Against Marcion 4.42

For having brought him to Pilate they began to charge him with calling himself Christ the King, no doubt (the Son of God who would sit at God's right hand). Otherwise they would have pressed him with some other charge, uncertain whether he had called himself Son of God, (un)less he had said “You say so” in such a way as to mean that he was what they said. To Pilate too, when he asked, “Are you the Christ?”, he (answered) likewise, “You say so,” lest from fear of authority he should seem to have answered more fully.

So the Lord was set up in judgment — “And he has set his people in judgment; the Lord himself comes into judgment with the elders and rulers of the people,” according to Isaiah — and from then on he fulfilled everything written about his passion: “The nations raged together, and the peoples plotted vain things; the kings of the earth stood up and the rulers gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ.” The nations were the Romans who were with Pilate; the peoples, the tribes of Israel; (the kings) are seen in Herod, (the rulers) in the chief priests. For when he was sent by Pilate to Herod as a gift, he kept faith with the words of Hosea, who had prophesied of Christ: “And they will lead him bound as a present to the king.” Herod was indeed delighted at seeing Jesus, and heard no word from him. For “like a lamb before its shearer so he did not open his mouth,” because the Lord had given him the tongue of discipline to know when he ought to utter a word — that tongue, namely, which he said in the psalm cleaves to his throat, and which he then proved by not speaking.

And Barabbas, most guilty in his life, is granted as though he were good, while Christ, most righteous, is demanded for death as a murderer. And two criminals too are crucified on either side of him, so that he might be reckoned among the wicked. His clothing, divided by the soldiers partly (and partly) given over to the lot, Marcion has plainly removed, with an eye to the prophecy of the psalm: “They divided my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing.” Then remove the cross itself too. For the same psalm is not silent about it: “They pierced my hands and feet.” The whole outcome is read in it: “Dogs surrounded me, the synagogue of evildoers besieged me. All who looked at me mocked me with sneering noses; they spoke with their lips and shook their heads: He hoped in God; let him deliver him.” What use now is it to remove the testimony of the garments? Keep the spoils of your falsification: the whole psalm is the garments of Christ.

But see, the elements too are shaken. For their Lord was suffering. Otherwise, if it had been their adversary who was harmed, the sky would have blossomed with lights, the sun would have exulted the more in its rays, the day would have stood still the longer, gladly watching Marcion's Christ hanging on the gibbet. These arguments would have suited my case even if these things had not been foretold: “I will clothe the heaven with darkness,” says Isaiah; this will be the day of which Amos too says: “And it will be on that day, says the Lord, the sun will set at noon” — you have the sixth hour indicated too — “and it will grow dark over the earth.” The veil of the temple too was torn, by the bursting out of the angel abandoning the daughter of Zion like a watchtower in a vineyard and a hut in a cucumber field. O how he persisted in expressing himself even in the thirtieth psalm! He cries out to the Father: … , so that even while dying he might fulfill the prophets with his last cry. With this word he breathed out his spirit. Who did? Did the spirit breathe out itself, or the flesh the spirit? But the spirit could not breathe itself out. What breathes out is one thing, what is breathed out another. If the spirit is breathed out, it must be breathed out by another. But if he had been spirit alone, he would rather have been said to have departed than to have breathed out. Who, then, breathes out the spirit but the flesh, which both breathes while it has the spirit and so breathes it out when it loses it? In short, if it was not flesh but a phantom of flesh, and a phantom was spirit, and the spirit breathed itself out and by breathing out departed, then without doubt the phantom departed when the spirit, which was the phantom, departed, and the phantom was nowhere to be seen along with the spirit. Did nothing, then, remain on the wood, nothing hang there even after the breathing out? Was nothing asked of Pilate, nothing taken down from the gibbet, nothing wrapped in the linen, nothing laid in the new tomb? But it was not nothing. What then was it? If a phantom, then the spirit was still in it. If the spirit had departed, then it had taken the phantom away with it. It remains for heretical shamelessness to say that the phantom of a phantom remained there; but of course Joseph knew it was a body that he handled with all piety, that Joseph who had not consented with the Jews in their crime, a blessed man, who did not walk in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of the pestilent.