The Hands That Touched the Leper

According to prophecy the Creator’s Christ had to be called a Nazarene; and that is exactly why the Jews call us Nazarenes after him, by that very name. For we are the people of whom it is written, “Her Nazirites were whiter than snow” — we who were once stained with sin and darkened with the clouds of ignorance. And the title Nazarene was going to suit Christ in any case, from the hiding place of his infancy: he went down and settled at Nazareth to get clear of Archelaus the son of Herod. [a]

I have not held back from mentioning this, and here is why. Marcion’s Christ ought to have kept clear of every last one of the home towns of the Creator’s Christ, when he had so many towns in Judea that the prophets had never made over to the Creator’s Christ. But Christ will be the prophets’ Christ wherever he turns up in agreement with the prophets. And in fact even at Nazareth he is not noted as having preached anything new, while in another verse he is said to have been rejected over nothing more than a proverb.

The moment I notice that they laid hands on him, I cannot help drawing a conclusion about his bodily substance. It cannot have been a phantom, since it could be touched and even roughly handled: he was seized, hauled off, and led to the very edge of a cliff. He did escape through the middle of them — but he had already been through their handling, and only then went on his way, no doubt because the crowd gave way, as usually happens, or was even broken through. Not because he slipped out of their hands like a fog; and if that is what he had been, he would never have let himself be touched at all.

That is a maxim worth a place even in the world’s wisdom. In short, he touched people himself. He laid on them hands that could be felt, and gave them the gift of healing — cures no less true, no less unimaginary, than the hands that gave them. So he was the very Christ of Isaiah, the healer of our sicknesses.

“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.”

Now the Greeks habitually use for “carry” a word that also means “take away.” A general promise is enough for me for the moment: whatever cures Jesus worked, he is mine. But let us come to the kinds of cures.

To set people free from evil spirits is a cure of sickness. So the wicked spirits — just as in the earlier case — used to come out giving testimony, shouting, “You are the Son of God.” Of which God, the case itself makes clear enough.

But they were rebuked and ordered not to speak, and for this precise reason: Christ wanted to be announced as the Son of God by men, not by unclean spirits — the one Christ, that is, to whom this was fitting, because he had sent men ahead through whom he could be made known, and they were certainly the worthier preachers. It was in character for him to refuse an unclean spirit’s announcement, when he had holy people in abundance at his call.

The other one, though — who had never been foretold at all — would not have turned down testimony from a stranger, or from a substance of any kind, since he had no substance of his own but had come down in someone else’s. (This is assuming he wanted to be recognized; and if he did not want even that much, his coming was pointless.) And by now, as the Creator’s destroyer as well, he would have wanted nothing better than to be acknowledged by the Creator’s own spirits and published abroad, so as to be feared.

Except that Marcion says his god is not feared. A good being, he maintains, is no object of fear; only a judging being is, since he is where the grounds of fear are kept — anger, severity, verdicts, revenge, condemnation. But it was fear, plainly, that made the evil spirits give way. So what they confessed was that Christ was the Son of a God who is to be feared: they would have had a reason not to submit if they had had none to be afraid of. Besides, he showed that he was to be feared, because he drove them out not by persuasion, the way a good being would, but by command and rebuke.

Or was he rebuking them for making him an object of fear, when all along he did not want to be feared? And how did he expect them to come out, when they could not come out except in fear? So he was cornered: he had to act against his own nature, when in his simple goodness he might have dealt gently with them from the start. And he was cornered a second time, into plain double-dealing, when he let the demons fear him as the Son of the Creator so that he could drive them out — not by his own power, but on the Creator’s authority.

“He departed, and went into a deserted place.” That was the Creator’s own familiar country. It was right that the Word should appear there in a body, where he had once worked in a cloud; and the good news suited the same kind of place that had once been settled on for the law. “Let the wilderness and the desert be glad and rejoice,” then — Isaiah had promised as much.

When the crowds held him back, he said, “I must preach the kingdom of God to other towns as well.” Had he displayed a god of his own anywhere yet? Nowhere yet, I suppose. But was he talking to people who knew of a second god too? I do not believe so. So if he had preached no God but the Creator, and they had known no God but the Creator, then the kingdom he was announcing was the kingdom of the God he knew to be the only God his hearers knew.

Out of so many kinds of work, why did he think so highly of fishing that he picked his apostles out of it — Simon and the sons of Zebedee? The story cannot have been drawn out at that length for the bare event’s sake. He said to Peter, who was shaken by the enormous catch of fish, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.” By saying it he showed them what prophecy had just been fulfilled: it was he who through Jeremiah had foretold, “Look, I am sending many fishermen, and they will fish them” — men, that is. Then at last they left their boats and followed him, because they understood that he was the one who had begun to carry out what he had announced. [j]

It is quite another matter when your Christ made a point of choosing from the guild of shipmasters, meaning one day to make the shipmaster Marcion an apostle. We have already established, against his Antitheses, that Marcion’s case gains nothing from the difference he supposes between the Law and the Gospel, since even that difference was arranged by the Creator, and in fact promised beforehand in his promise of a new Law, a new Word, and a new covenant.

But he argues with particular care, taking his proof from the Creator’s own ground, out of a certain fellow sufferer and comrade in being hated — a leper, cleansed. I am glad to take him on, and to point out to him first of all the force of the law read figuratively. In this case of a leper, who was not to be touched but rather kept away from all company, the law forbade any dealings with a person defiled by sins — the very person the apostle also forbids us so much as to eat with, since the taint of sins would be passed on as though it were catching, wherever a man mixed himself in with a sinner.

The Lord, then, wanting the law to be understood more deeply, as signifying spiritual things by bodily ones — and so not destroying that law but building it up, since what he wanted was for it to be acknowledged in earnest — touched the leper. As a man he might have been defiled by it; as God he could not be, being of course incorruptible. So the rule could not have been aimed at him, that he was bound to keep the law and not touch an unclean person, since contact with the unclean would not make him unclean.

That, I say, holds together in my Christ — and all the better once I show that it does not hold together in yours. Suppose it was as an enemy of the law that he touched the leper, flouting the law’s precept by treating defilement with contempt. How could he be defiled at all, when he had no body that could be defiled? A phantom cannot take a stain. So the one who could not be defiled, being a phantom, does not owe his freedom from pollution to any divine power, but to his own empty unreality. He cannot be credited with despising pollution, when he had no material capacity for it in the first place; nor, in the same way, with destroying the law, when he escaped defilement by the accident of his phantom nature and not by any display of strength.

Now, if the Creator’s prophet Elisha cleansed Naaman the Syrian and only him, out of so many lepers in Israel, that fact does nothing to set Christ apart — as though he were the better of the two for cleansing this Israelite leper, a stranger to him, whom the leper’s own Lord had not been able to cleanse.

The cleansing of the Syrian stood rather for the cleansing of all the nations of the world in Christ their light — nations stiff with the stains of seven capital offenses: idolatry, blasphemy, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, false witness, and fraud. Seven times, then, as if once for each, he washed in the Jordan: both so that he might carry out the cleansing of a complete seven, and because the whole power and fullness of the one baptism was in this way solemnly assigned to Christ alone, who would one day set up on earth not only a word in short compass, but a washing of the same short compass.

Even here Marcion finds an antithesis: Elisha, he says, needed a material aid, applied water, and did it seven times, whereas Christ used a word alone, and that once for all, and produced the cure on the spot. And I might well make bold to claim the Word itself for the Creator’s own substance. There is nothing whose first maker is not also the one with more power over it. Oh, of course — it is unbelievable that the Creator’s power should have produced a remedy for one disease by a word, when it once brought a structure as vast as the world into being by a word. From what could the Creator’s Christ be better recognized than from the power of his word?

But your Christ is a different Christ on this account, because he did it differently from Elisha — because, in fact, a master is more powerful than his servant! Why, Marcion, do you lay it down as a rule that servants do things exactly as their own masters do? Are you not afraid it will go against you, if you deny that Christ belongs to the Creator on the ground that he was once more powerful than a servant of the Creator? Set against Elisha’s weakness he is admitted to be the greater — if greater is even the word. For the cure is the same, though the working of it differs. What has your Christ done more than my Elisha? Or rather, what great thing has your Christ’s word done, when all it has done is what a river of the Creator’s did?

Everything else follows the same rule. So far as giving up all human glory went, he told the man not to spread the cure about; but so far as the honor of the law went, he asked that the usual course be taken: “Go, show yourself to the priest, and present the offering that Moses commanded.”

He still wanted the figures of the law observed in their types, because of what they foretold. What those types meant was this: a man who had once been a sinner and had afterward been scoured clean of its stains by the word of God was bound to bring God a gift in the temple — prayer and thanksgiving in the church, through Christ Jesus, who is the Father’s universal priest. So he added, “that it may be a testimony to you” — a testimony, no doubt, by which he would attest that he was not destroying the law but fulfilling it, and would attest also that it was he himself who had been foretold as the one who would take our sicknesses and weaknesses upon himself.

This perfectly consistent and fitting sense of “the testimony” is what that flatterer of his own Christ, Marcion, tries to shut out under cover of mercy and gentleness. He was good — these are Marcion’s own words — and he knew besides that every man freed from leprosy would be sure to go through the ceremonies of the law; that, says Marcion, is why he gave the instruction.

Well, what of it? Has he continued in his goodness — that is, in letting the law stand — or not? If he has kept it up, he will never turn into a destroyer of the law, and he will never be counted as belonging to another god, because there would be no destruction of the law to make him the other god’s. But if he has not continued good, and has since destroyed the law, then the testimony he laid on them at the leper’s cure is a false one, since he abandoned his goodness in destroying the law.

So if he was good while he was upholding the law, he has now turned evil as its destroyer. And by the support he gave the law, he was declaring that the law was good; nobody lets himself support a bad thing. So he is bad not only if he permitted obedience to a bad law, but worse still if he has shown up as the destroyer of a good one.

So then: if he commanded the gift to be offered because he knew that every cured leper would be sure to bring one, he could have left uncommanded what he knew would be done of its own accord. His coming down was wasted, then, as if he meant to destroy the law, when he makes concessions to the men who keep it. And in fact, since he knew their habits, he ought to have worked all the harder at turning them away from the law, seeing that this was what he had come for.

Why did he not keep quiet, then, so that a man might obey the law of his own free will? At least then he might have looked, up to a point, as though he had stuck to his patience. Instead he adds his own authority as well, weighted with this “testimony.” A testimony to what, I ask, if not to the law? And it makes no difference in what spirit he backed the law — as good, or as unnecessary, or out of patience, or out of inconsistency — so long as I drive you off your ground, Marcion.

Look: he commanded that the law be fulfilled. In whatever way he commanded it, he could in the same way have said this sentence first: “I did not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it.”

So what business had you cutting out of the Gospel something that was perfectly sound in it? You have admitted that in his goodness he did in deed what you deny he did in word. We have solid proof, then, that he spoke the word, in the fact that he did the deed — and that you erased the Lord’s word, rather than that our own people put it in.