Against Marcion 5.15

It will be no trouble to attend to the shorter letters too. There is flavour even in a little. The Jews had killed their own prophets. I can say: what has that to do with the apostle of another god, and the best god at that, who is said not to condemn even the sins of his own people, and who himself, by destroying those same prophets, in a way kills them? What wrong did Israel commit in his eyes if it killed those whom he too rejected, if it passed a hostile sentence on them before he did? But it sinned against its own God: he will reproach the iniquity to whom the injured party belongs; certainly anyone rather than the adversary of the injured. Nor would he have loaded them with the charge of the Lord's death too, saying that they killed both the Lord and their own prophets (although “their own” is the heretic's addition). For what would be so bitter in their having killed Christ, the preacher of another god, when they had slaughtered the prophets of their own God? But the point of the heightening is that they had killed both the Lord and his servants. In short, if they killed the Christ of one god and the prophets of another, he made the impiety equal; he did not heighten it. But it was not to be made equal; so it could not have been heightened unless both crimes were committed against the same God. So the Christ and the prophets belong to the same God. What sanctification of ours he calls “the will of God” may be recognized from the opposites which he forbids: “to abstain,” he says, from fornication, not from marriage; “that each should know how to possess his own vessel in honour.” How? “Not in lust, as the nations do.” But not even among the nations is lust ascribed to marriage, but to the extravagant, unnatural, and monstrous forms of self-indulgence. It is contrary to every kind of vileness and uncleanness; it does not exclude marriage but lust, and handles our vessel in the honour of marriage. I would treat this passage while keeping the preference for the other, that is, the fuller holiness, setting continence and virginity above marriage, yet without forbidding it. For I am beating back those who destroy the God of marriage, not those who pursue chastity. He says that those who remain until the coming of Christ, together with the dead in Christ, who will rise first, will be caught up in the clouds into the air to meet the Lord. I recognize that the heavenly beings, having already then foreseen these things, marvelled at the Jerusalem that is above itself, and declared through Isaiah: “Who are these who fly hither like clouds, like doves with their young, to me?” If Christ will prepare this ascent for us, he will be the Christ of whom Hosea speaks: “who builds his ascent into the heavens,” for himself, surely, and for his own. From whom, then, shall I now hope for it, if not from him from whom I heard these things? What Spirit does he forbid to be quenched, and what prophecies does he forbid to be despised? Surely not the Creator's Spirit nor the Creator's prophecies, in Marcion's view. For what he destroys he has himself already quenched and made nothing of, and he cannot forbid what he himself has done. So it falls to Marcion to produce today, in his own church, the Spirit of his god, which is not to be quenched, and prophecies which are not to be despised. And if he has produced what he thinks such, let him know that we will challenge whatever it is by the standard of spiritual and prophetic grace and power: that it foretell things to come, reveal the secrets of the heart, and expound mysteries. When he has brought forward and proved nothing of the kind, we will bring forward both the Spirit and the prophecies of the Creator, speaking according to his will. And so it will be clear what the apostle was speaking of: namely, of the things that were to be in the church of that God who, since he exists, also has his Spirit at work and his promise fulfilled. Come now, you who reject the salvation of the flesh, and, whenever the body is named in such a context, interpret it as some other thing, I know not what, rather than the substance of the flesh: how is it that the apostle distinguished all the substances in us by definite names and placed them all under one prayer for salvation, wishing that our “spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord and Saviour Christ”? For he named both soul and body, as two things and as different. For even if the soul too is a body of some quality of its own, as the spirit also is, still, since body and soul are named separately, the soul has its own proper name and does not need the common word “body”; that is left to the flesh, which, not being named by its own name, must use the common one. And indeed I see no other substance in man, after the spirit and the soul, to which the word “body” can be applied, except the flesh; and I understand the flesh under the name “body” whenever it is not named, much more here, when what is called the body is called by its own name.