The Phantom of a Phantom

In the same way, he also knows the exact time at which he had to suffer, since the law had already sketched his suffering in advance. Out of all the Jewish festivals he chose the Passover. Moses had declared that there was a sacred sign in it: “It is the Lord’s Passover.” See, then, how plainly he shows where his heart was set: I have longed with all my heart to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. What a destroyer of the law this was — a man who ached to keep the law’s own Passover! Was he simply that fond of Jewish mutton? Or was it because he had to be “led like a lamb to the slaughter,” and because “as a sheep is silent before her shearers, so he would not open his mouth” — was that why he wanted so deeply to carry out the sign that stood for his own redeeming blood? [a]

He could have been handed over by any stranger — except that here too I find him fulfilling a psalm: “The man who ate bread with me has lifted up his heel against me.” He could also have been handed over for nothing. What need was there of a traitor at all in the case of a man who offered himself to the people in the open, and who could have been seized by force as easily as taken by treachery? That might have done well enough for some other Christ. It would not have suited one who was bringing prophecies to completion. For it was written, “They sold the righteous man for silver.” And the exact sum, and where the money went — called back from its first purpose as a fee, once Judas was sick with regret, and spent instead on a potter’s field, as Matthew’s Gospel tells it — all of that Jeremiah had plainly foretold: “And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of the one who was valued, and gave them for the potter’s field.”

When he said so earnestly that he wanted to eat the Passover, he was treating the feast as his own; it would have been beneath God to want a share in what did not belong to him. Then, taking the bread and giving it to his disciples, he made it his own body by saying, “This is my body” — that is, the figure of my body. But there could be no figure unless there were first a real body. An empty thing, a phantom, cannot be the subject of a figure. If, as Marcion might say, he only pretended the bread was his body because he had no real bodily substance, then it follows that he must have given up bread for us. It would be a great help to Marcion’s hollow case if bread had been crucified! And why call his body bread, and not — say — a melon, which is what Marcion must have had in place of a heart?

He never grasped how old this figure of Christ’s body is. Christ himself said through Jeremiah: “I was like a lamb or an ox led to the slaughter, and I did not know that they were plotting a plot against me, saying, Let us cast the wood upon his bread” — meaning, of course, the cross upon his body. And so, throwing light on the old prophecies as he always did, he said plainly enough what he meant by the bread when he called the bread his own body. In the same way, when he speaks of the cup and makes the new covenant to be sealed “in his blood,” he is confirming that his body is real. No blood can belong to a body that is not a body of flesh. If some body were set before our eyes that was not made of flesh, then, not being fleshly, it would have no blood. So from the evidence of the flesh we get proof of the body, and from the evidence of the blood, proof of the flesh.

And to see how ancient a figure wine is for blood, turn to Isaiah, who asks: “Who is this who comes from Edom, from Bosor, with garments dyed red, so splendid in his clothing, in the greatness of his strength? Why are your garments red, and your clothes like the clothes of a man coming from the treading of a full winepress?” The prophetic Spirit is looking at the Lord as already on his way to his suffering, dressed in his fleshly nature; and because he was to suffer in that nature, the Spirit pictures his flesh bleeding under the image of garments dyed red, as if reddened in the treading and crushing of the winepress, out of which the workers come down stained with the juice like men stained with blood.

Genesis foretells it more clearly still. In the blessing of Judah — and it was out of Judah’s tribe that Christ was to come, as far as the flesh goes — it drew Christ even then in the person of that patriarch: “He washed his garments in wine, and his clothes in the blood of grapes.” The garments and the clothes pointed to his flesh, and the wine to his blood. So the one who was now consecrating his blood in wine is the one who back then, through the patriarch, used wine as the figure for his blood.

“Woe,” he says, “to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed!” Now it is certain that this “woe” has to be taken as the curse and the threat of an angry, offended Master — unless Judas was going to get off unpunished after so enormous a sin. If he was to get off, the “woe” was an idle word. If he was not, then of course he was to be punished by the one against whom he had committed his treachery. [p]

Now if your god knowingly let a man whom he had deliberately chosen as one of his own companions fall into so great a crime, you can no longer use Adam’s case as a weapon against the Creator, because it now rebounds on your own god. Either he did not know, and had no foresight to stop the man who was going to sin; or he was unable to stop him, even granting he did know; or else he was unwilling, though he had both the foreknowledge and the power — and then he earns the charge of malice, for letting a man of his own choosing perish in his sin. So my advice is that you willingly acknowledge the Creator in that god of yours, rather than end up, against your will, making your excellent god exactly like him. Peter’s case, too, shows you that your god is a jealous god: after the apostle’s presumptuous protests of loyalty, he assigned him to a flat denial rather than keep him from falling.

The Christ of the prophets, moreover, was destined to be betrayed with a kiss, since he was the Son of the very God whom that people “honored with their lips.” When he was brought before the council, he was asked whether he was the Christ. What Christ could the Jews have been asking about, except their own? Why, then, did he not tell them about the rival Christ, even at that moment? Your answer is: so that he might be able to suffer. In other words, this most excellent god was pushing men into crime while deliberately keeping them in the dark.

But even if he had told them, he would still have had to suffer. He said so himself: “If I tell you, you will not believe.” And refusing to believe, they would have gone right on demanding his death. In fact, would he not have been even more likely to suffer if he had announced himself as sent by the rival god, and therefore as the Creator’s enemy? So it was not in order to suffer that he held back at that critical moment from proclaiming himself the other Christ. It was because they wanted to force a confession out of his mouth that they had no intention of believing even if he gave it to them — when their plain duty was to recognize him from his works, which were fulfilling their own Scriptures. It was exactly right, then, for him to keep himself hidden at that moment, since the recognition owed him was one they should have come to on their own.

All the same, he stretched out his hand and said, “From now on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God.” It was on the authority of Daniel’s prophecy that he hinted to them that he was “the Son of Man,” and on the authority of David’s psalm that he would “sit at the right hand of God.” And once he had said this and so invited them to compare the Scripture, a ray of light did seem to show them who he wanted them to understand him to be, for they say:

Are you then the Son of God? Of what God, except the only one they knew? Of what God, except the one they remembered from the psalm as having said to his Son, “Sit at my right hand”? Then he answered them: You say that I am. It is as if he meant: you are the ones saying this, not I. And yet at the same time he let himself be everything they had said, in this second question of theirs.

And how are you going to prove to us that they said “So you are the Son of God” as a question and not as a statement? Take it this way. Because he had shown them in a roundabout way, out of passages of Scripture, that they ought to regard him as the Son of God, they meant their own words, “You are then the Son of God,” to be taken in the same roundabout way, as much as to say, “You do not want to say this of yourself in plain words.” And in exactly the same way he answered them, “You say that I am,” in a sense equally free of doubt — that is, affirming it. His statement was so complete that they held on to the sense it carried.

For when he was brought before Pilate, they went on to press him with the serious charge of calling himself Christ the King — that is, without doubt, the Son of God, the one who was to sit at God’s right hand. They would have loaded some other title on him if they had been unsure whether he had called himself the Son of God, and if he had not said the words “You say that I am” in a way that admitted he was what they said he was. In the same way, when Pilate asked him, “Are you the Christ, the King?” he answered as he had answered the council, “You say that I am,” so as not to look as though fear of Pilate’s power had driven him into a fuller answer. [w]

“And so the Lord took his place at the trial.” And he set his people on trial as well. The Lord himself comes to a trial “with the elders and the rulers of the people,” as Isaiah foretold. And then he fulfilled everything that had been written about his suffering. At that time “the nations raged and the people plotted in vain; the kings of the earth took their stand, and the rulers gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ.” The nations 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 Pilate sent him off to Herod as a free gift, the words of Hosea came true, for Hosea had prophesied about Christ: “And they will carry him bound as a present to the king.” Herod was “overjoyed” when he saw Jesus, but he did not hear a word from him. For “as a lamb is silent before its shearer, so he did not open his mouth,” because “the Lord had given him a disciplined tongue, so that he might know how and when he ought to speak” — that same tongue that “stuck to his jaws,” as the psalm said it would, by his not speaking.

Then Barabbas, the guiltiest of criminals, is let go as though he were the innocent man, while the wholly righteous Christ is handed over to be put to death as though he were the murderer. What is more, two criminals are crucified on either side of him, so that he might be counted in with the lawbreakers. His clothing, beyond any question, was divided among the soldiers, part of it handed out by lot — and Marcion has erased the whole thing from his Gospel, because he had his eye on the psalm: “They divided my garments among them, and cast lots for my clothing.” You may as well take away the cross itself! Even then the psalm does not keep quiet about it: “They pierced my hands and my feet.” Indeed, the details of the whole event can be read there: “Dogs surrounded me; the gang of the wicked closed in on me. Everyone who looked at me laughed me to scorn; they stuck out their lips and shook their heads, saying, He hoped in God — let God rescue him.”

What good is your tampering with the evidence of the clothes now? Take it as plunder for your false Christ if you like: the whole psalm is Christ’s clothing. But look — the very elements are shaken, because their Lord was suffering. If it had been their enemy to whom all this injury was done, the sky would have blazed with light, the sun would have shone brighter still, and the day would have stretched its own course out, gladly gazing at Marcion’s Christ hanging on his gallows. These proofs would have served me even if they had never been prophesied at all.

Isaiah says, “I will clothe the heavens with blackness.” This is the day Amos also writes about: “And it will come about in that day, says the Lord, that the sun will go down at noon, and the earth will grow dark in broad daylight.” At noon the curtain of the temple was torn in two, by the escape of the cherubim, who left “the daughter of Zion like a shelter in a vineyard, like a hut in a cucumber field.”

And with what steadiness he has worked in Psalm 30 as well to set the very Christ before us! He calls out with a loud voice to the Father:

Into your hands I entrust my spirit. So even in dying he would spend his last breath fulfilling the prophets. “And when he had said this, he breathed out his spirit.” Who did? Did the spirit give itself up, or did the flesh give up the spirit? The spirit could not have breathed itself out. The thing that breathes is one thing; the thing breathed is another. If the spirit is breathed, it must be breathed out by something else. And if there had been nothing there but spirit, we would say that it departed rather than that it breathed out. What is it that breathes out spirit, if not the flesh, which both breathes the spirit while it has it and breathes it out when it loses it?

Indeed, if what hung there was not flesh but a phantom of flesh — and a phantom is nothing but spirit, so that the spirit breathed out its own self and departed in the act — then no doubt the phantom departed when the spirit that was the phantom departed, and phantom and spirit vanished together and were nowhere to be seen. So nothing was left on the cross, nothing hung there after that last breath: nothing to ask Pilate for, nothing to take down from the cross, nothing to wrap in the linen, nothing to lay in the new tomb. And yet what was there was not nothing. What was there, then? If it was the phantom, then Christ was still there; and if Christ had gone, he had taken the phantom away with him. The only dodge left to the heretics’ nerve is to admit that what stayed behind was the phantom of a phantom!

But what if Joseph knew that it was a body he was handling with so much reverence — that same Joseph “who had not agreed” with the Jews in their crime, the “happy man who did not walk in the counsel of the ungodly, or stand in the way of sinners, or sit in the seat of the scornful”?