Against Marcion 5.3

Then he writes that he went up to Jerusalem after fourteen years to seek the backing of Peter and the other apostles, in order to confer with them about the rule of his gospel, lest he had run or should run in vain for so many years, that is, if he were preaching in any way short of their pattern. So much did he desire to be approved and confirmed by those whom, if anyone, you want to be understood as closer akin to Judaism. And when he says that not even Titus was circumcised, he begins to show that only the question of circumcision had been stirred up, out of a continuing defense of the law, by those whom he therefore calls false brothers brought in secretly. They were going on to establish nothing other than the continuance of the law, out of a faith in the Creator that was no doubt intact, and so were perverting the gospel, not by tampering with Scripture so as to fashion a Christ of the Creator, but by retaining the old rule of life so as not to exclude the Creator's law. “Because of false brothers brought in secretly,” he says, “who had slipped in to spy out our freedom which we have in Christ, to bring us into slavery, we did not yield in submission even for an hour.” Let us attend both to the sense itself and to its reason, and the corruption of the text will appear. When he first says, “But not even Titus, who was with me, though he was a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised,” and then adds, “because of false brothers brought in secretly,” and the rest, he begins to give the reason for the opposite action, showing why he did what he would not have done if that on account of which he did it had not happened. Tell me, then: if those false brothers had not slipped in to spy out their freedom, would they have yielded in submission? I think not. So they yielded because there were people for whose sake one had to yield. For this suited a faith still raw and still in suspense about keeping the law, when the apostle himself too was anxious lest he had run or should run in vain. So the false brothers who were spying out Christian freedom had to be thwarted, lest they carry it off into the slavery of Judaism before Paul knew that he had not run in vain, before his predecessors gave him their right hands, before he took up the office of preaching to the nations with their consent. So of necessity he yielded for a time; and in this way his reason is consistent for circumcising Timothy and for bringing shaven men into the temple, which are recorded in the Acts. So true are these things that they agree with the apostle's own profession that he became a Jew to the Jews to win the Jews, and one living under the law for the sake of those who lived under the law; and so also for the sake of those men who had been brought in; and finally that he became all things to all people to win all. If these things too require to be understood from this passage, this too no one will doubt: that Paul was a preacher of that God and Christ whose law, though he was excluding it, he had nevertheless meanwhile admitted for the times; a law that he would have had to clear away at once if he had brought forward a new god. It is well, then, that Peter and James and John gave Paul their right hands and made an agreement on the division of duties, that Paul should go to the nations and they to the circumcision, “only that they should remember the poor”: this too according to the law of the Creator, who cherishes the poor and needy, as was proved in the examination of your gospel. So it is clear that the question concerned the law alone, since it is shown what of the law it was fitting to keep. But he rebukes Peter for not walking with a straight foot toward the truth of the gospel. He rebukes him indeed, yet for nothing else than inconsistency in his way of eating, which he varied according to the kind of people present, fearing those who were of the circumcision; not for any difference of deity. On that point he would have withstood others to their face too, he who did not spare Peter himself for the lesser matter of wavering conduct, if he had believed in the way the Marcionites want. For the rest, let the apostle go on, denying that a man is justified by works of the law, but by faith: faith, however, in that God to whom the law also belongs. For he would not have labored to distinguish faith from the law if a difference of deity itself, had there been one, had already distinguished them unaided. Rightly he did not rebuild what he had destroyed. And the law was to be destroyed from the time the voice of John cried in the wilderness, “Prepare the ways of the Lord,” so that the valleys and hills and mountains should be filled and brought low, and the crooked and rough made straight and level: that is, the difficulties of the law turned into the ease of the gospel. He had remembered, too, that the time of the psalm had come: “Let us burst their bonds from us and cast their yoke from us,” since “the nations raged and the peoples devised vain things; the kings of the earth stood up and the rulers gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ”; so that a man should now be justified by the freedom of faith, not by the slavery of the law, because “the righteous lives by faith.” And if the prophet Habakkuk declared this, you have the apostle confirming the prophets, as Christ did too. So the faith by which the righteous will live will belong to the same God as the law by which the worker is not justified. Likewise, if in the law there is a curse and in faith a blessing, you have both set forth with the Creator: “Behold,” he says, “I have set before you a curse and a blessing.” You cannot claim a difference of gods on this ground (a difference which, though it is one of things, is not therefore one of authors) when both are set forth by one author. And why Christ became a curse for us, since the apostle himself teaches it, is clear, and how much it makes for us, that is, for faith in the Creator. For it will not seem that, because the Creator pronounced, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree,” Christ therefore belongs to another god and was for that reason already cursed by the Creator in the law. Or how could the Creator have cursed in advance one he did not know? And why is it not more fitting for the Creator to have given his own Son up to his own curse than for that god of yours to have subjected him to a curse, and that for a man who was a stranger to him? In short, if this seems cruel in the Creator toward his Son, it is equally so in your god; but if it is reasonable in yours, it is equally so in mine, and more so in mine. For it will more easily be believed that he provided a blessing for man through the curse of Christ who once set both a curse and a blessing before man, than he who, by your account, never professed either. “We receive the spiritual blessing through faith,” he says: the faith, that is, by which the righteous lives according to the Creator. This, then, is what I say: that faith belongs to that God to whom faith, the pattern of grace, belongs. And when he adds, “For you are all sons of faith,” it is shown what the heretic's industry erased above, namely the mention of Abraham, in which the apostle affirms that we are sons of Abraham through faith; and in keeping with that mention he here too called us sons of faith. Otherwise, how are we sons of faith? And of whose faith, if not Abraham's? For if Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness, and from that he deserved to be named father of many nations, and we, by believing God more …, are likewise justified as Abraham was, and likewise obtain life, as the righteous lives by faith, so it comes about that above he declared us sons of Abraham, as the father of faith, and here sons of faith, through which Abraham had been promised as father of the nations. The very fact that he called faith away from circumcision: was he not seeking to make them sons of Abraham, who had believed while his flesh was still uncircumcised? In short, faith in one god cannot be admitted to the pattern of the other god, so as to reckon believers as righteous, to make the righteous live by faith, to call the nations sons of faith. All this belongs to the one with whom it was already known before.