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| Each Side Claims to Possess the True Gospel. Antiquity the Criterion of Truth in Such a Matter. Marcion's Pretensions as an Amender of the Gospel.
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Chapter IV.—Each
Side Claims to Possess the True Gospel. Antiquity the Criterion of
Truth in Such a Matter. Marcion’s Pretensions as an Amender of
the Gospel.
We must follow, then, the clue3561
of our discussion, meeting every effort of
our opponents with
reciprocal vigor. I say that my Gospel is the true one; Marcion,
that his is. I affirm that Marcion’s Gospel is
adulterated; Marcion, that mine is. Now what is to settle the point for
us, except it be that principle3562
of
time, which rules that the authority lies with that which shall
be found to be more ancient; and assumes as an elemental
truth,3563
that corruption (of
doctrine) belongs to the side which shall be convicted of comparative
lateness in its origin.3564
| 3564 Posterius revincetur.
See De Præscriptione Hæret., which goes on this
principle of time. Compare especially chapters xxix. and xxx. [p. 256,
supra.] | For, inasmuch as
error3565
is falsification of truth, it must needs be
that truth therefore precede error. A thing must exist prior to its
suffering any casualty;3566
and an
object3567
must precede all
rivalry to itself. Else how absurd it would be, that, when we have
proved our position to be the older one, and Marcion’s the later,
ours should yet appear to be the false one, before it had even received
from truth its objective existence;3568
| 3568 De veritate
materiam. | and
Marcion’s should also be supposed to have experienced rivalry at
our hands, even before its publication; and, in fine, that that should
be thought to be the truer position which is the later one—a
century3569
later than the
publication of all the many and great facts and records of the
Christian religion, which certainly could not have been published
without, that is to say, before, the truth of the gospel.
With regard, then, to the pending3570
question, of
Luke’s Gospel (so far as its being the common property3571
of ourselves and Marcion enables it to be
decisive of the truth,3572
| 3572 De veritate
disceptat. | ) that portion of it
which we alone receive3573
| 3573 Quod est secundum nos.
[A note of T.’s position.] | is so much older
than Marcion, that Marcion himself once believed it, when in the first
warmth of faith he contributed money to the Catholic church, which
along with himself was afterwards rejected,3574
| 3574 Projectam. [Catholic =
Primitive.] |
when he fell away from our truth into his own heresy. What if the
Marcionites have denied that he held the primitive faith amongst
ourselves, in the face even of his own letter? What, if they do not
acknowledge the letter? They, at any rate, receive his
Antitheses; and more than that, they make ostentatious
use3575
of them. Proof out of these is enough for
me. For if the Gospel, said to be Luke’s which is current amongst
us3576
(we shall see whether it be also current
with Marcion), is the very one which, as Marcion argues in his
Antitheses, was interpolated by the defenders of Judaism, for
the purpose of such a conglomeration with it of the law and the
prophets as should enable them out of it to fashion their Christ,
surely he could not have so argued about it, unless he had found it (in
such a form). No one censures things before they exist,3577
when he knows not whether they will come to
pass. Emendation never precedes the fault. To be sure,3578
an amender of that Gospel, which had been
all topsy-turvy3579
from the days of
Tiberius to those of Antoninus, first presented himself in Marcion
alone—so long looked for by Christ, who was all along regretting
that he had been in so great a hurry to send out his apostles without
the support of Marcion! But for all that,3580
heresy, which is for ever mending the Gospels, and corrupting them in
the act, is an affair of man’s audacity, not of God’s
authority; and if Marcion be even a disciple, he is yet not
“above his master;”3581
if Marcion be
an apostle, still as Paul says, “Whether it be I or they, so we
preach;”3582
if Marcion be a
prophet, even “the spirits of the prophets will be subject to the
prophets,”3583
for they are not
the authors of confusion, but of peace; or if Marcion be actually an
angel, he must rather be designated “as anathema than as a
preacher of the gospel,”3584
because it is a
strange gospel which he has preached. So that, whilst he amends, he
only confirms both positions: both that our Gospel is the prior one,
for he amends that which he has previously fallen in with; and that
that is the later one, which, by putting it together out of the
emendations of ours, he has made his own Gospel, and a novel one
too.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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