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For they say Marcion did not so much innovate a rule by separating law and gospel as restore one formerly adulterated. O Christ, most patient Lord, who for so many years endured the overturning of your preaching until Marcion came to help you!
But which goods of the law shall I rather defend than those the heresy has struck at? As the definition of talion, demanding eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and bruise for bruise.
But also in the very commerces of life and human conduct at home and abroad he distinguished even to the care of vessels in every way, so that with those legal disciplines meeting everywhere they would not be vacant from regard of God at any moment.
So also in the rest you cast contradictions of precepts at him as if at one mobile and unstable—forbidding to work on the sabbath and commanding the ark to be carried around through eight days, that is even on the sabbath, in the assault on the city of Jericho.
We now summon every sentence and whole apparatus of impious and sacrilegious Marcion already to his gospel itself, which by interpolating he made his own;
He draws the publican chosen by the Lord into argument as if chosen by the law’s adversary—a stranger to the law and a Gentile profane to Judaism.
About the sabbath too I premise this: this question could not even have stood if Christ were not carrying around the God of the sabbath. For there would be no debate why he was destroying the sabbath if he ought to destroy it.
Here now about lending, when he inserts: and if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what thanks is there to you? Run through Ezekiel’s sequel about the same just man: he shall not give his money at interest and shall not take what abounds—namely the surplus of interest, which is usury.
If their presence was necessary, they should not have been shown in conversation (mark of familiarity) nor in shared brightness (example of dignity and grace) but in some squalor as argument of destruction, or in the Creator’s darkness he was sent to scatter, far discrete from Christ’s brightness who would separate…
Surely Christ, who—though Marcion’s—is called Son of Man, who received from the Father the seed of the kingdom, namely the word of the gospel, and sowed it in the garden, in this world of course.
But Christ checks divorce, saying: whoever dismisses his wife and marries another commits adultery, and whoever marries a woman dismissed from a husband is likewise an adulterer—so that by making marriage of a repudiated woman unlawful he also forbids divorce.
But from here we enter another step, challenging Marcion’s gospel itself, as we professed, so as to prove it adulterated this way too. For surely everything he labored—also by prefacing the Antitheses—drives to this: that by establishing diversity of old and new testament he may likewise establish his Christ separated…
Why, of so many kinds of works, did he look to fishing so as to take from it into the apostles Simon and Zebedee’s sons—for a deed from which an argument was going to proceed cannot seem simple—saying to Peter trembling at the rich catch: Fear not, for from now on you will be catching men?
Finally he writes that after fourteen years he went up to Jerusalem to confer with them on the rule of his gospel, lest he should have run or be running in vain—so much did he desire to be approved and confirmed by those you prefer to hint were more akin to Judaism.