The Fourfold Gospel

John, the Lord’s disciple, proclaims this faith. By announcing the good news he sets out to clear away the error that Cerinthus had been spreading among people — and that long before Cerinthus the group called the Nicolaitans had spread, an offshoot of what is falsely called “knowledge.” He means to confound them and to convince them that there is one God, who made all things through his Word. It is not, as they claim, that the Creator is one being and the Father of the Lord another; nor that the Son of the Creator is one and the Christ from above another — a Christ who stayed beyond suffering, came down upon Jesus the Son of the Creator, and then flew back again into his Pleroma; nor that Monogenes was the beginning while Logos was the true son of Monogenes; nor that this creation of ours was made, not by the first God, but by some power lying far below him and shut off from any dealing with the things that are invisible and beyond speech. [a]

So the Lord’s disciple, wanting to put an end to all such teachings and to set up the rule of truth in the church — that there is one Almighty God, who made all things through his Word, both what is visible and what is invisible — and showing at the same time that through the Word by whom God made the creation he also granted salvation to the people who belong to that creation, began his teaching in the Gospel this way: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was nothing made. What was made was life in him, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not take it in.”

“All things,” he says, “were made through him.” So this creation of ours is included in “all things”; we cannot grant these men that “all things” is said only of what lies inside their Pleroma. For if their Pleroma really does contain these things, then this creation, being what it is, is not outside it — as I showed in the previous book. And if these things are outside the Pleroma, which already turned out to be impossible, then it follows that their Pleroma cannot be “all things.” Either way, this vast creation is not outside it.

John himself, however, puts the matter beyond any argument on our part when he says: “He was in this world, and the world was made through him, and the world did not know him. He came to his own things, and his own people did not receive him.” But according to Marcion and those like him, the world was not made through him, and he did not come to what was his own but to what belonged to someone else. According to certain of the Gnostics, this world was made by angels and not by the Word of God. And according to the followers of Valentinus, the world was not made through him but by the Demiurge. Soter, they say, had likenesses made after the pattern of the things above, while the Demiurge carried out the actual work of creation; for they hold that this lord and creator of the whole plan of creation, by whom they say the world was made, was produced from the Mother. The Gospel, meanwhile, states plainly that all things were made through the Word who was in the beginning with God — the Word who, John says, “was made flesh, and lived among us.”

But according to these men, the Word was not made flesh, nor was Christ, nor Soter the Savior, who they say was produced out of the joint contributions of all the Aeons. They insist that the Word and Christ never came into this world at all; that the Savior never took on flesh and never suffered, but came down like a dove on the Jesus of the plan, and that as soon as he had declared the unknown Father he went back up into the Pleroma. Some of them do say that this Jesus of the plan took on flesh and suffered — but they picture him as having passed through Mary the way water passes through a pipe. Others make him the son of the Demiurge, on whom the Jesus of the plan came down. Others again say that Jesus was born from Joseph and Mary, and that the Christ from above came down on him, without flesh and beyond suffering.

But on no one’s account among these teachers was the Word of God made flesh. Examine all their systems carefully and you will find that every one of them brings in the Word of God as having no flesh and no capacity to suffer, and the Christ from above along with him. Some hold that he was shown to us as a man transfigured, but maintain that he was neither born nor took on flesh; others hold that he took no human form at all, but came down as a dove upon that Jesus who was born from Mary. So the Lord’s disciple, pointing them all out as false witnesses, says: “And the Word was made flesh, and lived among us.”

And so that we will not have to ask which God the Word was made flesh from, John teaches us beforehand. He says: “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the Light. He was not that Light, but came to testify about the Light.” By what God, then, was John the forerunner sent, who bears witness about the Light? By the God whose angel Gabriel is — the same Gabriel who brought the good news of John’s birth; the God who had also promised through the prophets that he would send his messenger ahead of his Son’s face to prepare his way, that is, to bear witness about that Light in the spirit and power of Elijah. And whose servant and prophet was Elijah? The God who made heaven and earth, as Elijah himself confesses. So John was sent by the founder and maker of this world. How, then, could he bear witness about a Light that came down from things unspeakable and invisible? For all these teachers have decided that the Demiurge knew nothing of the Power above him — and it is that Power whose witness and herald John turns out to be.

That is why the Lord judged him “more than a prophet.” All the other prophets announced the coming of the Father’s Light and longed to be worthy of seeing the one they announced. John did both: he announced the coming beforehand, as the others did, and he actually saw him when he came, pointed him out, and convinced many people to believe in him. So he held the place of prophet and of apostle at once. That is what it means to be more than a prophet, since the order runs “first apostles, second prophets” — and all of it comes from one and the same God.

The wine that God produced in a vineyard, and that was drunk first, was good. No one who drank it found fault with it, and the Lord drank it too. But the wine the Word made out of water was better — made on the spot, and simply for the use of the people who had been called to the wedding. The Lord had the power to supply wine to the guests without using anything created, and to fill the hungry with food the same way; but that is not the course he took. He took the loaves the earth had produced and gave thanks; and on the other occasion he made water into wine. So he satisfied the people reclining at table and gave drink to those who had been invited to the wedding. In this way he showed that the God who made the earth and told it to bear fruit, who set the waters in place and brought out the springs, is the one who in these last times gave the human race, through his Son, the blessing of food and the gift of drink — the one who cannot be grasped acting by means of what can be grasped, and the invisible by means of the visible. For there is no one beyond him; he is in the Father’s bosom.

For “no one,” he says, “has ever seen God” — except “the only Son of God, who is in the Father’s bosom; he has made him known.” The Son who is in his bosom declares to everyone the Father who cannot be seen. And so those to whom the Son reveals him know him; and again, the Father, by means of the Son, gives knowledge of his Son to those who love him. Taught by him, Nathanael too recognized him — Nathanael, of whom the Lord bore witness that he was “truly an Israelite, in whom there is no deceit.” The Israelite recognized his King, and so cried out to him: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God, you are the King of Israel.” Taught by him, Peter too recognized Christ as the Son of the living God, when God said: “Look at my dearly loved Son, in whom I am well pleased. I will put my Spirit on him, and he will proclaim judgment to the nations. He will not quarrel or cry out, and no one will hear his voice in the streets. He will not break a bruised reed or put out a smoldering wick, until he sends judgment out into the strife; and in his name the nations will hope.”

These, then, are the first principles of the Gospel: that there is one God, the maker of this universe, the one the prophets announced, the one who through Moses set out the arrangement of the law. These principles proclaim the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and they know no other God or Father besides him. The ground these Gospels stand on is so firm that the heretics themselves bear witness to them: each of them starts from these documents and tries to build his own particular teaching out of them.

The Ebionites, who use Matthew’s Gospel only, are refuted out of that very Gospel, since what they suppose about the Lord is false. Marcion, who cuts down the Gospel according to Luke, is convicted of blaspheming the only God there is out of the passages he still keeps. Those who separate Jesus from Christ, claiming that Christ stayed beyond suffering while it was Jesus who suffered, prefer the Gospel according to Mark — and if they read it with a love of the truth, they can have their errors corrected. Those who follow Valentinus make heavy use of the Gospel according to John to illustrate their pairings, and will be shown to be entirely in error by that same Gospel, as I showed in the first book. Since our opponents give evidence for us, then, and use these same documents, the proof we draw from them is firm and true.

It is not possible that the Gospels should be more or fewer in number than they are. There are four regions of the world we live in and four principal winds; the church is scattered over the whole world; and the church’s “pillar and support” is the Gospel and the spirit of life. So it is fitting that she should have four pillars, breathing out imperishable life on every side and making people alive again. From this it is clear that the Word, the craftsman of all things, who sits upon the cherubim and holds all things together, and who was made known to human beings, gave us the Gospel in four forms, held together by one Spirit. As David says, asking him to appear: “You who sit between the cherubim, shine out.”

For the cherubim have four faces, and their faces are images of the way the Son of God works. The first living creature, Scripture says, “was like a lion” — which stands for his effective power, his leadership, and his kingship. The second was like a calf, signifying his place as sacrifice and as priest. The third “had a face like a man’s” — a plain description of his coming as a human being. The fourth was “like a flying eagle,” pointing to the gift of the Spirit hovering over the church with his wings. And the Gospels match all this, and Christ Jesus is seated among them.

The Gospel according to John tells of his original, effective, and glorious birth from the Father, declaring, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and again, “all things were made through him, and without him was nothing made.” This is why that Gospel is full of all confidence: such is the person it describes. The Gospel according to Luke takes up his priestly character and begins with Zechariah the priest offering sacrifice to God — for now the fattened calf was being made ready, to be killed for the finding of the younger son. Matthew, again, tells of his birth as a man, saying, “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham,” and, “The birth of Jesus Christ happened in this way.” This, then, is the Gospel of his humanity, and that is why the character of a humble and gentle man is kept up all through it. Mark, for his part, begins from the prophetic Spirit coming down to people from on high, saying, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet” — which points to the winged look of the Gospel. That is why he made his account short and rapid, for that is what prophetic writing is like.

And the Word of God himself used to talk with the patriarchs who lived before Moses, in keeping with his divinity and his glory; for those under the law he set up a priestly and public service; and afterward, having been made man for us, he sent the gift of the heavenly Spirit out over the whole earth, sheltering us with his wings. So the course the Son of God followed was matched by the form of the living creatures, and the form of the living creatures by the character of the Gospel. The living creatures are fourfold, and the Gospel is fourfold, and so is the course the Lord followed. That is why four principal covenants were given to the human race: one before the flood, under Adam; the second after the flood, under Noah; the third the giving of the law, under Moses; and the fourth the one that makes man new and sums all things up in itself by means of the Gospel, lifting people up and carrying them on its wings into the heavenly kingdom.

Since this is so, all those who wreck the form of the Gospel are empty, ignorant, and reckless besides — I mean the people who present the aspects of the Gospel as being either more in number than has just been said, or fewer. The first do it so as to seem to have found more than the truth contains; the second, so as to set God’s arrangements aside. Marcion rejects the whole Gospel — or rather, cuts himself off from the Gospel — and then boasts that he has a share in the Gospel’s blessings.

Others set the gift of the Spirit at nothing, the Spirit poured out on the human race in these last times by the Father’s good pleasure; and so they refuse to admit the aspect of the Gospel presented by John, in which the Lord promised that he would send the Advocate. They throw out the Gospel and the prophetic Spirit together. Wretched men! They want to pass for prophets themselves, and yet they push the gift of prophecy out of the church — behaving like the people who hold themselves aloof from fellowship with the brothers because some come among them as hypocrites. We must conclude, besides, that these men cannot accept the apostle Paul either. In his letter to the Corinthians he speaks expressly about the gifts of prophecy, and acknowledges men and women prophesying in the church. Sinning in all these ways against the Spirit of God, they fall into the sin that is not forgiven.

The followers of Valentinus, on the other hand, are utterly reckless. They put out compositions of their own and boast that they possess more Gospels than there really are. They have carried their nerve so far as to give a comparatively recent writing of theirs the title “the Gospel of Truth,” though it agrees at no point with the Gospels of the apostles — so that in fact they have no Gospel that is not full of blasphemy. For if what they have published is the Gospel of truth, and yet is entirely unlike the ones handed down to us from the apostles, then anyone who cares to can learn from the Scriptures themselves that what has been handed down from the apostles can no longer be reckoned the Gospel of truth.

But that these Gospels alone are true and dependable, and that their number admits of no addition and no subtraction, I have proved by many arguments of this kind. Since God made all things in due proportion and fitness, it was fitting too that the outward form of the Gospel should be well arranged and well harmonized. Now that we have looked into the mind of the men who handed the Gospel down to us, tracing it from its very sources, let us go on to the remaining apostles and inquire into their teaching about God; and after that, in due course, we will listen to the very words of the Lord.