Tertullian takes Marcion's own gospel of Luke apart chapter by chapter, arguing that every episode in it actually proves the very Creator-God and Old Testament prophecies Marcion tried to erase.
Book Four of Against Marcion is Tertullian's longest sustained argument in the whole work: a verse-by-verse cross-examination of the gospel Marcion himself circulated — a trimmed and altered version of Luke, stripped of its birth narrative and purged of anything that agreed too well with the Jewish scriptures. Rather than reconstructing Luke from scratch, Tertullian uses Marcion's own edited text as the crime scene, opening with a review of the Antitheses (Marcion's list of contradictions between Law and Gospel) before turning, chapter after chapter of Luke, to show that Christ's teachings, miracles, and parables were foretold by Moses and the prophets and therefore belong to the same God who gave the Law.
The argument unfolds as a running commentary keyed to Luke's own sequence: the calling of the fishermen fulfills Jeremiah's promise to "send many fishermen"; the rich women who minister to Christ answer Isaiah's summons to "rich women, arise and hear my voice"; the Sermon on the Plain's blessings and woes mirror the reversals promised throughout the prophets; the teaching on divorce, far from overturning Moses, is shown by Tertullian to be Moses' own concession to hardness of heart rather than a rival law; and the burial and resurrection are traced back to Hosea's line about being struck down and healed "after two days, on the third day." Tertullian's method throughout is to deny Marcion any clean separation between an angry God of the Law and a gentle Christ of the Gospel, insisting that the two testaments were written by, and point to, one and the same Creator.
Historically the book matters because it preserves, argument by argument, the shape and content of the Marcionite gospel as it existed around 207–212 CE — a text that no longer survives independently and that scholars must reconstruct largely from Tertullian's quotations and paraphrases here. It is also one of the earliest sustained pieces of Christian exegesis to treat the Old Testament as systematically predictive of the New, laying out, chapter by Lucan chapter, the typological reading of scripture that would become standard in later Christian interpretation, while simultaneously giving modern readers a rare window onto a rival, competing form of early Christianity that ultimately lost out.
“Every opinion and every piece of equipment belonging to the impious and sacrilegious Marcion we now call to account before his own gospel”
— Adversus Marcionem 4 – Chapter 1
“To Peter, trembling at the huge catch of fish, he says, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men."”
— Adversus Marcionem 4 – Chapter 9
“That rich women clung to Christ, and even ministered to him out of their own means — among them she who was wife to the king's household steward — this too fulfills prophecy.”
— Adversus Marcionem 4 – Chapter 19
“But Christ forbids divorce, saying: Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery; and whoever marries a woman divorced by her husband is likewise an adulterer.”
— Adversus Marcionem 4 – Chapter 34
“It was fitting that even the Lord's burial be prophesied and there and then rightly blessed, since prophecy does not pass over even the office of those women who came before dawn to the tomb with their prepared spices.”
— Adversus Marcionem 4 – Chapter 43
It is Tertullian's chapter-by-chapter refutation of Marcion, the second-century teacher who taught that the vengeful Creator-God of the Old Testament was different from the loving Father revealed by Christ. Tertullian works through Marcion's own edited version of Luke's gospel, showing episode by episode that its content fulfills Old Testament prophecy and therefore proves both Testaments come from one God.
Marcion had circulated a shortened, altered edition of Luke with the birth narrative and Old-Testament-friendly material removed. Tertullian's strategy is to use that very text as evidence against Marcion: even in its trimmed form, he argues, it still contains enough material to expose Marcion's theology as false.
The Antitheses were Marcion's own treatise cataloguing supposed contradictions between the Law and the Gospel, designed to prove the two came from different gods. Tertullian opens Book 4 by answering this document before moving into his verse-by-verse commentary on the gospel text itself.
He pairs specific gospel episodes with prophetic texts he says predicted them — for example, linking the calling of the fishermen to Jeremiah's promise of "many fishermen," and the women at Jesus's burial to a line from Hosea about being struck down and healed on the third day. The technique runs throughout the book as his primary proof strategy.
Yes. In his treatment of Luke's teaching on divorce, Tertullian argues that Christ's prohibition does not contradict Moses's concession of divorce in Deuteronomy, since Christ himself explains that Moses permitted it only "because of the hardness of your hearts" — meaning the same God speaks in both texts.
Tertullian examines the "Woe to that one through whom the Son of man meets betrayal" and argues that a real woe implies real punishment, which in turn requires a judging God — directly undermining Marcion's picture of a Christ whose God does not punish.
Because Marcion's own gospel text does not survive on its own, Adversus Marcionem 4 is one of the main sources scholars use to reconstruct what that text contained and how it differed from the canonical Luke, making it valuable evidence for the history of the New Testament canon.
Both. It functions as sustained biblical commentary on Luke, structured chapter by chapter, but it is undertaken entirely in service of a theological and philosophical argument about the unity of God across the two Testaments.
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