The Son of Man Forgives Sins

The paralyzed man is healed — and healed in public, where the people could see it. For Isaiah says, “They will see the glory of the Lord, and the majesty of our God.” What glory, and what majesty? “Be strong, you weak hands, and you feeble knees” — that is the paralysis. “Be strong; do not be afraid.” Be strong is not repeated for nothing, and do not be afraid is not added for nothing. Along with the mending of the limbs there was to be, as the promise said, a restoring of the body’s own energy — “Get up and pick up your bed” — and along with that, strength of mind as well, so as not to be afraid of the people who would say: “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” So what you have here is not only the fulfillment of a prophecy that promised one particular kind of healing, but the fulfillment of the symptoms that followed the cure as well. [a]

In the same way you should recognize Christ, in this same prophet, as the one who forgives sins. “He will remit the sins of many,” he says, “and will himself take away our sins.” For earlier, speaking in the person of the Lord himself, he had said: “Though your sins be like scarlet, I will make them white as snow; though they be like crimson, I will whiten them like wool.” By the scarlet color he points to the blood of the prophets, and by the crimson — which is the brighter of the two — to the blood of the Lord. Micah says the same thing about the forgiveness of sins: “Who is a God like you, pardoning wrongdoing and passing over the offenses of the remnant of your inheritance? He does not hold on to his anger as evidence against them, because he delights in mercy. He will turn back and have compassion on us; he wipes away our wrongdoing and throws our sins into the depths of the sea.”

Now if nothing of this kind had been predicted of Christ, I would still find in the Creator examples of a kindness that holds out to me the promise of similar feelings in the Son whose Father he is. I see how the Ninevites obtained forgiveness of their sins from the Creator — not to say from Christ, even then, since from the beginning he acted in the Father’s name. I read too how, when David admitted his sin against Uriah, the prophet Nathan said to him, “The Lord has cancelled your sin; you will not die.” And how king Ahab, Jezebel’s husband, guilty of idolatry and of Naboth’s blood, was pardoned because he repented. And how Jonathan the son of Saul had the guilt of a broken fast wiped out by pleading. Why should I go through all the times the nation itself was restored after its sins were forgiven? — restored by that God, in fact, who wants mercy rather than sacrifice, and a sinner’s repentance rather than his death.

You will first have to deny that the Creator ever forgave sins. Then you will have to show, as the next step, that he never appointed any such right for his Christ. Only then will you have proved how new that much-advertised kindness of your — of course — new Christ really is: when you have proved that it neither matches the Creator nor was predicted by the Creator. But whether forgiving sins can belong to someone who is said to be unable to retain them; and whether acquitting can belong to someone who is not competent even to condemn; and whether pardon suits someone against whom no offense can be committed — these are questions we have met elsewhere, where we preferred to drop hints rather than write them up again as a fresh treatise.

On the Son of man, the objection I lodge has two parts. First, that Christ cannot lie, and so cannot declare himself Son of man if he is not truly that. Second, that he cannot be constituted Son of man unless he was born of a human parent, either father or mother. The discussion then turns on which human parent he ought to be counted the son of — the father or the mother. Since he is begotten of God the Father, he is obviously not the son of a human father. And if not of a human father, then he must be the son of a human mother. And if of a human mother, then plainly she must be a virgin. For where no human father is assigned to a man, no husband will be reckoned to his mother; and to whatever mother no husband is reckoned, the condition of virginity belongs. But if his mother is not a virgin, two fathers will have to be reckoned to him, a divine one and a human one. She must have a husband if she is not a virgin, and by having a husband she would give him two fathers, one divine and one human, so that he would be Son of God and son of a man both. That is the kind of birth — if it can be called one — that the old stories assign to Castor, or to Hercules.

So if this distinction is kept — that he is Son of man because he was born of his mother, since he was not begotten by a father, and that his mother is a virgin because his father is not human — then he is that Christ whom Isaiah foretold a virgin would conceive. On what principle you, Marcion, can allow him to be Son of man, I simply cannot see. If through a human father, then you are denying he is Son of God. If through a divine father as well, then you are turning Christ into the Hercules of the stories. If through a human mother only, then you have conceded my point. And if not through a human father either, then he is not the son of any man at all, and he must have been lying when he declared himself to be what he was not. Only one thing can get you out of the difficulty: the nerve either to name your own god as the actual human father of Christ, as Valentinus did with his Aeon, or else to deny that the Virgin was human — which even Valentinus did not do.

And what if Christ is entered in Daniel under this very title, “Son of man”? Is that not enough to prove that he is the Christ of prophecy? If he gives himself the designation that prophecy had provided for the Creator’s Christ, then he is plainly offering himself to be understood as the one the prophet assigned it to. Perhaps, you say, it can be regarded as nothing more than two people happening to share a name. But we have already maintained that neither Christ nor Jesus ought to have been called by those names if they were of two different kinds. And as for the designation “Son of man,” to the extent that it comes about by accident, to that extent it is hard for it to occur alongside a chance sharing of names as well. For a thing like this is sheer accident, especially where the same cause is not there to bring the sameness about.

So if Marcion’s Christ is also said to be born of a man, then he too would receive an identical designation, and there would be two Sons of man, just as there would be two Christs and two Jesuses. Since, then, the designation belongs by right only to the one in whom it has a fitting reason, if it is claimed for another who has the same name but no title to the designation, then even the sameness of name starts to look suspicious in a man for whom sameness of designation is claimed without reason. And it follows that the one who must be believed to be one and the same is the one who is found the fitter to receive both the name and the designation, while the other is shut out, having no right to the designation because he has no reason to show for it. Nor will anyone have a better claim to both than the one who came first, and who was allotted the name of Christ and the designation Son of man — the Jesus of the Creator. It was he whom the king of Babylon saw in the furnace with his witnesses: “the fourth, who was like the Son of man.” And he was revealed to Daniel himself in so many words as “the Son of man, coming in the clouds of heaven” as a judge, as the Scripture also shows.

What I have brought forward might have been enough about the way prophecy designates the Son of man. But Scripture offers me more still, in the Lord’s own interpretation of it. The Jews looked at him as merely a man and were not yet sure that he was also God, being likewise the Son of God, and so they said — rightly enough — that a man could not forgive sins, but God alone. Why, then, did he not follow up their point about man and answer them that a man had the power to forgive sins? For in mentioning the Son of man he was naming a human being. It must have been because he wanted to use that very designation “Son of man” from the book of Daniel to strike their objection back at them, and so show them that the one forgiving sins was God and man — that unique Son of man in Daniel’s prophecy who had received the power of judging, and with it, of course, the power of forgiving sins as well, since the one who judges also acquits. Then, once that stumbling block of theirs was smashed to pieces by their own recollection of Scripture, they could the more easily acknowledge him to be the Son of man himself, by his actually forgiving sins. One last observation: nowhere yet had he professed himself to be the Son of man — not until this passage, in which for the first time he forgave sins; that is, in which for the first time he used his function as judge, by acquitting.

As for everything the other side has to allege in argument against all this, look hard at what it comes to. It has to strain itself to such a pitch of madness as to maintain, on the one hand, that their Christ is Son of man too, to save him from the charge of lying, and on the other hand to deny that he was born of a woman, in case they should have to grant that he was the Virgin’s son. But since God’s authority, and the nature of the case, and plain common sense will not allow the heretics this insane position, we have here our chance to enter an objection, in the fewest possible words, about the substance of Christ’s body, against Marcion’s phantoms. Since he is born of man, being the Son of man, he is body derived from body. I assure you, you will more easily find a man born without a heart or without brains — like Marcion himself — than without a body, like Marcion’s Christ. And let that be the limit of your inspection of the heart, or at any rate the brains, of the heretic from Pontus.