Against Marcion 1.2

The man of Pontus brings in two gods, like the two Clashing Rocks of his own shipwreck: the one whom he could not deny, that is, the Creator, that is, ours; and the one whom he will never be able to prove, that is, his own. The unhappy man took the impulse for this presumption from a simple saying of the Lord, who applied those examples of the good and the bad tree to human beings, not to gods: that the good tree does not bear bad fruit, nor the bad tree good fruit — that is, neither does a good mind or faith produce bad works, nor a bad one good works. For he was sick (as many are even now, and heretics above all) over the question of evil — where does evil come from? — and, his senses dulled by the very excess of his curiosity, he found the Creator declaring: “I am he who creates evils.” The more he presumed him to be the author of evil, on the strength of other arguments too, which persuade any perverse person in that way, the more he interpreted the Creator as the bad tree producing bad fruit, namely evils, and presumed that there must be another god, on the side of the good tree, with good fruit. And so, finding in Christ what seemed to be another arrangement, one of sole and pure kindness, as though different from the Creator's, he easily argued that a new and foreign divinity had been revealed in his Christ; and thereafter, with a little leaven, he soured the whole lump of the faith with heretical acid. He also had a certain Cerdo as instructor in this stumbling-block; the two of them, being blind, the more easily supposed they had seen two gods, for they had not seen the one whole. To the bleary-eyed even a single lamp is many. The one god, then, whom he was compelled to acknowledge, he destroyed by defaming him with evil; the other, whom he strove to invent, he built up by preferring him for goodness. On what articles he has arranged these natures we shall show in our replies themselves.