Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] In my prescription against all heresies I habitually strike a shortcut from the testimony of dates, claiming for our rule priority over every heretical afterbirth. This the apostle will now prove too, when he speaks of the hope laid up in the heavens, which you heard proclaimed in that trustworthy message, the gospel now come to you, as also into the whole world. For if by that early date the evangelical tradition had already flowed everywhere, how much more now? [2] Furthermore, if it is ours that has flowed everywhere — more than any heretical version, let alone the recent-vintage Marcion's — then ours will be the apostolic faith. As for Marcion's, even once it has filled the whole world, it still will not be able to defend itself as apostolic. For it will be established as apostolic only in the sense that it was the version which first filled the world — namely, the gospel of that god who also sang this of his own preachings: Their voice has traveled across every land, and their sayings unto earth's farthest reaches. [3] He terms Christ the image of the unseen God. But we too say that Christ's Father is unseen, knowing that the Son has always in the past been seen, whenever he was seen, in God's name, as his image — lest anyone carve out of this passage some distinction between a God who can be seen and one who cannot, when it has long been settled as a definition of our God: No man shall see the Lord and live. [4] If Christ is not the firstborn of creation, as the Word of the Creator by whom every thing was fashioned, apart from whom not a single thing came to be; if it was not in him that the universe was founded, in the heavens and on the earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones, dominions, rulers, or authorities; if it is not through him and in him that all things were founded (for these are the very things that should have displeased Marcion) — then the apostle would surely not have stated so baldly, And he is before all things. For how is he before all things, if not before all created things? How before all created things, if not the firstborn of creation, if not the Word of the Creator? On what ground will he be proved to have existed before all things, when he only appeared after all things? Who knows that someone was prior, when he does not even know that he existed? [5] How, likewise, did it please that it should be the good god in whom all fullness dwells? For to begin with, what is this fullness, if not made up precisely of those things Marcion has stripped away — the things founded in Christ, in the heavens and on the earth, angels and men, the invisible and the visible, thrones and dominions and principalities and powers? Or if our pseudo-apostles and Jewish gospel-peddlers have smuggled these in on their own authority, then let Marcion produce the fullness of his own god, who founded nothing. Besides, how does it make sense that the rival and destroyer of the Creator's fullness should wish that very fullness to dwell in his own Christ? And to whom, after all, does he reconcile all things in himself, making peace through the blood of his cross, if not to the one whom all things had offended, against whom they had rebelled by transgression, whose they had originally been? For one can be conciliated with a stranger, but reconciled only with one's own. [6] So too us — once we were alienated and hostile in mind through evil works — he restores to favor with the Creator, whose offense we had incurred by worshiping the creation instead of the Creator. And wherever he also says that the church stands as Christ's body, as here where he says he fills up in his flesh what is lacking of the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the church, that does not mean you may transfer every mention of 'body' away from the substance of flesh across the board. For above, too, he says we are reconciled in his body through death — surely in that body in which he was able to die through flesh; he died, that is, not through the church but plainly on behalf of the church, exchanging one body for another, the fleshly for the spiritual. [7] But when he warns us to beware of hairsplitting talk and philosophy, as an empty deception, that which is according to the elements of the world — not meaning by that heaven or earth, but rather worldly literature and human tradition, that is, the tradition of hairsplitters and philosophers — it would take too long, and be the business of another work, to show that every heresy stands condemned by this sentence, since all of them are built out of the resources of hairsplitting and the rules of philosophy. But let Marcion at least acknowledge that the founding tenet of his faith comes from the school of Epicurus, representing the Lord as inert, so that he cannot be said to be feared; and that he pairs matter with the Creator-god straight out of the Stoic porch, denying the resurrection of the flesh — a doctrine, incidentally, on which no philosophy agrees with him. [8] From the cleverness of such minds our truth is so far removed that it does not shrink from stirring up God's wrath, and confidently holds that he brought all things out of nothing, and promises that he will restore this very flesh, and is not ashamed that Christ was born from a virgin's womb — while philosophers and heretics and pagans themselves laugh. For God selected the foolish things of the world so as to put the wise to shame — that same God, no doubt, who from the vantage of this very plan of his was foretelling that he would bring the wisdom of the wise to nothing. By this simplicity of the truth, set against hairsplitting talk and philosophy, we are incapable of any perverse cleverness. [9] Finally, if God gives us life together with Christ, forgiving us our transgressions, we cannot believe that transgressions are forgiven to one against whom none had ever been committed, as though he were previously a stranger to sin. Come now: when he says, Let no one judge you in food or drink, or in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a sabbath, which are a mere shadow of what was coming, whereas the body belongs to Christ — what do you make of that, Marcion? We need not go back over the law again, except that here too he teaches how it has been set aside, precisely by being transferred from shadow to body, that is, from figures to the truth, which is Christ. Therefore the shadow belongs to the one to whom the body also belongs — that is, the law belongs to the very one to whom Christ belongs. Go ahead, assign the law to one god and Christ to another, if you can manage to separate any shadow from the body which casts it. Christ plainly belongs to the law, if he is the substance of which the law is only the outline. [10] But if he is also rebuking certain people who, on the strength of angelic visions, said that certain foods must be abstained from — 'do not touch, do not taste' — wanting to walk about in a show of humility of mind, not holding fast to the head, that does not mean he is thereby striking a blow at the law and Moses, as though he had established the prohibition of certain foods on the basis of some angelic superstition. [11] For it is agreed that Moses received the law from God. In fact this very discipline he assigns, according to the precepts and doctrines of men, to those who do not hold the head — that is, the very one in whom everything is summed up, in Christ, back to whom even the indifference of foods is being recalled at its origin. As for the rest of the precepts, it is enough that I have already shown elsewhere, as being the same precepts, that they flow from the Creator, who, in proclaiming that the old order would pass away and that he would fashion all things anew, and even commanding, Make for yourselves a fresh renewal, was already at that time teaching men to strip off the old self and clothe themselves with the new.
20. ON THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS.