Which Gospel Came First

Every opinion Marcion holds, and the whole outfit of that irreverent and sacrilegious man, I now summon before the very Gospel which he has made his own by tampering with it. To win belief for that Gospel he actually provided it with a kind of dowry: a work made up of contradictory statements set against each other, and titled for that reason Antitheses. It was put together to pry the law apart from the gospel so thoroughly that it would split the Deity in two — and not merely in two, but into gods of different kinds, one for each document, or Testament, as it is more usual to call it. By that means he could also act as counsel for belief in “the Gospel according to the Antitheses.” [c]

I would rather have attacked these in a fight of their own, hand to hand, and taken on the several devices of the Pontic heretic one at a time — if it were not far more convenient to refute them inside the very Gospel they exist to support. I could of course meet them at once with a flat objection and be done with it. But I want them admitted into the argument, and treated as valid statements of opinion, and even shown to make for our side, so that the blindness of the man who wrote them may be all the redder with shame. So I have now drawn up some antitheses of my own against Marcion.

And I do allow this much: one arrangement ran its course in the old order of things under the Creator, and another is running its course now in the new order under Christ. I do not deny that their documents differ in language, their rules of conduct in what they require, and their teaching in what it makes of the law. But all that variety is consistent with one and the same God — the God who arranged it and who also foretold it. Long ago Isaiah announced that “out of Zion the law will go out, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem” — meaning some other law, that is, and another word. In short, he says, “He will judge among the nations, and will rebuke many peoples” — and he does not mean the Jewish people only, but the nations, who are judged by the new law of the gospel and the new word of the apostles, and who are rebuked among themselves for their old error as soon as they have believed. And here is the result of it: “they beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears” (which are a kind of hunting weapon) “into pruning hooks” — that is, minds that were once fierce and cruel are changed by these into good dispositions that bear good fruit.

And again: “Listen to me, listen to me, my people, and you kings, give ear to me; for a law will go out from me, and my judgment for a light to the nations.” So he had settled and decreed that the nations too were to be given light by the law and the word of the gospel. This will be the law that David also calls blameless, because it is “perfect, turning the soul” from idols to God. And this will be the word about which the same Isaiah says, “The Lord will make a word cut short in the land” — because the New Testament is cut short, and freed from the fussy, tangled burdens of the law.

But why go on at length, when the Creator, through the same prophet, foretells the renewal more plainly and more clearly than daylight itself? “Do not remember the former things, and do not think about the things of old. Look, I will do new things, which will now spring up.” The old things have passed away, and new things are coming up. So too by Jeremiah: “Break new ground for yourselves, and do not sow among thorns, and circumcise yourselves in the foreskin of your heart.” And in another passage: “Look, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Jacob and with the house of Judah — not according to the covenant I made with their fathers, on the day when I took them in hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt.” In that way he shows that the old covenant is only temporary, since he tells them it will change; and he shows it again when he promises that an eternal one will follow it. For by Isaiah he says, “Hear me, and you will live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you,” and he adds, “the sure mercies of David,” so as to show that this covenant was to run its course in Christ. That Christ was of David’s family, by Mary’s line, he declared in a figure even by the branch that was to come out of the root of Jesse.

So then, he said that other laws would come from the Creator, and other words, and new arrangements of covenants. He indicated as well, through Malachi, that the sacrifices themselves were to be given higher work to do, and that among all nations: “I have no pleasure in you, says the Lord, nor will I accept your sacrifices at your hands. For from the rising of the sun to its going down my name will be great among the nations, and in every place a sacrifice is offered to my name, a pure offering.” That pure offering means plain prayer out of a clean conscience. Since he said all this, then, it follows of necessity that every change which comes about by something new being brought in introduces a difference into the things that are changed, and out of that difference a contrariety also arises. For as nothing that has undergone a change fails to become different, so nothing that is different fails to be contrary. Of that very thing, then, a contrariety will be asserted, because of the difference that came upon it when its condition changed after something new was introduced. The one who brought about the change is the one who set up the difference; the one who foretold the new thing is the one who announced the contrariety beforehand.

Why, on your reading, do you put down a difference in the state of things to a difference of powers? Why do you twist to the Creator’s disadvantage the very examples you draw your antitheses from, when you can recognize every one of them in his own feelings and reactions? “I will wound,” he says, “and I will heal”; and again, “I will kill, and I will make alive” — the same God “who creates evil and makes peace.” It is on that ground that you are in the habit of charging him with fickleness and inconsistency, as though he forbade what he commanded and commanded what he forbade.

Why, then, have you not counted up the antitheses that occur in the Creator’s natural works as well, since he is forever contrary to himself? Unless I have been misinformed, you have not managed to notice that the world — in Pontus too, among your own people — is made up of a diversity of elements hostile to one another. It was your plain duty, then, to have established first that the god of light was one being and the god of darkness another, so that you could go on to assert plainly that one of them was the god of the law and the other the god of the gospel. My own mind, however, is settled already from proofs in plain sight: as his works and his arrangements in the world stand in antitheses, so by the same rule do the mysteries of his religion.

That is our answer to the Antitheses, set out in short. I move on now to prove that a Gospel has been tampered with — not the Jewish one, of course, but the Pontic one; and this will lay the groundwork for the order in which I proceed. [r]

My first position is this: the gospel document has apostles for its authors, men to whom the Lord himself assigned the work of publishing the good news. There are apostolic men as well, but they do not stand alone; they appear alongside apostles and after apostles. Preaching by disciples might be suspected of a grab at glory if the authority of their masters did not stand beside it — and that authority is Christ’s, since it was Christ who made the apostles masters in the first place. So among the apostles it is John and Matthew who first work the faith into us, and among apostolic men it is Luke and Mark who set it up again afterwards. They all begin from the same rules of faith, so far as concerns the one and only God, the Creator, and his Christ: that he was born of the virgin, and came to fill out the law and the prophets. Never mind if the order of their narratives varies somewhat, so long as they agree on the main head of the faith — and that is the very point on which there is no agreement with Marcion.

Marcion, you should know, assigns no author at all to his Gospel — as though he could not be allowed to put a title on the thing whose whole body he had felt free to overturn. I could plant myself right here and argue that no work ought to be recognized which does not hold its head up, which shows no consistency, which gives no promise of being believable out of a full title and an honest declaration of its author. But I would rather engage on every point, and not pass over in silence what can fairly be taken as making for our side.

Now among the authors we possess, Marcion seems to have picked out Luke to hack at. But Luke was not an apostle; he was only an apostolic man. Not a master but a disciple, and so beneath a master — at least as far behind him as the apostle he followed (and that, no doubt, was Paul) was behind the others. So even if Marcion had published his Gospel under Paul’s own name, the single authority of that document, with no support at all from the authorities before it, would not be a sufficient basis for our faith. There would still be wanted the Gospel that Paul found already in existence: the one he believed, and the one he was so anxious for his own to agree with that he actually went up to Jerusalem on that account, to know and consult the apostles, “in case he should be running, or had been running, for nothing.” In other words, he went so that the faith he had learned and the gospel he was preaching should be in accord with theirs. Then at last, having conferred with the first authors and come to an agreement with them about the rule of faith, they joined hands in fellowship and divided the labor of preaching between them from then on: they were to go to the Jews, and Paul to the Jews and the nations. So then: if the very man who gave Luke his light wanted the authority of those before him for his own faith and his own preaching, how much more may I require for Luke’s Gospel what was necessary for the Gospel of Luke’s master?

It would be another matter if, on Marcion’s scheme, the disclosed secret of the Christian religion began with Luke’s discipleship. But it was already on its course before that point, so it must have had an outfit of its own, which carried it down to Luke; and it is by the support of the testimony it brought with it that Luke himself is admissible at all. [x]

But then Marcion got hold of Paul’s letter to the Galatians — where Paul rebukes even apostles for “not walking straight by the truth of the gospel,” and charges certain false apostles with twisting the gospel of Christ — and he works very hard at pulling down the standing of the Gospels that are published as genuine and under apostles’ names, so as to secure for his own Gospel the credit he takes away from theirs. But even if Paul does criticize Peter and John and James, who were reckoned pillars, the reason for it is plain: they seemed to be varying whom they would sit at table with, out of respect for persons. And since Paul himself “became all things to all men” in order to win them all, it was perfectly possible that Peter too had taken up the same plan, and practiced somewhat differently from what he taught. In the same way, if false apostles crept in as well, their character showed itself in their insisting on circumcision and the Jewish ceremonies. So it was not for their preaching but for their way of living that Paul marked them out — and he would have marked them with the same impartial censure if they had gone wrong at any point about God the Creator or his Christ.

Each case, then, has to be kept separate. When Marcion complains that apostles are under suspicion, for shuffling and pretending, of having actually corrupted the gospel, he is accusing Christ, since he is accusing the men Christ chose. Suppose the apostles, censured only for an inconsistent way of living, composed the Gospel in a pure form; and suppose false apostles interpolated their true record; and suppose our own copies were made from those. Then where will the genuine document of the apostles’ writings be found that has not suffered adulteration? Which was it that gave light to Paul, and through him to Luke? Either it is blotted out altogether, as though by some flood, drowned under an inundation of falsifiers — in which case not even Marcion possesses the true Gospel — or else the edition Marcion alone possesses is the true one, the apostles’ own. But then how does it agree with ours, which is said to be not the apostles’ work but Luke’s? Or take it the other way: if Marcion’s copy is not to be put down to Luke merely because it does agree with ours — ours being, on their account of it, falsified in its title too — then Marcion’s copy is the apostles’ work. And in that case ours, which agrees with it, is equally the apostles’ work, and falsified only in the title it carries.

So the rope has to be hauled on, and every pull of my opponents met with a pull of my own. I say my Gospel is the true one; Marcion says his is. I say Marcion’s Gospel is adulterated; Marcion says mine is. What is to settle the point between us, if not the rule of time — the rule that gives the authority to whichever is found to be older, and takes it as settled beforehand that corruption belongs to the side convicted of coming later? For since a falsehood is the falsification of a truth, the truth must come first and the falsehood after. A thing has to exist before anything can happen to it, and an object has to exist before anything can be set up as its rival. [ac]

Otherwise, see how absurd it would be. We have proved our position to be the older one and Marcion’s the later; and yet ours is to be reckoned the false one, before it had even received from truth any substance to be false about, and Marcion’s is to be supposed to have met with rivalry from us before it was so much as published. And in the end the later position is to be thought the truer one — later by a century than the publishing of all the many and great facts and records of the Christian religion, which certainly could not have been published apart from the truth of the gospel, that is to say, before it.

Take, then, the question in hand: Luke’s Gospel. So far as its being held in common by us and by Marcion allows it to decide where the truth lies, the part of it that we alone accept is so much older than Marcion that Marcion himself once believed it — back when, in the first warmth of faith, he made a gift of money to the universal church, money that was thrown out along with him afterwards, when he fell away from our truth into a heresy of his own. What if the Marcionites deny that he ever held the original faith among us, in the face of a letter of his own? What if they will not acknowledge the letter? At any rate they accept his Antitheses; more than that, they parade them. Proof out of those is enough for me.

For here is the point. The Gospel said to be Luke’s that is current among us — we shall see whether it is current with Marcion as well — is, on Marcion’s own showing in the Antitheses, the very one that was interpolated by the defenders of Judaism, in order to weld the law and the prophets into it and so fashion a Christ of their own out of it. He could not have argued that way about it unless he had found it in that form. Nobody criticizes things before they exist, when he does not know whether they will ever come about. Correction never comes before the fault.

So of course: a corrector of a Gospel that had been upside down from the days of Tiberius to the days of Antoninus appeared for the first time in Marcion, and in no one else. Christ had been waiting for him all that while, sorry all along that he had been in such a hurry to send out his apostles without Marcion to back them up. But for all that, heresy — which is forever mending the Gospels and corrupting them in the act — is a matter of human nerve, not of God’s authority. If Marcion is a disciple, still he is not “above his master.” If Marcion is an apostle, then, as Paul says, “whether it be I or they, so we preach.” If Marcion is a prophet, still “the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets,” for they are not authors of confusion but of peace. And if Marcion is actually an angel, he must be called accursed rather than a bringer of good news, because the gospel he has preached is a strange one. So while he mends, he only confirms both of my positions: that our Gospel came first, since he mends what he had already come across; and that his is the later one, since he made it his own by putting it together out of corrections to ours — a novelty besides.