The Five Books Against Marcion — Book 3, Chapter 4

1

Your God.

2

Ipse.

3

Ejus (i.e. Marcionis) Dominum, meaning Marcion’s God, who had not yet been revealed.

4

The Creator and His Christ, as rivals of Marcion’s.

5

He twits Marcion with introducing his Christ on the scene too soon. He ought to have waited until the Creator’s Christ (prophesied of through the Old Testament) had come. Why allow him to be predicted, and then forbid His actual coming, by his own arrival on the scene first? Of course, M. must be understood to deny that the Christ of the New Testament is the subject of the Old Testament prophecies at all. Hence T.’s anxiety to adduce prophecy as the main evidence of our Lord as being really the Creator’s Christ.

6

Atquin.

7

Vanus.

8

The reader will remember that Tertullian is here arguing on Marcion’s ground, according to whom the Creator’s Christ, the Christ predicted through the O.T., was yet to come. Marcion’s Christ, however, had proved himself so weak to stem the Creator’s course, that he had no means really of checking the Creator’s Christ from coming. It had been better, adds Tertullian, if Marcion’s Christ had waited for the Creator’s Christ to have first appeared.

9

Marcion’s Christ.

10

Emendare.

11

Revocare.

12

Aut si.

13

Posterior emendator futurus: an instance of Tertullian’s style in paradox.

14

Vero.

15

Redarguens.

16

Si forte.

Book 3 · Chapter 4

Chapter IV.—Marcion’s Christ Not the Subject of Prophecy. The Absurd Consequences of This Theory of the Heretic.

Notes