Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] He sends out his disciples to proclaim the kingdom of God. Did he here, if nowhere else, publish whose kingdom it was? He forbids them to carry provisions or clothing for the road. Who could have given such an order but the very one who feeds the ravens and clothes the lilies growing wild in the field, who had already, in an ancient precept, decreed that the ox treading out the grain should have its mouth left unmuzzled to snatch a mouthful from its own labor, because the laborer deserves his wage? Let Marcion strike out these words, provided the sense survives intact. But when he bids them shake the dust from their feet against those who did not receive them, he ordains that this too be done as a testimony. [2] No one bears testimony to something not destined for judgment; whoever orders inhumanity reduced to a legal deposition is threatening a judge's sentence. And that no new god was ever vouched for by Christ, the common opinion of everyone declared as well — since some told Herod that Jesus Christ was John, others Elijah, others one of the old prophets come again. Whichever of these he was supposed to be, he was certainly not raised from the dead in order to preach, after his resurrection, some other god. He feeds the people in the wilderness — plainly after the old custom. [3] Or if the majesty is not the same, then he is already less than the Creator, since he sustained them not for a single day but for forty years, and not on inferior stuff like bread and fish but on manna from heaven, and not some five thousand but six hundred thousand men. [4] Indeed such was that majesty that it willed not merely to make a meager ration suffice, but even to make it overflow, following the old precedent. For in the same way, in the time of famine under Elijah, the widow of Zarephath's scant and final provisions overflowed for the whole span of the famine through the prophet's blessing. There you have your third Book of Kingdoms. [5] And if you unroll the fourth as well, you will find this whole pattern already belonging to Christ, in that man of God who ordered the ten barley loaves brought to him distributed among the people, and whose servant, reckoning the size of the crowd against the smallness of the provisions, answered, "What, am I to set this before a hundred men?" "Give it," he said, "and they shall eat, for so the Lord has spoken: they shall eat, and there will be some remaining" — just as that Lord had promised. O Christ, even amid your new works, still the same ancient one! [6] And so Peter, who had seen these things and set them beside the ancient ones, and had recognized not only the deeds done long ago but even now the things then already prophesying the future — when the Lord asked who they thought he was, and Peter answered on behalf of them all, "You are the Christ" — he cannot have understood by "Christ" some new figure, but only the one he already knew from the scriptures, whom he was already recognizing in these deeds. And the Lord himself confirms this by his patience up to that point — indeed by enjoining silence. For if Peter could not have confessed him as anyone other than the Creator's Christ, and yet the Lord commanded that they tell no one this, he certainly did not want what Peter had perceived to be broadcast. [7] "No," you say, "it was because Peter had perceived wrongly that he did not want the lie spread abroad." But he gave another reason for the silence: that it was necessary for the Son of man to undergo great suffering, and to be spurned by the elders, the scribes, and the priests, and to be put to death, and to rise again on the third day. Since these things had been foretold — and foretold, as I will show in their proper places, of the Creator's Christ — in this way too he shows himself to be the one of whom they were foretold. [8] Certainly, even if they had not been foretold, the reason he gave for enjoining silence was not one that exposed an error of Peter's, but the necessity of undergoing his sufferings. "Whoever wishes to save his life," he says, "will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will save it." This is certainly a sentence pronounced by the Son of man. Look, then, yourself, at the burning furnace of the Babylonian king, and you will find there, so to speak, a Son of man (though not yet actually one — not yet, that is, brought forth of a woman) already at that time setting up this same principle. He rescues the souls of the three brothers who had resolved to forfeit them on God's behalf, yet he destroys the souls of the Chaldeans, who chose to preserve theirs through idol-worship. What sort of new doctrine is this, whose evidences are old? [9] And indeed the preachings of martyrdoms, both those yet to come and those that would receive their reward from God, have already run their course. "Behold," declares Isaiah, "the just man is perishing, and there is no one who lays it to mind; and just men are being carried off, and no one gives it thought." When does this come to pass more fully than during the hunting-down of his own saints? This is assuredly no trifling affair, no ordinary law of nature, but that notable, soldierly law of the faith, in which whoever loses his life for God's sake preserves it — so that here too you may recognize a judge, one who rewards the loss of the soul as its evil gain, and the soul's preservation as its harmful loss. [10] But he shows himself to me also as a jealous God, repaying evil with evil: "Whoever is ashamed of me," he says, "of him I too will be ashamed." And when could there be occasion for shame except in the case of my Christ, whose condition is so much more shameful that it lies open even to the taunts of heretics — all the ugliness of his birth and upbringing, and the very indignity of his flesh, all declaimed with such bitterness as they can muster? [11] But how could that other Christ be liable to shame, who does not even admit of it? He was not congealed in a virgin's womb — yet still a woman's — not indeed from seed, yet still by the law of bodily substance, from a woman's fluid; he was not flesh given shape before form, not called a lump before it was figured, not deliberated over through ten months of anguish, not poured out onto the ground through the sewer of the body amid the sudden shock of birth-pangs after so long a mire, nor did he greet the light at once with tears at the first wound of his own confinement, nor was he washed in wine, nor seasoned with salt and honey, nor wrapped in the swaddling-cloths that are the first shroud, nor thereafter tumbled amid filth between a mother's breasts, a nuisance at the nipple, an infant long, a boy slow to grow, a man later still — no, he was set forth from heaven, at once full-grown, at once entire, at once Christ, spirit and power and nothing but God. But just as he was not truly real, since he was not truly seen, so too he had no cause to blush at the curse of the cross, since he was without the reality of it, being without a body. [12] He therefore could not have said, "Whoever is ashamed of me." It was ours who had to pronounce this — he who was made lower than the angels by a little, by the Father's will, a worm and no man, the reproach of men and the scorn of the people — inasmuch as he so willed that by his bruise we might be healed, that our salvation might rest on his disgrace. And rightly did he lay himself down 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 that same boldness, unashamed of Christ, he might, by the very shamelessness of faith, make sufficient amends to God for the shamelessness of idolatry. Which of these fits your Christ, Marcion, as grounds for shame? Clearly you ought to be ashamed, since you fashioned him yourself.
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