He Brought Himself

Now I will say this plainly, against all the heretics, and above all against Marcion’s followers and anyone like them who maintains that the prophets came from some other God than the one announced in the good news. Read with real care the Gospel the apostles handed down to us, and read the prophets with the same care, and you will find that the whole course of our Lord’s life, all his teaching, and all his sufferings were foretold through them. But suppose a thought of this kind comes to you, and you say: then what did the Lord actually bring us by his coming? Know that he brought all the newness there could be, by bringing himself — the one who had been announced. For this very thing was proclaimed in advance: that something new was coming, to renew mankind and bring it to life. A king’s arrival is announced beforehand by the servants who are sent ahead, so that the men who are to receive their lord may be made ready and equipped. But once the king has actually come, and his subjects have been filled with the joy that was promised, and have come into the freedom he gives, and share in the sight of him, and have listened to his words, and have enjoyed the gifts he hands out — then nobody with any sense will ask what new thing the king has brought beyond what his heralds announced. For he has brought himself, and he has given men the good things that were announced beforehand, the things the angels longed to look into. [a]

The servants would have been shown up as liars, not sent by the Lord at all, if Christ at his coming had not fulfilled their words by being found exactly what they had announced. That is why he said: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish, but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law and the prophets until it has all happened.” By his coming he himself fulfilled everything, and he is still fulfilling in the church the new covenant the law foretold, on to the end of all things. Paul, his apostle, says the same in the letter to the Romans: “But now, apart from the law, God’s righteousness has been made plain, with the law and the prophets bearing witness to it; for the righteous will live by faith.” And that very thing — that the righteous will live by faith — had already been announced by the prophets.

But where could the prophets have got the power to foretell the king’s coming, and to preach in advance the freedom he gives, and to announce beforehand everything Christ did — his words, his works, his sufferings — and to foretell the new covenant, if they had received their prophetic inspiration from some other God than the one revealed in the good news? On your own account they knew nothing of the Father no words can express, nothing of his kingdom, nothing of the arrangements the Son of God carried out when he came to earth in these last times. Nor are you in any position to say that all this happened by some sort of coincidence — that the prophets were speaking about somebody else, and that events much like it simply befell the Lord. For all the prophets prophesied these same things, but they never came true in the case of any man of old. If these things had happened to any one of the ancients, the prophets who came later would certainly not have gone on foretelling that they were to happen in the last times. And in fact there is no one among the fathers, or the prophets, or the old kings, in whose case any one of these things took place strictly and specifically. They all prophesied about the sufferings of Christ, but they themselves came nowhere near enduring sufferings like the ones foretold. The details foretold about the Lord’s suffering came true in no other case. At no man’s death among the ancients did the sun set at midday. The curtain of the temple was not torn. The earth did not shake. The rocks were not split. The dead did not rise. Not one of those men of old was raised on the third day, or taken up into heaven, or had the heavens opened at his being taken up. The nations did not believe in anyone else’s name. And not one of them died, rose again, and threw open the new covenant of freedom. So the prophets were speaking of no one else but the Lord, in whom all these signs came together at once.

Someone may take up the Jews’ case and argue that this new covenant was the rebuilding of the temple under Zerubbabel after the removal to Babylon, and the people’s departure from there once the seventy years were up. Let him understand this. The temple built of stones was indeed rebuilt then, since the law made on tablets of stone was still being kept; but no new covenant was given. They used the law of Moses until the Lord came. From the Lord’s coming on, the new covenant that brings peace back, and the law that gives life, have gone out over the whole earth, just as the prophets said: “For out of Zion the law will go out, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he will rebuke many peoples, and they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and they will not learn to fight anymore.” Now if some other law and word going out from Jerusalem had brought about that kind of peace among the nations that received it, and had convinced many a nation, through them, of its own foolishness, then and only then would it look as though the prophets had been speaking of somebody else. But it is the law of freedom — that is, the word of God, preached by the apostles who went out from Jerusalem — that has gone through all the earth and changed the state of things so far that these nations did beat their swords and their battle lances into plowshares, and made them over into pruning hooks for reaping the grain, into tools used for peaceful work, so that they are now out of the habit of fighting, and when they are struck they offer the other cheek as well. So the prophets did not say these things about anyone else, but about the one who brought them about.

That person is our Lord, and the saying holds good in him. For he is the one who made the plow and brought in the pruning hook — that is, the first sowing of man, the creation displayed in Adam, and the gathering in of the crop in the last times by the Word. And because he joined the beginning to the end and is Lord of both, at the last he displayed the plow, in that the wood was joined to the iron, and so he cleared his land; because the Word, firmly united to flesh and fixed in that frame with pins, has broken up the wild earth. From the beginning he sketched out the pruning hook in Abel, showing that there was to be a gathering in of a righteous race of men. He says: “See how the righteous man perishes, and no one takes it in; and righteous men are taken away, and no one lays it to heart.” These things were acted out beforehand in Abel, and were declared in advance by the prophets, but were carried out in the Lord’s own person — and the same still holds for us, the body following the example of the head. These are the arguments to use against people who hold that the prophets were inspired by a different God, and that our Lord came from another Father — in the hope that they may at last leave off such extreme folly. That is what I am after in bringing forward these proofs from Scripture: that by refuting them out of these very passages, as far as I am able, I may hold them back from such great blasphemy and from madly manufacturing a crowd of gods.

Then there are the Valentinians, and the other so-called Gnostics. They hold that some parts of Scripture were spoken at one time from the Pleroma, from the height, by means of the seed that comes from that place; that others were spoken from the middle region by means of the reckless mother, Prunica; and that a great many are owing to the maker of the world, who is also the one the prophets got their commission from. Against them we say that it is altogether unreasonable to bring the Father of all down to such straits that he has no instruments of his own by which the things in the Pleroma might be perfectly proclaimed. Whom was he afraid of, that he could not make his will known in his own way and on his own, freely, without getting entangled with a spirit that came into being in a state of decay and ignorance? Was he afraid that a great many would be saved, if more people had listened to unadulterated truth? Or was he, on the other hand, simply unable to prepare men of his own to announce the Savior’s coming? [l]

But consider. When the Savior came to this earth, he sent his apostles into the world to proclaim his coming accurately and to teach the Father’s will, with nothing in common with the teaching of the Gentiles or of the Jews. How much more, then, while he was still in the Pleroma, would he have appointed heralds of his own to announce his coming into this world — heralds with nothing in common with prophecies that came from the Demiurge. But if, while he was inside the Pleroma, he made use of prophets who were under the law and declared his own affairs through them, then how much more, once he had arrived here, would he have used those same teachers and preached the good news to us through them. So let them stop saying that Peter and Paul and the rest of the apostles proclaimed the truth; let them say instead that it was the scribes and Pharisees and the others, the men through whom the law was set out, who proclaimed it. But if at his coming he sent out his own apostles in the spirit of truth and not in the spirit of error, then he did exactly the same in the case of the prophets; for the Word of God was always one and the same. And if, on these men’s system, the Spirit from the Pleroma was the Spirit of light, the Spirit of truth, the Spirit of completeness, and the Spirit of knowledge, while the spirit from the Demiurge was a spirit of ignorance, decay, and error, and the offspring of darkness — how can completeness and defect, knowledge and ignorance, error and truth, light and darkness all exist in one and the same being? And if such a thing was impossible in the case of the prophets, since they preached the word of the Lord from one God and announced the coming of his Son, then how much more would the Lord himself never have spoken words that came at one moment from above and at the next from the decay below, making himself the teacher of knowledge and of ignorance at once. Nor would he ever have glorified as Father at one time the founder of the world and at another the one above him, since he himself declares: “No one puts a piece of a new garment on an old one, and no one puts new wine into old wineskins.” So these men must either have nothing whatever to do with the prophets, as men of an older order, and stop alleging that they were sent out beforehand by the Demiurge and yet spoke certain things under that new influence that belongs to the Pleroma — or else let them be convinced by our Lord, when he says that new wine cannot be put into old wineskins.

And where could the mother’s offspring have got his knowledge of the mysteries inside the Pleroma, or the power to talk about them? Grant that the mother did bring this very offspring into being while she was outside the Pleroma. But what is outside the Pleroma they describe as being beyond the reach of knowledge — that is, as ignorance. How, then, could a seed conceived in ignorance have the power to declare knowledge? Or how did the mother herself come to know the mysteries inside the Pleroma? She is shapeless and undefined, thrown out of doors like a miscarriage; she was organized outside it and given her form there, and kept from coming in by Horos, and she remains outside the Pleroma until the end of all things — that is, beyond the reach of knowledge. Then there is this. They say the Lord’s suffering is a pattern of the stretching out of the Christ above, which he carried out by means of Horos, and by which he gave their mother a form. But they are caught out on all the other details of the Lord’s suffering, since they have no pattern at all to show for them. When was the Christ above given vinegar and gall to drink? When was his clothing divided up? When was he pierced, so that blood and water came out? When did he sweat great drops of blood? And the same may be asked about everything else that happened to the Lord and that the prophets spoke of. So where did the mother, or her offspring, get their knowledge of things that had not yet taken place, but were going to happen later?

They claim that still other things, besides these, were spoken from the Pleroma; but they are refuted by the passages of Scripture that bear on the coming of Christ. And which passages these are they cannot agree on: they give different answers. If a man wants to test them and questions their leading teachers one at a time about any given passage, he will find one of them referring it to the Propator — that is, to Bythus; another assigning it to Arche — that is, to the only Son; another to the Father of all — that is, to the Word; while another again will say it was spoken of that one Aeon who was put together out of what all the Aeons in the Pleroma contributed; others will take it of Christ, and another of the Savior. One who is cleverer than the rest, after a long-drawn-out silence, declares that it was spoken of Horos. Another says it means the Sophia inside the Pleroma; another that it announces the mother outside the Pleroma; and another will bring up the God who made the world. That is how much they vary over a single passage, holding contradictory opinions about the same Scriptures. And when that same passage is read out, they all begin arching their eyebrows and shaking their heads, and they say that they could indeed deliver a discourse of surpassing loftiness, but that not everyone can take in the greatness of the thought that lies behind it, and that therefore silence is the chief thing among the wise — since the Sige above must be pictured by the silence they keep. So off they all go, as many as they are, each holding his own opinion about one thing and carrying his clever notions around inside him, in secret. When they have managed to agree among themselves about what the Scriptures foretell, then we will refute them too. In the meantime, wrong as their opinions are, they convict themselves, since they are not of one mind about the same words. But we follow one teacher, the one and only true God, and we hold his words as the rule of truth; and so we all say the same thing about the same things. We know one God, the maker of this universe, who sent the prophets, who led the people out of the land of Egypt, who in these last times made his own Son known — to put the unbelievers to shame, and to look for the fruit of righteousness.