Against Marcion 3.6

If these two peculiarities of Jewish literature are sufficiently established for the present, remember, reader, that it has been settled that, when we bring forward anything of this kind, the question is not reopened about the form of Scripture but concerns the state of the case. Since, then, heretical madness presumed that a Christ had come who had never been announced, it followed that it should contend that the Christ who had always been foretold had not yet come; and so it was forced to join with the error of the Jews and build its argument from it, as though the Jews, themselves certain that the one who came was a stranger, not only rejected him as a foreigner but even killed him as an adversary, whereas they would doubtless have recognized him and attended him with every duty of religion if he had been theirs. No doubt a law, not of Rhodes but of Pontus, had provided for that ship-owner that the Jews could not err about their own Christ; when, even if nothing of the kind were found foretold against them, the human condition alone, liable to deception, would surely have persuaded him that the Jews could err, being men, and that no prejudgment should be taken from the opinion of those who may credibly have erred. Moreover, since it was also foretold that they would not recognize Christ and therefore would even put him to death, then he will be the very one who was both unrecognized and put to death by them, against whom they were marked out beforehand to commit such things. If you demand proof of this, I shall not unroll those Scriptures which, declaring that Christ could be put to death, also affirm that he could go unrecognized (for unless he were unrecognized, he could suffer nothing); but, keeping those for the question of the sufferings, it will suffice at present to bring forward those foretellings which meanwhile prove that Christ could go unrecognized, and that briefly, since they show that all power of understanding was taken away from the people by the Creator. “I will take away,” he says, “the wisdom of their wise, and the prudence of their prudent I will hide”; and: “With the ear you will hear and not hear, and with the eyes you will see and not see; for the heart of this people has grown fat, and with their ears they have heard heavily, and their eyes they have shut, lest at some time they hear with their ears and see with their eyes and understand with their heart and turn, and I heal them.” They had deserved this dulling of their saving senses, loving God with their lips but in heart standing far off from him. So if Christ was being announced by the Creator, who establishes the thunder and creates the wind and announces his Christ to mankind according to the prophet Joel; if all the hope of the Jews, not to say also of the Gentiles, was directed toward the revelation of Christ, then without doubt it was being shown that they would not recognize or understand what was being announced, that is Christ, the powers of recognition and understanding, wisdom and prudence, having been taken away; that their chief wise men, that is the scribes, and their prudent men, that is the Pharisees, would err about him; and likewise that the people would hear with their ears and not hear, Christ teaching, of course, and see with their eyes and not see, Christ doing signs, of course; according to what is said elsewhere as well: “And who is blind but my servants? And who is deaf but those who rule over them?” And also when he reproaches them through the same Isaiah: “Sons I have begotten and raised up, but they have rejected me; the ox knew its owner and the ass its master's manger, but Israel has not known me and the people has not understood me.” We indeed are certain that Christ always spoke in the prophets (the Spirit of the Creator, as the prophet testifies: “The person of our spirit, Christ the Lord”), who from the beginning, as the Father's deputy, was both heard and seen in the name of God; and we know that such were his words, even then reproaching Israel for what they were foretold to commit against him: “You have forsaken the Lord and provoked the Holy One of Israel to anger.” But if you prefer to refer the whole charge of Jewish ignorance of old not to Christ but rather to God himself, unwilling to grant that even in the past the Word and Spirit, that is, the Creator's Christ, was despised and not recognized by them, even so you are refuted. For since you do not deny that his Christ is the Son and Spirit and substance of the Creator, you must concede that those who did not recognize the Father could not recognize the Son either, by the condition of the same substance; for if its fullness was not understood, much more so the portion, as sharer in the fullness. With these matters thus examined, it is now clear how the Jews both rejected Christ and killed him: not understanding him as a foreign Christ, but not recognizing him as their own. For they could not have understood a foreign one about whom nothing had ever been announced, whereas they could have understood one who had always been foretold. For that alone admits of being understood or not understood which, having the substance of a foretelling, will have the material for either recognition or error; what lacks that material does not allow any outcome of wisdom. And so it was not as the Christ of another god that they turned from him and persecuted him, but only as a man whom they thought a deceiver in his signs and a rival in his teachings; so that they brought the man himself to judgment as their own, that is a Jew, but a subverter and destroyer of Judaism, and punished him by their own law, which they would not have used in judging a stranger. So far are they from seeming to have understood Christ as a stranger, that they did not even judge his humanity as that of a stranger.