Against Marcion 4.10

The paralytic too is healed, and that in a gathering, with the people looking on. “For the people,” says Isaiah, “will see the majesty of the Lord and the glory of God.” What majesty and what glory? “Be strong, you slack hands and loosened knees” (this will be paralysis); “be strong, do not fear.” Not idly repeating “be strong,” nor pointlessly adding “do not fear,” since with the restoration of the limbs he was promising the return of strength as well (“Rise and take up your bed”), and at the same time vigor of mind not to fear those who were going to say, “Who will forgive sins but God alone?” So you have here the fulfilled prophecy both of the particular healing and of what followed the healing. Recognize Christ as the forgiver of sins too in the same prophet: “For,” he says, “he will forgive the sins of many, and he himself will take away our sins.” For at the very beginning too, in the person of the Lord himself: “Even if your sins are like rose-red, I will make them white as snow; even if like scarlet, I will make them white as wool”; showing in the rose-red the blood of the prophets, and in the scarlet, as brighter, the blood of the Lord. Micah too, of the pardon of sins: “Who is a God like you, taking away iniquities and passing over the injustices of the remnant of your inheritance? And he has not kept his anger as a testimony, because he delights in mercy. He will turn and have mercy on us; he will sink our sins, and he will sink our sins into the depth of the sea.” But even if nothing of the kind had been foretold of Christ, I would have examples of this kindness in the Creator, which promise me the Father's affection in the Son too. I see the Ninevites obtaining pardon for their crimes from the Creator, not to say from Christ even then, who from the beginning acted in the Father's name. I read too that the prophet Nathan said to David, when he acknowledged his sin against Uriah, “And the Lord has put away your sin, and you shall not die”; likewise that King Ahab, husband of Jezebel, guilty of idolatry and of the blood of Naboth, obtained pardon on the ground of repentance; and that Jonathan, the son of Saul, wiped out by entreaty the guilt of breaking a fast. Why should I recount the people itself, so often restored by the forgiveness of sins, by that God, of course, who prefers mercy to sacrifice and the repentance of the sinner to his death? First, then, you must deny that the Creator ever forgave sins; next, you must show that he foretold nothing of the kind of his Christ; and so you will prove that this kindness of Christ, a new Christ, of course, is new, if you prove that it is neither equal to the Creator's nor foretold by the Creator. But whether forgiving sins can belong to one who is denied to retain them, whether it is his to acquit whose it is not also to condemn, and whether it is fitting for him to pardon against whom nothing has been committed, we have already engaged elsewhere, and prefer to recall rather than rehandle. About the Son of Man our prescription is twofold: that Christ could not lie so as to declare himself Son of Man if he was not truly so; and that no one is constituted son of man who is not born of a human being, whether father or mother. And so we must discuss of which human being he should be taken as son, father's or mother's. If he is from God the Father, then certainly not from a human father; if he is not from a human father, it remains that he is from a human mother; if from a human mother, it is now clear that he is from a virgin. For one to whom no human father is given will not have a husband assigned to his mother either; and one to whom no husband is assigned is a virgin. Otherwise two fathers will be held, God and a man, if the mother is not a virgin. For she will have a husband, so as not to be a virgin, and by having a husband she will make two fathers, God and man, for one who would be the son both of God and of a man. Such a birth, perhaps, the fables give to Castor or Hercules. If these points are distinguished thus, that is, if he is son of man from his mother, because not from a father, and from a virgin mother, because not from a human father, this will be Isaiah's Christ, whom he foretells a virgin will conceive. On what ground, then, you admit him as Son of Man, Marcion, I cannot see. If as son of a human father, you deny he is the Son of God; if also of God, you make Christ the Hercules of fable; if only of a human mother, you grant me mine; if neither of a human mother nor of a human father, then he is son of no human being, and he must have told a lie who said he was what he was not. One thing can relieve your straits: if you dare either to give your god, the father of Christ, the name of Man as well, as Valentinus did with his Aeon, or to deny that the virgin was human, which not even Valentinus did. What now if Christ is registered under the very title Son of Man in Daniel? Will that not suffice to prove him the prophetic Christ? For when he calls himself what was foretold of the Creator's Christ, he doubtless offers himself to be understood as the one of whom it was foretold. A sharing of names may perhaps be seen as simple chance (and yet we maintain that he ought not to have been called either Christ or Jesus, holding to the condition of difference); but a designation, such as “Son of Man,” in so far as it arises from a circumstance, is the harder to coincide, over and above a sharing of names, since it arises from a particular circumstance, especially when the cause by which it would come to be shared does not agree. And so, since a designation belongs properly to the one in whom it has its cause, if it is also claimed for another who shares the name, then the sharing of the name too becomes suspect in the one for whom a shared designation is claimed without cause; and it follows that the one is to be believed who is found more fitted for both name and designation, while the other is excluded who has no share in the designation, lacking its cause. And none will be more fitted for both than the one who first received both the name of Christ and the designation Son of Man, namely the Creator's Jesus. He it is who was seen by the king of Babylon in the furnace as the fourth with his martyrs, “like a son of man”; the same who was revealed to Daniel himself directly as a Son of Man, coming with the clouds of heaven as judge, as Scripture also shows. I have said that this could have been enough about the prophetic naming of the Son of Man. But Scripture gives me more, namely the Lord's own interpretation. For when the Jews, looking only at his humanity and not yet sure of his divinity, as being also Son of God, rightly objected that a man could not forgive sins, but God alone, why did he not answer them, according to their meaning, about a man, that he had authority to forgive sins, when by naming the Son of Man he would be naming a man? Why, unless he wished to strike them back with the very designation “Son of Man” from the book of Daniel, to show that a man too was the one who forgave sins: namely that one alone, the Son of Man in Daniel's prophecy, who received the authority to judge, and through it, of course, to forgive sins as well (for he who judges also acquits), so that, this stumbling-block being removed by the recollection of Scripture, they might more easily recognize him as the Son of Man himself from the very forgiveness of sins. Indeed, he nowhere professed himself Son of Man before this passage, the first in which he forgave sins, that is, the first in which he judged, by acquitting. Consider what sort of thing the opposing side argues against this, whatever it is. For it must tend to this madness: to maintain that he is Son of Man, so as not to make him a liar, and to deny that he was born of a human being, so as not to concede that he is the son of a virgin. But if divine authority, the nature of things, and common sense do not admit the heretical insanity, here too is an opportunity to interject, as briefly as possible, about the substance of his body against Marcion's phantoms. If he was born of a human being, as Son of Man, he is body from body. You would plainly more easily find a man born without a heart or a brain, like Marcion himself, than without a body, like Marcion's Christ. And so examine the heart, or the brain, of the man from Pontus.