Against Marcion 3.8

Let the heretic now stop borrowing poison from the Jew, the asp, as they say, from the viper; let him now vomit up the venom of his own invention, claiming that Christ was a phantom. Except that in this opinion too he will have other forerunners, premature and in a way abortive Marcionites, whom the apostle John declared antichrists, denying that Christ had come in the flesh; not, however, in order to establish the right of another god (for on that point too they would have been branded), but because they had presumed it incredible that God should have flesh. All the more did the antichrist Marcion seize that presumption for himself, being better suited, naturally, to reject the bodily substance of Christ, since he had brought in a god who was neither the author of flesh nor its raiser, supremely good, no doubt, in this too, and utterly unlike the lies and deceits of the Creator. And so his Christ, so as not to lie or deceive and in this way perhaps be counted the Creator's, was not what he seemed and lied about what he was: flesh and not flesh, man and not man; and likewise, I suppose, God and not God. For why should he not have carried a phantom of God as well? Or am I to believe him about his inner substance, when he has been a cheat about his outer one? How will he be held truthful in what is hidden, when he has been found so deceitful in what is open? And how, by mixing in himself the truth of the spirit with the deceit of the flesh, did he make that fellowship of light, that is truth, with darkness, that is deceit, which the apostle denies? Now then, when the flesh of Christ is detected as a lie, it follows that everything done through the flesh of Christ was done by a lie: his meetings, his touching, his living with others, even his mighty works. For if by touching someone he freed him from an affliction, or was touched by someone, what was done bodily cannot be believed to have been truly done without the reality of the body itself. Nothing solid could be accomplished by what is empty, nothing full by what is void: a supposed condition, a supposed action; an imaginary worker, imaginary works. So neither will the sufferings of his Christ deserve belief. For he suffered nothing who did not truly suffer, and a phantom could not truly suffer. The whole work of God, then, is overturned. The whole weight and fruit of the Christian name, the death of Christ, is denied, which the apostle so emphatically commends, as real of course, making it the highest foundation of the gospel, of our salvation, and of his own preaching: “For I delivered to you,” he says, “first of all, that Christ died for our sins, and that he was buried, and that he rose on the third day.” Further, if his flesh is denied, how is his death asserted, which is the passion proper to flesh, as it returns through death into the earth from which it was taken, according to the law of its author? And once death is denied by denying the flesh, there will be no certainty about the resurrection either. For he did not rise, for the same reason that he did not die, namely not having the substance of flesh, to which resurrection belongs as death does. And so, once the resurrection of Christ is weakened, ours too is overturned. For it will not hold, the resurrection for whose sake Christ came, if Christ's does not hold. For just as those who said there is no resurrection of the dead are refuted by the apostle from the resurrection of Christ, so, if the resurrection of Christ does not stand, the resurrection of the dead is also taken away. And so our faith too is empty, and empty the preaching of the apostles. And they are even found to be false witnesses of God, because they testified that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise. And we are still in our sins, and those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished; due to rise again, certainly, but perhaps as a phantom, like Christ.