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Anti-Marcion
For when He was brought before Pilate, they proceeded to urge Him with the serious charge[5121], of declaring Himself to be Christ the King;[5122] that is, undoubtedly, as the Son of God, who was to sit at God’s right hand. They would, however, have burdened Him[5123] with some other title, if they had been uncertain whether He had called Himself the Son of God—if He had not pronounced the words, “Ye say that I am,” so as (to admit) that He was that which they said He was. Likewise, when Pirate asked Him, “Art thou Christ (the King)?” He answered, as He had before (to the Jewish council)[5124] “Thou sayest that I am”[5125] in order that He might not seem to have been driven by a fear of his power to give him a fuller answer. “And so the Lord hath stood on His trial.”[5126] And he placed His people on their trial. The Lord Himself comes to a trial with “the elders and rulers of the people,” as Isaiah predicted.[5127] And then He fulfilled all that had been written of His passion. At that time “the heathen raged, and the people imagined vain things; the kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers gathered themselves together against the Lord and against His Christ.”[5128] The heathen were Pilate and the Romans; the people were the tribes of Israel; the kings were represented in Herod, and the rulers in the chief priests. When, indeed, He was sent to Herod gratuitously[5129] by Pilate,[5130] the words of Hosea were accomplished, for he had prophesied of Christ: “And they shall carry Him bound as a present to the king.”[5131] Herod was “exceeding glad” when he saw Jesus, but he heard not a word from Him.[5132] For, “as a lamb before the shearer is dumb, so He opened not His mouth,”[5133] because “the Lord had given to Him a disciplined tongue, that he might know how and when it behoved Him to speak”[5134]—even that “tongue which clove to His jaws,” as the Psalm[5135] said it should, through His not speaking. Then Barabbas, the most abandoned criminal, is released, as if he were the innocent man; while the most righteous Christ is delivered to be put to death, as if he were the murderer.[5136] Moreover two malefactors are crucified around Him, in order that He might be reckoned amongst the transgressors.[5137] Although His raiment was, without doubt, parted among the soldiers, and partly distributed by lot, yet Marcion has erased it all (from his Gospel),[5138] for he had his eye upon the Psalm: “They parted my garments amongst them, and cast lots upon my vesture.”[5139] You may as well take away the cross itself! But even then the Psalm is not silent concerning it: “They pierced my hands and my feet.”[5140] Indeed, the details of the whole event are therein read: “Dogs compassed me about; the assembly of the wicked enclosed me around. All that looked upon me laughed me to scorn; they did shoot out their lips and shake their heads, (saying,) He hoped in God, let Him deliver Him.”[5141] Of what use now is (your tampering with) the testimony of His garments? If you take it as a booty for your false Christ, still all the Psalm (compensates) the vesture of Christ.[5142] But, behold, the very elements are shaken. For their Lord was suffering. If, however, it was their enemy to whom all this injury was done, the heaven would have gleamed with light, the sun would have been even more radiant, and the day would have prolonged its course[5143]—gladly gazing at Marcion’s Christ suspended on his gibbet! These proofs[5144] would still have been suitable for me, even if they had not been the subject of prophecy. Isaiah says: “I will clothe the heavens with blackness.”[5145] This will be the day, concerning which Amos also writes: And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord, that the sun shall go down at noon and the earth shall be dark in the clear day.”[5146] (At noon)[5147] the veil of the temple was rent”[5148] by the escape of the cherubim,[5149] which “left the daughter of Sion as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers.”[5150] With what constancy has He also, in Psalm xxx., laboured to present to us the very Christ! He calls with a loud voice to the Father, “Into Thine hands I commend my spirit,”[5151] that even when dying He might expend His last breath in fulfilling the prophets. Having said this, He gave up the ghost.”[5152] Who? Did the spirit[5153] give itself up; or the flesh the spirit? But the spirit could not have breathed itself out. That which breathes is one thing, that which is breathed is another. If the spirit is breathed it must needs be breathed by another. If, however, there had been nothing there but spirit, it would be said to have departed rather than expired.[5154] What, however, breathes out spirit but the flesh, which both breathes the spirit whilst it has it, and breathes it out when it loses it? Indeed, if it was not flesh (upon the cross), but a phantom[5155] of flesh (and[5156] a phantom is but spirit, and[5157] so the spirit breathed its own self out, and departed as it did so), no doubt the phantom departed, when the spirit which was the phantom departed: and so the phantom and the spirit disappeared together, and were nowhere to be seen.[5158] Nothing therefore remained upon the cross, nothing hung there, after “the giving up of the ghost;”[5159] there was nothing to beg of Pilate, nothing to take down from the cross, nothing to wrap in the linen, nothing to lay in the new sepulchre.[5160] Still it was not nothing[5161] that was there. What was there, then? If a phantom Christ was yet there. If Christ had departed, He had taken away the phantom also. The only shift left to the impudence of the heretics, is to admit that what remained there was the phantom of a phantom! But what if Joseph knew that it was a body which he treated with so much piety?[5162] That same Joseph “who had not consented” with the Jews in their crime?[5163] The “happy man who walked not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the seat of the scornful.”[5164]
It was very meet that the man who buried the Lord should thus be noticed in prophecy, and thenceforth be “blessed;”[5165] since prophecy does not omit the (pious) office of the women who resorted before day-break to the sepulchre with the spices which they had prepared.[5166] For of this incident it is said by Hosea: “To seek my face they will watch till day-light, saying unto me, Come, and let us return to the Lord: for He hath taken away, and He will heal us; He hath smitten, and He will bind us up; after two days will He revive us: in the third day He will raise us up.”[5167] For who can refuse to believe that these words often revolved[5168] in the thought of those women between the sorrow of that desertion with which at present they seemed to themselves to have been smitten by the Lord, and the hope of the resurrection itself, by which they rightly supposed that all would be restored to them? But when “they found not the body (of the Lord Jesus),”[5169] “His sepulture was removed from the midst of them,”[5170] according to the prophecy of Isaiah. “Two angels however, appeared there.”[5171] For just so many honorary companions[5172] were required by the word of God, which usually prescribes “two witnesses.”[5173] Moreover, the women, returning from the sepulchre, and from this vision of the angels, were foreseen by Isaiah, when he says, “Come, ye women, who return from the vision;”[5174] that is, “come,” to report the resurrection of the Lord. It was well, however, that the unbelief of the disciples was so persistent, in order that to the last we might consistently maintain that Jesus revealed Himself to the disciples as none other than the Christ of the prophets. For as two of them were taking a walk, and when the Lord had joined their company, without its appearing that it was He, and whilst He dissembled His knowledge of what had just taken place,[5175] they say: “But we trusted that it had been He which should have redeemed Israel,”[5176]—meaning their own, that is, the Creator’s Christ. So far had He been from declaring Himself to them as another Christ! They could not, however, deem Him to be the Christ of the Creator; nor, if He was so deemed by them, could He have tolerated this opinion concerning Himself, unless He were really He whom He was supposed to be. Otherwise He would actually be the author of error, and the prevaricator of truth, contrary to the character of the good God. But at no time even after His resurrection did He reveal Himself to them as any other than what, on their own showing, they had always thought Him to be. He pointedly[5177] reproached them: “O fools, and slow of heart in not believing that which He spake unto you.”[5178] By saying this, He proves that He does not belong to the rival god, but to the same God. For the same thing was said by the angels to the women: “Remember how He spake unto you when He was yet in Galilee, saying, The Son of man must be delivered up, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.”[5179] “Must be delivered up;” and why, except that it was so written by God the Creator? He therefore upbraided them, because they were offended solely at His passion, and because they doubted of the truth of the resurrection which had been reported to them by the women, whereby (they showed that) they had not believed Him to have been the very same as they had thought Him to be. Wishing, therefore, to be believed by them in this wise, He declared Himself to be just what they had deemed Him to be—the Creator’s Christ, the Redeemer of Israel. But as touching the reality of His body, what can be plainer? When they were doubting whether He were not a phantom—nay, were supposing that He was one—He says to them, “Why are ye troubled, and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? See[5180] my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; for a spirit hath not bones, as ye see me have.”[5181] Now Marcion was unwilling to expunge from his Gospel some statements which even made against him—I suspect, on purpose, to have it in his power from the passages which he did not suppress, when he could have done so, either to deny that he had expunged anything, or else to justify his suppressions, if he made any. But he spares only such passages as he can subvert quite as well by explaining them away as by expunging them from the text. Thus, in the passage before us, he would have the words, “A spirit hath not bones, as ye see me have,” so transposed, as to mean, “A spirit, such as ye see me to be, hath not bones;” that is to say, it is not the nature of a spirit to have bones. But what need of so tortuous a construction, when He might have simply said, “A spirit hath not bones, even as you observe that I have not?” Why, moreover, does He offer His hands and His feet for their examination—limbs which consist of bones—if He had no bones? Why, too, does He add, “Know that it is I myself,”[5182] when they had before known Him to be corporeal? Else, if He were altogether a phantom, why did He upbraid them for supposing Him to be a phantom? But whilst they still believed not, He asked them for some meat,[5183] for the express purpose of showing them that He had teeth.[5184]
And now, as I would venture to believe,[5185] we have accomplished our undertaking. We have set forth Jesus Christ as none other than the Christ of the Creator. Our proofs we have drawn from His doctrines, maxims,[5186] affections, feelings, miracles, sufferings, and even resurrection—as foretold by the prophets.[5187] Even to the last He taught us (the same truth of His mission), when He sent forth His apostles to preach His gospel “among all nations;”[5188] for He thus fulfilled the psalm: “Their sound is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.”[5189] Marcion, I pity you; your labour has been in vain. For the Jesus Christ who appears in your Gospel is mine.
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Dr. Holmes appends the following as a note to the Fourth Book. (See cap. vi. p. 351.)
The following statement, abridged from Dr. Lardner (The History of Heretics, chap. x. secs. 35–40), may be useful to the reader, in reference to the subject of the preceding Book:—Marcion received but eleven books of the New Testament, and these strangely curtailed and altered. He divided them into two parts, which he called τὸ Εὐαγγέλιον (the Gospel) and τὸ ᾽Αποστολικόν (the Apostolicon).
1. The former contained nothing more than a mutilated, and sometimes interpolated, edition of St. Luke; the name of that evangelist, however, he expunged from the beginning of his copy. Luke 1; 2. he rejected entirely, and began at Luke 3.1, reading the opening verse thus: “In the xv. year of Tiberius Cæsar, God descended into Capernaum, a city of Galilee.”
2. According to Irenæus, Epiphanius, and Theodoret, he rejected the genealogy and baptism of Christ; whilst from Tertullian’s statement (chap. vii.) it seems likely that he connected what part of chap. iii.— Luke 3.1,22—he chose to retain, with Luke 4.31, at a leap.
3. He further eliminated the history of the temptation. That part of Luke 4. which narrates Christ’s going into the synagogue at Nazareth and reading out of Isaiah he also rejected, and all afterwards to the end of Luke 4.30.
4. Epiphanius mentions sundry slight alterations in capp. v. 14, 24, vi. 5, 17. In Luke 8.19 he expunged ἡ μήτηρ αὐτοῦ, καὶ ἀδελφοὶ αὐτοῦ. From Tertullian’s remarks (chap. xix.), it would seem at first as if Marcion had added to his Gospel that answer of our Saviour which we find related by Matt. 12.48: “Who is my mother, and who are my brethren?” For he represents Marcion (as in De carne Christi, vii., he represents other heretics, who deny the nativity) as making use of these words for his favourite argument. But, after all, Marcion might use these words against those who allowed the authenticity of Matthew’s Gospel, without inserting them in his own Gospel; or else Tertullian might quote from memory, and think that to be in Luke which was only in Matthew—as he has done at least in three instances. (Lardner refers two of these instances to passages in chap. vii. of this Book iv., where Tertullian mentions, as erasures from Luke, what really are found in Matt. 5.17; 15.24. The third instance referred to by Lardner probably occurs at the end of chap. ix. of this same Book iv., where Tertullian again mistakes Matt. v. 17 for a passage of Luke, and charges Marcion with expunging it; curiously enough, the mistake recurs in chap. xii of the same Book.) In Luke x. 21 Marcion omitted the first πάτερ and the words καὶ τῆς γῆς, that he might not allow Christ to call His Father the Lord of earth, or of this world. The second πατήρ in this verse, not open to any inconvenience, he retained. In chap. xi. 29 he omitted the last words concerning the sign of the prophet Jonah; he also omitted all the Luke 11.30-32; in Luke 11.42 he read κλῆσιν, ‘calling,’ instead of κρίσιν ‘judgment.’ He rejected verses Luke 11.49-51, because the passage related to the prophets. He entirely omitted Luke 12.6; whilst in Luke 12.8 he read ἔμπροσθεν τοῦ Θεοῦ instead of ἔμπροσθεν τῶν ἀγγέλων τοῦ Θεοῦ. He seems to have left out all the Luke 12.28, and expunged ὑμῶν from Luke 12.30,32, reading only ὁ πατήρ. In Luke 12.38, instead of the words ἐν τῇ δευτέρᾳ φυλακῇ, καὶ ἐν τῇ τρίτῃ φυλακῇ, he read ἐν τῇ ἑσπερινῇ φυλακῇ. In Luke 13. he omitted the Luke 13.1-5, whilst in the Luke 13.28 of the same chapter, where we read, “When ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and ye yourselves thrust out,” he read (by altering, adding, and transposing), “When ye shall see all the just in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves cast out, and bound without, there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” He likewise excluded all the Luke 13.29-35. All Luke 15.11-31, in which is contained the parable of the prodigal son, he eliminated from his Gospel. In Luke 17.10 he left out all the words after λέγετε. He made many alterations in the story of the ten lepers; he left out part of Luke 17.12-14, reading thus: “There met Him ten lepers; and He sent them away, saying, Show yourselves to the priest;” after which he inserted a clause from Luke 4.27: “There were many lepers in the days of Eliseus the prophet, but none of them were cleansed, but Naaman the Syrian.” In Luke 18.19 he added the words ὁ πατήρ, and in Luke 18.20 altered οἶδας, thou knowest, into the first person. He entirely omitted Luke 18.31-33, in which our blessed Saviour declares that the things foretold by the prophets concerning His sufferings, and death, and resurrection, should all be fulfilled. He expunged nineteen verses out of chap. xix., from the Luke 19.27-47. In chap. xx. he omitted ten verses, from the Luke 20.8-18. He rejected also Luke 20.37-38, in which there is a reference to Moses. Marcion also erased of Luke 21.1-22, on account of this clause, “that all things which are written may be fulfilled;” Luke 20.16 was left out by him, so also Luke 20.35-37, 50-51 (and, adds Lardner, conjecturally, not herein following his authority Epiphanius, also Luke 20.38,49). In Luke 23.2, after the words “perverting the nation,” Marcion added, “and destroying the law and the prophets;” and again, after “forbidding to give tribute unto Cæsar,” he added, “and perverting women and children.” He also erased Luke 23.43. In Luke 24. he omitted that part of the conference between our Saviour and the two disciples going to Emmaus, which related to the prediction of His sufferings, and which is contained in Luke 24.26-27. These two verses he omitted, and changed the words at the end of Luke 24.25, ἐλάλησαν οἱ προφῆται, into ἐλάλησα ὑμῖν. Such are the alterations, according to Epiphanius, which Marcion made in his Gospel from St. Luke. Tertullian says (in the 4th chapter of the preceding Book) that Marcion erased the passage which gives an account of the parting of the raiment of our Saviour among the soldiers. But the reason he assigns for the erasure—‘respiciens Psalmi prophetiam’—shows that in this, as well as in the few other instances which we have already named, where Tertullian has charged Marcion with so altering passages, his memory deceived him into mistaking Matthew for Luke, for the reference to the passage in the Psalm is only given by St. Matthew xxvii. 35.
5. On an impartial review of these alterations, some seem to be but slight; others might be nothing but various readings; but others, again, are undoubtedly designed perversions. There were, however, passages enough left unaltered and unexpunged by the Marcionites, to establish the reality of the flesh and blood of Christ, and to prove that the God of the Jews was the Father of Christ, and of perfect goodness as well as justice. Tertullian, indeed, observes (chap. xliii.) that “Marcion purposely avoided erasing all the passages which made against him, that he might with the greater confidence deny having erased any at all, or at least that what he had omitted was for very good reasons.”
6. To show the unauthorized and unwarrantable character of these alterations, omissions, additions, and corruptions, the Catholic Christians asserted that their copies of St. Luke’s Gospel were more ancient than Marcion’s (so Tertullian in chap. iii. and iv. of this Book iv.); and they maintained also the genuineness and integrity of the unadulterated Gospel, in opposition to that which had been curtailed and altered by him (chap. v.).
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