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| Absurdity of Marcion's Docetic Opinions; Reality of Christ's Incarnation.
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Chapter
VIII.—Absurdity of Marcion’s Docetic Opinions; Reality of
Christ’s Incarnation.
Our heretic must now cease to borrow poison from
the Jew—“the asp,” as the adage runs, “from the
viper”3208
| 3208 So Epiphanius, adv.
Hæres. l. 23. 7, quotes the same proverb, ὡς
ἀσπὶς
παρ᾽ ἐχίδνης
ἰὸν
δανιζομένη.
[Tom. II. p. 144. Ed. Oehler.] | —and
henceforth vomit forth the virulence of his own disposition, as when he
alleges Christ to be a phantom. Except, indeed, that this opinion of
his will be sure to have others to maintain it in his precocious and
somewhat abortive Marcionites, whom the Apostle John designated as
antichrists, when they denied that Christ was come in the flesh; not
that they did this with the view of establishing the right of the other
god (for on this point also they had been branded by the same apostle),
but because they had started with assuming the incredibility of an
incarnate God. Now, the more firmly the antichrist Marcion had seized
this assumption, the more prepared was he, of course, to reject the
bodily substance of Christ, since he had introduced his very god to our
notice as neither the author nor the restorer of the flesh; and for
this very reason, to be sure, as pre-eminently good, and most remote
from the deceits and fallacies of the Creator. His Christ, therefore,
in order to avoid all such deceits and fallacies, and the imputation,
if possible, of belonging to the Creator, was not what he appeared to
be, and feigned himself to be what he was not—incarnate without
being flesh, human without being man, and likewise a divine Christ
without being God! But why should he not have propagated also the
phantom of God? Can I believe him on the subject of the internal
nature, who was all wrong touching the external substance? How will it
be possible to believe him true on a mystery, when he has been found so
false on a plain fact? How, moreover, when he confounds the truth of
the spirit with the error of the flesh,3209
| 3209 As in his Docetic
views of the body of Christ. |
could he combine within himself that communion of light and darkness,
or truth and error, which the apostle says cannot co-exist?3210
Since however, Christ’s being flesh is
now discovered to be a lie, it follows that all things which were done
by the flesh of Christ were done untruly,3211
—every act of intercourse,3212
of contact, of eating or drinking,3213
yea, His very miracles. If with a touch, or
by being touched, He freed any one of a disease, whatever was done by
any corporeal act cannot be believed to have been truly done in the
absence of all reality in His body itself. Nothing substantial can be
allowed to have been effected by an unsubstantial thing; nothing full
by a vacuity. If the habit were putative, the action was putative; if
the worker were imaginary, the works were imaginary. On this principle,
too, the sufferings of Christ will be found not to warrant faith in
Him. For He suffered nothing who did not truly suffer; and a phantom
could not truly suffer. God’s entire work, therefore, is
subverted. Christ’s death, wherein lies the whole weight and
fruit of the Christian name, is denied although the apostle
asserts3214
it so
expressly3215
| 3215 Tam impresse,
“so strongly.” | as undoubtedly
real, making it the very foundation of the gospel, of our salvation and
of his own preaching.3216
| 3216 1 Cor. xv. 3, 4, 14, 17, 18. | “I have
delivered unto you before all things,” says he, “how that
Christ died for our sins, and that he was buried, and that He rose
again the third day.” Besides, if His flesh is denied, how
is His death to be asserted; for death is the proper suffering of the
flesh, which returns through death back to the earth out of which it
was taken, according to the law of its Maker? Now, if His death be
denied, because of the denial of His flesh, there will be no certainty
of His resurrection. For He rose not, for the very same reason that He
died not, even because He possessed not the reality of the flesh, to
which as death accrues, so does resurrection likewise. Similarly, if
Christ’s resurrection be nullified, ours also is destroyed. If
Christ’s resurrection be not realized,3217
neither shall that be for which Christ
came. For just as they, who said that there is no resurrection of
the dead, are refuted by the apostle from the resurrection of Christ,
so, if the resurrection of Christ falls to the ground, the resurrection
of the dead is also swept away.3218
And so our
faith is vain, and vain also is the preaching of the apostles.
Moreover, they even show themselves to be false witnesses of God,
because they testified that He raised up Christ, whom He did not raise.
And we remain in our sins still.3219
And those who
have slept in Christ have perished; destined, forsooth,3220
to rise again, but peradventure in a phantom
state,3221
| 3221 Phantasmate
forsitan. | just like
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