The Shipmaster of Pontus

Nothing is without a beginning except God alone. And since a beginning comes first in the makeup of everything, it must come first in any discussion of it too, if we mean to arrive at clear knowledge of what a thing is. You cannot even examine what sort of thing something is until you are certain that it exists — and you are certain of that only once you have found out where it came from. So, now that this little book of mine has brought me to the subject, I want Marcion to tell me where his apostle came from. [b]

I ask as a newcomer of sorts, a pupil of no other teacher, a man who for the moment can believe nothing except this: that nothing ought to be believed in a hurry. And anything is believed in a hurry, I would add, that is believed without any look into how it began. I have every reason to press this inquiry to a careful settlement, since the man being put before me as an apostle is one I cannot find in the Gospel’s register of the apostles. In fact, when I am told that this man was chosen by the Lord after the Lord had already entered his rest in heaven, it looks to me as though a certain want of foresight can be charged against Christ. He did not know beforehand that he would need this man, and so had to add him to the body of the apostles by a chance encounter rather than by deliberate choice — by necessity, so to speak, and not by free decision — when the apostles had already been duly appointed and sent off to their several missions.

So then, shipmaster of Pontus: if you have never carried contraband or a smuggler’s cargo in your little boats, if you have never thrown a freight overboard or tampered with one, then no doubt you are more careful and honest still in the things of God. Tell us, then, on what bill of lading you took the Apostle Paul aboard. Who stamped his label? What owner consigned him? Who handed him over to you? Then you can land him with a clear mind — in case he should turn out to belong to someone else, someone who can make good his claim to him by producing every one of the man’s apostolic papers.

Paul declares himself an apostle — in his own words, “not from men, nor through a man, but through Jesus Christ.” Now anyone at all may make a declaration about himself, but a declaration is only made valid by a second person’s authority. One man signs, another countersigns; one man sets his seal to a document, another enters it in the public records. Nobody is proposer and seconder to himself at once. Besides, you have surely read that “many will come, saying, I am Christ.” If a man can pretend to be Christ himself, how much more easily can he claim to be an apostle of Christ! Still, for my part I keep to the character of a pupil asking questions, so that even on those terms I may refute a belief of yours that has nothing to hold it up, and shame your effrontery in making claims you have no means of establishing.

Let there be a Christ, then, and let there be an apostle, even of another god. What of it? They still have to fetch their proofs out of the Creator’s own Testament. Genesis, in fact, promised me the Apostle Paul long ago. Among the figures and prophetic blessings that Jacob pronounced over his sons, when he turned to Benjamin he cried out: “Benjamin will be a ravening wolf; in the morning he will devour the prey, and in the evening he will hand out food.” He saw that Paul would come out of the tribe of Benjamin — a greedy wolf, devouring prey in the morning; that is, in his early years he would lay waste the Lord’s sheep as a persecutor of the churches. But in the evening he would hand out food; that is, in his declining years he would feed the flock of Christ as the teacher of the nations. And in Saul’s conduct toward David — first violent persecution, then remorse and amends, when David repaid his evil with good — we have nothing but a foreshadowing of Paul in Saul, who belonged to the same tribe, and of Jesus in David, from whom he was descended, as the Virgin’s family line shows.

But if these figures do not satisfy you, the Acts of the Apostles at any rate has handed down to me this course of Paul’s life, and you have no business refusing it. From that book I show that he turned from a persecutor into “an apostle, not from men, nor through a man.” From it I come to believe the Apostle himself. From it I get my ground for driving you off his defense, and for hearing your jeer without a tremor: “So you deny the Apostle Paul.” I am not slandering the man I am defending. I deny him in order to force you to prove him. I deny him in order to convince you that he is mine. If you have any regard for our belief, you must accept the things that make it up. If you summon us to your belief, then tell us what it is built on. Either prove that what you believe is true, or, failing that, tell us how you manage to believe it. Otherwise, what kind of man are you — believing in the teeth of the one from whom alone the proof of what you believe can come?

So take the apostle now from my hands, in the same way that you have already had to take the Christ — the apostle shown to be as much mine as the Christ is. And here too we shall fight along the same lines, and meet our opponent on one plain rule. An apostle who is said not to belong to the Creator — who is in fact displayed as the Creator’s open enemy — can fairly be expected to teach nothing, know nothing and want nothing in the Creator’s favor; and it would be his first business to set out another god as eagerly as he works to draw us away from the Creator’s law. It is not at all likely that he would call people away from Judaism without at the same time showing them what god he was inviting them to believe in, because nobody could pass out of allegiance to the Creator without knowing whom he had to cross over to.

There are two possibilities. Either Christ had already revealed another god — and then the apostle’s testimony would have had to say the same, or else he would not have counted as an apostle of the god Christ had revealed, and it would have been improper for him to keep hidden the one Christ had already brought into the open. Or Christ had made no such revelation about God — and then the need was all the greater for the apostle to reveal a god whom nobody else could now make known, and who would certainly have been left without a single believer if not even an apostle revealed him.

I lay this down as my first principle because I want to say at once that I shall handle the apostle’s case here exactly as I handled Christ’s case before, to prove that he announced no new god: my evidence will come out of Paul’s own letters. And since we found the heretic’s Gospel in a mangled state, we should already be prepared to find the letters cut about with the same perversity — even in how many of them there are.

The letter that we ourselves allow to be the chief weapon against Judaism is the one in which the apostle instructs the Galatians. We fully admit that the ancient law has been done away with, and we hold that this came about by the Creator’s own arrangement — a point we have already made again and again in the course of this discussion, where we showed that the change was foretold by the prophets of our God. Now if it was the Creator who promised that “the old things would pass away,” to be replaced by a new order rising in their place, and if Christ marks the moment of division when he says, “The law and the prophets were until John” — making the Baptist the boundary between the two orders, the old ending there and the new beginning there — then the apostle, who comes in Christ, and Christ was revealed after John, can hardly do anything but cancel “the old things” and confirm “the new.” And in doing so he promotes faith in no god but the Creator, on whose word it was foretold that the ancient things would pass away. [m]

So both the abolishing of the law and the setting up of the good news serve my argument even in this letter, where both of them bear on the fond notion of the Galatians. They supposed that faith in Christ — the Creator’s Christ, of course — was required, but that it did not annul the law, since they still found it past believing that the law should be set aside by its own author. Besides, if they had heard from the apostle of any other god at all, would they not have concluded at once, on their own, that they must give up the law of the God they had left in order to follow another? Who would take long to learn that he must take up a new way of life once he has taken up a new god?

But since the God announced in the good news was the same God long familiar from the law, and the only change was in the way of life, the single point up for discussion was this: ought the Creator’s law to be shut out by the good news, in the Creator’s own Christ? Take that point away and the whole argument collapses. For once it is withdrawn, they would all have known by themselves that faith in another god meant renouncing every obedience to the Creator; and then there would have been no call for the apostle to teach them so earnestly what their own belief would have suggested to them of itself. So the whole drift of this letter is simply to show us that the setting aside of the law comes from the Creator’s own appointment — a point we shall have to keep before us.

And since he mentions no other god — and he could have found no better opening for it than when his purpose was to set out the reason the law was abolished, especially since laying down a new god would have been a singularly good and entirely sufficient reason — it is clear enough in what sense he writes: “I am astonished that you are being moved away so quickly from him who called you by his grace, to another good news.” He means “another” in the conduct it prescribes, not in the worship it offers; “another” in the way of life it teaches, not in its divinity. For the business of Christ’s good news is to call people from the law to grace, not from the Creator to another god. Nobody had moved them away from the Creator, so that they could be said to be “carried over to another good news” simply by coming back to the Creator again.

And when he adds the words “which is not another,” he confirms that the good news he stands by is the Creator’s. For the Creator himself promises the good news when he says through Isaiah: “Go up onto a high mountain, you who bring good news to Zion; lift up your voice with strength, you who bring good news to Jerusalem.” And of the apostles themselves he says: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring the good news of peace, who bring good news of good things.” They carry that good news to the nations as well, since he also says, “In his name the nations will hope” — that is, in the name of Christ, to whom he says, “I have given you as a light of the nations.”

You, however, will have it that what the apostle set out then was the good news of a new god. That gives us two kinds of good news, administered by two gods; and the apostle made a great mistake when he said that “there is not another,” since on your account there is another. He could have defended his own message better by proving that than by insisting that there is only one. But perhaps, to escape this, you will say that he added just afterward, “Even if an angel from heaven brings you any other good news, let him be cursed,” precisely because he knew that the Creator was going to bring in a message of his own. That only tangles you further; this is the net you are caught in now. To claim that there are two kinds of good news is not the part of a man who has already denied that there is another.

His meaning is plain enough, since he names himself first in the curse: “But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should bring you any other good news.” He has put it that way as an example. If not even he himself might preach another message, then neither might an angel. He spoke of an angel in order to show how much less people are to be believed, when neither an angel nor an apostle is to be believed — not because he meant to attach an angel to the Creator’s good news.

He then touches in passing on his own turning from persecutor to apostle, and in doing so he confirms the Acts of the Apostles — the very book in which the subject of this letter can be found: how certain people broke in and said that men must be circumcised and that the law of Moses must be kept, and how the apostles, when they were consulted, determined by the authority of the Holy Spirit that “no yoke should be laid on people’s necks which even their fathers had not been able to bear.” Now since the Acts of the Apostles agrees with Paul in this way, it becomes clear why you reject it. It is because it announces no God but the Creator, and proves that Christ belongs to no God but the Creator, while the promise of the Holy Spirit is shown to have been fulfilled in no other document than the Acts of the Apostles. It is hardly likely that this book should be found in agreement with the apostle when it describes his career exactly as he describes it himself, and yet at odds with him when it declares the divinity of the Creator’s Christ — as though Paul had not been following the apostles’ preaching when he received from them the rule for unteaching the law.