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| Marcion, Justifying His Antithesis Between the Law and the Gospel by the Contention of St. Paul with St. Peter, Shown to Have Mistaken St. Paul's Position and Argument. Marcion's Doctrine Confuted Out of St. Paul's Teaching, Which Agrees Wholly with the Creator's Decrees.
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Chapter
XX.—Marcion, Justifying His Antithesis Between the Law and the
Gospel by the Contention of St. Paul with St. Peter, Shown to Have
Mistaken St. Paul’s Position and Argument. Marcion’s
Doctrine Confuted Out of St. Paul’s Teaching, Which Agrees Wholly
with the Creator’s Decrees.
This most patent conclusion requires to be
defended by us against the clamours of the opposite side. For they
allege that Marcion did not so much innovate on the rule (of faith) by
his separation of the law and the gospel, as restore it after it had
been previously adulterated. O Christ,2553
| 2553 Tertullian’s
indignant reply. |
most enduring Lord, who didst bear so many years with this interference
with Thy revelation, until Marcion forsooth came to Thy rescue! Now
they adduce the case of Peter himself, and the others, who were pillars
of the apostolate, as having been blamed by Paul for not walking
uprightly, according to the truth of the gospel—that very Paul
indeed, who, being yet in the mere rudiments of grace, and trembling,
in short, lest he should have run or were still running in vain, then
for the first time held intercourse with those who were apostles before
himself. Therefore because, in the eagerness of his zeal against
Judaism as a neophyte, he thought that there was something to be blamed
in their conduct—even the promiscuousness of their
conversation2554
| 2554 Passivum scilicet
convictum. | —but
afterwards was himself to become in his practice all things to all men,
that he might gain all,—to the Jews, as a Jew, and to them that
were under the law, as under the law,—you would have his censure,
which was merely directed against conduct destined to become acceptable
even to their accuser, suspected of prevarication against God on a
point of public doctrine.2555
| 2555 Prædicationis.
[Largely ad hominem, this argument.] | Touching their
public doctrine, however, they had, as we have already said, joined
hands in perfect concord, and had agreed also in the division of their
labour in their fellowship of the gospel, as they had indeed in all
other respects:2556
“Whether it
were I or they, so we preach.”2557
When, again,
he mentioned “certain false brethren as having crept in
unawares,” who wished to remove the Galatians into another
gospel,2558
he himself shows
that that adulteration of the gospel was not meant to transfer them to
the faith of another god and christ, but rather to perpetuate the
teaching of the law; because he blames them for maintaining
circumcision, and observing times, and days, and months, and years,
according to those Jewish ceremonies which they ought to have known
were now abrogated, according to the new dispensation purposed by the
Creator Himself, who of old foretold this very thing by His prophets.
Thus He says by Isaiah: Old things have passed away. “Behold, I
will do a new thing.”2559
And in another
passage: “I will make a new covenant, not according to the
covenant that I made with their fathers, when I brought them out of the
land of Egypt.”2560
In
like manner by Jeremiah: Make to yourselves a new covenant,
“circumcise yourselves to the Lord, and take away the foreskins
of your heart.”2561
It is this
circumcision, therefore, and this renewal, which the apostle insisted
on, when he forbade those ancient ceremonies concerning which their
very founder announced that they were one day to cease; thus by Hosea:
“I will also cause all her mirth to cease, her feast-days, her
new moons, and her Sabbaths, and all her solemn feasts.”2562
So likewise by Isaiah: “The new moons,
and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; your holy
days, and fasts, and feast-days, my soul hateth.”2563
Now, if even the Creator had so long before
discarded all these things, and the apostle was now proclaiming them to
be worthy of renunciation, the very agreement of the apostle’s
meaning with the decrees of the Creator proves that none other God was
preached by the apostle than He whose purposes he now wished to have
recognised, branding as false both apostles and brethren, for the
express reason that they were pushing back the gospel of Christ the
Creator from the new condition which the Creator had foretold, to the
old one which He had discarded.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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