah.

The whole shape of this vision we have also in Habakkuk, where the Spirit speaks at times in the person of the apostles: “Lord, I have heard your report and was afraid” — at what, more than at that heavenly voice, “This is my beloved Son; hear him”? — “I considered your work (and) was out of my mind” — when more than when Peter, having seen his glory, did not know what he said? — “In the midst of two living creatures you will be known,” that is, Moses and Elijah, whom Zechariah too saw in the figure of two olive trees and two olive branches. For these are the ones of whom it was said to him: “The two sons of fatness stand by the Lord of the whole earth.” And again the same Habakkuk: “His power covered the heavens,” surely with that cloud, “and his splendor will be like light,” surely the light with which even his clothing shone. And if we recall the promise to Moses, it will be found fulfilled here. For Moses had longed for the sight of the Lord, saying: “If then I have found favor before you, show yourself to me, that I may see you knowingly,” longing for that sight in which the Lord would be acting as a man, as the prophet knew — for the face of God, he had already heard, no man shall see and live —; and the Lord said: “This word too, which you have spoken, I will do for you.” And again Moses: “Show me your glory.” And the Lord likewise, of the future: “I will go before you in my glory,” and the rest. And at the end: “And then you will see my back parts,” not the loins or the calves, but the glory he had longed for, to be revealed in the latter times, in which he had promised that he would be visible to him face to face, saying also to Aaron: “And if there is a prophet among you, I will be known to him in a vision and will speak to him in a vision, not as to Moses; mouth to mouth will I speak to him, in form” — surely the form of the man he was going to bear — “not in a riddle.” For even if Marcion did not want him shown conversing with the Lord, but only standing there, yet even standing he stood mouth to mouth and face to face — “with him,” it says, “not apart from him” — in his very glory, not merely in his sight. From that glory he departed from Christ illumined no differently than he used to depart from the Creator, dazzling the eyes of the sons of Israel then, just as now those of blinded Marcion, who did not see that this argument too tells against him.