Against Marcion 3.15

So much, then, for the question of the flesh, and through it of the birth, and meanwhile of the one name Emmanuel. But as to the other names, and above all “Christ,” what will the opposing side reply? If with you the name of Christ is as common as that of God, so that it is fitting for the son of either god to be called Christ, just as either father is called God, a sure reason will stand against this argument. For the name “God,” as belonging by nature to divinity, can be shared with all to whom divinity is ascribed, even idols, as the apostle says: “For there are those who are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth.” But the name “Christ,” coming to him not from nature but from an arrangement, becomes the proper possession of him by whom the arrangement is found to have been made, and is not open to be shared with another god, least of all a rival who has his own arrangement, to which he will owe names of his own too. For what sort of thing is it that people who have devised different arrangements of two gods allow a partnership of names amid the discord of their arrangements, when no proof of two rival gods would be more at hand than if, in their arrangements, a difference of names were found as well? For no state of difference is marked except by distinct designations. When these are lacking, then if ever the Greek catachresis, the misuse of another's term, comes to the rescue. But with God, I think, nothing ought to be lacking, nor his arrangement to be furnished from another's. Who is this god, who claims names for his son too from the Creator, names not merely belonging to another but old and commonplace, which even so would not suit a new and unknown god? How, finally, does he teach that a new patch is not sewn onto an old garment, nor new wine entrusted to old wineskins, when he himself is sewn onto and put into old names? How does he cut the gospel off from the law, when he is clothed in the whole law, namely in the name of Christ? Who prevented him from being called something else, since he preached something else and came from somewhere else, when for this very reason he did not take on the reality of a body, lest he be believed to be the Creator's Christ? It was futile for him to refuse to seem to be the one whose name he chose to bear, since even if he had truly had a body, he would all the more not have seemed the Creator's Christ if he had not been so called. But as it is, he rejects the substance whose name he took, though he would even prove the substance from the name. For if “Christ” means “anointed,” and to be anointed is certainly something that happens to a body, one who had no body could not be anointed at all; and one who could not be anointed at all could in no way be called Christ. It is another matter if he affected a phantom of the name too. “But how,” he says, “could he creep into the faith of the Jews except through a name customary and familiar among them?” You describe an inconstant or crafty god: to advance anything by deceiving is a plan either of distrust or of malice. The false prophets acted far more freely and simply, coming in the name of their own god against the Creator. But I do not find that this plan worked either, since they more readily believed him to be either their own Christ, or rather some deceiver, than the Christ of another god, as the gospel will prove.