What the Demon Knew

So, taking it all together: if what is earlier is plainly the truer, and if what comes from the very beginning is earlier, and if what has the apostles for its authors comes from the beginning — then it will be just as plain that whatever has been kept untouched in the apostles’ own churches has come down from the apostles. Let us see, then, what milk the Corinthians drank from Paul; what rule of faith the Galatians were set straight by; what the Philippians, the Thessalonians and the Ephesians read aloud; and what the Romans have to say too, so close at hand — the Romans, to whom Peter and Paul together left the good news, sealed with their own blood into the bargain. We have John’s foster churches as well. For although Marcion throws out his Revelation, the line of overseers there, traced back to its source, will still come to rest on John as its author. The other churches’ noble descent is recognized the same way. [a]

So I say that in these churches — and not only in the ones the apostles founded, but in all the churches that are bound to them in the shared oath of the good news of Christ — that Gospel of Luke which we are defending with everything we have has stood its ground from the day it was first published. Marcion’s Gospel, on the other hand, is unknown to most people, and to nobody at all is it known without being condemned in the same breath. It has churches of its own, naturally — all its very own, and as late in date as they are counterfeit. And if you want to see their registration, you will turn up apostasy in it more easily than apostolicity, with Marcion himself for founder, or somebody out of Marcion’s swarm. Even wasps make combs; and so these Marcionites make churches.

The same authority of the apostolic churches will speak for the other Gospels as well, which we hold equally through those churches and according to their use — I mean John’s and Matthew’s — while the one Mark published may be claimed as Peter’s, Mark having been Peter’s interpreter. And Luke’s arrangement of the Gospel is commonly credited to Paul. It is reasonable enough to take what disciples publish as belonging to their teachers. Marcion, then, ought to be called strictly to account over these other Gospels too, for leaving them out and pressing Luke instead — as though they had not been running freely in the churches from the beginning, exactly as Luke’s was. In fact it is more credible still that they were there from the very beginning: being the work of apostles, they came first, and were founded along with the churches themselves. And if the apostles published nothing, how did it come about that their disciples got to such work ahead of them? They could not have been disciples at all without instruction from their teachers.

If, then, it is clear that these Gospels were current in the churches as well, why did Marcion never lay a finger on them — either to correct them if they had been tampered with, or to acknowledge them if they had not? It stands to reason that men who were perverting the good news would take more trouble over perverting the writings whose authority they knew to be most widely accepted. That is exactly why the false apostles got their name: they imitated the apostles by counterfeiting them. So in the measure that he corrected whatever there was to correct where he found it corrupt, in that same measure he confirmed that everything he saw no need to correct was free of corruption. In short, he corrected only what he thought was corrupt — and not even that justly, since it was not really corrupt at all.

For if the apostles’ Gospels have come down to us whole, and Luke’s, the one received among us, agrees with their standard closely enough to stand level with them in how long the churches have accepted it, then it plainly follows that Luke’s Gospel came down to us whole in the same way — right up to Marcion’s sacrilegious handling of it. Once Marcion laid hands on it, it became a different thing, and hostile to the Gospels of the apostles.

So here is my advice to his followers. Either let them change these other Gospels into agreement with their own — late in the day as it is — so that they may look as though they agree with the apostolic writings (they are retouching their work daily, since we convict them daily); or else let them blush for a master who stands exposed either way — now handing on the truth of the good news with a guilty conscience, now overturning it by shameless tampering. These are the summary arguments we use when we arm ourselves against heretics for the soundness of the good news. We hold to two things: the order of dates, which bars forgers by their lateness, and the authority of the churches, which stands behind the tradition of the apostles. For truth has to come before the forgery, and has to come straight from the men who handed it on.

But now we go a step further and take on Marcion’s own Gospel — as I promised I would — meaning to prove by that very means that it has been doctored. It is certain that the whole aim he has labored so hard at, right down to the drawing up of his Antitheses, comes to this: that he may set up a difference between the Old and the New Testament, so that his own Christ may be separate from the Creator, as belonging to this rival god of his and a stranger to the law and the prophets. It is certain too that with this in view he has struck out everything that went against his opinion and told for the Creator, as though the Creator’s supporters had slipped it in, while he has kept everything that agreed with his opinion. It is the passages he kept that we will now call him to account over. If they turn out to be rather on our side and to break up Marcion’s assumption, we will gladly take them up. It will then be obvious that in keeping them he showed just as much of that blindness which is heresy’s defect as he showed when he erased the whole first class of material. [h]

That, then, is to be the drift and the shape of this little book of mine — subject, of course, to whatever terms have been agreed on both sides of the question. Marcion has laid it down that the Christ who in the days of Tiberius was revealed by a god nobody had heard of before, for the salvation of all nations, is a different being from the one appointed by God the Creator for the restoration of the Jewish state, who is still to come. Between the two he drives the separation of a great and absolute difference — as great as the difference between what is just and what is good; as great as the difference between the law and the good news; as great, in short, as the difference between Judaism and Christianity.

From this our own rule follows as well, by which we settle that there ought to be nothing in common between the Christ of the rival god and the Creator. Christ has to be pronounced the Creator’s if he has carried out the Creator’s arrangements, fulfilled his prophecies, backed his laws, made his promises real, renewed his acts of power, reshaped his rulings, expressed his character and his marks. This law and this rule I earnestly ask the reader to keep always in mind, and on that footing to begin looking into whether Christ is Marcion’s or the Creator’s.

In the fifteenth year of Tiberius’s reign — this is Marcion’s own proposition — he “came down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee.” Down, of course, from the Creator’s heaven, into which he had already come down from his own. So what was his route, that he should be described as coming down first out of his own heaven into the Creator’s? Why should I hold back from finding fault with the parts of this account that will not meet the requirements even of an ordinary narrative, and that always end in a lie? Our objection has of course been made once and for all in the question I raised earlier: whether, coming down through the Creator’s territory — and coming in hostility to him at that — he could possibly have been let through by him, and passed on by him to the earth, which was just as much the Creator’s. [l]

Now, though, I want to know the rest of his way down as well, granting that he did come down. Never mind whether he is supposed to have been seen anywhere. “Coming into view” suggests a sudden unlooked-for glance, one that catches the eye for a moment on something going past without stopping. But the carrying out of a descent is, while it is happening, a visible business, and one that meets the eye. What is more, it involves facts, and so it forces you to ask in what condition and with what staging it was made, with how much violence or how much restraint, and at what hour of the day or night; and who saw the descent, who reported it, who solemnly vouched for a thing that was certainly not easy to believe even after his oath. It is really too bad that Romulus should have had Proculus to vouch for his going up into heaven, while the Christ of this god could not find anybody to announce his coming down from heaven — as though the going up of the one and the coming down of the other were not managed on one and the same ladder of lies.

And then, what business had he with Galilee at all, if he did not belong to the Creator, who had marked that region out for his Christ when he was about to begin his preaching? As Isaiah says: “Drink this first, and be quick about it, region of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, and the rest of you along the sea road and the Jordan road, Galilee of the nations. You people sitting in darkness, look at a great light; on you who live in that land, sitting in the shadow of death, the light has risen.” It is just as well that Marcion’s god does lay claim to enlightening the nations, so that he might have the better reason for coming down from heaven. Only, if it had to be done, he should have made Pontus his landing place rather than Galilee.

But since both the place and the work of enlightening fit Christ according to the prophecy, we begin to recognize that he is the one the prophecy is about — which shows that at the very outset of his preaching he came not to destroy the law and the prophets but rather to fulfill them. Marcion, naturally, has deleted that saying as an insertion. But it will do him no good to deny that Christ said in words what he immediately began doing in part. The prophecy about the place he fulfilled at once: from heaven straight to the synagogue. As the saying goes, “The business we came for, let us get on with.” Marcion will have to strike out of the Gospel besides, “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” and, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to dogs” — all so that Christ may not look like an Israelite. But facts will satisfy me instead of words. Take away every saying of my Christ; his acts will speak.

Look: he goes into the synagogue — surely that is going to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Look: it is to Israelites first that he offers the “bread” of his teaching — surely he gives them that priority because they are the “children.” Notice: he does not yet share it with anyone else — surely he passes them by as “dogs.” For to whom else could he better have given it than to people who were strangers to the Creator, if he did not himself belong to the Creator?

And in any case, how could he have been let into the synagogue — a man turning up as suddenly as that, and as unknown; a man of whose tribe, nation and family nobody had yet been told, nor of his enrolment in the census of Augustus, that most reliable witness to the Lord’s birth, kept in the archives at Rome? If they did not know he had been circumcised, they would certainly have remembered that he must not be let into their holiest places. And even supposing he had the ordinary right of entry to a synagogue, the work of giving instruction was allowed only to a man who was extremely well known, examined and tested, and invested with the privilege for some while after his experience had been properly vouched for elsewhere.

But “they were all astonished at his teaching.” Naturally they were: “for,” says Luke, “his word was with power” — not because he taught against the law and the prophets. No doubt his speech gave off both power and grace, building up the substance of the law and the prophets rather than pulling it down. Otherwise what they felt would have been horror, not astonishment. It would not be admiration but revulsion, prompt and certain, that they would have handed to a destroyer of the law and the prophets — a man who as a natural consequence was chiefly putting forward a rival god. For he could not have taught anything that ran the law and the prophets down, and so far the Creator with them, without first laying down the doctrine of a different and rival divinity.

So, since Scripture says nothing more about the matter than that the plain force and power of his word produced astonishment, it shows more readily that his teaching agreed with the Creator, by not denying it, than that it stood against the Creator, by not asserting it. And so he will either have to be acknowledged as belonging to the one in agreement with whom he taught, or else be judged a deceiver, since he taught in agreement with the very one he had come to oppose.

In the same passage, the spirit of an unclean demon cries out: “What have we to do with you, Jesus? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are — the Holy One of God.” I am not raising here the question whether that title suited someone who ought not to be called Christ unless the Creator sent him. His titles have already had a full treatment elsewhere.

What I am discussing at present is how the evil spirit could have known that he was called by such a name, when not one prophecy had ever at any time been uttered about him by a god who was unknown and had been silent up to then — a god in whose name it was not possible for him to be attested as “the Holy One,” since that god was unknown even to the Creator himself. What had he put out that pointed to a new divinity, by which the spirit might mark him as the rival god’s holy one? That he went into a synagogue and did nothing, not even in a word, against the Creator?

So, since he could not possibly acknowledge as Jesus and the Holy One of God a being he knew nothing about, he was acknowledging the one he did know. For he remembered that the prophet had prophesied of God’s “Holy One,” and that God’s name of “Jesus” was in the son of Nun. He had picked these up from the angel too, as our Gospel has it: “Therefore the one who will be born of you will be called the Holy One, the Son of God”; and, “You shall call his name Jesus.” So the evil spirit — evil spirit though he was — actually had some notion of the Lord’s arrangement, rather than of some strange one that nobody had properly understood before.

He led with that question, too: “What have we to do with you?” — not as if he were speaking of a strange Jesus, since it is to this one that the Creator’s evil spirits belong. And he did not say, What have you to do with us? but, “What have we to do with you?” — as if lamenting over himself and pleading against his own ruin, which he sees coming when he adds, “Have you come to destroy us?” That is how completely he acknowledged in Jesus the Son of the God who was judicial and avenging and, so to speak, severe — and not of the one who was simply good, and did not know how to destroy or how to punish.

Now, for what purpose have we put this passage first? To show that Jesus was neither acknowledged by the evil spirit, nor claimed by himself, to be anyone other than the Creator’s. But Jesus rebuked him. He certainly did — for being an envious spirit, and, in the very act of confessing him, insolent, and vicious in his flattery. As though it had been Christ’s highest glory to have come for the destruction of demons and not for the salvation of mankind — when what he actually wanted was that his disciples should take their glory not in evil spirits being put under them, but in the white robe of salvation.

Why else did he rebuke him? If it was because he was wrong all through, then Jesus was neither Jesus nor the Holy One of God. If it was because he was only partly wrong — for taking him, rightly enough, to be Jesus and the Holy One of God, but also to belong to the Creator — then it would have been thoroughly unjust to rebuke him for thinking what he knew he ought to think about him, and for not supposing about him what he had no way of knowing he ought to suppose: that he was a different Jesus, and the holy one of the other god. And if the rebuke has no likelier explanation than the one we give it, then it follows that the evil spirit made no mistake and was not rebuked for lying. It was Jesus himself, and no other could the evil spirit possibly have acknowledged; while Jesus confirmed that he was the one the evil spirit had acknowledged, by not rebuking him for telling a lie.